THE interfaith dialogue summit which was held in Madrid a few months ago left many of us perplexed, even indifferent — not least because of the current, distorted image of Islam in the Arab and Muslim world. One commentator says that some “Arab countries today are dominated by a profoundly contradictory culture — one that I would call Disneyland Islam.” In an article, he exposes the fundamentalists’ — and fatwa issuers’ — obsessive search for purity and the “real Islam” and shows how their efforts have resulted in a form of kitsch Islam ripe for ridicule. The main purveyors of this kitsch Islam are the fundamentalists and the Western media who feed off each other, spurring each other on from one absurdity to the next.
Responding to the heightened curiosity of the Western world for anything “Muslim” or “Islamic”, writers from different parts of the globe have volunteered their experiences of Islam, joining in the race to be the first to successfully rubbish the image of “the Muslim religion and culture”. The fervor with which these writers have approached their subject matter and the hysteria with which it has been greeted may well be unprecedented in the history of world media.
The appetite for Islam-as-global-threat and medieval religion has given birth to new TV channels, websites and perhaps most importantly commercial books, or what Fatemeh Keshavaraz calls the “New Orientalist Narrative”: A clearly discernable literary element that primarily relies on the strategy of shocking the readers by intentionally breaking taboos, showcasing the Muslims as savage, primitive and sexually repressed.
WHILE literature is a mirror of reality and any reality yields a mixed harvest of sorrow and joy, we have been witnessing the emergence of a new, strongly biased literature — one that plays to Western preconceptions of Arabs and Muslims and helps force them into one mold. Muslims, and in particular Muslim men, are framed as aggressive, sexually repressed and socially backward, fit only for acts of terrorism and the oppression of “their” women.
“The Caged Virgin” by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and “The Almond” by Nedjma are just two examples among hundreds of works in this genre. On the cover of the former book is a photo of a woman who is covered from head to toe in a burqa, revealing only her diffident eyes. The cover of “The Almond” has a woman wearing what seems to be an all-enveloping but seductive dancing costume evoking Orientalist paintings of Arabian harems. The images touch a chord with the Western reader. They know the content will sing a familiar, sneering tune — a tune that is greeted by a chorus of Islamaphobic material. Scanning the shelves of bookstores worldwide reinforces the suspicion that our religion has been packaged and sold for the highest price — it is a dumbed-down, Disneyfied version with its cartoon goodies and baddies. Pejorative titles and threatening images sell Islam as a singularly bloodthirsty religious ideology and the Muslim world as a hotbed of terrorism, especially after 9/11.
Muslim fundamentalism is an extreme ideology like any other. But the vast majority of us who practice Islam do so because we want to live a peaceful, righteous, interesting life, and should not, by default, be branded ideologically suspect. Western media have in their various forms been constructing a binary opposition between the East and the West and insisting that Muslims pose a threat to democracy. From the hyped issue of the hijab in France and Turkey to the gratuitous blasphemy of the Danish cartoons against the Prophet (peace be upon him), the Muslim person feels stigmatized and stripped of his dignity and identity.
These thoughts flashed through my mind with horrifying clarity while I was making small talk with an American lady, and the subject moved to books that stereotype Arabs. Firmly she stated, “Yes, Arabs are stereotyped as terrorists, but this is a realistic image; Arabs are terrorists”. For a second I was baffled, but then I found myself saying: “If we are terrorists what do you think the Americans are when they barge into other countries?” She repeated the usual line: “You mean the American government?”
This woman has lived in the region for over 20 years; still she has failed to empathize with our culture, and our political and regional predicaments that began long before 9/11, when Al-Quds in Palestine — the third Qibla of Islam — was snatched out of the hands of the Arabs with the Balfour declaration and UN Resolution 181, gifting historic Palestine to the Zionist movement and creating the Palestinian refugee problem. This American who has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries was not willing to see things through our eyes. The Arab media have been saying for over 50 years now that world peace cannot be achieved without an end to the total military and economic support by the US and Britain of the region’s apartheid — and pariah — state, Israel.
Regrettably, the constant outcry of Muslims over the occupied lands of Palestine fails to register with many Westerners, noticeably those from the United States. Many of them certainly experience some kind of conflict of beliefs and values when they live in the region, but instead of questioning established preconceptions, most choose to remain shielded by their prejudices — secure in the knowledge that they have invested in the dominant discourse. It is a lot easier to adopt the prêt-a-porter politics that prioritizes the condemnation of violence in the name of Islam over inquiries into relentless aggression and genocide in the name of security, democracy and the free market. We should all be aware that the world’s most powerful states profit principally from the creation of enemies and the exploitation of their enemies’ resources, a concept that Noam Chomsky has identified in his book “Media Control” (2002) as “the war of resources”.
This is not to say that we in the Arab world can take our eyes off extremism at home; every type of aggressor undermines our security and dignity, and every berserk fatwa that calls for violence destroys our image. The media have come a long way since 9/11. People from both sides of the globe can no longer turn a blind eye to the failures of their own governments or to major issues in the world. Interfaith dialogue is an empty concept if we meet on the rare occasion to smile and shake each other’s hands and say how much we like each other’s religion, etc. We must openly debate the nature of corrosive ideologies in West and East, our own involvement in them, and, crucially, why their existence continues to be so expedient — and profitable — to many governments.
— Basma Al-Mutlaq has a Ph.D. in comparative and feminist literature in the Middle East from SOAS, London University.
source Arabnews.com
http://samotalis.blogspot.com/
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