The Eurocentric or, if you wish, Orientalist — make that racist — way of seeing the world through the prism of what the French, in their colonial heyday, used to call “la mission civilizatrice,” has it that another people’s culture whose building blocks do not conform to one’s own is not a civilization at all.
At the time, one spoke openly of the “civilized world” and the “uncivilized world,” the one inhabited by the empowered peoples of the West and the other by the colonized ones of the East. Sure, the paradigm was born out of bigotry, but the bigotry itself was born out of the objective realities of the time — the need by Europeans to delude themselves into believing that their exploitation of the “subjugated” peoples was a moral good. The colonizers’ mission, really, scout’s honor, was to “civilize” the natives and introduce them to the superior ways of the European world.
Those were the days, my friend, thought they’d never end. Well, guess what? They haven’t. At least not in the US, where intellectual sclerosis in the world of academe and the public discourse has not only insured the perpetuation of antiquated ideas about the Islamic world and the wider Middle East, but has produced, particularly since Sept. 11, a bumper crop of wacky ideas about Islam itself.
Enter the noted scholars Peter Berkowitz and Michael McFaul, respectively of the Hoover institution and Stanford University, in a long piece last week in the Washington Post, to bemoan the “embarrassing” fact that “our universities (have) changed little to educate our nation and train experts” on the region and its faith. They write: “For believers in a good liberal arts education, it has long been a source of consternation that faculties in political science, history, economics and sociology lack scholars who know Arabic or Persian and understand Islam.” To be sure, theirs is not merely an emphasis on the Jeffersonian notion of education as a social concern — faith in knowledge as a crucial vehicle in personal independence and upward mobility — but also as a potent political issue. They insist that, yes, bolstering faculty and curriculum resources devoted to the Muslim Middle East is obvious from an academic perspective, but in addition to that it has become clear that “since Sept. 11, this abdication of responsibility is more than an educational problem: It also poses a threat to our national security.” There is no doubt about the fact that for Americans — who yet have to recognize their ignorance about the issue — an intimate acquaintance with Islam will be enriching not only for practical reasons of national security, as Berkowitz and McFaul suggest, but for intellectual reasons as well. You get to know a people’s religion, and you get to know that people’s expression of human spirit, their inward preoccupations and archetypal concerns. After all, there are many junctures where Islam and Christianity intersect, representing a basis for the unity of the two worlds they define. What divides Muslims and Christians in modern times are not their religions — which are not antithetical by any means — but their politics.
What is even more enriching would be an equally intimate acquaintance with a community’s language and habits of semantic perception, an asset guaranteed to open doors to that society’s culture. Language, after all, is an embodiment of the consciousness of a culture. Perhaps then Americans will come to realize, for example, that jihad (struggle by an individual, or collectively a community, to transcend the limitations of the self through spiritual discipline) does not translate as “holy war,” that Allahu Akbar (a call by a Muslim in a moment of crisis, or wonderment at the objective world, to assert that “God is greater” than the challenges at hand) does not mean “God is great,” and that shahid (a fallen patriot who dies defending his holy cause) is not a martyr, a term unique to Christian iconography denoting a person in early Christianity who refused to renounce his religion and died defending it. (The late Michael Kelly, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book “Martyr’s Day,” about the Arab world, preferred to mock the term rather than choose the correct title, “Momorial Day.”) And so on down the line with the debasement of those verbal codes in Arab culture, whose rhetoric of vivid presentation not only articulates a social mood but defines how a people see the world around them.
Alas, the list of writers who have had the astuteness to enlarge for their fellow Americans the compass of intellectual awareness of what the Islamic, including the Arab, world is all about — who have introduced a new or novel focus to the study of the Middle East — is very small. Fine, that is now off my chest. But what of the unutterable monotony of the debate by Arab critics about the Euro-American world? We complain, often bitterly, as I have just done, about how little Westerners know about our societies. But in the end, I have to say this: Despite their at times inescapable sense of triviality and dissimulation, American commentators, analysts and academics still know more about the Arab world than their counterparts there know about the United States.
How many think-tanks are there in the Arab world that devotes themselves to the study of the American world? How many Arab universities are there with American Studies departments? How many Arab researchers have written about the United States — its foreign policy, its social life, its popular culture, its history, its political system — with penetrative grasp, with resolute objectivity, a genuine focus on facts untainted by conspiracy theories and the rhetoric of the 1950s and 60s about darn American imperialists lurking behind every single one of our lampposts? Berkowitz and Macfaul conclude: “Dramatically increasing opportunities for the study of Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Islam in our universities is the right thing to do, in order to advance the cause of learning and America’s interest in training people who can contribute to the spread of liberty abroad. We owe it to our universities to demand that they live up to their responsibilities.”
Okay, I’m on board.
