Review
Reviewed Work(s): Layla M. by Mijke de Jong, Frans van Gestel, Arnold
Heslenfeld and Laurette Schillings
Review by: Mervat Youssef
Source: Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies , Vol. 3, No. 1 (May 2018), pp. 99-104
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jims.3.1.09
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Youssef / Film Reviews 99
Diab’s tack is different. He involves us in the lives of the ensnared Egyptians,
twenty-two in the back of his van, but also secondary characters on the outside, all
of whom we come to know, and empathize with to one degree or another. Then,
in a furious finale of jolting, blurred, upended images, he strips away their faces,
calling only a few faintly by name, leaving us to wonder if any will survive.
Joel Gordon
Professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR. He is the author of
Revolutionary Melodrama, (The University of Chicago MEDOC, 2002), and writes
on Egyptian and Middle East film and pop-culture. The following are among his recent
publications: “Three Tales of Obsession: Crosscutting Boundaries in Middle Eastern
Film,” in History Compass, 2016; “Hasan and Marika: Screen Shots of a Vanishing
Egypt,” in Journal of Levantine Studies, 2017; and “Viewing Backwards: Egyptian
Historical Television Dramas in the 1990s,” in Review of Middle East Studies, 2018.
doi:10.2979/jims.3.1.08
Endnotes
1. The most famous serious treatment is Atif al-Tayeb’s Sawaq al-autobis (The Bus Driver
1982). The classic eccentric is the elderly commuter encountered daily by Adil Imam in Sharif
Arafa’s comic classic al-Irhab wa al-kabab (Terrorism and Kebab 1992).
2. For example, Jehane Noujaim in her otherwise powerful documentary, The Square (2013).
3. I recommend Ibrahim El Batout’s al-Shita’ illi fat (Winter of Discontent 2012) and Yousry
Nasrallah’s Ba`d al-mawqi`a (After the Battle 2013).
4. Chaos (al-Fawda) was the name of Youssef Chahine’s last film, one that presaged the Arab
Spring and depicted the uprising as a righteous movement. See my “Chahine, Chaos, Cinema: A
Revolutionary Coda,” in Bustan 4.2 (2013): 99–112.
Layla M.
Feature, Starring Nora El-Koussour, 2016, 98 Minutes, Directed by
Mijke de Jong, and Produced by Frans van Gestel, Arnold Heslenfeld
and Laurette Schillings
At the backdrop of rising anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric, Layla Murabit
(starring Nora El-Koussour), a smart high school student of Moroccan descent
grows alienated in her own city, Amsterdam. Layla could be any teenager: bikes
everywhere, enjoys soccer, talks back whenever she can and is indeed in your
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100 Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies, Vol. 3.1
face. It is because the protagonist is easy to like and identify with, that Layla M.
offers viewers a thoughtful insight into how radicalization might happen without
justifying it, or demonizing those who slip down that rabbit-hole. It allows us to
understand and critique without condemning the protagonist or falling into the
trap of Islamophobia. Central to the movie are questions about identity, national
belonging and the prevailing patriarchy.
The opening scene of Layla M. very much mirrors who she is. Unlike her
mother, who does not wear a hijab, Layla wears one, on her own terms. During
the soccer game, she tied it to the back of her head leaving her neck bare. She
has an earnest look on her face as she diligently monitors the players in the
field; she is sometimes the assistant referee. When the referee fails to call on a
white player who violated the rules to the disadvantage of another of immigrant
descent, Layla yells at the referee deeming his call a misjudgment. In response,
the referee tells her father that she should either control her temper, or he should
not bring her to the game. The father orders her to be silent. It is there and then,
at the soccer field, that women in full body cover (abaya), reach out to Layla and
invite her over to their group. In what seems like a scouting mission, the women
chose outspoken, angry Layla to model for an image of a woman in a burqa to be
used in media materials for protesting the burqa ban. Layla puts on the burqa for
the shoot and expresses her eagerness to get out of it; “it is too hot,” she thought.
Director de Jong makes it clear from the get-go that Layla’s choices put her in
direct confrontation with figures of authority, be it at home or in public. Layla’s
involvement with the Islamist group, protesting and posting her image online,
infuriates her father. Defying him further, she wears the burqa to the dinner
table and cites Qur’anic text to argue back. When a police officer asks a fellow
female protester to remove her face cover, to confirm her identity, Layla defies
him: “we do not ask you to remove your pants.” Layla reaches the flipping point
when she and her brother are arrested during a protest. Feeling that Amsterdam
and her family house are no longer her home, she marries Abdel (starring Ilias
Addab), a young man she met through her activism, and the two head off to
Amman, Jordan. There, they aspire to live a pious life in an Islamic utopia free
of racism and discrimination. Arriving in Amman immediately proves this to be
an illusion. She is faced with a patriarchal structure that keeps women sidelined
and in the kitchen. Not before long, she realizes that her own beloved Abdel
had trained to be a suicide bomber. One of the strengths of this movie is that it
smoothly unpacks the layered challenges that a young Muslim faces on a daily
basis in a Western society, while acknowledging the context for these challenges.
We watch Layla struggling to belong as a Dutch at a time when her own existence
as a citizen seems to be contested and even rejected. Actor Ilias Addab (Abdel),
recalls that while shooting the movie, he wore his beard long and felt the toll of
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Youssef / Film Reviews 101
being a non-white young male with facial hair. People were suspicious of him. To
dismiss suspicions that he is a jihadi, he started wearing a cap.1
With the rise of far-right politicians like Geert Wilders, racist anti-Muslim
rhetoric (including Moroccan immigrants) came to the fore and was received
with increasing support. Layla feels that her sense of belonging to where she was
born and raised is being challenged and contested. When exclusionary rhetoric
and practices are on the rise, she feels that the national contract2 is neither upheld
nor binds her into belonging. Religious identification, on the other hand, offered
an alternative contract where “God is great” and it is “He” who rules. Indeed,
Layla hisses “Allahū Akbar,” whenever frustrated or defiant. When protesting
with her Islamist friends, we hear them all chanting in Arabic, not Dutch. They
too are rejecting the national contract.
Layla M. navigates smoothly through such shifts in group membership and
belonging without vilifying Layla or condoning the Islamists. This is a fine line
that de Jong successfully treads since it was baffling to see Layla the intelligent,
free-thinking young lady not questioning or reading the writing on the wall
when it was clear that she is slipping into radicalization and getting involved with
jihadis. De Jong skillfully mediated the complexities and the mundaneness that
getting involved with jihadis can entail, but she did so without risking the loss of
empathy with her protagonist. Layla can be held accountable for her choices, but
she is not dehumanized. The fact that Layla is a teenager further serves De Jong’s
goal of avoiding the dehumanization of any of the characters.
What Layla faces throughout the movie is a search for belonging intertwined
with a sense of righteousness, or like many teenagers, she is looking for a cause.
Layla herself does not wear a burqa, yet dons it in a protest to support those
who choose to wear it. She lives safely but advocates for those who face death
in Syria every day. She detests her parents’ response to racism, discrimination
and violence in Syria and the Middle East. Layla wants them to have a stronger
reaction if not a clear stance, a position which the parents see as unnecessary.
Her disillusion fuels all her confrontations with her family and even her choices
in life, similar to those she befriends, how she dresses, and the type of media
materials she consumes online.
The movie allows us into the home of a middle-class immigrant family that
seems fully integrated: they speak Dutch at home most of the time, engage in
community activities and the father owns a small business that seems to be
thriving. Layla and her family members try, each their own way, to bridge their
differences; she argues her cases with Qur’anic evidence and they argue back
with reason and compassion, she reaches out to her younger brother teaching
him how to recite the Qur’an, and he goes to demonstrations with her. The
family, however, is still unable to find common ground in terms of how to
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102 Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies, Vol. 3.1
respond to Layla’s pressing concern about rising anti-immigrant sentiment in
the Netherlands, or to their insistence that one must think beyond rituals and
dress to be Muslim. This is where radicalization fills the gap. In a telling scene,
she tries to explain and defend her choices to her father by showing him a video
of a grieving Syrian father who had just lost two children and is sobbing as he
clings to their little lifeless bodies. “This could be us,” she explains. Her father
responds that she should be thankful it is not them. For Layla, this is a lame
reaction that she would not accept. The alienation she feels crept into her own
home.
De Jong made sure that Layla’s strife for gender equality is present throughout
the movie. It is apparent in her consistent efforts to understand the holy text;
when courting Abdel, she points out passages regulating gender relations. She
is fascinated with women fighters in Syria. To her, they affirm her image of a
Muslim woman: active and equal to man. But patriarchy is in Layla’s face both in
the public space and at home: the soccer referee totally dismissed her, charging
another man—her father—with managing her “temper” and later in the movie
her father tells her point-blank that he is the one who decides what she could
wear or not (the burqa in this case). She arrives in her imagined Islamic utopia,
Amman, only to be received with prevalent patriarchy. The jihadis do not even
acknowledge her presence; they order her husband to control her, and end up
putting her under house-arrest. It is Layla’s response to such patriarchy that invites
the viewer to sympathize with her. She fights back even under house-arrest.
The movie juxtaposes Layla’s challenges and radicalization without
assuming causation sparing the viewer any confusion about the danger of
militant Islam. It highlights the human in both Layla and Abdel while providing
alternative paths that the characters could have taken throughout. While Layla
is enraged after her arrest, her brother, chooses to shave his beard and rethink
how religion is manifested in his life. Layla’s feistiness is juxtaposed against her
mother’s gentleness and wisdom. Layla chooses confrontation, but her mother
suggests finishing school as a means for attaining independence and the ability
to lead her life as she pleases. In the face of a threat to ship Layla back to Morocco
in case she does not quit her involvement with the Islamists, her mother steps
in to Layla’s rescue and firmly tells the father that Layla is to stay home and go
to medical school; “s.afī!” she says in Moroccan dialect (done). Layla’s mother is
definitely a different caliber from the submissive jihadi women Layla meets in
Amman. But the movie provides alternatives in Amman as well. Layla meets a
Dutch expatriate (Sanaa) at a nearby mosque. Sanaa chooses to do charity work
in a refugee camp near the Syrian border as opposed to the submissive life that
her next door neighbor, Um-Usama, a German jihadi wife, leads.
De Jong skillfully communicated Layla’s struggle to belong. Layla shifts
between identities, but not without difficulty. The unasked questions about
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Youssef / Film Reviews 103
who she is and where she belongs are so pressing that she almost envies Abdel
for being born in Morocco. While the young loving couple flees Amsterdam,
the home they feel alienated from, Layla tells Abdel that everything in his life is
logical for the simple fact that he belongs to the place where he was born. This
is where the movie also unpacks the imaginary nature of group membership.
Abdel’s mother had left Morocco after he was born in search for a better future.
Yet, the assumption that one must belong to his/her birthplace resurfaces
during Layla’s own experience in Amman. When she meets expatriate Sanaa,
Layla seems happy to mention that she is from Amsterdam; she identifies herself
by the local, not the national. Furthermore, Layla’s face lights up the moment
Sanaa responds in Dutch. Layla’s Dutch identity seems to be activated when she
is placed in an alien culture (here being Amman), and that is perhaps surprising
to her. When Abdel forbids her to go out with Sanaa, Layla hops into a cab and
goes to the refugee camp by the Syrian border. There, she merrily plays soccer
with kids, and she seems to wear her real self. As the jihadi culture does not
measure up to her expectations, and in the face of attempts to control her, Layla
reverts back to her Dutch ways. These shifts are indicative of the fluid nature of
identities,3 a theme touched on frequently in the movie.
The title choice Layla M. is worth contemplating. In reporting a crime, the
identity of those involved is kept private by using the initials of the last name only.
Perhaps the director wanted to make a point about Layla’s complicity whether it
is by naivete or association. This choice is one of the things that de Jong did very
well in this movie; it humanized the protagonist without exonerating her.
This is a good movie choice for undergraduate Middle East studies or
introduction to Islamic courses. It is important, however, to point out that the
movie returns Layla to Amsterdam with inexplicable ease. Perhaps de Jong
wanted to avoid ending the movie on a grim note. It is possible that de Jong
wanted to leave the door open for those who want to come back. After all, de
Jong had the characters of Abdel and Layla dance to the tunes of a popular
song by Fadl Shaker, the famous Lebanese singer turned terrorist in 2013 then
renounced terrorism again in 20154.
Mervat Youssef
Associate professor of Arabic in the Department of French and Arabic at Grinnell
College, Grinnell, IA. She holds a B.S. from the University of Helwan in Cairo, Egypt,
an M.S. in journalism and mass communication from South Dakota State University,
and a Ph.D. in journalism and mass communication from the University of Iowa.
Her research interests include media constructions of identity, especially in relation to
news coverage of Middle Eastern affairs, propaganda, and the sociology of news. In
the past few years, her research has focused on Egypt. Specifically, she investigates the
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104 Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies, Vol. 3.1
expansion and contraction of public space and its manifestation and impact in terms
of democratization. Her most recent publication “Arab Revolutions: Breaking Fear
Mediating Discourse of Democratic Uprising in Egypt: Militarized Language and
the ‘Battles’ of Abbasiyya and Maspero,” co-authored with Heba Arafa and Anup
Kumar, in International Journal of Communication, 2014.
doi:10.2979/jims.3.1.09
Endnotes
1. Shannon Bowen, “Oscars: A female Muslim Teen Becomes Radicalized in the Netherlands’
Layla M.’,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 1, 2017, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/
news/oscars-a-female-muslim-teen-becomes-radicalized-netherlands-layla-m-1063252
2. Ernst Renan, “What is a Nation?,” in Becoming National: A Reader, eds. Geoff Eley and
Ronald Grigor Suny (Oxford University Press, 1996), 41–55.
3. Desmond King, The Liberty of Strangers: Making the American Nation (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
4. Hayfa’ Ze‘aytar, “Al-fannān al-lubnānī Fadl Shākir yuthīr al-jadal min jadīd ba‘da tawbatihi
“al-thāniyah”,” France24, September 3, 2015, http://www.france24.com/ar
Furūshandih
[The Salesman]
Feature, Starring Shahab Hoseini and Taraneh Alidusti,
2015¸118 Minutes, Directed by Asghar Farhadi¸ and
Produced by Asghar Farhadi, Alexandre Mallet-Guy, and Olivier Père
The cinematic text of The Salesman and the sociopolitical context of its
international reception have made this seventh feature of Asghar Farhadi highly
controversial in and outside Iran. On the one hand, the film tackles universal
themes like sexual harassment and revenge. On the other hand, winning the 2017
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film politicized it. The politicization
was further intensified when the director refused to attend the Oscars ceremony
in response to President Trump’s Executive Order 13769 titled “Protecting the
Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” often referred to as
the Muslim ban or the travel ban. This order suspended the entry of the citizens
of several Muslim-majority countries, including Farhadi’s Iran, into the United
States. The deeply rooted ties of The Salesman to these historical moments makes
it of high significance for the cultural histories of both Iran and the U.S.A.
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8/21/2018
The Clash of Ignorance | The Nation
MEDIA
FEATURE
OCTOBER 22, 2001 ISSUE
The Clash of Ignorance
Labels like "Islam" and "the West" serve only to confuse us about a
disorderly reality.
By Edward W. Said
OCTOBER 4, 2001
m
S
amuel Huntington’s article "The Clash of Civilizations?"
appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs,
where it immediately attracted a surprising amount of
attention and reaction. Because the article was intended to
supply Americans with an original thesis about "a new
phase" in world politics after the end of the cold war,
Huntington’s terms of argument seemed compellingly large,
bold, even visionary. He very clearly had his eye on rivals in
the policy-making ranks, theorists such as Francis Fukuyama
and his "end of history" ideas, as well as the legions who had
celebrated the onset of globalism, tribalism and the
dissipation of the state. But they, he allowed, had understood
only some aspects of this new period. He was about to
announce the "crucial, indeed a central, aspect" of what
"global politics is likely to be in the coming years."
Unhesitatingly he pressed on:
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"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict
in this new world will not be primarily ideological or
primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind
and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation
states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs,
but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur
between nations and groups of different civilizations. The
clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault
lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the
future."
Most of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a
vague notion of something Huntington called "civilization
identity" and "the interactions among seven or eight [sic]
major civilizations," of which the conflict between two of
them, Islam and the West, gets the lion’s share of his
attention. In this belligerent kind of thought, he relies
heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran Orientalist Bernard
Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in its title, "The
Roots of Muslim Rage." In both articles, the personification
of enormous entities called "the West" and "Islam" is
recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like
identity and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where
Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one
always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over
his adversary. Certainly neither Huntington nor Lewis has
much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality
of every civilization, or for the fact that the major contest in
most modern cultures concerns the definition or
interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive
possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright
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ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole
religion or civilization. No, the West is the West, and Islam
Islam.
The challenge for Western policy-makers, says Huntington,
is to make sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all
the others, Islam in particular. More troubling is
Huntington’s assumption that his perspective, which is to
survey the entire world from a perch outside all ordinary
attachments and hidden loyalties, is the correct one, as if
everyone else were scurrying around looking for the answers
that he has already found. In fact, Huntington is an
ideologist, someone who wants to make "civilizations" and
"identities" into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off
entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and
countercurrents that animate human history, and that over
centuries have made it possible for that history not only to
contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be
one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing. This far less
visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the
ludicrously compressed and constricted warfare that "the
clash of civilizations" argues is the reality. When he
published his book by the same title in 1996, Huntington
tried to give his argument a little more subtlety and many,
many more footnotes; all he did, however, was confuse
himself and demonstrate what a clumsy writer and inelegant
thinker he was.
The basic paradigm of West versus the rest (the cold war
opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is
what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in
discussion since the terrible events of September 11. The
carefully planned and horrendous, pathologically motivated
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suicide attack and mass slaughter by a small group of
deranged militants has been turned into proof of
Huntington’s thesis. Instead of seeing it for what it is–the
capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band of
crazed fanatics for criminal purposes–international
luminaries from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir
Bhutto to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have
pontificated about Islam’s troubles, and in the latter’s case
have used Huntington’s ideas to rant on about the West’s
superiority, how "we" have Mozart and Michelangelo and
they don’t. (Berlusconi has since made a halfhearted apology
for his insult to "Islam.")
But why not instead see parallels, admittedly less spectacular
in their destructiveness, for Osama bin Laden and his
followers in cults like the Branch Davidians or the disciples
of the Rev. Jim Jones at Guyana or the Japanese Aum
Shinrikyo? Even the normally sober British weekly The
Economist, in its issue of September 22-28, can’t resist
reaching for the vast generalization, praising Huntington
extravagantly for his "cruel and sweeping, but nonetheless
acute" observations about Islam. "Today," the journal says
with unseemly solemnity, Huntington writes that "the
world’s billion or so Muslims are ‘convinced of the
superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority
of their power.’" Did he canvas 100 Indonesians, 200
Moroccans, 500 Egyptians and fifty Bosnians? Even if he did,
what sort of sample is that?
Uncountable are the editorials in every American and
European newspaper and magazine of note adding to this
vocabulary of gigantism and apocalypse, each use of which is
plainly designed not to edify but to inflame the reader’s
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indignant passion as a member of the "West," and what we
need to do. Churchillian rhetoric is used inappropriately by
self-appointed combatants in the West’s, and especially
America’s, war against its haters, despoilers, destroyers, with
scant attention to complex histories that defy such
reductiveness and have seeped from one territory into
another, in the process overriding the boundaries that are
supposed to separate us all into divided armed camps.
This is the problem with unedifying labels like Islam and the
West: They mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to
make sense of a disorderly reality that won’t be pigeonholed
or strapped down as easily as all that. I remember
interrupting a man who, after a lecture I had given at a West
Bank university in 1994, rose from the audience and started
to attack my ideas as "Western," as opposed to the strict
Islamic ones he espoused. "Why are you wearing a suit and
tie?" was the first retort that came to mind. "They’re Western
too." He sat down with an embarrassed smile on his face, but
I recalled the incident when information on the September
11 terrorists started to come in: how they had mastered all
the technical details required to inflict their homicidal evil
on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the aircraft
they had commandeered. Where does one draw the line
between "Western" technology and, as Berlusconi declared,
"Islam’s" inability to be a part of "modernity"?
One cannot easily do so, of course. How finally inadequate
are the labels, generalizations and cultural assertions. At
some level, for instance, primitive passions and sophisticated
know-how converge in ways that give the lie to a fortified
boundary not only between "West" and "Islam" but also
between past and present, us and them, to say nothing of the
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very concepts of identity and nationality about which there
is unending disagreement and debate. A unilateral decision
made to draw lines in the sand, to undertake crusades, to
oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate terrorism and,
in Paul Wolfowitz’s nihilistic vocabulary, to end nations
entirely, doesn’t make the supposed entities any easier to
see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make
bellicose statements for the purpose of mobilizing collective
passions than to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we are
dealing with in reality, the interconnectedness of
innumerable lives, "ours" as well as "theirs."
In a remarkable series of three articles published between
January and March 1999 in Dawn, Pakistan’s most respected
weekly, the late Eqbal Ahmad, writing for a Muslim
audience, analyzed what he called the roots of the religious
right, coming down very harshly on the mutilations of Islam
by absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose obsession with
regulating personal behavior promotes "an Islamic order
reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism,
aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion." And
this "entails an absolute assertion of one, generally decontextualized, aspect of religion and a total disregard of
another. The phenomenon distorts religion, debases
tradition, and twists the political process wherever it
unfolds." As a timely instance of this debasement, Ahmad
proceeds first to present the rich, complex, pluralist
meaning of the word jihad and then goes on to show that in
the word’s current confinement to indiscriminate war
against presumed enemies, it is impossible "to recognize the
Islamic–religion, society, culture, history or politics–as lived
and experienced by Muslims through the ages." The modern
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Islamists, Ahmad concludes, are "concerned with power, not
with the soul; with the mobilization of people for political
purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their
sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and timebound political agenda." What has made matters worse is
that similar distortions and zealotry occur in the "Jewish"
and "Christian" universes of discourse.
It was Conrad, more powerfully than any of his readers at
the end of the nineteenth century could have imagined, who
understood that the distinctions between civilized London
and "the heart of darkness" quickly collapsed in extreme
situations, and that the heights of European civilization
could instantaneously fall into the most barbarous practices
without preparation or transition. And it was Conrad also, in
The Secret Agent (1907), who described terrorism’s affinity for
abstractions like "pure science" (and by extension for "Islam"
or "the West"), as well as the terrorist’s ultimate moral
degradation.
For there are closer ties between apparently warring
civilizations than most of us would like to believe; both
Freud and Nietzsche showed how the traffic across carefully
maintained, even policed boundaries moves with often
terrifying ease. But then such fluid ideas, full of ambiguity
and skepticism about notions that we hold on to, scarcely
furnish us with suitable, practical guidelines for situations
such as the one we face now. Hence the altogether more
reassuring battle orders (a crusade, good versus evil,
freedom against fear, etc.) drawn out of Huntington’s alleged
opposition between Islam and the West, from which official
discourse drew its vocabulary in the first days after the
September 11 attacks. There’s since been a noticeable de-
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escalation in that discourse, but to judge from the steady
amount of hate speech and actions, plus reports of law
enforcement efforts directed against Arabs, Muslims and
Indians all over the country, the paradigm stays on.
One further reason for its persistence is the increased
presence of Muslims all over Europe and the United States.
Think of the populations today of France, Italy, Germany,
Spain, Britain, America, even Sweden, and you must concede
that Islam is no longer on the fringes of the West but at its
center. But what is so threatening about that presence?
Buried in the collective culture are memories of the first
great Arab-Islamic conquests, which began in the seventh
century and which, as the celebrated Belgian historian Henri
Pirenne wrote in his landmark book Mohammed and
Charlemagne (1939), shattered once and for all the ancient
unity of the Mediterranean, destroyed the Christian-Roman
synthesis and gave rise to a new civilization dominated by
northern powers (Germany and Carolingian France) whose
mission, he seemed to be saying, is to resume defense of the
"West" against its historical-cultural enemies. What Pirenne
left out, alas, is that in the creation of this new line of
defense the West drew on the humanism, science,
philosophy, sociology and historiography of Islam, which
had already interposed itself between Charlemagne’s world
and classical antiquity. Islam is inside from the start, as even
Dante, great enemy of Mohammed, had to concede when he
placed the Prophet at the very heart of his Inferno.
Then there is the persisting legacy of monotheism itself, the
Abrahamic religions, as Louis Massignon aptly called them.
Beginning with Judaism and Christianity, each is a successor
haunted by what came before; for Muslims, Islam fulfills and
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ends the line of prophecy. There is still no decent history or
demystification of the many-sided contest among these
three followers–not one of them by any means a monolithic,
unified camp–of the most jealous of all gods, even though
the bloody modern convergence on Palestine furnishes a
rich secular instance of what has been so tragically
irreconcilable about them. Not surprisingly, then, Muslims
and Christians speak readily of crusades and jihads, both of
them eliding the Judaic presence with often sublime
insouciance. Such an agenda, says Eqbal Ahmad, is "very
reassuring to the men and women who are stranded in the
middle of the ford, between the deep waters of tradition and
modernity."
But we are all swimming in those waters, Westerners and
Muslims and others alike. And since the waters are part of
the ocean of history, trying to plow or divide them with
barriers is futile. These are tense times, but it is better to
think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the
secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal
principles of justice and injustice, than to wander off in
search of vast abstractions that may give momentary
satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis.
"The Clash of Civilizations" thesis is a gimmick like "The
War of the Worlds," better for reinforcing defensive selfpride than for critical understanding of the bewildering
interdependence of our time.
Edward W. Said We mourn the loss of Edward Said, who passed away on the
morning of Thursday, September 25, 2003. Edward W. Said, the late University
Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, was
for many years the magazine's classical music critic as well as a contributing
writer. Known both for his groundbreaking research in the field of
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of Ignorance | The Nation
comparative literature andThe
hisClash
incisive
political commentary, Said was one of
the most prominent intellectuals in the United States. His writing regularly
appeared in the Guardian of London, Le Monde Diplomatique and the Arablanguage daily al-Hayat, printed in every Arab capital in the world. In 1948,
Said and his family were dispossessed from Palestine and settled in Cairo. He
came to the United States to attend college and lived in New York for many
years. Because of his advocacy for Palestinian self-determination and his
membership in the Palestine National Council, Said was not allowed to visit
Palestine until several years ago. Educated at Princeton and Harvard, Said
lectured at more than 150 universities and colleges in the United States,
Canada and Europe. His writing, translated into fourteen languages, includes
ten books, among them Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978), a runner-up in criticism
for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The World, the Text and the Critic
(Harvard, 1983); Blaming the Victims (Verso, 1988); Culture and Imperialism
(Knopf, 1993); Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East
Peace Process (Vintage, 1995); End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After
(Pantheon, 2000); and, most recently, Power, Politics, and Culture (Pantheon).
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