Some Thoughts on the Charlie Hebdo Tragedy We have all been following the reports on the horrifying massacre that took place on Wednesday in Paris and a number of things need to be said at this difficult time: One does indeed wonder some 13 years after the 9/11 attacks what George W. Bush’s war on terror has actually accomplished. After many years of U.S. military action in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, it is very hard to see how this toxic situation has been alleviated. Once again we see how the anarchic situation that has existed in the Middle East for many years has only deteriorated into further chaos. Once again we see the malignant role of religion in the violence. For all too long we have been browbeaten by the voices of strident militarism on the one side, and the arrogantly imperious voices of Interfaith Dialogue on the other. We still have little or no understanding of the native culture of the Middle East. Since the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in World War I we have seen the emergence of authoritarian regimes, post-Colonial violence, oil politics, and religious extremism coming from the three monotheistic faiths and their representatives in the various nationalist communities of the region. But we have not seen any serious attempt to articulate a rational understanding of the cultural and historical traditions of the Arab-Muslim world. Instead we have been inundated with various forms of propaganda from both Liberals and Conservatives to promote a viewpoint that is rooted either in interfaith ignorance or Western militant supremacy mired in violence. Extremism, as can be seen in the ongoing collapse of civic life in the Middle East – which has pointedly spilled over into immigrant communities in Europe and America, now rules significant portions of the Arab-Muslim world. The so-called “Arab Spring” has turned out to be a mirage; a complete failure that has not brought freedom and prosperity to the region and its citizens, but only further escalated the violence and chaos of malignant Islamist elements. The Bush-Cheney doctrine sought to use armed force to settle old scores in the region and in the end has proven to be an abject failure. There has been no accountability for those who beat the drums of war that continue to resound today. The ongoing participation in elite political circles of Neo-Conservative warmongers and chicken-hawks has not produced stability, but rather has served to further exacerbated tensions and internal conflicts, often to the advantage of extremist religious elements. The Neo-Conservative idea is rooted in a deep hatred of Arabs and Arab civilization that is connected to the Zionist-Israeli vision which sees the Middle East as a place of primitivism and barbarity. Orientalism is not dead by any stretch of the imagination. The propping up of authoritarian regimes in places like Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan has led to disastrous results with Western interests proving to be inimical to the interests of the Arab masses who have struggled to maintain their economic security under the tyranny of corrupt despots and their brutal enforcers. The Left has largely blamed the West and refused to look critically at the internal rot that has existed in the Arab-Muslim world for so long. Interfaith Dialogue has focused on a spurious equivalence between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism; each of which has its own parochial traditions and truth claims that are in sharp conflict with one another. The Right has consistently sought to use violence as a first option. It has enthusiastically embraced the demonizing interpretations of Arab civilization of vile individuals like Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, and Robert Spencer. The belief among denizens of the Right is that the West is in a permanent clash of civilizations with the Muslim world and we must bomb those nations into oblivion and install governments that will do our bidding. For many decades Israel has sought to manipulate the internal political system of the Palestinian Arabs with no success. Violence has continued apace. But the Right does not seem to be getting the message. The great irony of the Charlie Hebdo massacre is that the Right Wingers are the loudest voices in the cacophony of condemnation, while prior to the massacre such Right Wingers saw a Left Wing outfit like Charlie Hebdo as a menace to Western civilization. For all their blather about “free speech,” the Right Wing hawks are consistently suppressing it. The clash of civilizations thesis does seem to appeal to both the Western Right Wingers and the Islamists. These groups are locked in an endless struggle to assert their own version of the truth and deny the possibility of pluralism, tolerance, and the open society. Each side thrives on brutality, torture, and rapine. The Left has sought to turn a blind eye to the brutality of the Islamists while the Right has sought to justify its indiscriminate use of violence as it deals with the threat coming from the Arab-Muslim world. There is no questioning the central role played by oil production and the toxic effect it has had on the region and its cultural and economic development – or lack of development. The traditional culture of the region has been eviscerated by a dual-track development of one-party rule riddled with corruption and the parallel emergence of a strain of Islamic fundamentalism that reflects a lethal combination of militant nationalism and atavistic religious primitivism. These problems have been ignored as violence has been deployed by all participants in the ongoing conflict in the vain belief that more dead bodies will bring resolution and an end to the struggle. Both sides believe that only the language of force will settle things. President Obama gave a very inspired speech in Cairo back in June 2009; but like many of the positive signs that marked the early stage of his presidency it was quickly rejected in favor of the Bush-Cheney doctrine which continues to mark America’s foreign policy. The irritant of the Palestine Question remains a factor as the Obama administration continues to rubber-stamp official Israeli policy. What is not heard in any of these overheated discussions is evidence of the real historical culture and traditions of the region. Not the parochial religious traditions of Islam, but the cultural heritage of the classical Arab world which developed art, poetry and belles lettres, science, philosophy, economics, linguistics, and theological thought in the first centuries after the Muslim conquests. The cultures of Abbasid Iraq and Umayyad Spain and Fatimid Egypt are today unknown among the parties who are so viciously fighting one another. Traditions of intellectual attainment and social tolerance remain hidden from public view; invisible to the eyes of those who process the Middle East strictly through the lenses of religion and violence. The traditional culture of the Arab-Muslim world can best be called “Religious Humanism” as it allowed each faith tradition to maintain its unique character, but placed the particular in the context of a universal human culture. It was this Religious Humanism that grounded Middle Eastern civilization. And it is Religious Humanism that is at the epicenter of the Sephardic Jewish heritage. Sephardim were a central part of the Arab-Muslim world for many centuries, and yet our voices are not at all a part of the current discussion. The human relationships between Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the region have been forgotten under the pressures of a religious Hegelianism which has erased the Arab past and put in its place a corrupted nihilism that now grips all parties to the conflict. The vile murderers who entered the offices of Charlie Hebdo are the children of this nihilism. They have rejected the glorious civilization of the Arab heritage and instead have embraced a toxic religious fundamentalism whose primary value is death and destruction in the name of God. This death impulse has become common to those who seek to extol the superiority of their religion which is seen as a strictly nationalistic force. The Islamist militants who carried out the murders sought to “avenge” their prophet rather than seek tolerance and ways of co-existence with non-Muslims. Such radical nihilists look to Scripture for confirmation of their violent values. Thus it is that religion by itself cannot fix the problem. It is only a wider cultural engagement, understood for many centuries in the Andalusian-Sephardic and Ottoman worlds, which will help to enable Muslims and non-Muslims to live peacefully in an open society. The pre-modern Middle East, naturally, did not maintain the same basic civil rights structure that we now have in the West. But in the ongoing attempt to stabilize the Ottoman Empire, steps were taken in what was called the Nahda to develop such democratic and pluralistic values rooted in the traditions of the past. The end of the Ottoman Empire and the European encroachment led to the emergence of authoritarian rule and religious extremism. Until we are better equipped to understand and value the heritage of classical Arab civilization and the place of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the development of that civilization, we are fated to continue on this path to death, decay, and destruction. Neither the Left nor the Right has the necessary answers to solve the problems of violence and radicalism. It is only in educating ourselves in the vast expanse of the Arab past that we will be better to process the issues that plague us. Violence only leads to more violence. Religious extremism, like ethnocentric militant nationalism, can only ensure more death and more destruction. David Shasha via Joseph Cohen
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 19:01:21 +0000
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