by YUSOF AHMAD

G21 South Asia Correspondent

exploring all the
territories of your mind

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ASSAM, INDIA - Sometime last year, I received an email from a Muslim preacher who teaches Islamic studies at an American University and is a graduate in Islamic Studies from the University of Medina. The email was one of many such emails from different preachers of different Islamic schools that I receive as part of my ongoing education about Islamic theology and Muslim politics. This email was, however, different from the rest-most of which were simple rehashes of the moral science classes I received at my old Catholic school.

The author was here trying to prove how, from an Islamic jurisprudential viewpoint, the TV must be considered prohibited. And he premised his argument on the very principle on which I would have supposed it to have failed ã that where the religious law is not clear, a thing is to be considered permissible or prohibited depending on the use to which it is to be put. The author had even provided the example of the act of procuring a knife to illustrate his point. I forget the exact line of the reasoning that led the author to his surprising conclusion. What remains is that this was an email, delivered over the Internet to which both, the sender and the majority of his readers, had access. It did not matter that the Internet held out far greater avenues for moral corruption than the TV and that the virtues and vices of both these media depended on what use was made of them

The argument, however, held out a greater malice that characterizes most Saudi scholarship of Islam - the tendency to interpret the religion with a pronounced Arab (read racial) bias. It also pointed to a deep seated resentment amongst Muslim clerics against the media dominance of the West and the sub-texts of media reports that launched a full blown war on Arab culture in the post 9/11 period. It is the second of these that is the subject of this article.

At the time I had received this email, Al Jazeera was not yet doing the Iraq thing as there was no Iraq thing to be done. However, the Taliban had taken off in fright and the propaganda hype of the American conservative media was on in full swing. Most of the media, it was noticed then, was antipathetic to Arab sentiments and it found ready takers in the average Western household given that 9/11 was obviously something that had to do with terrorism exported from Arab lands and heavily financed by Arab money.

9/11 had also granted greater legitimacy to the tactics of the Israeli state as the funds that were funding terrorist activities in the United States were found to be parts of a larger flow, some of which was finding its way into Palestine. The pan-Islamic nature of the Palestinian cause was common knowledge and the methods of the Hamas and Islamic Jehad were no different from the methods of the 9/11 perpetrators. Suicide bombings by Palestinian separatists were now to be dealt with in the same way as suicide bombings against America with its tradition of legally-guaranteed civil liberties to all citizens irrespective of color, race or religion. These similarities were never lost on CNN and Fox reporters who never tired of drawing subtle analogies between these two groups.

In the Middle East, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Palestinian cause had suffered a severe blow but Arab sentiments were still with the Palestinian suicide bombers. Saudi scholars had supported these suicide bombings as valid methods of waging a moral war and - all of a sudden - all this was rebounding and a war on terror was about to undo all the imagined gains from such a war strategy. It was necessary to make this propaganda illegal - to keep the opinions and points of view of the liberal and even the conservative West out of the bedrooms of Arab masses, to close the Islamic world's window to the world lest the Arab cause should suffer. More importantly, it was necessary to teach the Western media to respect Arab sentiments and to project Arab lands, 9/11 notwithstanding, in better light.

In all of the above, Arab governments had as much of a stake as orthodox Wahhabi clerics. The political intricacies of Western democracy, its decision-making systems and its tolerance of many different opinions was something that was best left out of the education of Arab youngsters. Western Democracy was one thing that shone through even the most partisan reporting by CNN and its seeds, if it were to take root in Arab soil, would endanger the most carefully crafted aristocratic deceptions of the last century. Never mind that it was these same Western democracies that had propped up this deception in the first place. It is not wholly false, though it may be somewhat incoherent as a foreign policy basis, to assert that the rest of the world hated America because of its democratic freedoms and the fact that it was never weary of trumpeteering the same while at the same time it endeavored to support non-democratic authoritarian governments that were willing to do its bidding. This was dangerous, as were the trumpets - the media.

More than the material poverty of the average Arab, and American connivance with continued Israeli persecution of Palestinians, there were two other fundamentals that had, however, so swayed the Arab world against the U.S. of A.

1. The first fundamental was RESPECT or the lack of it. The Arab's perceived love of haggling, his perceived avidness for quarrels over petty matters and in short, the perceived general lack of quality of the Arab mind were favorite laughing points for Western cartoonists as was the Arab's perceived trigger-happy nature. Whether the devil is in the perceptions or that perceived, is subject to differences of opinion. However, a people who had brought Aristotle and Plato to a reawakened Europe and thereby, spurred the Renaissance, that had given to the language such terms as Chemistry and Algebra and that had authored medical texts that were used in European Universities as late as the sixteenth century had reason to feel sore over this assassination of cultural content and personality. And with this perceived feebleness of the Arab personality came the political betrayals of an entire century over Palestine.

   The Arabs had been bartered off, their lands divided willy-nilly and care taken to see that a pan-Arab state that was the goal of Arab nationalism never took off. These are a people who feel duped and who are now shouting out "We want respect". It is, of course, partly the West's fault that they do not know how to assert that right to demand respect and, partly, the fault of interested Arab aristocracies.

   One great merit of a democratic system is that it instills into its members self-respect and confidence. For democracy means, fundamentally, that a people are fit to rule themselves, able to debate alternatives and choose an alternative that best answers to the preferences of the majority. But the West propped up aristocracies over Arab lands without ever preparing their inhabitants for democratic governance. Bottled up frustrations about domestic State policies that have seen persistent dips in standards of living are therefore now being thrown upon the West and its institutions. The absence of democracy means the absence of systems whereby competing viewpoints about national policies can be debated out and channeled.

   The inability of Arab States to use their oil reserves in a way that is best suited to their economic interests and, indeed, to set the price of this valuable resource despite the cartel arrangements of the OPEC is, in the most part, the result of arm-twisting by America and its NATO allies that see it fit to ignore free market economics where this resource is concerned. The result is that economic discrepancies have spilled over into politics and are affecting the global economy via this pathway of popular sentiment.

   And these aristocracies are still paraded as friends of America, interests that need support and help and protection from those very sentiments that the American media has helped to foster. On the one hand, the Arab nations are laughable for the primitiveness of their social systems and on the other, they are to be protected from more progressive political education. The media must be free but free speech, again, is dangerous to the friends of the West. Thus has the West fabricated a whirlpool of contradictions in which the average Arab must inevitably feel thrown around and helpless.

   The other side of the coin is that America must now itself be caught in this mess it helped create. A preference for the convenience of the limited points of control and influence of aristocracies has now resulted in the backlash of diffused points of dissent, which is why the monster called Islamic terrorism is getting so difficult to stalk.

2. The other fundamental is, undeniably, cultural conflict and the general lack of any theory that can guide towards a world of cultural pluralism. Despite what Muslim apologetics and American-Arab voices (with a very large political and survival stake in the debate) may have to say, it remains that religious Islam has very sharp points of conflict with Western civilization. The Greco-Roman tradition (often called the Judeo-Christian tradition, though anything but Jewish) with its emphasis on cultural expression and its celebration of sexuality is sharply opposed to the sterner strains of the Islamic way of life. Even puritanical Christianity retained the artistic forms of Greece and Rome and each of these is vehemently opposed to the nature of Islam whose art is severely circumcised by religious considerations.

   The challenge here to bring about change not through overt aggression such as, for example, was evidenced from the flooding of Afghanistan by women's cosmetics closely after the successful invasion of that country but rather through subtle encouragement of the little freedom that already exists. Islam, for example, has no restrictions per se on women professionals in the health sector. At the same time, in most of these societies, it is women's emancipation from the shackles of ignorance that is likely to be the most effective catalyst to change. And this is where the western media may play a more proactive part by moving out of its traditional role of partisan and often uninformed reporting to actually being the agents of constructive cultural change that yet does not strike at the deeper sensibilities of these peoples.