Edward Said's Orientalism is worth revisiting. For those who think that we can talk about Arab culture as something "other" and "abstract" and "out there" it's worth pondering a moment the source of the words on this
list:
cotton, coffee, artichoke, sash, racket, orange, magazine, hazard, sofa, spinach, sugar, syrup, tariff, algebra, almanac, lime, lilac, jar, chemistry, alcohol, alfalfa, check, muslin, zero, alcove, mattress
In a nation engaged in a war of occupation, contempt for the "opponent" is easy and sickening. The Bush Administration entered post-invasion Iraq speaking freely of "evildoers" and "thugs." It allowed the looting of museums, undertook a campaign of counter-productive debaathification and propped up the torture and degradation of prisioners with legalistic memos. As Said pointed out in Orientalism: the box we view others from tells us more about ourselves than it does them.
Understanding, of the kind we never even began in Iraq, requires work. In one of the last essays he wrote before his death in 2003, Edward Said said it well:
Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires...
The terrible conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like "America," "The West" or "Islam" and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be opposed....Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow. But for that kind of wider perception we need time, patient and skeptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.
One year ago, President Bush made just such a major statement of "official discourse" regarding his vision for "Freedom in Iraq and the Middle East" in a speech before the National Endowment for Democracy on Nov. 6th, 2003 in Washington. In that speech, he opined:
Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country, or that people, or this group, are "ready" for democracy -- as if freedom were a prize you win for meeting our own Western standards of progress. In fact, the daily work of democracy itself is the path of progress. It teaches cooperation, the free exchange of ideas, and the peaceful resolution of differences.
These last four years George Bush has demonstrated, at home and abroad, his true views of "the daily work of democracy": cooperation, the free exchange of ideas, and the peaceful resolution of differences. What his administration hasn't shown is the least understanding of the country and people of Iraq, or how ahistorical and hollow the phrase, "our own Western standards of progress" really is in this context.
That George Bush has pledged to bring peace and democracy to Iraq is a yardstick that he will be measured by. That George Bush seems ignorant, as so many are, not just of the debts we owe to Islam and the Arab world, but of the opinions and views of the Iraqis themselves, is an irony that is not of the delicious variety...
it's unforgiveable.
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