By James Brooks*
On May 30, Associated Press Radio Headline News reported that at least "50 hard-core Muslims" were ready to carry out suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia. It's possible that AP copywriters now consider words like "militant" or "terrorist" to be mere superfluities. It's also possible they were striving for both brevity and accuracy. "After all," they may have reasoned, "we don't know if they are militants or terrorists, we only know that they want to blow themselves up. So all we know is that they're hard-core Muslims."
From the barbecue down the street to the pinnacles of government and influence, racism and bigotry are once again the accepted norm in America. We have returned to our former habit of publicly attacking races, cultures and religions as a matter of national politics. Widely ridiculed attempts to encourage tolerance with 'political correctness' have been trumped by right-wing venomists exploiting events to legitimate a more visceral and familiar discourse of threat, fear, and intolerance. Thanks to this concerted effort to tap the sewers of the American heart, our racism now has an official language and a "new" approved target: Arabs and Muslims.
Americans who are aware of the problem tend to blame it on current or recent personalities and events, because they cannot reflect on a history they do not know. They point first to September 11, twisted and amplified through the gov-media input stream. Some go on to point out that decades of neoconservative, fundamentalist, pro-Israeli and Hollywood propaganda made Americans easy marks for politicians brewing a spirit of national retribution. A few remember that we had already shown our anti-Islamic stripes, long before the bigotry got organized enough to establish its own think tanks. From our demonization of Nasser and the PLO to the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, when
Iranian-American citizens instantly became "sand niggers" and victims of mobs and hate crimes from coast to coast, we had already revealed a wide seam of hatred for Arabs and Islam in the bedrock of our national character.
But these points, important as they are, merely scratch the surface of our problem. To solve it, we need to get at its roots, and learn some history they didn't teach us to forget in high school. We need to expose a thousand year-old cover-up, and learn that we inheritors of European culture have yet to thank the Islamic-Arabic world for a few small items. Like the foundations of our culture, science and technology, for starters. We need to understand how Western history has perennially denied, hidden, and demonized Islamic culture and peoples, to learn how and why we are doing it today.
The recent US adventure in Iraq presented an updated, digitized example of the latter practice, as TV networks conspired with the Pentagon to show that war can be painless, if we hide the enemy, especially if she is dead, if the gored and dismembered civilians can't be seen, if their race and religion are inferior, if "they will have to change anyway, one way or another," as Tom Friedman might put it. Then we know we are in the right. We slip into it so easily, it's as if we've been doing it for a thousand years.
When the "new" bigots claim that Islam is a "uniquely violent religion," they, too, are piping a very old and wretched tune. Armed with scriptures that are objectively far bloodier and less tolerant than the Qur'an, Christian and Jewish fundamentalists teach their flocks the finer points of self-delusion as they fulminate this age-old lie.
Empirically, from the beginning of Islam fourteen centuries ago, Europeans have been far more bloodthirsty, perhaps by a power of ten or more, than the followers of Mohammed. (I use "Europeans" to connote people of European stock and heritage, wherever they may be.) Not only did Europeans leapfrog the Muslim world in developing sheer killing power, they have also been at each other's throats in large conflicts far more frequently than have Arab Muslims in their own sphere.
Europeans essentially invented large scale genocide and colonization of foreign lands as a state-commercial enterprise. What in Islamic history even begins to compare with the seizure, annihilation, and occupation of an entire hemisphere?
And what, to cite just one example, do Europeans have to compare with the Moorish occupation of Spain? Instead of sowing lasting bloodshed and dispossession, Islamic Spain allowed a fairly peaceful co-existence among Muslims, Christians and Jews for 800 years, as they co-developed the beautiful Spanish language and culture. Although Spanish is taught extensively in American schools, this rich and instructive heritage is barely mentioned.
In a recent article in the New Statesman, Ziauddin Sardar gets at the roots of our problem when he writes that "the west's hatred of Islam stems from, more than anything else, the denial of its true lineage.
The western world as we understand it is a child of Islam. Without Islam, the west - however we conceive it today - would not exist. And, without the west, Islam is incomplete and cannot survive the future."
With the phrase "the western world..is a child of Islam" Sardar refers to a history that many Arabs and Muslims continue to learn today, a history that has been blotted out of European culture ever since it happened.
In the year 700, Islam and the Arabic language were on the move. Soon their influence would stretch from India to Spain. Europe was entering its Dark Ages, nursing its dwindling links to a dead Roman culture. Arabic scholarship, science and invention surpassed Europe in every way. Arabic scholars would soon include Greeks, Persians, Indians, Africans, Christians, Jews and more. Arabic would become as essential as English is today. Europe would cling to Latin, already a dying language.
Four hundred years later, Europe began to catch on. Translating more Arabic texts into Latin, we began to learn. Not only did we imbibe the fundamentals of our math, science and technology in Arabic, we learned the very roots of our culture and democracy at the feet of our Islamic neighbors. At a time when very few in Europe could even read Greek, the Arabs were already rescuing the genius of ancient Greece from oblivion. They translated Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, the whole Pantheon of Greek learning and art into Arabic, and brought it back to life in Islamic culture.
We in the West learned "our" Greek heritage by translating the Arabic translations into Latin. For centuries, the fundamental texts of budding European scholarship were based on Arabic translations, and Europe's scholarship continued to be informed by its more learned Arabic contemporaries. Europeans even copied principles of Islamic scholarship and academic organization in building their own nascent academies. But soon we were spinning the myth that we'd got it all directly from "our" Greek ancestors. Which may have made it easier to launch the Crusades, to begin murdering our teachers.
The injection of ancient Greek learning and art into Church-bound Europe is generally held to be the engine of the Renaissance and the beginning of our humanist traditions. Yet even this momentous "cultural starter kit" was just one of many gifts received from our Islamic intellectual superiors. The language of algebra and the concept of zero were also vital to Europe's growth. By the year 800, Arabic mathematicians had learned these tools and the place-valued decimal system from the scholars of India. Four hundred years later, Fibonacci wrote his groundbreaking "Liber abaci" to introduce modern (Arabic) numerals and the Hindu-Arabic decimal system to a Europe still muddling with Roman numerals.
The word 'algebra' is from an Arabic name in the title of the book "Hisab al-jabr w'al muqabala", written around 830 by the renowned astronomer and mathematician Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi. When translated into Latin, it caused a sensation in Europe - 310 years later. Where would Newton have been, without the Arabs? On what would he and Leibniz have based the calculus? Whither Maxwell and Einstein, without Islam? How can we receive such gifts and perpetually rebuke the giver?
There are many other examples, including the Arabic roots of European music and musical instruments, and the rich Islamic/Arabic influence spanning the people and cultures of southern and eastern Europe, to name but two. We have a lot of history to recover. Who would we be, without this cornucopia of gifts? Even the engines of our world dominance are built with intellectual handtools forged in the Muslim mind. If we are not the child of Islam, we are at best its belligerent kid brother.
Benighted by an ethnocentric and bigoted myth-history, a hegemonic America threatens the world. Although efforts have begun to recover the suppressed fabric of America's racial and labor history, the deeper roots of our historical denial remain firmly buried. Until we dig them up and begin to reconcile our own story with the history of the world, we will continue to repeat the mistakes of our bloody past.
* James Brooks of Worcester, Vermont, is a writer and former business owner. His recent articles have been published by several Web sites covering the Middle East, investigative journalism and alternative politics. Currently, Brooks serves as webmaster for Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel (www.vtjp.org) and publishes News Links, a free, once-daily (Mon-Sat) e-mail digest of in-depth Middle East news and commentary. To subscribe, contact [email protected].
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
