The Sept. 11 Canon: Week 2
Dear Ted,
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StumbleUponI want to take more seriously the question of whether dwelling on Arab self-pity amounts to "easy denunciations of the Arab/Muslim worldview." I realize your point, Ted, was more complicated than that. What you were really doing was comparing me and the two Chrises—the critics of Armstrong and to a lesser degree of Islam—to Bernard Lewis and not surprisingly, finding our breadth of historical knowledge wanting. In your opinion, we have no right to pass judgment on whether the Arabs are entitled to pity themselves or whether their worldview poses a threat to us because we don't have as deep and nuanced an understanding of Islam or the causes of Muslim anger. Ignorant as we are, we ought not get up on our high horses.
Well, let me get off my high horse and get onto my favorite hobby horse, Hannah Arendt, to explain what's wrong with that premise. In a wonderful essay called "Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding)" she begins, "Many people say that one cannot fight totalitarianism without understanding it. Fortunately this is not true." In other words, we don't have to come to a full understanding of something bad in order to oppose it. This doesn't relieve of us the responsibility of working like hell to understand it, but Arendt makes the sensible point that true understanding takes a long time, if not forever, and you can never be certain you've achieved it, and in the meantime you have an obligation to take the best moral stand against evil that you can at the time. Ignorance is no excuse for neutrality. I know this doctrine contradicts many truths sacred to academics and intellectuals, but it starts to seem apt when you apply it to periods in history when people are forced to choose a moral course of action—to stand up for the good or inadvertently collaborate with the bad. Are we in such a period? I think we are; you might disagree.
Anyway, if Arendt's right, then I don't need a Lewisian grasp of Arab history to condemn self-pity when I come across it. All I have to do is see the illogic of the argument made under the influence of self-pity—in Armstrong's case, blaming the West for the failure of the Arab world to establish a democracy. However, I do believe I'm obliged to make two additional moves. One is to keep reading and informing myself, and the second is to be consistent and fair-minded in my condemnations.
Thinking about this has led me to wonder whether self-pity in general, not just Arab or Muslim self-pity, isn't the single biggest threat to the safety of the world today. Every time a religious or ethnic or national group descends into self-pity, the emotion is invariably used to justify violence. The Crusaders and the Germans and Baruch Goldstein, who shot up a mosque full of worshippers, all felt themselves to be more sinned against than sinning. So did the Serbs. The ultra-Orthodox Jews settling in on the West Bank have elevated their self-pity to an expansionist principle—they're thinking, everyone's against the Jews anyway, so we might as well just do what we want and take over more Arab land. The funny thing is how often historians of a particular religious or ethnic group elevate their subjects' self-pity to an intellectual principle—call it Saidism, the idea that histories that are critical and at times unsympathetic to the people whose stories they tell thereby collude with those people's oppressors, and that history must represent the point of view of the oppressed. Lewis, by this model, is absolutely a tool of colonialism since he often looks at Arabs, oppressed as many of them undeniably are, through skeptical eyes.
How do we fight self-pity? I haven't figured that out yet. One thing we clearly don't do is give in to the sulking that self-pity promotes. The West failed to support democratic governments in the Arab world, giving democracy itself a bad name. Let's say that's true. What then? Should Arabs give up on democracy itself? Why should our failures lead them to deny themselves this obvious good? Isn't that the international equivalent of the Jewish joke—the little old lady who'd rather just sit there in the dark than forego the pleasure of making her children feel guilty?
Yours,
Judith
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Notes From The Fray Editor:
Bernard Lewis is the man of the moment: see also this "Assessment" and the Fray Notes at the end.
Comments:
Judith Shulevitz and several posters have argued that being educated about Islam and the Middle East is secondary to the conflict underlined by the September 11 attacks, that one can take a stand against evil without being informed as to its contours…
I don't see how one can fight a war against "terrorism," unless one knows enough to define the objective. Sure, we want to stop suicide bombers, but whom are we going to go after? This requires that we know something about the setting in which the acts are planned, the particular motivations of the actors, and the ideologies through which new terrorists are recruited. What is the history of these organizations? What alliances have been formed between violent anti-American groups? What apparent alliances are implausible? Should we carry the war on terrorism to Iraq? To Palestinians? Moreover, since these terrorists are foreigners, we are to some extent acting on the sufferance of their home countries; we have to have enough knowledge about these places to explain in effective terms why we want to kill or arrest their native sons…
We need to be able to provide at least minimally informed oversight of foreign policy, to be able to survey the broad contours of our war on terrorism and say, "This is a reasonable definition," or "this will be an effective intervention." We can't know that unless we have done some investigation on our own. And this investigation includes not only things like the history of the Deobandi madrasas set up by Zia ul-Haq in the 1970s, in which many of the Taliban studied, but also things like the Deobandi movement itself, the ideology that motivates it , the Islamic reform movement of Salafism that spawned both it and the Arabian Wahhabis, and so on…
--ADAS
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Bernard Lewis is a highly erudite, and readable--hence his popularity--scholar of classical and medieval Islam. He is not, however, a social or cultural historian. His is extremely textual history. Lewis begins, continues, and ends with the text. As a literary critic and cultural historian, I find this somewhat limiting. It exposes him to a very serious difficulty: he all too often takes classical texts as definitive of history, and classical history as definitive of the present. They even define, he seems to believe, the very essence of Islam, an essence he feels he can capture.
We need first to understand that the "essence" of Islam will be just as diverse, and just as un-essential, as the "essence" of Christianity, whatever that might be. (Notice that when we ask questions about Islam, we rarely ask the exactly parallel question about Christianity; doing so would demonstrate the dubious intellectual footing of many of our questions.)
Second, Lewis's brand of history tends to start with a famous or important classical text, read it in a very erudite--and at times rather uncritical--way, and then state that what we find in that text demonstrates what was actually going on in the society that produced it. A cultural historian knows that while this may be a starting point for investigation, it's hardly workable as a general assumption. Lewis unfortunately tends to assume just this, forgetting that isolated texts or works of art by elite groups may tell us rather little about the overall picture, or even the day-to-day operations, of their culture.
For all that, he's a fine read. Indeed, probably a must-read, if we are looking for popular primers.
--Seth Graebner
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(11/16)