A friend sent me this link to an article about Muslim "lies," dragomans, and Orientalism.
Did anybody else see that Saturday Night Live sketch when Joe Montana was the guest host, consisting of some people standing around in a living room talking, and each person would say something out loud and then there would be a voiceover saying what the person was actually thinking to themselves, and the thoughts would be radically different from the speech each time? And then they got to Joe Montana, and he said something nice to the other people, and his thought voiceover said the exact same thing, word for word? [Laugh] And then he said, out loud, "Well, it's been nice talking to you people. I'm going to go up to my room and masturbate now." [Big laugh] And his voiceover repeated it as he walked up the stairs [Another big laugh]. It worked especially well, I think, because football players are generally believed to be bone-stupid.
In everyday life, every time another person opens his or her mouth to speak, we know they are editing their thoughts and tailoring their words to us in one way or another, and we know that we constantly do the same when we speak to others. We think of this as an indispensable social skill rather than "lying." And in the arena of politics, we know that every time a conservative or liberal pundit opens his or her mouth to speak about the same issue, they will be highlighting entirely different data points about it. This is not "lying" either; this is analysis and interpretation (the selection and integration of the most salient data to illuminate a given way of thinking about an issue), and rhetoric (the presentation of that data to persuade others to share that way of thinking about an issue by associating it with what the speaker presumes the audience already believes), and no political discussion can take place without it. A precise and even-handed presentation of every relevant detail about a given issue, if such a thing is even possible, can never move beyond itself. What are we to make of this great mass of facts? What do they mean? We are always of necessity intellectually imposing one sort of order or another on a chaotic world. (I did try to start writing about rhetoric but found it impossible again--I never did turn in a paper for the rhetoric course I took in college--because as my husband said to me, trying to talk about rhetoric itself is a lot like expecting a fish to describe the water in which it swims, but my point would have been: people who understand how rhetoric works know that they are doing basically the same thing as their political opponents are but from a different set of premises, whereas people who don't understand how rhetoric works think that they are telling the unvarnished truth and others are lying).
I might never get around to writing the "right vs. left stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims" thing that I mentioned before, but if I ever do, the theme will be "savage vs. noble savage." The right theorizes the Arab and Muslim Other as a superstitious medieval peasant with access to high-tech weaponry; the left theorizes this Other as post-colonial victim, period. Both are cartoons serving different political agendas, and both end up, in their most idealized form, looking a lot like Joe Montana (if Joe Montana were a ventriloquist's dummy that is, but pass over that for now). In both theories, this Other is supposed to be incapable of higher-order intellectual functions like analysis, interpretation, and rhetoric. Every word out of their mouths is supposed to be, simply, "true." If it isn't "true", then they're lying (right) or suffering from false consciousness, known in this context as "Westernization" (left). Not interpreting, not arguing, not "spinning," just lying, or succumbing to someone else's lie. Both conceptions assume that we (the non-Muslim "West") know what is "true," what Arabs and Muslims ought to have in their heads, which of course is whatever "truth" reinforces our own politics. Underlying both assumptions is the unstated belief that for the simple, dusky foreigner, the mouth is the telegraph of the brain (or more precisely the "authentic" self, in the left conception), and corruption is the only possible explanation for any discontinuity between thought and speech.
If you asked a dozen Christian theologians whether or not the Bible says that the Jews killed Jesus, how many would simply say "yes?" The words on the page do in fact describe Jews involved in the death of Jesus. So if the theologians said "no," would they be "lying?" If you are a believing Christian, you believe the Bible is "true." But you also believe that there are different ways to interpret it, and that some types of interpretation have authorized acts (like the Holocaust) that contradict other Christian principles that seem more central according to other interpretations. And you further believe that it is your duty to present the correct interpretation of Christianity whenever you speak of it. Asking what the Bible "says" is really asking what it means. So a Christian being asked whether the Jews killed Jesus will be considering not just the words on the page, but what it has meant to answer that question in a certain way in the past, and what it means to answer it a certain way now, and how those meanings might qualify the concept of Christianity itself. The Christian knows what the text contains, but wants to exert some control over what it is understood to say, with several goals in mind: to avoid authorizing anti-Semitism, to present his or her own belief about the real central meaning of the Passion, whatever that might be, to avoid presenting Christianity as inherently anti-Semitic, intolerant, and murderous. The answer will be heavily qualified, therefore, not only by interpretation itself, but also in reaction to an array of presumed biases, both against Christians and against Jews, and indeed the very presumption that this is a vitally important question to ask about the Christ story in the first place.
Islamic religious leaders and Western "dragomans" like Karen Armstrong are of course constantly being asked equally fraught questions about Islam with respect to Islamist terrorism. They answer these questions knowing that they have no control over not only how much of their answer will see print, but how much else the reader or the journalist might be able to add to contextualize whatever portion of their remarks are quoted. The imam says what he believes about Islam, which is that of course it does not authorize the kidnapping and beheading of random civilians for Muslims living today. He says this in a context in which interrogating Christians are not the only audience for his answer. Islamism represents a grafting of Islamic concepts onto mostly Marxist-Leninist tropes for the purpose of fomenting a political revolution across the Muslim world. It is a particular reading for a particular purpose, and one that loses much in the translation from more traditional readings. Muslims disagree amongst themselves about what Islam "really" means, in much the same way Christians do about Christianity. For a Muslim to assert that a given terrorist practice does not "come from" the Koran is not so much an attempt to deceive Christians about what Islam "really" means, but an assertion of his own beliefs about his own faith. What would it mean to "admit" that beheading "comes from" the Koran? Wouldn't this amount to validating the Islamist interpretation, implying that the Koran is in fact a terrorist playbook? It turns out that a lot of people on the right would say yes to that.
And, oddly enough, so do a lot of people on the left seem to think, though they would never say so out loud, exactly. When Islamist violence finally caught our collective attention about 3 years ago, the presumption that such an act must be the result of something we had done was natural enough. I think Paul Berman captured the reasoning process fairly well in his Terrorism and Liberalism, in the context of his discussion of the initial French Communist reaction to the excesses of Nazi Germany:
For it is very odd to think that millions or tens of millions of people, relying on their own best judgments, might end up joining a pathological political movement. Individual madmen might step forward--yes, that is unquestionable. The Reverend Jim Jones might lead the demented residents of his pathetic Jonestown in Guyana to their collective suicide. But, surely, millions of people are not going to choose death, and the Jonestowns of this world are not going to take over entire societies. The very idea of a pathological mass movement seems too far-fetched to be believable …
Let us suppose that … a social or political movement does appear to be showing, in fact, signs of a pathological attachment to murder and suicide. In that case, there has got to be a rational explanation. Perhaps some unspeakable social condition has provoked the murderous impulse. Perhaps small groups of exploiters or imperialists, through their terrible deeds, have driven thousands or even millions of people out of their minds. Perhaps a population has been humiliated beyond human endurance. Unbearable social conditions might well breed irrational reactions--though, in such a case, the irrational reactions ought not to be seen as irrational. For the human race does not act in irrational ways.
Yet this theory of a purely reactive sort of violence, though it proceeds from a desire to provide a rationale for apparently irrational behavior, ends up infantilizing the actor. French liberals were saying things like this about Nazis on the assumption that if other members of their society "knew" why the Other was behaving like that, then they would not behave in a likewise reactive fashion themselves, and become caught up in a cycle of violence. But there was no question that Weimar era Germans "knew" why they were humiliated; you could tell they'd picked a culprit through their aggressive words and actions. Indeed, the deprivations of Weimar Germany were a result of the quite intentional punishment of Germany for its role in WWI contained in the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Why would such knowledge of the Other's complaints about past wrongs make one group peaceful, but the other group violent? Why is one "punishment" just and another unjust? In this conception, one group is simply morally or perhaps intellectually superior to the other. One group is supposed to have some sort of perspective on the situation, and the other group is not. One group is expected to act responsibly, towards another group that is understood merely to react blindly.
Thus, there is a presumption of some sort of diminished capacity in the Other if we attribute the other's violence to our own fault--because in this theory we should avoid rather than embrace a symmetrical reaction. And worse, if we attribute the violence of a given movement to the wrong that we have done to an entire collectivity, then the entire collectivity must react in that same violent way, or our theory collapses. And how can an entire collectivity exhibit such an inferior moral and intellectual capacity? Why through some sort of defect or disorder in their culture, of course. (Some might even say, through some defect in their race, but we are too smart to go there, not directly anyway).
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I wrote the forgoing about a month ago, and stopped there, but I think it’s probably obvious where I was going with it, i.e., how the Western leftist academy’s embrace or at least defence of Islamism as an expression of Muslim "authenticity" is at bottom just another iteration of Orientalism. A number of Muslim Middle Eastern ex-pat intellectuals I’ve read have alluded to this point, but now I’m reading what promises to be a sustained, focused critique of this tendency, Haideh Moghissi’s Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: the Limits of Postmodern Analysis, so I’d rather return to this topic after I’ve chewed that one over a bit.
Btw, the article I linked to contains a paragraph that I think is extremely misleading.
And then there's the case of Montasser al-Zayat, a source who has been tapped by virtually every Western journalist who has gone through Cairo in the last decade. He is a lawyer who specializes in defending Islamists, mostly members of al-Gama'a al-Islameya, and he serves as unofficial spokesman for the group. He's a genial fellow, or, as one Egyptian reporter described him, everyone's favorite Islamist. When I met him, he told me, as he has told many others, that the Egyptian government made the Islamist groups violent. Of course, that's not true. At the very beginning, the groups formed military wings to carry out assassinations and other terrorist operations, but Zayat has told his story to so many Western journalists, who have reported it in books, magazines, and newspapers, that it is perhaps fair to credit him as the man responsible for spreading the idea that the Egyptian government made the Islamists violent.
I’d just like to note in passing that the radicalization of the Muslim Brotherhood by Nasserite repression has been discussed in every history of the movement I’ve read so far; that story may be wrong (and I’d be interested to know if anyone’s seen a good alternate interpretation that would contradict it), but it is hardly the product of one Islamist successfully spinning ignorant Western journalists.
by Milton Viorst.