In very private company, a venerable Arab commentator is in the
habit of repeating every so often an old maxim of his: "I will know that we [the
Arab world] have made it when I rhapsodize to Bach in Mecca.”
At first impact, the man’s pining hits almost every sensitive
chord in the politics of our identity. His is a strike out in a bowling alley,
hitting Islam and Arabhood with all the pride and honor and pieties and colonial
insults and indigenous humiliations and Western arrogance and nativist
chauvinisms that are packed into them.
Were he to sigh this way in public, death would be his wish. And
herein lies the heart of the problem: much more than the actual yearning itself,
audacious though it may be, it is this mindless intolerance towards any perceived
provocation that speaks most poignantly about one of our more confounding regional
realities.
In truth, this Arab Muslim’s vision is anything but an affront:
a people who are confident enough of who and what we are that we think nothing
of welcoming the best of the West—and what could be more sublime than Bach’s
cantatas?—to the most sacred place in Islam.
Why not, for that matter, Umm Kulthum, the better
to press home the source of the pain and the urgency of, first, an intra-cultural
dialogue? Because this attitude that deems diversity--the very essence of
humanity—anywhere between a
grave offense and blasphemy considers homespun colors even more menacing
than the imported variety. In fact, for those who hold dear their grievances
and phobias, the West and its modernities are the easiest targets to caricature
and slander. But what do you do with the enemy within?
Insist, especially in these times, on sealing yourself clean of
the world around you, from the best of its challenges to the worst of its cheap
shots, and yours is a life of insupportable hypocrisy and contradictions, not
to mention every imaginable infraction.
Ours, of course, is not a unique mistrust of (or even rage
against) the Other. Wherever there is
life, there is injury, bigotry,
hate, along with a lurking mob eagerly waiting to feed off of them. All
cultures suffer demagogues. But ours have been climates in which supposedly
fringe groups have had a remarkably successful track record in barging into the
center, enfeebling serious discourse and dictating agendas. As crowds, egged on
by high-ups acting as lowlifes, grow apoplectic about the merest slight to
Islam, most of us have a tendency to recoil, as if retreating into our eternal
dystopia, ceding precious ground for others to monopolize.
How unbelievable is it that the hilariously dumb Innocence of Muslims and its maker
Nakoula Bassely Nakoula—what the hell kind of name is that anyway?--a moronic, meth-cooking,
two-bit crook could manage this kind of havoc in our midst? Even if we were sure that the
idiot is a sinister conspiracy dressed as a clown, could we not offer a
reaction—if any were required at all—that is more befitting of the man and his
movie, perhaps a snigger and a yawn?
They say that this mayhem started out as Islamist fury and very
quickly morphed into a free for all. But the multiplicity of reasons does not
obscure the fundamental fact that this Islamism of ours can’t seem to rise
above, let alone outsmart, even the stupidest of taunts. Worse still, that’s
the last thing it wants.
But since Islamists have long been insisting that theirs is the only answer to
an all out Western assault on our identity, surely they can muster a more
convincing one than just frothing
at the mouth.
True, among the countless provocateurs that get mobs riled up,
religion is king. There’s nothing quite like a mob drunk on sanctimony as it storms the streets avenging its
victimhood or flaunting its self-righteousness. In that, we are no different
from other offenders. But frankly, this pious fury that is always agitating on
the surface of our collective existence is but that massive boil that keeps
erupting in a body politic that appears utterly lacking in resilience. More
than that, a body politic that visibly relishes its sickness, thinking it the
proper antidote to all contaminants, homegrown no less than foreign.
If the trashy Innocence of Muslims is the price
Liberty pays for its insistence on the vital tenet of freedom of speech, so it
goes that the mad frenzy of the last week is the price Islamism is happy to pay
for its insistence on the fundamental absence of that same freedom of speech.
This
illiberalism does not a citizenship make. When sticking to their guns, as it
were, it behooves Islamists (of all strains) to think hard about the lessons of
the Arab uprisings. More importantly, it behooves the rest of us to do the
same. For a while now, we, in the Middle East, have been witness to conversations
on the compatibilities between democracy and Islam. It’s time to jack up the
volume.
And should--for
some bizarre reason--the West, and specifically the United States, be feeling
the need to revisit its policy in the region, the first places to land in and
the first friends to talk to are those who have long given sustenance and
comfort to the most troubled among Islam’s devout children.
