[wvns] Secrets of Intellectual Warfare
Saree Makdisi: Secrets of intellectual warfare
Interview by Amira Howeidy
Al-Ahram Weekly
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/844/profile.htm
In its 59th anniversary, the memory and repercussions of the
Palestinian Nakba continue to haunt this troubled region. But so does
neo-Orientalism, which dictates much of American foreign policy
Few if any of the tens of thousands of Egyptians flocking to theatres
in the last month to see the epic movie 300 are aware of what the
scriptwriter, Frank Miller, told American national radio about
Arab-Muslim culture in January. Had they known, his movie would have
likely had a different reception.
In what was supposed to be a critique of President George W Bush's
State of the Union Speech which included references to the "global war
on terror", Miller warned Americans of what they're "up against" --
"the sixth-century barbarism that these people actually represent". In
fact, he said, "the contention that all cultures are equal and that
every belief system is as good as the next, is utterly reprehensible.
We have to understand that some cultures are superior and some
cultures are inferior. Our culture in the West is superior than their
culture".
While American media and foreign policy alike are rife with such
ridiculously misinformed racism, back in this part of the world little
attention is paid to the neo-con world view; even the energetic
critique of the US media in the wake of 9/11 has all but completely
died down. Arab-Muslims are in fact required not only to pay attention
to such discourse and the damage in which it results, but equally to
wage intellectual war in self-defence.
Such, at least, was the view of Saree Makdisi, University of
California, Los Angles professor of English and comparative
literature, during a series of lectures he delivered in Cairo this week.
Asked if the three subjects are connected, Makdisi immediately
answered, "no"; then he paused, evidently registering the fact that,
in many ways, they are. Zionism, the direct cause of the 1948 Nakba
and the subsequent establishment of the state of Israel in the same
year, "always had a degree of Orientalism written into it", not only
with regard to Arabs but also with Israel's own Arab Jewish
population: "Both Orientalism and Zionism are founded on an opposition
between the self and other. And it is this that is underlying the very
structure that defines both," he told Al-Ahram Weekly following the
last lecture on Monday.
Makdisi lectured on the Revival of Orientalism, explaining how
politically catastrophic it is to think of the world in such binary
terms, which is precisely what the current US administration is doing.
Although the Arab and Muslim world remains the primary victim of the
neo-Orientalist influence on US foreign policy, the countless examples
that Makdisi cited during his talk of how "they" perceive "us" only
served to illustrate how oblivious Arabs and Muslims have become of
policies that affect their present and future.
"I think it's a mistake to imagine that US foreign policy these days
is driven strictly by national interests or realpolitik," he warned.
"It is increasingly driven by certain cultural predispositions,
certain ways of imagining the world that US policy-makers have thought
themselves in possession of. And it's these cultural predeterminations
that I think are driving a lot of what's going on in American foreign
policy rather than America's actual material interest, particularly in
the Middle East." So, for example, when Miller "critiques" Bush's
State of the Union speech, Makdisi notes, he actually replicates what
the president says.
"There's no question that US policy- makers and far too many
intellectuals, filmmakers, artists and so forth, are gripped by a view
of the world that takes for granted the idea that there's a clash of
civilisations between the East and West and that there's a titanic
struggle that we're now witnessing between the secular, rational,
modern freedom of the West and the religiously crazed, irrational and
backward 'totalitarianism' of the East." Even those who disagree with
the Bush administration' s policy in the Middle East, such as John
Kerry during his presidential campaign, Makdisi pointed out, are
arguing that what's happening in Iraq is a distraction from the real
war on terror, which they want to go back to.
Observing this from within the US, the worrying development for
Makdisi isn't simply that the US is making flawed assumptions about
the nature of its supposed opponents in the world, but rather that,
"it's chasing after an opponent that doesn't really exist. This
spectre that they created in their own minds of what they call Islamic
fascism that is taking over the entire world and wants to subject the
entire world to their totalitarian ideology and so on, that doesn't
exist".
So what American policy is expressing are "America's own fears,
internally, the products of its own unconscious, and it is chasing
after those ghosts and spectres rather than its actual, real opponents
and enemies." And while this is being translated into "destructive and
self- destructive policies", it is important for Arabs to realise that
US policy-makers and their ideologues can only understand reactions to
their policies by falling back on cultural terms.
In other words, "there's a tendency for Americans to come up with
their own imagination of what it is that Arabs and Muslims think". So,
for example, when the Al-Jazeera news network launched its English
station to reach out to English-speaking viewers, not one single US
satellite or cable company wanted to touch them. "Here is a channel
deliberately made for an American audience to provide an Arab
perspective and what's the reaction? No thank you. We don't want to
know what you have to say, we'd rather tell you what we think you say
and think. And we listen to ourselves talk to you, rather than listen
to you tell us what you think."
Meanwhile, Hollywood continues to produce one film and TV series after
another in which Arabs and Muslims play central roles -- as the bad
guys. To mention just a few, Makdisi listed movies like United 93 ,
World Trade Centre, and TV series like 24 and Sleeper Cell. As more
and more Americans -- both inside and outside the US administration --
embrace the clash-of-civilisations worldview, Makdisi points an
accusing finger at one of this vision's proponents: Bernard Lewis.
Currently America's leading "expert" on the Middle East, Lewis,
Makdisi says, has "zero credibility in the university system". And yet
the work of this 91-year-old professor emeritus at Princeton
University has tremendous appeal outside the academy and especially
within US policy- making circles. In fact, Makdisi points out, Samuel
Huntington's famous Clash of Civilizations was based on an article by
Lewis titled "The roots of Muslim rage". (Makdisi quotes Lewis: "in
confronting Islam we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending
the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them.
This is a clash of civilizations, the irrational reaction of an
ancient historic rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our
secular present and the worldwide expansion of both".)
As the US failure in Iraq continues to provoke reactions back home,
more and more evidence is surfacing in the media on the ideological or
cultural influences that contributed to the decision to invade and the
manner in which the invasion was undertaken. Makdisi points out how
former national security adviser Brent Scocroft recently stirred up a
storm when he pointed out Lewis in particular among those who led to
the disastrous American invasion of Iraq. Scocroft, said Makdisi, told
an interviewer in the New Yorker, "this idea that we've got to hit
somebody hard comes from Bernard Lewis". And what does Lewis say?
Makdisi quotes him again: "I believe that one of the things you have
to do to Arabs is to hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They
respect power." It is also no coincidence that, when American
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh exposed the Abu Ghreib
prisoners scandal, experts pointed to a book, The Arab Mind which they
said is "the bible" of the neo-cons on Arab behaviour. It is no
coincidence either that its author, Raphael Patai, is an Israeli
Orientalist.
(Page 35 of the book reads: "A crying boy quickly receives attention
while a crying girl is often ignored. This expectation is further
enforced by another childhood experience of which many male infants
partake in the first year of their lives... This comforting and
soothing of the baby boy often takes the form of handling his
genitals. Mother, grandmother, other relatives and visitors, will play
with the penis of the boy, not only to soothe him, but also to make
him smile.")
Although the military defeat of the US in Iraq has turned the tide
against the neo-cons as calls to end the war gain momentum in America,
this is not enough; it does not sufficiently counter the effect of
neo-con on the Arab and Muslim world. "There is not enough of a
reaction against this way of thinking in the US," Makdisi argued,
referring to the revolutionary 18th-century English poet and artist
William Blake's concept of an "intellectual warfare". There need to be
more English- speaking Arabs, scholars and intellectuals to counter
these damaging misconceptions about us, he urged. "The great lesson
is," he said, "we have to convey our ideas, articulate our point of
view and get our point of view across to an American audience. If
people in the US administration think of us in neo-Orientalist terms,
to a certain extent they are to blame because it's wrong to think that
way. But we're to blame for letting them think that way about us."
Makdisi's bold views and prolific writings have earned him respect but
also, unsurprisingly, enemies. In January 2006 he published an article
in the LA Times entitled "Witch hunt at UCLA", which explains how he
and other "targeted professors" were the subject of an offer made by a
UCLA graduate website encouraging students to "expose" professors who
talk about Bush or the war on Iraq in return for money. Makdisi's
articles which appear in various American newspapers often generate
positive feedback from "normal Americans" who, he says, have thanked
him for speaking up and presenting a critical point of view. But he
also gets hate mail by America's Israel defenders accusing him of
"vicious lying" and "hate". Still, he says, "I'm holding up to what I
know objectively to be a humanist argument. These guys see this and
recognise -- subconsciously because they can't really process it --
their own inhumanity in what they represent. So in their twisted
minds, they turn it around and project it onto me. They accuse me of
talking about hate, when I'm talking about peace and justice. They're
the ones talking about hate. It's like you press a button and hate
comes out of it like a volcano."
In his calmness and low-pitched voice, Makdisi easily sounds
sarcastic. He also bears a resemblance to Edward Said, who happens to
be his uncle. When I asked him how the witch hunt in UCLA or Zionist
criticism of his views has affected him, he said it didn't. "I'm an
intellectual, somebody who uses his brain to think and write. So it's
utterly offensive that somebody articulating a point of view is
received not with counter arguments but rather with hate, blind
derision, anger and viciousness." Personally, he adds, he doesn't
"give a damn". Nor should he, he explains: "the kind of things they
say are utterly stupid and the reason why Israel's America defenders
resort to these tactics is because they have nothing else to say. They
have no arguments, reason, justification, they have no legal basis."
In his talk on the Nakba, Makdisi described Zionism in soft- and
hard-core terms of his own forging. "New" Israeli historians such as
Benny Morris, who openly admit that ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinians was a necessity for the creation of Israel in and after
1948 are hard- core Zionists, says Makdisi, because they are "honest"
about vicious racism, whereas men like Harvard University law
professor Alan Dershowitz or novelist Amos Oz, who "want to defend
what Israel does by inventing their alternate history, their counter
reality", stand for soft-core Zionism. "It always struck me that
there's something problematic with [Oz's] view of the conflict,
something missing. And it seems to me that a lot of what's missing is
honesty. Honesty to himself. The mantra that little Israel declared
its independence and the next day armies of Arabs attacked it -- this
was dismissed as a myth 40 years ago, so for him to say it again in a
book published two or three years ago is pathetic."
Such Israeli narratives of 1948 -- which insist that there was always
a Jewish land, that the Arabs were a minority, and Palestinians were
killed by accident, not because of systematic Zionist massacres --
contrasts sharply with the Palestinian narrative of the Nakba, which
Makdisi describes as "raw". It is personal, spontaneous and in the
case of Ghassan Kanafani, for example, "intimate". And this might be
the difference, he explained, between "myth" -- propagated by Zionist
and Israeli narrative, and "reality" -- expressed in the Palestinian
narrative.
In a comment during Makdisi's lecture on the Nakba, Egyptian novelist
Radwa Ashour suggested that 1948 "hasn't in fact been written" by the
Arabs or Palestinians. "After 60 years, it's still very painful to
handle the whole experience."
Makdisi agrees.
But today, he believes, things have changed and Americans are
interested in reading about Palestine and the Palestinians. It's
ironic perhaps that former US president Jimmy Carter, who sponsored
the first Israeli-Arab peace agreement, unpopular among Arabs to this
day, has contributed to this state of mind. Makdisi believes that the
attack on Carter's book Palestine, Peace not Apartheid by America's
Jews only paved the way for the publishing of more books on Palestine.
photo: Sherif Sonbol
C a p t i o n : At 42, Lebanese-Palestinian-American scholar and
writer Saree Makdisi has already carved a niche for himself in
academic and intellectual circles. The author of Romantic Imperialism:
Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity and William Blake and
the Impossible History of the 1790s, Makdisi, also a prolific writer
on politics, will publish his third book on Palestine with Norton next
year. He has written in publications ranging from Studies in
Romanticism, the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Race and
Imperial Culture, and the Cambridge Companion to English Literature,
1740-1830, to the South Atlantic Quarterly , Boundary 2, Critical
Inquiry, and the London Review of Books. On a two-week visit to Cairo,
Makdisi gave three lectures at Ain Shams University and the American
University in Cairo on "The revival of Orientalism", "William Blake"
and the "Palestinian Nakba" on 29 April, 2 and 7 May.
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