Prelude to Catastrophe
By Mary Geday

This Week in Palestine

Issue No. 87, July 2005

http://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/details.php?id=1375&ed=104#

Some weeks ago a commissioning editor of a UK television network told me with self-congratulatory zest that she is working to transform British public opinion to what extent she can about the value and virtue of Islamic culture and to create awareness in British public opinion that Islamic cultural history is not an oxymoron, that its does exist or did exist, and that the West should look beyond the dominating paradigm 'Islam is terror.' She looked at me to see if I was pleased with the project, with its humanistic, politically correct, inclusive and very trendy vision. I replied that if the West does not know its own history and the sources of much of its own architecture, fine arts, typography, musicology, astronomy and even Chaos Theory – yes, that now fashionable and trendy science – then why on earth should anyone bother to remind it. That this television channel should find in itself a generosity towards the past of Islam, a generosity to the history of an entire other civilization, be it blue or green, was apparently to be congratulated. Indeed, one must constantly prove oneself worthy to be looked at, considered and reconsidered; don't you think? What is more, apparently, one must take pride in wanting to present oneself not as untouchable; and apparently, one must be proud of one's daring to present the other, the reluctantly touchable, to the obviously touchable world. The Louvre museum's Islamic art, for example, is making a comeback before the civilized world. In the ebbing and flowing of France's public battle with its own 'multicultural' conscience, the Louvre is reminding the touchable, and maybe even the untouchable, that it is looking at, considering and apparently even reconsidering the other. Even Princeton University's Transregional Institute's call for fellowships this year lends a generous ear to the other, the Palestinian, hoping to understand the Palestinian national identity with as close a Palestinian eye as possible under the condition that the fellowship applicant accept that the term 'occupation' is a questionable and possibly illegitimate term.

It is fascinating to me how we Palestinians, and Arabs in general, must become as extroverted as possible, must change our introverted culture to a belligerently extroverted culture like that of Israel and the United States, in order to attract consideration of our humanity and intellect. The Palestinian Authority should use its newly acquired $40 million courtesy of reinvigorated peace talks with US Secretary of State Rice and the ever-conditional 'aid-for-democratic initiatives/aid-for-peace' donor projects like that of the EU's Partnership for Peace Programme to build a Palestinian Burj Dubai. It seems that if we adopt an unfathomable saucer on the top of a steel skyscraper where Andre Agassi can hit some tennis balls we might be able to convince the liberal, progressive, democratic and progress-minded world that an investment in the redemption of the Palestinian people and the forgetting of 'Islam is terror,' for a moment or two or three or more, is possible.

Dubai fascinates me and saddens me for two reasons. It represents capital success and civilizational poverty. It represents the mutable so sensationally and the immutable so absently. It is the perfect representation of what the world doesn't want to know about Arab culture. It is the perfect answer to denial: denial of one's own civilizational history and culture, and denial of the world's evasion of that history and culture. Dubai is one thing that Iraq was not: Western. Dubai is a prime candidate for a Weight Watchers franchise or fat-free Danone products, and it wouldn't have to explain itself when applying for a 'democratic initiative' project grant which insists that ten points will be counted for 'gender equality' and 'women's issues.'

What I'm trying to say is that Palestinians and Arabs are, at best, trapped in a dooming, relinquishing, conceding and apologetic inferiority complex and, at worst, in a complete and utter stupefying thought crisis.

I have been teaching George Orwell’s 1984 to my students and most of the time I don't know what my students do with what they are reading. What do they think when they hear Winston, the dilapidated hero, crying pathetically and mockingly that if there is hope it lay in the proles? What do they think when they read Orwell's narrative dimming any sign of oppressed people's consciousness and vision because the women are fighting over saucepans and the men are playing the lottery? What do they think when they read about sexcrime and thoughtcrime and facecrime? What do they think when they read that Winston's greatest pleasure lies in looking at a glass paperweight that carries within its glimmer of reflecting light a pink coral? What do they think when they read that Winston’s greatest desire is the desire for knowledge, for music, for art, for history? What do they think when they read Orwell telling them that the law of the human chain, the underdeveloped, the oppressed, the marginalized, the forsaken, the brutish, the proles, the untouchables have one abiding characteristic: ignorance, or the unconsciousness of anything outside the drudgery of their everyday lives?

Every time I drive through the West Bank and see newly resurrected billboards advertising cigarettes I think, my god, Big Brother is certainly watching and hoping that we stay preoccupied, stupid and silent. These billboards are also courtesy of democratic and peace initiatives; they are courtesy of elections and the ever insurmountable democratic process that it would behoove us untouchables to partake.

And then of course, there is Islam. That forsaken word by East and West. I was telling a colleague just recently that the 'fundamentalist' form which Islam has taken up in recent history reminds me of the dissent from the Catholic Church and the birth of Protestantism. The Catholic Church, horrors and all, believed in the beauty and necessity of the body and the mind, pleasures, curiosities and all. Had it not, we would have no Raphael, no Rubens, no Descartes and no Galileo – not even Galileo. Money was necessary, but so was desire and intellect, if not Dante would have never made it from the Inferno to Paradiso. Protestantism refused the unity of intellect and desire: for some strange reason, the human will could work without them. And so Winston learns to live without chocolates and sugar until he can find some on the black market.

And so Islam today has taught its followers to learn and submit to deprivation, the deprivation of instinct, of intellect, of desire, of all those inherent qualities of the human being. And so shop signs in Ramallah, Abu Dis, Bethlehem, East Jerusalem and every other Palestinian city are without any sign of aesthetic, cultural and historical consideration. Even the Arabic type is no longer painted by hand with care, pleasure, pride and even humour. There is no aesthetic, cultural, historical and civilizational pride in our culture. Our only art is a Xeroxing art of the Koran. Our students memorize instead of think. They follow instead of question and create. Our universities advocate multiple-choice answers instead of student writing, and lectures instead of discussions.

A colleague asked me recently whether I could tell him my view on Discourse as a science or discipline in Arab culture. I told him there is no such concept materially practised here because there is no place for discourse in a culture that is dumbstruck by an absence of the pleasure in thought and curiosity. To think that religion is so afraid that the shepherd will lose its flock if the human is permitted and encouraged to use those gifts that make the human human.

I don't care if anyone else appreciates our humanity; I want my students to appreciate their humanity, their faculties, their intellect, and their instincts to think, to make, to create. When they throw a stone, get detained or imprisoned they should be fighting not merely for their house, their street, their father, their mother, their saucepan, their Arnona, their ID card, their religion or even for the last half century. They should be fighting for their civilization, which they themselves have discarded along with everyone else.

Mary Geday is an assistant professor of English literature. She lives and works in Jerusalem.