[ALBSA-Info] NYTimes.com Article: Response to Attack Splits Arabs in the West

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Response to Attack Splits Arabs in the West

September 29, 2001 

By PATRICIA COHEN


 

Since the end of the First World War, when the French and
British willy-nilly carved up the decaying Ottoman Empire,
people have been divided over who is to blame for the veil
of misery that shrouds millions of people across the Arab
world. 

Are outsiders or insiders, Westerners or Arabs primarily
responsible for the persistent poverty, corruption and
repression? The question has been bubbling up since Sept.
11, as people grope to explain the virulent radicalism that
has been growing across the region. For while a single
madman can be dismissed as an evil aberration, what
intelligence reports describe as a sprawling army of nearly
11,000 cannot. 

Among Arab intellectuals educated and living in the West,
who are at once both outsiders and insiders, the question
is particularly pointed. Revulsion at the murderous attack
has brought a moment of unity here. (In the Arab world it
is not hard to hear voices calling the attack justified
retribution.) Across continents Arab writers and scholars
have been e-mailing one another vehement condemnations. 

But the attack has also created new pressures to choose
sides within a group that is at times wrung with suspicion
over loyalties and motives. Now, like feuding brothers who
etch a chalk line across their bedroom floor, Arab
intellectuals in the West are split over how to respond to
the attack. All are horrified at the senseless deaths. But
on one side are those who argue that it is essential to
understand how United States policies helped create the
conditions that produced such monstrous fanatics. On the
other are those who insist that any attempts to link the
attacks to grievances against the West play into terrorist
hands. 

"I say that's wrong," the author Kanan Makiya said. "Of
course there's power and there's injustice, but we should
be at the forefront of separating those issues from what
happened Sept. 11." Islamic extremists have appropriated
"anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist rhetoric" in order to
erase the distinction between themselves and the broader
Muslim world, he said. Including such qualifications now
lends "credence to what the terrorists did," he continued,
adding, "That's what they want to do." 

Fawaz A. Gerges, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and
the author of "America and Political Islam," agreed. "This
terribly hideous act, you can never justify it, never
rationalize it, regardless of what American foreign policy
has done," he said. "This is not the time to condemn"
United States policy, he continued. "This is the time to
condemn what has happened. It's time Arab intellectuals
rise to the occasion." 

To Edward Said, one of the most prominent intellectuals,
Arab or otherwise, such logic is flawed. "The appropriation
or hijacking of language by self-appointed spokesmen goes
on all the time," he said in an e- mail. "But why should we
simply accede to the hijackers? To understand is not to
condone." 

This split among the community of Arab scholars here
mirrors the long- running - and at points bitter -
discussion over American responsibility for the wretched
conditions in most Arab countries. Vigorously defend the
United States (and Israel) and risk being labeled an Uncle
Abdul, the Arabs' Uncle Tom; keepquiet about the absence of
freedom and rights and risk being called a silent
accomplice. 

No serious scholar denies that the reasons for the Arab
world's ills are enormously complex. The question is how to
calculate the algebra of blame. And to most Arab
intellectuals the United States now commands the stage. As
Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Middle East history at the
University of Chicago, said, "To say the U.S. determines
everything is to deny agency of the people, and that's
obviously wrong." But he added, "The greater share of power
is obviously in the hands of the West." 

America's entry into the Arab theater came midcentury.
Before then the United States was considered a world apart
from corrupt European imperialists. Woodrow Wilson's call
in 1918 for self-determination electrified the Arab world.
The following year an unscientific survey of
representatives from some 1,500 Arab villages found that if
forced under the rule of a foreign power, a majority would
choose the United States. 

>From the moment the United States supported Israel's
creation in 1948 and the partition of Palestine, Arabs
scholars detail the catalog of wrongs: American and British
support for the 1953 overthrow of the democratically
elected Mossadeh government in Iran; backing of Israel in
the 1967 war that led to its occupation of the West Bank
and throughout the intifada; cold war opposition to Arab
nationalism; support of undemocratic regimes like the one
in Saudia Arabia; sanctions imposed after the gulf war that
blocked food and medical supplies, contributing to
malnutrition and death among Iraqis; American-led
globalization that has widened the chasm between rich and
poor. 

"I think blame can be distributed pretty evenly," Mr. Said
said in a telephone interview, adding that "the main
problem with the Arab national movement throughout the
century has been the lack of attention to democracy and
democratic rights." 

Still, he offered a blunt summation of America's
shortcomings. "To most people in the Islamic and Arab
worlds the official U.S. is synonymous with arrogant power,
known mainly for its sanctimoniously munificent support not
only of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes and
its inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue
with secular movements and people who have real
grievances," he wrote last week in The Observer in London. 

"Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a hatred
of modernity or technology envy," he continued. Rather, "it
is based on a narrative of concrete interventions, specific
depredations and, in the cases of the Iraqi people's
suffering under U.S.- imposed sanctions and U.S. support
for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian
territories, cruel and inhumane policies administered with
a stony coldness." 

Mr. Said sees imperial designs in the United States'
threatened military attack on Afghanistan as well, arguing
that it would help solidify its control of oil "from the
gulf to the northern oil fields." 

Afghanistan, one of the most blighted spots on the map and
where Osama bin Laden is said to be holed up, is a place
where outsiders - in this case the former Soviet Union even
more than the West - has a lot to answer for, Mr. Khalidi
said. The Soviets, who fought a brutal 10-year war there,
and the Americans, who helped train militant rebels to
oppose them, "created the conditions which put a monster
into the world, a golem," he said, "one million killed, one
and a half million maimed and five to six million
refugees." 

Muslims' view of the United States now very much depends on
America's next move, Mr. Khalidi said. If its military
response fails to distinguish "between innocent people and
people who have committed these crimes against humanity,"
and thousands of Afghans are killed, he said, to most Arab
eyes the United States will be seen as no better than the
suicidal hijackers. 

To a small group of Arab scholars in the West, however, too
many of their colleagues devote too much energy detailing
outsiders' wrongs instead of focusing on the maladies at
the heart the Arab system: tyrannical regimes, rejection of
modernity and individual rights, rigidly hierarchical
social structures and lack of freedom. 

"The dominant tendency among Arab intellectuals is to put
the blame for most of the problems in the area on the
shoulders of the West," said Mr. Gerges, who spent the last
two years doing research in the Arab world. That doesn't
exonerate American policies, he said. "To suggest that
somehow the U.S. in the second part of the 20th century has
not played a preponderant role is to simplify and distort."
He cited in particular United States support of Israel in
its gnawing conflict with the Palestinians. But to ignore
"the failure of the Arab leadership" to create accountable
political institutions, ensure civil liberties and provide
their people a measure of social justice and economic
equity, he said, is also to distort and simplify. 

These failings are the major reasons for the lack of Arab
development, yet few Arabs take moral or personal
responsibility for their predicament, he argued. 

Mr. Makiya, who detailed the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's
regime in his book "Republic of Fear," said that since
Israel defeated the Egyptian-led Arab alliance in the 1967
war, Saddam Hussein and other dictators in Libya, Algeria
and Sudan have legitimized their rule by "finding
scapegoats for their problems." 

"For a while it worked," said Mr. Makiya, who is compiling
an archive of Iraqi documents for the Center for Middle
Eastern Studies at Harvard. But then "one catastrophe
followed another: the Iran-Iraq war, the Lebanese civil
war, the Iranian revolution, all leading to enormously
large body counts and claiming more victims than all the
Arab-Israeli wars together." 

"A very, very important lost opportunity was the 1991 gulf
war," he said. "Here the bankruptcy of this previous two
decades of rhetoric was revealed in Saddam's land grab, the
exposure of his Nazilike terror of the Arab world." But
Arabs failed to seize the moment. 

That's when Mr. Makiya wrote "Cruelty and Silence," which
he described as his "J'accuse" of Arab intellectuals, a
book that he said elicited some expressions of support and
lots of fury. 

"The responsibility for the failure of the Arab political
order can no longer be placed on the West or Israel, as
Arab intellectuals are so fond of doing," he wrote. "It
cannot even be placed only, or primarily, on the shoulders
of the rulers of the Arab world." 

"The deeper problem lies not in their psychology, but in
the distorting lens through which they have been viewed by
the real source of failure in the culture of modern Arab
intellectuals," he continued. The title of his book
referred to their silence on human rights. 

Mr. Makiya argues that the language of human rights and the
language of Arab nationalism and political Islam are
irreconcilable. 

Rather than trying to accommodate these two traditions,
Arab intellectuals have defended not only the noble
elements of Islamic culture but the repressive ones as
well, said Hazem Saghyeh, an author and columnist for
Al-Hayat, an Arabic newspaper published in London. The
intellectual should be "the one who contradicts his nation,
his army, his church, his national institutions," Mr.
Saghyeh said in a telephone interview from London, "while
the tradition that predominates in the Arab world is that
the intellectual is the one who fights for the sake of his
nation, his institutions, his hierarchy and his own
heritage." 

Whether the terrorist attacks will prove a transforming
moment for Arab thinkers depends both on what the United
States does and whether Arab intellectuals can shake their
habit of mind, he said. 

Mr. Gerges said he was hopeful that would happen. "For me
as an Arab-American intellectual it's a watershed," he
said. 

But to Mr. Said, the dilemmas of expatriate intellectuals
are ultimately beside the point. "I think the crucial
debate is the one taking place inside the Arab world," he
said, adding that was why he started writing for an Arab
audience at the end of the 1980's. "That's where the battle
is, not in New York."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/29/arts/29ARAB.html?ex=1002781645&ei=1&en=a7bcf6d20c659e31



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