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CounterPunch
February
15, 2003
The View from a "Globalized"
India
The
Invisible Modernities of the Islamic World
By RANJIT HOSKOTE
Ever since President George W. Bush, Jr. declared
a renewal of the US jihad against Iraq's Ba'ath government last
year, we have lived in an eerie media climate, in which the most
unsubstantiated allegations made by the Bush regime and its vassals
have dominated global airtime. By contrast, viewpoints critical
of the US position have barely been heard. Mainstream television
shows us almost nothing of the global movement against the impending
attack on Iraq, which has brought together activists, literati,
church representatives, students, scientists, former soldiers
and large numbers of ordinary, decent citizens: many of the most
vocal protestors are Americans, including families of some of
the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, who do not wish
an unjust war to be conducted in their name. Cynically blanking
this out, mainstream television endlessly serves up the theatrics
of those cut-rate Horsepersons of the Apocalypse: Bush, Rumsfeld,
Powell, Rice and Blair.
In such a media climate, we have had
to put up with the calm discussion of 'regime change' in Iraq,
proposed as the best possible solution by politicians and commentators
alike, as though it were a simple mechanical fix for a malfunctioning
car. Some have even suggested that a quick war would be preferable
to the 12-year sanctions regime that has destroyed an entire
generation of Iraqi children and reduced the planet's second-largest
oil-producing nation to destitution. Such blithe talk not only
discounts Iraqi popular feeling, but also ignores the fact that
the impending war is a desperate effort to accomplish what a
decade of legislated suffering has failed to do: to remove a
government that has opposed the US drive towards complete ascendancy
in that region, and survived against the most overwhelming odds.
The indifference of the US leadership
and the global media towards popular opinion within Iraq, is
consistent with a long tradition of condescension towards the
Islamic world. The belief that the Western powers can dictate
political arrangements within the House of Islam is an expression
of the mentality of the 1914-1948 period. Having steadily occupied
North Africa and parts of Arabia through the 19th century, Britain
and France defeated the Ottoman Caliphate in World War I and
divided it, by the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1920, into a patchwork
of mandates and protectorates: borders were arbitrarily redrawn
across West Asia, new states created, communities mobilised into
new conceptions of dependency, chieftains moved about like pawns
on a chessboard. This process reached its climax in 1948, with
the creation of Israel: a transference of atonement by which
Asians were forced to pay, in land and independence, for the
sins of Europe.
It was in revolt against this Western
assumption of supremacy that numerous movements of regional self-assertion
emerged in Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere
in the Islamic world through the 20th century. While the religious
and conservative among these movements are constantly invoked
in the genre of Western political nightmare, the liberal-secular
among them are passed over in silence. Phrased as critiques of
Euro-American modernity, these liberal-secular movements within
the House of Islam evolved their own versions of the contemporary
and the progressive (sometimes, as in Turkey, this secularisation
was radical enough to overthrow religious orthodoxy while securing
nationalist autonomy as well as uneasy acceptance within the
European magisterium). The intellectuals and political figures
who led these movements thus charted enterprises of modernity
that were more in consonance with their societies than the patent
medicines administered by the last colonialists and their successors,
the developmentalists of the World Bank.
It is tragic that these vibrant alternative
discourses on modernity, founded and being elaborated within
the Islamic world, are never acknowledged in the discussion of
the West's turbulent relationship with countries like Iraq. West
Asian and North African opinion is reduced, especially in the
global media, to the cliché of the 'Arab street', which
is invoked as a site of irrational unrest and agitation, backed
up with convenient footage of Palestinian crowds protesting an
Israeli outrage. While a panoply of Western academics, demagogues,
military analysts and media commentators have held forth on the
Islamic world on CNN and BBC since the 11 September 2001 events,
only occasionally have articulate Arab or Muslim intellectuals
been invited to participate in discussions by these channels;
critics of US neo-imperialism such as Edward Said and Noam Chomsky
are kept out, and the BBC only very occasionally opens its platform
to the spirited Tony Benn.
The denial of contemporaneity to the
Islamic world can sometimes proceed from the best intentions,
as when invited experts cite and discuss the Holy Koran and the
Sayings of the Prophet as the ultimate and armatural texts for
present-day political choices. This approach creates the impression
that Islamic civilisation has made no further contribution to
the history of thought since the 7th century; it also negates
the role of secular philosophies in the evolution of the Muslim
or Arab political consciousness. For instance, this writer cannot
recall a single reference, in mainstream-channel discussions
during the last 17 months, to Ali Shariati, the political visionary
and critic of consumption capitalism whose teachings provided
the stimulus for the first, 1978 phase of the Iranian Revolution.
Or to the historian of science and gnosis, Seyyed Hossein Nasr;
or the Egyptian secular revolutionary, Gamal Abdel Nasser, or
the Algerian socialists Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumediene.
The Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi is usually mentioned only
in the context of the Lockerbie case or dismissed as a maverick;
his contribution to post-colonial praxis goes unremarked. These
and many other thinkers and political figures from the world
of Islam have been consigned to oblivion by the global media;
the modernities they symbolise, their conceptions of freedom,
justice and the scope of human possibility, are rendered invisible.
The Western channels have, at least,
the excuse of subscribing to a long history of supremacism. Their
Indian counterparts, however, have no such defence. It is shameful
that the State-run Doordarshan Television, Aaj Tak, Star News
and Zee News who serve a viewership that numbers close
to a billion people, a vast proportion of humankind have
all mindlessly followed the route set by CNN and BBC for the
coverage of the Iraq crisis, without making the slightest effort
to represent an autonomous perspective. Are they, perhaps, afraid
of appearing unfashionably Third-Worldist or, worse, as outmoded
partisans of the Non-Aligned Movement? These ideological positions
may have been relegated to the museum of superseded ideas, but
they still hold out the promise of an independent position. But
an independent position is precisely what our political and electronic-media
elites have renounced, with their fallacious identification of
Indian with Western interests.
This identification is merely an update
on the kinship that many upper-caste Hindus claimed with their
British masters during the colonial period, on the grounds of
a shared 'Aryan' ancestry posited by racial mythology. The updated
kinship claim, version 2003, demonstrates the willingness of
our elites to turn their back on the anti-imperialist charter
of the Indian Republic, in order to acquiesce in the expansionism
of the US establishment as it entrenches itself firmly within
the Islamic world through military occupation and puppet regimes,
to control oil reserves as well as contain potential opposition.
The best justification that can be advanced for the Indian policy
is that there is some pragmatism to being on the winning side;
unfortunately, this is the myopic and unrewarding pragmatism
of the sidekick. After all, the cooks in Napoleon's army were
often on the winning side; unlike
the Emperor's marshals, however, they were not usually ennobled
for their pains.
Ranjit Hoskote
is an Indian cultural theorist. He is also Assistant Editor,
The Hindu, Bombay (India). He cab be reached at: ranjithoskote@hotmail.com
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