Thoughts on giving up....

Greetings, once again, from this beautiful country, The Far Maghrib, the place where the sun sets over the Atlantic, the land of generous hospitality and warm, friendly people, and the place I'm struggling to find a reason for being in.

Here is an article I tried to write for an online magazine back at home....

Year in Morocco / Learning not to Kill Mockingbirds.

The analogy has been there since the earliest stirrings of my political conciousness. Boo Radley: kind, gentle and harmless yet slandered and genuinely feared for one simple reason - that he was never seen or spoken to. Harper Lee's creation, in her 1961 novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird', has been growing on my mind for many months now. How do Boo Radleys filter into our imagination? How are strangers created, and how can we prevent ourselves from being convinced of the grossest untruths about people we have never met and whose lives are at once similar and utterly different from our own?

As the 'War on Terror' continues, our minds are made ever more aware of Boo Radley. You could spend months researching 'Islamic' Terrorism, the new 'Biggest Threat Civilisation Has Ever Faced' (remember when it was the Soviet Union?) and come away convinced that a walk down the street in Cairo or Marrakesh was dicing with death. The War on Terror is being fought with Terror: a propaganda war which plants in the western mind a terror of the unknown which is then used to justify military wars on the grounds of 'protecting' the 'civilised world' from this mortal danger.

So what is the truth behind these images of fear and western governments' exploitation of Arab and Muslim 'otherness'? I realised, not long after the tragic events of September 11th 2001 and the following war in Afghanistan that it was a moral and intellectual duty on all thinking westerners to try and understand, objectively and open-mindedly, the new realities of global power and conflicting ideologies.

Around November 2002, my father prompted me to do the obvious: to start learning Arabic. Now I have been doing so for over three years - on my own in Exeter, then in Jordan, then at Leeds University, and now in Morocco. My course at Leeds requires that I spend a year in Fez studying Arabic language and trying to engage with Maghribi culture.

Sadly, I realise now that my hopes for intercultural dialogue were misplaced. The following passage is from an online magazine published by Colorado University, where the late Edward Said, the great writer on western perceptions of the Orient, taught:

"In class I handed out a 19th c. American example of Orientalism, taken from the time when Chinese immigration was at its peak after the Civil War, when American companies were importing Chinese men as a cheap labor source, particularly for building the transcontinental railroad system. The poem “The Heathen Chinee,” by Bret Harte, is a classic example of a discursive creation of the idea of the Oriental. Ah Sin in the poem is a card shark, a cheat, but smiles and smiles “inscrutably” and the Americans he plays with can’t read his expressions at all. Ah Sin does not speak, in the poem; rather, the poem is written/spoken about him, in “plain language” by “Truthful James.” The Western identity gets to speak, to produce images and ideas about the Oriental identity, which doesn’t get to talk back. On the back of that handout is another example of Orientalism, one which seems perhaps more benign than the overt racism of the poem. This passage, from an 1879 magazine, is protesting the labeling of the Chinese as “heathen Chinee” and is working to defend “the Chinese” from those negative associations. This is still an example of Orientalism, however, because this piece, even while it works to say that the Chinese are civilized and clean, is still constructing “the Chinese” as a race/national identity; it is still the West writing “the Chinese” into knowledge, rather than chinese people speaking/writing for themselves about their cultural practices and identities".

So it feels like even writing an article like this is unacceptable because by simply being a westerner studying Islam and Arabic I am projecting my western-based perceptions, which are always seen as negative, onto the discourse. Thus, however much I study, however much I know, I am not one of the people I am trying to defend and understand; even that attempt to understand is seen as patronising and it is always assumed that I despise the thing I am studying. A westerner studying Arab culture, if he is not a muslim, is generally seen as an imperialist, WTO-loving, anti-Palestinian, pro-War Republican (no matter that I've spent three long years working my heart out to learn Arabic, most of my friends are Arabs, and the only place I feel truly comfortable, socially, is with Arabs).

Sadly, then, it's hard to see where I'm going with the course. I cannot open my mouth without offending someone, I cannot state my pro-Palestinian position, my anti-globalisation position, or my anti-war position without somebody assuming that I am just saying it for Arab ears and in fact I think something else. It's so sad, because although my Arabic goes from strength to strength, the acadamic/political position I'm trying to take, which is my purpose for studying it in the first place, seems impossible to sustain.

Boo Radley can stay in his house, because he doesn't want to know.
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