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Note from wizard: Brilliant, deep, sick, sad..........true ------- To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk Emasculating Arabia Images of an American being beheaded in Iraq have horrified the west, but the photographs of prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib jail sparked surprisingly little outrage among Arabs. Why? Because, says Jonathan Raban, it was precisely what they expected Jonathan Raban Thursday May 13 2004 The Guardian Seeing the terrible pictures of the beheading of Nicholas Berg, it's easy to miss the significance of the soundtrack that accompanies them. The taped voice - presumably that of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian associate of Osama bin Laden - rails not just against the Bush administration, but against the torpor of the Arab world. "The shameful photos are evil humiliation for Muslim men and women in the Abu Ghraib prison. Where is the sense of honour, where is the rage? Where is the anger for God's religion? Where is the sense of veneration for Muslims, and where is the sense of vengeance for the honour of Muslim men and women in the crusaders' prisons?" Professing himself to be outraged by the absence of Arab outrage at the photos from Abu Ghraib, Zarqawi proceeds with his gruesome remake of the videotaped killing of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002. That portion of Zarqawi's repellent message - his claim that people in the Middle East haven't been as shocked by the Abu Ghraib pictures as one might expect - is surely true. For days, there was a feeling of tentative, nervous relief in the United States that the pictures streaming out of Abu Ghraib had not - yet - provoked the wave of uncontrollable and violent popular protest across the Arab world that many Americans had feared. It was suggested that Arabs are so inured to torture in their own countries that they had lost the ability to be shocked by it, also that Iraqi Shia Muslims and Kurds were unlikely to be greatly upset by the sight of Ba'athist Sunnis getting a taste of their own medicine from their western jailers. Both these quasi-explanations were self-serving shots in the dark. What was clear from reading the English-language Arab press over last weekend was the truth of the old saying: "American viciously humiliates Arab" is not news; only when the terms are reversed are headlines made. To most of the Arab editorial writers, and perhaps to most Arabs, the digital photos merely confirmed what they had been saying since long before the invasion of Iraq took place: America is on an orientalist rampage in which Arabs are systematically denatured, dehumanised, stripped of all human complexity, reduced to naked babyhood. Defining the orientalist project, Edward Said wrote of how occidentals feminised and infantilised Arabs, crediting them with "feminine" traits like intuition and an incapacity for reason (so Arab magicians figure large in the mythology, but Arab mathematicians not at all), and rendered Arabia as pliant, sensuous, passive, awaiting penetration by the rational masculine west. In classic orientalist fashion, Iraq was brutally simplified before it was invaded. Because of the way that the British, operating on the principle of divide and rule, had cobbled together three profoundly dissimilar Ottoman provinces to make a nation, Iraq stands alone in the Arab world in its complex rifts of religion, politics, tribe, race and class. For 80 years, Iraq has been an immensely tricky spiderweb of social and cultural lines and intersections. None of this was recognised by the invaders. As recently as last January, so we are told, George Bush was cheerfully ignorant of the deepest, most conspicuous fault-line in Iraqi society, the division between Sunni and Shia. The Bush administration rhetorically homogenised the several peoples of Iraq by endless iteration of the phrase "the Iraqi people", or, when speaking of Saddam, "his own people". When Saddam's gang of Tikritis gassed Kurdish villages or drained the water from the Marsh Arabs' swamps, they were decidedly not dealing with their "own people", but with people they regarded as dangerous aliens: tribally, racially, religiously, politically distinct from themselves. Now, when coalition forces insist on blaming "foreign fighters" for home-grown Iraqi insurrections, they unconsciously mirror the mindset of the Ba'athists, who regarded Kurds and southern Shia as equally foreign fighters. War, said Ambrose Bierce, is God's way of teaching Americans geography, and in the last year some human geography has been learned, mainly to the effect that a large number of Iraqi people appear not to belong to the Iraqi people - that orientalist construct which was the catchphrase of 2002. The Iraqi people were pictured as yearning, femininely, childishly, with one voice, for a pluralist free-market democracy, and (bad taste though it is to recall this detail) they would greet their liberators, femininely, childishly, with flowers. In the early autumn of 2002, the secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, warned that a western invasion of Iraq would "open the jaws of hell", but the orientalists listened to no one from the region, preferring to trust the Middle Eastern expertise of Paul Wolfowitz, who blithely represented Iraq as a comely bride, trapped in a dungeon by her wicked stepfather. By the time of the invasion, Iraq had been so exhaustively orientalised that it had lost almost all connection to reality. Much of this effort was grandly sentimental, oozing goodwill toward "the Iraqi people". All of it was dehumanising, robbing Iraqis of their intractable particularity. None of it fooled the long-memoried Arabs in neighbouring states, who had seen this stuff many times before, and who might, perhaps, have recognised in the perorations of Wolfowitz of Arabia the ghostly voice of TE Lawrence in the poem that prefaces The Seven Pillars of Wisdom with a breathtakingly vain promise of mutual orgasm: I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me When we came. In the event, Lawrence's seed was spilled, like Onan's, and like that of every orientalist who has dreamed of liberating Arabia, on the sand. It is necessary to go over this old and painful ground in order to read the messages from Abu Ghraib. One searches the photos in vain for signs of furtiveness on the part of the torturers, for any indication that they were snapped on the sly. To the contrary: the soldiers, fresh-faced, smiling, happy, look as if they are taking pride in a job well done - and the job in question looks like the orientalist enterprise, acted out in gross cartoon form. Here is Arabia nude, faceless under a hood, or ridiculously feminised in women's panties, forced into infantile masturbatory sex and sodomy. (These people are ruled by their nether organs, not by their higher faculties, is the orientalist line.) The jail has become a grotesque nursery, with Private Lynndie England (her very name like the nom de guerre of a sex worker), cigarette jutting from her cheerful grin, playing the part of the au pair from hell. The pictures appear to be so single-minded in their intent, so artfully directed, so relentlessly orientalist in their conception, that one looks instinctively for a choreographer - a senior intelligence officer, perhaps, who keeps Edward Said on his bedside table, and ransacks the book each night for new ideas. That speculation is probably misplaced. A chilling story in last Saturday's New York Times made plain that the humiliations depicted in the Abu Ghraib pictures are regularly practised in domestic American prisons. The reporter, Fox Butterfield, dug up examples of hooding, stripping naked and forced sex inflicted by guards in jails in Arizona, Utah, Virginia and Texas. At least two of the American soldiers due to be court-martialled are reservists who are "corrections officers" in civilian life, and it seems likely that in Baghdad they were indulging in sadistic amusements perfected back home in the US. Like Esperanto, dehumanisation is an international language with a universal grammar, and orientalism is one of its local dialects - a distinction that will, unfortunately, be lost on every Arab and Muslim who brings the photos up on his or her computer. However fortuitously, the pictures of torture fit snugly into the larger pattern of the orientalist conquest of Arabia as it is perceived on the peninsula. What began as romantic simplification of the real life of Iraq - the Wolfowitz scenario - culminates in the erasure of human identity and the rendering of men and women as inanimate objects. Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib story in the New Yorker, quotes Specialist Matthew Wisdom of the Military Police: "I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its ribcage ... I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another with its mouth open." When pronouns drift so casually from he to it (and the speaker here is a whistleblower, not a torturer), we are in a nightmare world where men are barely distinguishable from flies or black beetles. The gruesome murder of Nicholas Berg should not obscure the fact that the pictures from Abu Ghraib were generally accepted in the Muslim world with eerie, almost philosophical calm. It is as if they knew all along that it was like this. Even before President Bush drew tides of men into his hands and wrote his will across the sky in stars, and long before the goons with digital cameras came on the scene, Arabs knew they were thought of as "it"s. A released detainee, quoted by the New York Times on May 10, says: "I realised [the Americans] came to obliterate a whole society, a whole civilisation" - a thought so old and so commonplace that one might hear it uttered, world- wearily, in any Arab cafe, anywhere across the globe. The questionable truth of the thought hardly matters now: it is so widely believed, so amply, extravagantly confirmed in the grinning face of Lynndie England. "American humiliates Arab" is not news. Unfortunately for us, those - like Zarqawi's al- Qaida franchise - bent on exploiting the injuries of the humiliated know all too well what does make news. Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited |
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good article, though. |