Wednesday, January 30, 2002

Remora

Unwisely, Limited Inc pledged to write about Bernard Lewis yesterday. A friend sent us a Paul Kennedy's review of B.L.'s latest book. This friend remarked on the last graf of that review, which reads:


"What, then, is to be done? At the end of the day, Lewis
argues, the answer lies within the Muslim world itself.
Either its societies, especially those in the Middle East,
will continue in ''a downward spiral of hate and spite,
rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression,'' with all that
implies for a horrible and troubled future; or ''they can
abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences
and join their talents, energies and resources in a common
creative endeavor'' to the benefit of themselves and the
rest of our planet. Perhaps the outside world can help a
bit, though probably not much. ''For the time being, the
choice is their own.'' With this final sentence, and all
that precedes it, Lewis has done us all -- Muslim and
non-Muslim alike -- a remarkable service."

Well, there seems to be two choices outlined here -- things can get worse, or things can get better. To which Limited Inc would add, things can stay the same. This pretty much completes the futures open to all God's creatures. What is interesting is the crash of all that nineties globalization confidence. Remember, the end of history, and the iron path to capitalist nirvana? Seemingly, that has hit the dustbin. Now we have whole regions that can only influence themselves. Still, Limited Inc, with our youthful infatuation with Marxist internationalism, thinks that the globalist slant shouldn't be thrown out entirely. Surely the idea that the outside world can "help a bit" significantly underplays the position of the "outside world" -- which is the world, presumably, that uses oil and is lubricated regularly with Arabic money, invested in the intricate business of equities, bonds and derivatives. Where else are Pakistani generals going to hide their mega-bucks? Mr. Kennedy's seems to think that the Middle East can be wholly disconnected from the outside world -- but if the last two centuries have shown us anything, they've shown us that the outside world definitely wants things from the Middle East, and means to get them come hell or high water.

Okay, okay, Kennedy's teeter-totter ending is not Lewis' fault. Hell, Limited Inc has ended many a review in a platitudinous antithesis -- it is a remarkable fact about reviewing that one almost invariably runs out of things to say at the end of a review. Or, to put it more truthfully, things to say that sound like closure -- usually, there are plenty of things to say that would overleap the bounds of the review, but inspiration has to be reigned in if you are going to get a check in the mail from your publication.

So here is a better example of Lewis's over-generalizing. It comes from a New Yorker article entitled, typically, the Rage of Islam. In Lewis' world, Islam is a uniform thing that is always as splenetic as a crack addled gangbuster. The essay lifts off with this analysis of one of bin Laden's Unplugged vids:


"In his pronouncements, bin Laden makes frequent references to history. One of the most dramatic was his mention, in the October 7th videotape, of the "humiliation and disgrace" that Islam has suffered for "more than eighty years." Most American�and, no doubt, European�observers of the Middle Eastern scene began an anxious search for something that had happened "more than eighty years" ago, and came up with various answers. We can be fairly sure that bin Laden's Muslim listeners�the people he was addressing�picked up the allusion immediately and appreciated its significance. In 1918, the Ottoman sultanate, the last of the great Muslim empires, was finally defeated�its capital, Constantinople, occupied, its sovereign held captive, and much of its territory partitioned between the victorious British and French Empires. The Turks eventually succeeded in liberating their homeland, but they did so not in the name of Islam but through a secular nationalist movement."

Lewis' confidence that Pakistani and Egyptian and Iraqi listeners were signifying along with bin L. is odd. Personally, I doubt that there is a lot of moping in Pakistan about the fate of Mehmet VI. And there is something really wierd about the phrase "bin Laden's Muslim listeners" -- so odd that Lewis adds the opaque modifier, the people he was addressing. Because the implication, one congenial to Lewis' mindset, is that all Muslims were grooving on this kind of message. Lewis, however, knows he would be in trouble if he let that cat out of the bag. That bin L.'s intended audience was Muslim, as opposed to Buddhist, Hindu, or Satanist seems certain. Jim Jones' audience, in long ago Guyana, was Christian. Point is, the difference between set and subset, here, is considerable. Now, one might make the argument that it is in the extremes that we see the hidden essence. Sometimes Limited Inc is up for that kind of argument. But it has to be made in order to be made plausible. It is never made by Bernard L.

It is this kind of sloppy extapolating, this hanky panky with generalizations, that drives Bernard L.'s opponent (in heaven and hell and the New York Review of Books), Edward Said, fairly batty. Said counters with a sometimes ineffectual nominalism, saying that Islam isn't one thing. That seems obvious. The deeper problem is that Bernard L.'s generalizations seem to go down so well with his Christian/neo-liberal listeners -- the people he is addressing. So they tranquilly swallow things like this:

"In current American usage, the phrase "that's history" is commonly used to dismiss something as unimportant, of no relevance to current concerns, and, despite an immense investment in the teaching and writing of history, the general level of historical knowledge in our society is abysmally low. The Muslim peoples, like everyone else in the world, are shaped by their history, but, unlike some others, they are keenly aware of it. In the nineteen-eighties, during the Iran-Iraq war, for instance, both sides waged massive propaganda campaigns that frequently evoked events and personalities dating back as far as the seventh century. These were not detailed narratives but rapid, incomplete allusions, and yet both sides employed them in the secure knowledge that they would be understood by their target audiences�even by the large proportion of that audience that was illiterate. Middle Easterners' perception of history is nourished from the pulpit, by the schools, and by the media, and, although it may be�indeed, often is�slanted and inaccurate, it is nevertheless vivid and powerfully resonant."

Now, Bernie L. might be so far out of the petit bourgeois lifestyle (the one in which Limited Inc was nourished) that he's never gone to church, but if he had, he'd be amazed that Americans are continually refering to things that happened 2000 years ago. Worse, the one trope that Americans recognize from history, that can be used by every evangelist with confidence, has to do with the fall of the Roman empire -- which happened before the seventh century. It is referred to in rapid, incomplete allusions, but the empire is always thought to have fallen because of some special depravity of the Romans that the Americans are repeating. You don't, however, hear a lot of American commentators making much of our vivid and revanchist sense of this history, and what it says about our culture. In the same way that these thinkers don't often allude to the anti-scientific attitude that consistently shows up in polls -- only a minority of Americans believe in evolution, and stadiums full of them believe we all arrived on this planet six thousand years ago. If we took our survey of what America was like from your average AM radio sunday sermon, it would be a misconceived image indeed. Cultures contain contradictions. Lewis, however, thrives off describing Islam as if it were all one thing -- one horrid consistency, slice through it how you will. And this is what makes me rather avoid the man.

Well, I imagine the friend who asked for this post will not be happy with it. Limited Inc does try to please, but so often we simply... fail.

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