Fear Drives Perceptions, Not Reality

It turns out that the supposed prayer heard on the cockpit voice recorder of EgyptAir Flight 990, suggesting a possible Islamic factor in the crash, was merely the phrase tawakaltu ala Allah (I put my trust in God), which is uttered a dozen times a day upon undertaking the most mundane tasks, not only by Muslims--religious and nonreligious-- but also by Christian and agnostic Arabs alike. Failure to utter it, I was once admonished as a child by my Christian Arab father, was an expression of arrogance, a reflection of the absence of humility. The equivalent in English--”In God We Trust”--now decorates the currency of our capitalist nation.

To be sure, the cause of the airplane crash may turn out to be a pilot suicide, which, although rare, is not unprecedented regardless of the pilot’s religion. Even before the recovery of the cockpit tape, many experienced pilots had suggested that the early evidence indicated some human act rather than a mechanical failure as the cause of the airplane crash. Even in Egypt, where there is now a backlash against the “suicide theory,” most early reports pointed fingers at possible human perpetrators. Yet like the American tendency to be drawn to Islamic religious and cultural explanations for violent events involving the Middle East, the tendency in much of the Arab world is to place the blame for many mysterious tragedies on Israel and Zionism. From the mere fact that 33 Egyptian military officers were among the airplane victims, theories were woven about the possible causes of the tragic death of so many. The suicide explanation, with hints of religious overtones, is likely to feed into the unfortunate conspiracy theories in the Middle East--a region already fearful that the West is quick to see Islamic connections.

The consequence of allowing instinctive fears to drive explanations before all the facts are known is that a common disaster that knew no national or religious boundaries, the kind which usually is mitigated by the coming together of grieving strangers, may in this case widen the gap separating the U.S. from the Arab and Muslim world.

There is a lesson to be learned here. Even if the investigation ultimately concludes that someone of the Muslim faith was responsible for the downing of this airplane, one should not rush to make broader conclusions about religion and violence in the Middle East. That there has been much unfortunate terrorism in the Middle East is beyond debate. Yet many may be surprised to learn that, according to State Department reports, the Middle East has not been the leading region in the number of terrorist acts, lagging well behind Western Europe and Latin America. That much terrorism in the Middle East today is carried out in the name of Islam is readily clear. However, that much of the violence in the region was mostly carried out by secular nationalists in the 1950s and 1960s may have been forgotten.

Many Western scholars associate political violence with Islam. It is forgotten history that Western intellectuals and nationalist Arab revolutionaries after World War II saw Islam as a passive force that opposed revolutionary violence. The phrase of reference explaining Islamic passivity at the time was al-hamdu l’Allah--thanks be to God--which Muslim, Christian and Jewish Arabs regularly uttered in daily life to express acceptance of whatever God handed them, including the most difficult disasters.

These dramatically different interpretations of Islam suggest that our perceptions in the West, like the perceptions of the West in the Middle East, are often more driven by fear than by reality. The EgyptAir tragedy should not be used to fuel this fear.