Blind to reason

IF ever there was a time when the nations of the West needed to bridge the chasm of ignorance and misunderstanding that afflicts their relationship with the Muslim world, it is now. And if ever there was a need for the voices of enlightened Muslim intellectuals to rise above the rhetoric of hate and distrust that has characterized the post-Sept. 11 debate, it is now.

Ahdaf Soueif purports to speak with just such a voice in “Mezzaterra,” a collection of essays and reviews. Born in Egypt and a resident of Europe for most of her adult life, she sets out to explain, to the Western readers she believes are tragically misinformed by an indifferent media, the root causes of the rage that has driven some Muslims to take up arms against those in the West. Her stated aim is to show that Middle Easterner or American, Muslim or Christian, we are all children of one God; that we have more in common than we know; that the only way to achieve peace is for all of us to find this common ground and learn to inhabit it together.

Too bad, then, that eight pages into her book, Soueif gives up any pretense of searching for this middle ground and proceeds to paint the world as a battlefield in which Arab nations are “weak, in disarray, subsumed” and -- mistakenly -- “identified as enemies of the West,” and Western nations are “still colonialist and racist; identified as enemies of Islam and Arabs,” intent on forcing them to “accept Israel without a solution to the Palestinian question.”

It all started in 1967, when Israel defeated some Arab neighbors and occupied their lands. Until then, Soueif assures us in a breathless -- if condescending -- tone, the Arab world was a playground of “benign, rich Muslim traditions and rituals” that were “intertwined” with “rich Christian traditions,” “African liberation,” “Socialist equality,” “Non-aligned pride,” “humanist values, pop & rock” and Western fashions.

“Growing up Egyptian in the Sixties,” she writes without irony, “meant growing up Muslim/Christian/Egyptian/Arab/African/Mediterranean/Non-aligned/Soci alist but happy with small scale capitalism. On top of that, if you were urban/professional, the chances were that you spoke English and/or French and danced to the [Rolling] Stones.... “

Those of us who were born and raised in the Muslim world at the same time as Soueif (I’m an Iranian Jew), may wonder at the absence of Jews from this brotherhood of nations. We may also ask how the author managed to create, in her own mind if nowhere else, this pre-1967 wonderland of peace and harmony, free of the glaring vestiges of tribal warfare, colonial devastation, crippling poverty, illiteracy and religious divisions apparent to even the least insightful observers in that era.

Soueif is not the first, and undoubtedly won’t be the last, to mistake her experience for that of an entire nation; to believe that having miniskirts in a capital city, Norman Mailer in urban bookstores and Madonna in the backwaters signifies a genuine meeting of the minds between Arab nations and their more secular Western counterparts. Nor is she the first Arab to hold Israel in particular, Jews everywhere and the United States by association responsible for everything that ails her people. She is, however, a spokeswoman for others who claim to understand the West and the East. As such, she has a responsibility to seek and expose the truth, to resist idealizing an undeniably difficult past and creating a mythic ground that she believes would exist today were it not for the incursion of evil from outside forces.

It is true that Israel’s occupation of Arab land has had devastating repercussions for peace in the Middle East. Any honest and productive conversation about the origins and evolution of the present conflict between Islam and the West, however, must take into account a multitude of other social and historical concerns that continue to exist, independent of the fate of the West Bank and Gaza.

At the core of those concerns are two ideologies that, regardless of their original intent, have been employed by corrupt clergy and ruthless autocrats to enlist armies of “believers” -- Muslim and Christian -- to serve “the cause.” Islam may or may not be a militant religion; what is relevant is that it is being used successfully to instigate war. Christian values and Western-style democracy may or may not be transferable at gunpoint in Iraq or elsewhere; what is important is that both ideologies are being used, tragically, as permission to invade and rob.

Much of “Mezzaterra” consists of Soueif’s writings over a 23-year period that shine little light on the larger questions facing East and West. Some of her essays (“The Circus Comes to Town” and “The Language of the Veil”) depict facets of what one might call the “modern Arab predicament.” They do so, however, without assigning any blame to internal forces and cultural trends -- a fatalistic outlook, a prevailing interpretation of Islam that justifies and promotes the oppression of women -- that may account for at least some of what has gone wrong in the Arab world.

Finally, in the section titled “Political Essays,” Soueif’s assertions take on an old and ominous echo: The West, she tells us, is under attack by Islamic fundamentalists because of U.S. support for Israel; Israel is responsible for every bad thing that happens to Arabs; all Jews, even ones who criticize Israeli government actions by writing about or making films that expose injustices done to Palestinians, serve the great conspiracy against Arabs. Even during the Holocaust, Jews had it better than Arabs do now. (Comparing pictures from Nazi death camps to ones from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, she writes: “I have not come across photos of SS women officers laughing and pointing at Jewish genitals.”)

Notably absent from the discourse is an acknowledgment that Muslim clergy had battled the influence of the Christian West long before the founding of Israel in 1948, or that Muslim anti-Semitism dates back centuries before the inception of the state of Israel.

Missing too is any hint of an awareness that the Ayatollah Khomeinis and Osama bin Ladens of the world may be using Islam for purposes that have little to do with serving God or restoring nationhood to Palestinians, or that there is something inherently wrong with a philosophy that drove some parents in Iran in the 1980s to send their 10-year-old sons to be used as mine-clearing devices in the war against Iraq or that drives some Muslim mothers today to celebrate the suicide deaths of their young daughters as long as other people’s children die in the process.

Soueif, in fact, has no tolerance for anyone who may hold a view different from hers: Westerners who criticize an Arab leader, she insists, do so out of contempt for Arabs and Muslims everywhere; Arabs who point to weaknesses and shortcomings among their own do the bidding of the United States and Israel: “By decrying the political oppression rampant in their countries of birth and exposing the atrocities that take place there, these intellectuals ... provide the ideological justification to ‘save these people from themselves.’ ”

The real shame here is not the paucity of candor and insight in Soueif’s essays, or the lengths she goes to support her view of America as doing the bidding of the Jews. The real shame is that by using a single issue -- Israel’s occupation of Arab lands -- as an explanation for all that is wrong in the world today, and by warning everyone that “if you’re not with us, you’re against us,” she sounds very much like that Western inhabitant of “the common ground,” our own president, whose aversion to self-doubt and introspection she so rightfully laments. *