Reports
that US soldiers at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility had
desecrated the Qur'an resulted in an outpouring of popular Muslim
anger from Mauritania to Indonesia. Thousands took to the streets to
denounce the desecration of Islam's holy book, clashing with
security forces as they staged anti-US protests, spitting on the
American flag, throwing tomatoes at a picture of President Bush, and
burning the US constitution. Waving copies of the Qur'an,
demonstrators across the Middle East and Asia demanded an apology
from the US, as well as punishment for the perpetrators.
Unsurprisingly, the White House denied the Bush administration’s
responsibility, accusing a few people of violating policy, and the
media for blowing “isolated incidents” out of proportion
(“White House”).
Despite
Newsweek's retraction of its earlier story, which reported
that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushed a Qur'an down the
toilet to get inmates to talk, the Pentagon confirmed on June 3rd
that more than 13 cases of “alleged mishandling of the Qur'an by
Joint Task Force personnel had taken place. Ten of those were by
guards and three by interrogators,” (“Pentagon Confirms”).
Incidents involved kicking or stepping on the holy book, throwing
water balloons into a cell block to cause an unspecified number of
Qur'ans to get wet, and a guard’s urine splashing on a detainee
and his Qur'an (“Pentagon Confirms”).
Numerous
former detainees had previously complained of incidents of Qur'an
abuse or mishandling. Aryat Vahitov told Russian television in June
2004 that “they [Americans] tore the Qur'an to pieces in front of
us, threw it in the toilet,” and Abdullah Tabarak told a Moroccan
newspaper in December 2004 that the Americans had trampled the
Qur'an underfoot and had thrown it in a “urine bucket,”
(Greenway). In its harshest criticism to date, Amnesty International
labeled the United States the number one human rights offender,
calling the Guantanamo Bay detention facility the “gulag of our
time”—reminiscent of the extensive system of Soviet prisons in
which thousands of political prisoners died of hunger, cold and
physical abuse (Dodds).
The
Trail of Bigotry
Many
in the West fail to appreciate that the concept of religion in Islam
is not a private, individual matter, but rather a communal affair
that involves the global Muslim community, or Ummah. The Qur'an
represents the core of an all-encompassing belief system that is
regarded by Muslims as the eternal source of guidance for all
mankind. It represents the main source of authority for all
intellectual disciplines of Islam (Kafrawi). Even the art of
Qur'anic recitation (tilawah) and inscription or calligraphy
(khatt) has been deemed of great value in Islamic culture.
Hence, the desecration of the Qur'an is more significant and
consequential than other forms of abuse in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo.
The former amounts to the spiritual, emotional, and psychological
torture of all Muslims, whereas the latter—though equally shameful
and traumatizing—represents the physical and psychological abuse
of a few Muslims held in captivity (Khan). In either case,
successive incidents of humiliation and desecration should not be
seen as isolated incidents committed by a few "rotten
apples," but rather as the ultimate result of the pervasiveness
of an Islamophobic discourse that permeates the upper echelons of
decision-making in the US administration, military command, and
certain intellectual and social circles affiliated with influential
policymakers in the United States.
The
desecration is the result of the Islamophobic discourse that
permeates US decision-making. |
|
In
2001 and 2002, leading evangelical figures affiliated with
Christian-Zionist circles regularly insulted Islam and Prophet
Muhammad (peace and blessing be upon him) with impunity. Franklin
Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson described Islam as
“wicked, violent and not of the same God,” and called the
Prophet of Islam a “terrorist” and a “pedophile.” In
November 2002, John Ashcroft, then the US attorney general, got away
with similar bigotry when he said that “Islam is a religion in
which God requires you to send your son to die for him,” while
“Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for
you,” (Safi). In October 2003, Lt. Gen. Willian G. Boykin, the
deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, was allowed to
retain his job despite telling church gatherings that the Christian
God is “real,” whereas the Muslim God is an “idol” (Safi).
At a time when the United States has been urging Muslim governments
to shut down madrassas, or religious schools, for their
alleged “anti-Jewish” or “anti-Christian” teachings,
Rumsfeld defended Boykin’s remarks by citing the latter’s right
to freedom of speech.
More
disturbing is the prevalence of justifications for the US occupation
of Muslim lands based on condescending, arrogant, and racist
foundations; reformulations of the “white man’s burden” thesis
that seek to magnify the essential “otherness” and incurable
deficiencies of the Orient vis-à-vis an enlightened, progressive
West. Central to neo-conservative thinking in this regard is Raphael
Patai’s book entitled The Arab Mind (1973).
The
Arab Mind was catapulted into the limelight when Seymour Hersh,
investigating torture at Abu Ghraib, claimed that it was the
“bible of neocons on Arab behavior,” (Hersh). Patai, a
Hungarian-born Jew and an ardent Zionist, describes the Middle East
as a monolithic “cultural area,” with no plurality of
differences, and portrays Arabs as evasive, shifty, indifferent,
deceptive, and careless individuals, who are exceptionally and
intrinsically susceptible to humiliation and indignation. The same
mind-set is apparent in a work by Douglas A. Kupersmith, published
by the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, wherein it is argued
that the “Arab culture commonly exhibits a strong disdain for
manual labor and to leave things undone until the last possible
minute.” Kupersmith enthusiastically cites Patai, arguing that the
situation in the Arab world is one of “a handful of nations paying
cash for the best military hardware, while relying heavily on
outside expertise to keep their modern forces operational”
(O’Neil Ortiz). Thus, the US occupation of Muslim land is seen as
essentially picking up where intrinsic Arab weakness left off. In
other words, because Arabs are lazy and passive, it follows that all
“colonization of industry (or of nations themselves in the Middle
East) are in fact provoked by those who cannot help themselves,”
(O’Neil-Ortiz).
|
|
In a memo dated September 14, 2003, US Lt. Gen. Sanchez authorized using guard dogs to exploit “Arab fear of dogs.” |
Norvell
B. De Atkine, Director of Middle East Studies at the JFK Special
Warfare Center and Military School at Fort Bragg, and Patai’s
greatest champion, admits that “At the institution where I teach
military affairs, the ‘Arab Mind’ forms the basis of my cultural
instruction. Over the past 12 years, I have also briefed hundreds of
military teams being deployed to the Middle East.”
(O’Neil-Ortiz). De Atkine authored an article in the Middle
East Quarterly entitled “Why Arabs Lose Wars,” in which he
attributes Arab military defeats in the modern era not to
contemporary political or military specificities, but to a
“culture that engenders subtlety, indirection and dissimulation in
personal relationships... and the often-paranoid environment of Arab
political culture,” hinting at the possible role of Islam’s
“inherent fatalism” in encouraging a defeatist mentality among
Arabs, (De Atkine). More seriously, the “Area Studies” Branch of
the World Religions and Cultures Department of the Defense Language
Institute Foreign Language Center distributes an “Area Manual”
to soldiers and private personnel in various war theatres that is
replete with ethnocentric and utterly flawed notions of presumed
“typical Arab behavior,” (“Working and Training
Guidelines”). Again, the manual depicts Arabs as passive,
fatalistic, indecisive, incompetent, tribal, primitive, and
opportunistic. Even positive characteristics, such as “Arab
generosity,” are portrayed, not as a humanitarian attribute, but
rather the result of an innate desire to induce loyalty through
indebtedness, and thus strengthening one’s family and/or kin,
(“Working and Training Guidelines”).
Given
the dissemination of such essentialist and outright racist notions
in the military, it is obvious why US military personnel in Abu
Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, or Bagram Air Base would torture their
Muslim captives by using specific methods designed to shame and
humiliate, since the writings of Patai teach them that honor
envelops “the Arab ego like a coat of armor… the smallest chink
can threaten to loosen all the loops and rings,” (Wyatt-Brown).
Orientalism
Resurrected
US
occupation is justified on racist foundations; reformulations of the
“white man’s burden.” |
|
For
centuries Orientalism provided the intellectual justification for
the military conquest and subjugation of the Orient by European
powers. In Orientalist discourse, Westerners were seen as
fundamentally different from, and culturally superior to, Muslims.
Maxime Rodinson eloquently illustrated how mainstream Western
thinking in the nineteenth century about the Orient regarded Homo
Islamicus or “Islamic man” as a distinct type of human
being, essentially different from “Western man,” (Lockman 74).
Judging by the modern day expansion of direct US military and
political influence in the Muslim World, coupled with a series of US
abuses, we seem to be witnessing the resurfacing of Orientalist
modes of thinking that are being used to justify, and indeed
encourage, imperial encroachment upon Muslim lands, and the
trampling of Muslim dignity and honor.
Consider
the way in which the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been
conducted, with repetitive misinformation, multiple accounts of
abuses and torture, and little to show in terms of prosecuting the
perpetrators. No senior US official has yet been indicted or tried
for his/her responsibility for the trail of deceit that led to the
Iraq war. The low-ranking officers declared guilty of abuses have
been tried within the US judicial system, rather than by a competent
international tribunal. This sends the message that since the United
States is the global policeman, it will continue to assume the
self-proclaimed role of judge, jury, and executioner, without
intervention from or accountability to any international judicial
authority.
By
regularly dehumanizing Muslims and demonstrating contempt towards
the cornerstone of the Islamic belief system—the Qur'an—the US
has given credibility to all those in the Muslim world who believe
that Bush’s “war on terrorism” is another Western crusade
against Islam. It also gives America’s so-called “friendly
dictators” in the Middle East a green light to continue to abuse
their own citizens.
Perhaps
the main function of these abuses is to serve as a “trial
balloon,” to gauge the extent and duration of Muslim and Arab
anger and make policy predictions on future Muslim responses. But
with Muslims seemingly satisfied with limited outbursts of
condemnation and anger in response to the desecration of their holy
book, many have been left wondering if the reaction would be much
different if Jewish extremists were to carry on their repetitive and
explicit threat of demolishing the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Palestine, to
erect the Temple Mount in its place. That is a question only the
coming months will answer.
WORKS
CITED
De-Atkine,
Norvell B. “Why
Arabs Lose Wars,” Middle East Quarterly Dec. 1999
Accessed:
6 June 2005
Dodds,
Paisley. “Amnesty Takes Aim at ‘Gulag’ in Guantanamo,” Washington
Post 25
May
2005. Accessed: 6 June 2005
Greenway,
H.D.S. “Why
Muslims Distrust the West,” The Boston Globe 28 May 2005.
Accessed:
5 June 2005
Hassan,
Ghali. “The
Resort to Torture,” Online Journal 15 Mar. 2005. Accessed:
7
June
2005
Hersh,
Seymour. “The Grey Zone,” The
New Yorker 15 May 2004. Accessed: 7 June
2005
Kafrawi,
Shalahuddin. “Muslims Revere Qur'an as Direct Divine
Revelation,” Morning
Call
20
May 2005. Accessed: 8 June 2005
Khan,
M.A. Muqtedar. “Qur'an Desecration : Far Worse Than Abu
Ghraib,” Common
Dreams
19
May, 2005. Accessed: 5 June 2005
Lockman,
Zachary. Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and
Politics of
Orientalism
(New York : Cambridge University Press, 2004): 74
O’Neill-Ortiz,
Javier. “Raphael
Patai, Military Arab Studies, and Leftist Academia,”
Penumbral
18 Apr. 2005. Accessed: 7 June 2005
Safi,
Louay. “Can
the United States Lose the Whole World and its Soul Too?”
Insight
24
May 2005. Accessed: 6 June 2005
“US
Human Rights Abuses” News
From Russia 3 June 2005. Accessed: 6 June 2005
“White
House : Qur'an Abuse Isolated,” MSNBC 4 June 2005.
Accessed: 5 June,
2005
“Working
and Training Guidelines,” Area Studies : Middle East
(2004) Accessed: 8
June
2005
Wyatt-Brown,
Bertram. “The
Sad Parallels Between Iraq and Reconstruction,” History
News
Network 1 Sept. 2003. Accessed: 8 June 2005
**
Kareem M. Kamel is an Egyptian
analyst based in Cairo, Egypt. He has an MA in International
Relations and is specialized in security studies, decision-making,
nuclear politics, and Middle East politics. He is currently a PhD
candidate at the American University in London, and a teaching
assistant to the Political Science Department at the American
University in Cairo.
