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THE HANDSTAND |
SEPTEMBER 2003 |
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Deep Roots of Islamophobia By James Brooks America's long festering animus toward Arabs and Islam has finally arrived. From black tie affairs to your local barbecue, you can see it in the U.S.A. You can hear it, too, whispering in the White House and booming from Capitol Hill. Language that would get people fired if applied to blacks or Jews now passes without comment when used against Arabs and Muslims. It can be found somewhere, every day, in almost every newspaper and TV news show in the land. We tend to view this disturbing trend as the result of two, or twenty, or fifty years of politics and events. But we are children of a history we do not know. The roots of our "new" bigotry stretch through our racist American past to a thousand-year old blind spot, one big enough to drive half the world through. It's time to learn where we came from. It's true that our reaction to September 11, twisted and amplified through the gov-media input stream, opened a dark door in the American heart. Softened up by decades of neoconservative, fundamentalist, pro-Israeli and Hollywood propaganda, we were easy marks for politicians brewing a spirit of national retribution. But we had already shown our stripes, long
before the bigotry got organized enough to establish its
own think tanks. From our demonization of Nasser and the
PLO to the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, when
Iranian-American citizens instantly became "sand
niggers" and victims of mobs and hate crimes from
coast to coast, we had revealed a wide seam of hatred for
Arabs and Islam in the bedrock of our national character.
Today, after years of diligent polishing by powerful friends, this obdurate stone of intolerance is passed off as a sparkling gem, a dynamic, no-nonsense political point of view enjoying the highest official approbation. Bush foreign policy and the continuing round up and incarceration of Arab citizens and immigrants make the identity of the enemy crystal clear. We have returned to our former habit of publicly attacking races, cultures and religions as a matter of national politics. American racists once again have a "legitimate" language to express their hatred. No longer must the dirty business be kept behind the curtain, when the nation is willing to watch, mute and compliant. Instead, we hide the enemy, especially if she is dead. It seems to be easier to accept what's going on, if she has no humanity, if the dead and dismembered civilians can't be seen, if their race and religion are inferior, if "they will have to change anyway, one way or another", as Tom Friedman might put it. We slip into it so easily, it's as if we've been doing it for a thousand years.
For example, what is the background to the new bigots' favorite claim, that Islam is a "uniquely violent religion"? The scriptural perspective is simply embarrassing. Both the Old Testament and the Torah chronicle God's recurring commands to the Hebrews to wipe out everyone in sight, so copiously that the Qur'an looks downright tame by comparison. Christian and Jewish fundamentalists defy their own scriptures when they defame Islam as a violent religion. Empirically,
since the beginning of Islam fourteen centuries And what, to cite just one example, do Europeans have to compare with the Moorish occupation of Spain? Instead of sowing lasting bloodshed and dispossession, Islamic Spain allowed Muslims, Christians and Jews to live together in fairly peaceful co-existence for 800 years, as they co-developed the beautiful Spanish language and culture. You could take a lot of Spanish in a lot of American schools without learning much of anything about this rich and instructive heritage.
If you're having trouble with "the western
world…is a child of Islam", welcome to your
blind spot. Happily, it's not about theology, but to
clear it up we'll have to go back thirteen hundred years,
to the first contacts between Islam and Christian Europe.
You Alabaster 35-3000BC^ Four hundred years later, Europe began to catch
on. Translating more Arabic texts in Latin, we began to
learn. Not only did we imbibe the fundamentals of our
math, science and technology in Arabic, we learned the
very roots of our culture and democracy at the feet of
our Islamic neighbors. At a time when very few in Europe
could even read Greek, the Arabs were already rescuing
the genius of ancient Greece from oblivion. They
translated Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, the
whole Pantheon of Greek learning and art into Arabic, and
brought it back to life in Islamic culture. We learned "our" Greek heritage by
translating the Arabic translations into Latin. For
centuries, the fundamental texts of budding European
scholarship were based on Arabic translations, and
Europe's scholarship continued to be informed by its more
learned Arabic contemporaries. Europeans even copied
principles of Islamic scholarship and academic
organization in building their own nascent academies. But
soon we were spinning the myth that we'd got it all
directly from "our" Greek ancestors. Which may
have made it easier to launch the Crusades, to begin
murdering our teachers. The injection of ancient Greek learning and art
into Church-bound Europe is generally held to be the
engine of the Renaissance, and the beginning of our
humanist traditions. The fact that we learned it all from
our Islamic intellectual superiors has been blotted out
of Western history for a thousand years. The language of
algebra and the concept of zero were also vital to the
growth of Europe. By the year 800, Arabic mathematicians
had learned these tools and the place-valued decimal
system from the scholars of India. Four hundred years
later, Fibonacci wrote his groundbreaking Liber abaci to
introduce modern (Arabic) numerals and the Hindu-Arabic
decimal system to a Europe still muddling with Roman
numerals. The word 'algebra' is Arabic, from the book
"Hisab al-jabr w'al muqabala", written around
830 by the renowned astronomer and mathematician Mohammed
ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi. When translated into Latin, it
caused a sensation in Europe - 310 years later. Where
would Newton have been, without the Arabs? On what would
he and Leibniz have based the calculus? Whither Maxwell
and Einstein, without Islam? How can we receive such
gifts and perpetually rebuke the giver? There are many other examples, including the Arabic roots of European music and musical instruments, and the rich Islamic/Arabic influence spanning the people and cultures of southern and eastern Europe, to name but two. We have a lot of history to recover. Who would we be, without this cornucopia of gifts? Even the engines of our world dominance are built with intellectual handtools forged in the Muslim mind. If we are not the child of Islam, we are at best its kid brother. (The one that likes to blow up frogs with firecrackers??) Being a kid brother myself, I know the signs, when it's time to grow up and show your big brother some love and respect. A time to reconcile the past, and talk man to man. You find out he's not such a bad guy after all. And he sure knows a lot. James Brooks, writer and former business owner, resides in Worcester, Vermont. Currently, Brooks serves as webmaster for www.vtjp.org.
Papyrus paper is a laminated material made of thinly cut strips from the stalk of the Cyprus Papyrus plant, which is native to the marshes along the valley of the Nile River in Egypt.
To make papyrus, stalks are harvested from the banks of the Nile River. The outer green skin is then removed, and the inner portion of the stalk is cut into long strips which are pounded to break down the fibers. They are soaked for three days in water until they become clear and bendable. The strips are then cut to length and laid on a piece of cotton fabric, overlapping each other. Two layers are used, one horizontal and one vertical. The sheets of material are placed between two stiff, absorbent barriers. They are then stacked up, placed in a press, and squeezed. After this, they are left in the sun. Every eight hours the absorbent barriers are replaced. This process is repeated for 3 to 4 days or until it is dry. ancient arab
theorems and example of their math instruments   ZIGGURAT 2100BC |
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Have
you ever stood so close to a Monet that the image
dissolves into a sea of swimming color? Step back a pace,
and the background begins to resolve. Back another pace,
and the foreground jumps out with a sudden force. If we
take a few steps back into the deep history of our
problem with Islam, we may see the background for what it
is. And that may help us to resolve the turbulent
foreground of our picture. 
ago, the
Europeans have been far more bloodthirsty, perhaps by a
power of ten or more, than the followers of Mohammed.
("Christendom" casts a wider net than my
argument intends, so I will use the term
"Europeans", i.e. people of European stock and
heritage, wherever they may be.) Not only did Europeans
leapfrog the Muslim world in developing sheer killing
power, they have also been at each other's throats in
large conflicts far more frequently
In
a recent article in the New Statesman, Ziauddin Sardar
gets to the heart of the matter when he writes that
"the west's hatred of Islam stems from, more than
anything else, the denial of its true lineage. The
western world as we understand it is a child of Islam.
Without Islam, the west - however we conceive it today -
would not exist. And, without the west, Islam is
incomplete and cannot survive the future." 
PAPYRUS 
Papyrus was first created in
approximately 4000 BC, and quickly became one of Egypt's
major exports. Because of papyrus' economic importance,
the Egyptian rulers made sure its production technique
was a closely guarded secret…… In 105 AD paper
was invented in China.!!!
