All Things Not Considered

A Sisyphean Challenge

The Danish cartoons are once again in the news along with the tumult of the sanctimonious harangues on one side and the ill-advised street riots on the other. This is a sequel that restarted when the Jyllands-Posten and 15 other Danish papers decided to reprint a denigrating. While the theme of the 2005 episode was ‘Freedom to Blasphemy’, this latest one was ‘Solidarity and Defiance.’ Personally, I think the underlying theme to both is simply naked provocation, guised racism, and a childish game of intellectual ‘fart-counter-fart.’ A game as old as time where the only useless result it engenders is a stench that wafts up to our noses and drives us away from where we need to be: The round-table of discourse, of joint understanding, and mutual respect.

I am a Moroccan nonbeliever and I don’t have of a ‘religious’ dog in this fight. However, out of a sense of fairness, social equity, and moral justice I just couldn’t sit it out. It is true that I was irked when I heard of the republication of the prints, but I was equally irate when I saw the riots and heard of the misplaced public comments that ensued. This behavior will only alienate the Muslim minorities at best and vilify them and their religion at worst.

This past week, true to form, the neo-cons and some members of the European far right wing punditry weren’t a bit derelict in their propagandist obligations to stoke the fire under this controversy. And so we had to endure their calls for ‘Freedom of speech’, ‘Freedom to Blasphemy’, ‘War of ideology’, ‘East vs. West’, and the proverbial ‘The Clash of Civilizations.’ However, these same experts were remiss in their duties to be fair and just when they conveniently and temporarily spurned their own laws to support their spurious arguments.

For the record, in France, Spain, Belgium, Germany, and Austria it is against the law to deny that the Jewish or Armenian holocausts took place. On February 20, 2006, an Austrian court convicted British historian David Irving for making a speech where he claimed that some hitherto reported events about the holocaust didn’t actually take place thus breaking the law and getting a 3-year jail sentence for it. Here’s another rhetorical tidbit: How do you think the Jewish community would react if a newspaper in the US decides to print a caricature of an Israeli president drooling over few dollar bills? Well, there will be outrage, accusations, indignation, and all rightfully so. So why is it OK to protect the rights of some to desecrate while deny it to others? Why the double standard?

This is an absurd Tragicomedy, a progeny of some deep ethnic and religious differences that have since eroded the foundation of discourse and have widened and deepened the chasm between the ‘us’ and ‘them.’ To make matters worse, extremists in the Muslim world pull no punches in their senseless drive to galvanize the populist movement around their hateful, dogmatic, and acerbic message. They will do so even if they have to resort to unethical and morally outrageous deceptions. Equal to the task, the right-wingers in the West will resort to whichever means to drive their own ideological agenda or secure some profitable dividends. Freedom of speech is then decoupled from civic responsibility; moral decency and justice are replaced by xenophobia and hypocrisy.

It’s time to rethink these failed strategies and reconsider these fundamentally flawed preconceptions of each other. It’s time for the West to take an active role in the true enfranchisement of the Muslim minorities. It’s time to openly accept their cultural differences, learn and understand their ethnic and religious backgrounds, and allow them the benefit of the doubt. It is also time for the Muslim minorities to take a serious step toward a complete and genuine assimilation and integration within their host countries. It’s time to open up the intellectual sarcophagus where they have buried themselves for centuries and allow for some much needed fresh air to chase away a rather stale interpretation of the world. More importantly, we all need to revisit our respective definitions and interpretation of Tolerance. In his book “The Open Society and its Enemies Vol 1” Karl Popper convincingly proved that we couldn’t be tolerant of the intolerant. If we were, intolerance would invariably annihilate the tolerant as well as Tolerance itself. This is pretty much a call both sides need to seriously heed not just for the sake of human progress but also and more importantly for the sake and the future existence of humanity.

According to the Greek mythology, there was king by the name of Sisyphus who throughout his years had developed a reputation for being greedy, envious, and cunning. To punish him for his bad deeds, the Gods decided to put a curse on him. He was to roll a rock up a mountain only to have it roll all the way down. He was to endlessly repeat this futile endeavor Ad infinitum. Sometimes I feel that we, in a way, embody the myth of Sisyphus. In our quest to continually better each other and ourselves, we have been cursed with the apparent chimera of racial unity. We keep striving to climb the mount of human consonance and societal harmony, but over an over again we find ourselves at the bottom of it. But in the words of Albert Camus as they relate to our fateful Greek hero ‘…the struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ Indeed, Hope is eternal.

Terror In Casablanca - Part I

These past two weeks Casablanca has once again witnessed more suicide bombings that inflicted much harm to many civilians as well as some members of the police city department. Although the modus operandi of these murderers doesn't quite mesh with the common characteristics of Al Qaeda's, there just might be a link that ties in all these odious incidents together. It is not the equipment they have been using or the locations they have picked but the common thread is the neighborhoods where they have come from.

Most of these aimless hearts belong to the fundamentalist group called Takfir or Takfir Wal Hijra. According to their philosophy, anybody who doesn't religiously - no pun intended - adhere to their strict interpretation of the teachings of Islam is an apostate and therefore a kafir. Their aim is to purify the political system and restore the spirit of the Islamic community (Umma) to the country.

So the questions we have to tackle are: How did this problem originate? And what can we do about it?

The first question seems a bit easier to answer but further thought and analysis will prove otherwise, rather quickly. There are many reasons why this movement has taken root and has successfully mushroomed in the outskirts of many cosmopolitan centers in the Maghreb in general and Morocco in particular.

Sociological Most of these people are landless peasants who were driven out of their rural environment and out of desperation and need, have settled around old and abandoned quarries in the outskirts of big cities like Casablanca, Tangiers, Meknes, Fes, and Marrakech. These shantytowns have no electricity, no running water, and no semblance of urban character. These people feel they have been shunned and pushed aside by a society that in large despises them and even questions their citizenship.

Psychological This urban and sociological disintegration has marginalized them to the point where they feel no bond to the greater society. As outcasts and societal pariahs, they feel like a black and dirty spot on the Moroccan cultural tapestry. A spot that unmistakably identifies them as a victim and stigmatizes them as an inferior member of the social order.

I am usually asked what I like about America. My usual response is: Alternatives. There's nothing worse than not having alternatives or options. Just imagine you have a job that you hate but you can't go anywhere because nobody will take you. How would you feel? Well take that and multiply it by 10, maybe 100. That's what they feel in those makeshift shelters that have become their permanent lives. That's the reason why militant Islam seems like a good way out. But we will get back to that later.

Economical From a macroeconomic level, there's an undeniable collusion between the Moroccan government and various financial and world trade institutions to render the economy a market based one. This results in harsher economic conditions, public sector gentrification, and a paradigm shift in the citizen-state relationship. Moroccans, who have gotten used to a modicum of state sponsored economic stability, do now see it eroding to the global economic conditions imposed by the foreign investors.

On a microeconomic level, many people in Morocco are in a financial tailspin. The prices keep climbing while salaries stagnate. Unless you are well networked and have some financial gravitas or some serious name recognition, opportunities will be rare to come by, if nonexistent.

For these culturally and sociologically marginalized folks, life is a lot tougher. They usually lack the education and the skills that could help them better their lives and lift them out of their misery. They don't have the means to invest and their networks are more often than not just as financially destitute as they are.

Political The political machine has conveniently forgotten about this people. While the focus is on foreign investment, urbanization, and economic development, the side effects continue to pop up with gentrification, rural exodus, a widening gap between the have and the have-nots, and, case in point, the emergence of newer class of poor.

To a certain extent, the politicos have adopted the "ignore the nuisance and it might disappear strategy." This is very much akin to a person ignoring their rotten toe because they don't want to consider the possibility that it could be cancerous or diabetic and might need amputation. So instead of dealing with the problem, they opt to just forget about it and delegate the task to the immune system to carry the internal struggle and hopefully the complete annihilation of the disease.

In this case, these people know their predicament and they also know that not much is being done to rectify the most nefarious of ailments they face.

Religious Enter the religion. They are many people out there who prey on social and cultural victims of economic segregation to basically indoctrinate them into their ideological system and to serve their own twisted goals.

The late, and great, Kurt Vonnegut used to call them Psychopathic Personalities, or PP's for short. These are predators of the highest caliber. They combine all the aforementioned categories and intertwine them with a religious thread to strengthen and legitimize the cause, its necessity, its timeliness, and of course its relative and absolute importance.

Let's not forget that these soldiers of God are not the most educated and most intellectually skeptical bunch in the lot to start with. Couple that with their hapless existence, feelings of dread, psychological inferiority, and cultural Marginalization and you see how they use a sectarian idea of Islam to turn against the society and the system.

What can we do?

There are some possible solutions to this problem. And we better work hard in making them work because the alternative is not an alternative. I will post some possible solutions in the second part of this article.

Faith, Citizenship, and Identity

This is the result of a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center. Based on the question, it seems like Moslems, regardless of where they reside, identify with their religion more than their countries’ citizenship. Conversely, the Christians consider themselves more of citizens than members of their religion.

Many Christians in the US identify more with their religion than with their country. This distribution is rather skewed when compared to the European countries. One is left to wonder as to the reasons behind this and to the relationships between secularism, secularization, modernism, and of course, religion.

• Why is it that invariably, Moslems identify with Islam more than their country of residence?
• Why is it that the US numbers are statistically different than other countries in the West?
• Why is the Moslems distribution in France more balanced than any other place?
• What does this tell us about the Moslem/Christian dialog around current and future issues?

These and other questions will be addressed in a future article on this blog. Stay tuned.

Islam and Secularization

Considering how Islam was recently used to rationalize the tyrannical authoritarian regimes of the Talibans in Afghanistan, their masters, the Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia, and the ayatollahs in Iran, it is no wonder that the Western scholars and people alike views the term ‘Islamic Democracy’ with a doubtful eye. Some of them reject this notion outright stating that Democratic precepts cannot be reconciled with fundamental Islamic values. While others posit that an Islamic Democracy can only exist insofar as there’s no a priori moral framework around it. And this brings me to the issue of secularization and its role as a democratization agent.

As the theologian Harvey Cox states: “ secularization is the process by which certain responsibilities pass from ecclesiastic to political authorities” (US). Whereas secularism is an ideology based on the suppression of religion from public life (Turkey). If you look at the two-faceted histories of the US you will easily discern the rhetorical from the factual version. As recognized 2 centuries ago by Alexis de Tocqueville, religion, with its Judeo-Christian moral framework is the keystone of the American political system. One only needs to pay attention to the political language around such polarizing issues as abortion, gay rights, stem cell research, and government funded ‘faith-based initiatives” to understand the importance of religion in the US and how it permeates every fiber of its constitutional structures. I would highly recommend a book by Esther Kaplan called: “With God on Their Side: George W. Bush and the Christian Right”

Despite what we read in the history books, the true pillar of US democracy is not the symbolic words in “Separation of Church and State” as it is the long political evolutionary process of secularization based NOT on secularism but on pluralism. Pluralism is what defines democracy and not the moral framework it sits upon.

Islamic pluralism can be quite succinctly summed up in these two verses:

Qu’ran (42:38) “Those who hearken to their Lord and establish regular prayer; who (conduct) their affairs by mutual Consultation; who spend out of what We bestow on them for Sustenance”
In this verse, the Qur’an clearly orders Muslims to perform all their affairs thru (Shura) or consultation to mitigate the risks of oppression and authoritarianism thus inviting opposing views and opinions.

Qur’an (2:256) “There’s no compulsion in religion.”
The depth of this message was alas lost in translation when the purveyors of a different flavor of Islam established their pure and unadulterated line of demarcation between the sphere of peace (Dar Al-Islam) and the sphere of war (Dar Al-Harb) forever plunging us into a constant turmoil with devastating consequences.

In my opinion, the secret to democratization rests within the confines of inclusion, acceptance, and tolerance of everybody’s ideas and opinions. Past and contemporary History is peppered with examples where a failure to accommodate for diversity have had long lasting and painful scars in our collective political, religious, and societal psyche.

Babel - A Review

Aside from the allegory to the Biblical story of "The Tower of Babel", this movie was an amalgam of subjects and issues and a collage of human drama framed around confusion, lack of understanding, and lack of communication. True to the Biblical parable, the common theme that wove the 3 stories together is one of human despair and tragedy emanating from cultural bias, miscommunication, and misconstrued perceptions. Inarritu, the movie director, adopted the same style of cinematography, story telling, and underlying premise as in his previous movies, ‘Amores Perros’ and ‘21 Grams.’ This leads me to believe that ‘Babel’ is in fact, the 3^rd installment of the trilogy.

It didn't seem like there was one actor you could label as principal in the movie. All of them were as important in the roles they respectively played. Moreover, I thought they all did an incredible job; although, in my opinion, Barraza (the Spanish nanny) was a tad better because of the way she handled the harrowing experience she was put thru and how she made every human emotion come out to life on the screen.

As a Moroccan, I didn't have a lot of objections to how they portrayed Morocco thru the movie. The village was chosen carefully and deliberately to accentuate the desolation and the poverty of a desert when compared to the desert of our cities and desolation of our cosmopolitan hearts. This is very much repeated with the artificial and plastic-like landscape of Tokyo and the dusty and windy village in Mexico. The Tazarine village is pretty much typical of many small villages in Morocco. They are dusty, infrastructure poor, but full of goodhearted, decent, and generous people.

I didn't object to the nakedness of the teenage Japanese girl, which I actually found to be more sad and heartrending than sexual. However, I thought the whole episode of voyeurism, masturbation, and incest was misguided and inappropriate. First, it sends an erroneous message to viewers who don’t know the people in that region of the world. Second, it has no place in the context of the movie theme or its direction.

There was however a scene at the end of the movie that depicts the real nature of the true Moroccan. It took place when Richard (Brad Pitt) handed some money to Anwar (Mohamed Akhzam - the guide) to thank him for standing by him and his wife and helping them thru their horrific ordeal. Anwar politely rejects the generous offer. The camera zooms in as his face fills the white screen. His facial expression conveys a sense of duty to lend a hand and an inappropriateness to take financial advantage of a dreadful incident. Regardless of what one might surmise from that particular scene, I thought it was one of redemption for anything I could have found objectionable with the movie.

3 out of 4 stars.