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Jaundiced views on Arabs are not new
A US nuclear engineer makes a vain attempt to promote the supremacy of the Aryans over all other races.
- By Marwan Kabalan, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:04 January 25, 2008
- Image Credit: Illustration by Nino Jose Heredia/Gulf News
In the current issue of Middle East Quarterly, Melvin E. Lee, a nuclear engineer in the United States Navy and special operations officer for the commander, US Naval Forces Europe, wrote an article titled "The Fallacy of Grievance-based Terrorism".
Captain Lee criticised the thesis that resentment towards US policies in the Middle East motivates terrorism. Such assumption, Lee argued, misunderstand the enemy and its nature.
"In reality, the conflict is sparked not by grievance but rather by incompatibility between Islamist ideology and the natural rights articulated during the European Enlightenment and incorporated into US political culture.
Acquiescing to political grievances will not alter the fundamental incompatibility between Lockean precepts of tolerance and current interpretations of Islam: Only Islam's fundamental reform will resolve the conflict," Lee concluded.
Lee's argument is, in fact, an attempt to exonerate the US government from any wrongdoing in the region.
It is also apologetic in essence and synonymous to a call to bring about a fundamental change in the Islamic world, by force if necessary; something the Bush administration has been trying to do with little success since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In addition, Captain Lee has not really added anything new to the debate on the relationship between Islam and the West. His entire argument is mere reflection of the old orientalist view, which portrays the West as a victim of "Islamic terrorism"; and that the problem lies in the nature of Islam.
For the past two centuries, the likes of Lee have been trying to depict Islam as the anti-thesis of Western enlightenment, ignoring its contribution to civilisation and human progress.
The 19th century French historian Ernest Renan was among the first Western intellectuals who upheld this view. He argued that Islam was the latent cause behind the stagnant, unchanging and backward Arab culture, which disrespects reason and resists progress.
Islam and science, in his view, were poles apart. "Every one who has been in the Orient... will have been struck by the kind of iron circle in which the believer's head is enclosed, making him absolutely closed to science, and incapable of opening himself to any thing new," Renan argued.
This view was not confined to religious and cultural beliefs, however, but extended to include ethnographic and anthropological propositions. Renan, therefore, believed in the superiority of the Aryan spirit and race over all other races.
Analysed
Albert Hourani, who analysed Renan's thought, argued that the French philosopher believed that: It is the Aryan spirit which has created everything else: political life in the real sense, art, literature - the Semitic peoples have nothing of it, apart from some poetry - above all science and philosophy.
In these matters, Renan wrote, "we are entirely Greek; even the so-called Arabic sciences were a continuation of Greek sciences, carried on not by Arabs but by Persians and converted Greeks, that is to say, by Aryans.
"Christianity too in its developed form is the work of Europeans. The future of humanity therefore lies with the peoples of Europe, but there is a necessary condition of this: the destruction of the Semitic element in civilisation and of the theocratic power of Islam".
In this view, as Edward Said argued, Renan considered the overall mission of Europe as civilisational and any attempt to resist European colonialism was seen as a "disgrace to civilisation".
This is exactly what Captain Lee proposes in his Middle East Quarterly's article. "The present conflict is not new. And it is religious. Believing that only a few "rogues" have misappropriated religion is both naïve and counterfactual. US and Western leaders must confront the reality that Islamism is a religious phenomenon that has grown popular and powerful enough to threaten the continued progress of the American experiment and the European Enlightenment," Lee argued.
He concluded his article by advising US policy-makers to project power as a means to protect their interests and contain "this existential threat".
In different circumstances, one would perhaps dismiss these views as another hollow attempt by a minor scholar with little academic credentials to enflame the conflict between Islam and the West. It should cause grave concern, however, if they reflect the position of the US Navy or the US government.
Dr Marwan Kabalan is a lecturer in media and international relations, Faculty of Political Science and Media, Damascus University, Syria.
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