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| Nadia Yassine, 2007-02-01 |
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| Awakening the Memory |
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| In our quest of the purity of the Message, it is essential to recall the bitter reality of the Muslim countries. We are used to summing up such decay in a single word: fatalism. “Too bad for them! Their religion has made incorrigible quietists of them.” So say observers with firmly entrenched prejudices, whenever it strikes them to wonder about the decay of Muslim countries. But reality is not as simple as such labels. |
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| In Islamic countries a current of thought adopts an equally cursory reading, ascribing all our setbacks and trials to the West, which colonized us and waged war on us. According to this line, we are decadent because that’s what the other side wants—period. |
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| Of course it is inconceivable to deal with our present domestic crises without taking into account our status as vanquished with respect to a powerful and victorious West. It is in our blood; witness the attitude of our elite, trained to perpetuate Western cultural domination. In our colonial reality, Western civilization is undoubtedly the pale neon lighting that dazzles us and guides our hybrid politics and our derivative literature. |
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| Colonization is not in fact over yet, since its effects, far from having been absorbed, are still ongoing. We are sill experiencing the ebb of a corrosive reality, of a historical event that is not easily overcome. The pages of history are not so easily turned as those in textbooks. In reality, they are too heavy to turn and next to impossible to get through. |
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| While appearing to be free and sovereign, the decolonized countries are no more determined to sever the umbilical cord than the former colonial powers are prepared to loosen their grip just like that. A link is thus perpetuated by a loyal elite, a creation that enables the nostalgic power to depart the better to stay on, a dull yet efficient and often perverse clone. What had served as umbilicus connecting the culture of the civilized race in order to invigorate and maintain the domination has become the diseased appendix that now aggravates the illness of a body whose entire vital functions have begun to fail. |
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| Afflicted with such pundits, what chance do our Islamic societies have of standing one day among free and sovereign nations truly free and sovereign? With such myopic officials ruling us at sight, what chance do we have to emerge from the underdevelopment and economic stagnation behind our subservience and humiliation? |
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| In the context of overwhelming globalization, the centripetal force sucking everything into its infernal whirlwind, it makes all the more sense to blame our ills on the West. The phrase “global village” has a downhome flavor; its bucolic accents tickle our imagination and flatter our humanism. But the reality behind the traditional image is very different. |
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| It is easy enough to understand why the West stands at the center of the cur -rent worldview. Still, the complexity of the realities must not cause us to teeter into the kind of acute paranoia such facts might inspire. Nothing is more convenient - nor more crippling- than blaming one’s own faults on someone else. Explaining all our tragedies in terms of domination is an easy solution that only perpetuates our withdrawing from exerting any effort of our own. Such a path leads to despair. |
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| It is urgent to reexamine our history, to reconsider our deplorable lot by first examining crises that are home-grown. The domination to which the Muslim world is subject is due to a combination of circumstances in which the deciding element is not the overwhelming power of another civilization but the decay of Islam. |
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| Reawakening Islam will necessarily entail serious self-criticism. For it to advance, the myths stored up in our memories, myths more seriously distorted within than without, will have to be expunged. Scrutinizing history with objective eyes is a beneficial exercise that will help shake up lethargic minds and overcome their pathological nostalgia. Our damaged memories and diluted identities are in need of an asceticism rigorous enough to recover the vitality afforded by a faith that is supposed to be universal but has become little more than a safe-conduct used by certain politicians who vehemently protest that “We are all Muslims!” |
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| Curing an amnesia sustained by our deviant regimes remains a difficult challenge to overcome. Passing on the torch of a convalescent memory will perhaps help get us back on our feet again. Really understanding matters will help us out of the debris. It will render us useful to the rest of humanity, to whom we will re-offer Islam as a balm for bruised hearts, as the beneficial wind that brings rain to barren soils. |
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| The mercy residing in the Message could at last hinder the wind of insanity that has our world in its grip. The world, forgetful of everything, of humankind itself, might then stop its furious processional that carries us away, powerless, to an unknown destination. It would then turn to the rhythm of tolerance, of love of neighbor, of right guidance. It might then turn again in the right direction and at the right speed. |
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| The path leading to this wise and human world will long continue to be ignored since its defenders are stuck in their own political, ideological, and economic impasses. Between contradiction and abdication, the official bearers of the Message no longer represent it honorably. Who but a few eccentrics short on sensual exoticism would care to belong to the faith of the emirs of oil? Which woman only slightly informed about Islam would not be horrified by the so-called Muslim practice of the Taliban, who pretend to represent “true” Islam? |
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| In the chapter devoted to the media, I emphasized repeatedly that the image given of Islam is not to be trusted. That does not prevent us from believing that an umma that cannot defend itself or its image deserves what it gets. To comprehend exactly what has happened to it, our community must go further upstream in our history. |
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| *From the Book "Full Sails Ahead" (available online at www.jspublishing.net). |
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