Hysteria: Koran Burning and Hockey Games

It doesn’t seem to take much to touch off a firestorm in the Muslim world these days. Someone slaps together a nasty little movie insulting Islam, and the “Muslim mob” rears its ugly head.

In Benghazi, as everyone knows, this mob attacked the American consulate and killed Christopher Stevens, a man who, according to Robert Fisk, “really knew the Arabs as many of his colleagues did not” and was apparently a decent sort. He certainly didn’t deserve to be killed by a mob. He wasn’t the only victim, and there will likely be more.

The nastiness continues, from the Maghreb across South Asia to the shores of the Pacific. Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine publishes some cartoons insulting Muslims—and, incidentally, Jews—and France increases security at its embassies,  shutting some temporarily as a precautionary measure. Probably a good move. Charlie Hebdo insults everyone, and is hardly worth dying for.

We are rightly shocked and appalled. Methinks, though, that in our righteousness and indignation we might also do well to try to understand what this is all about.

I suggest that we try two things. First, we might do as the Quakers suggest: try to put ourselves in the other’s shoes and express his (for they are mostly men in this mob) point of view, as best we can understand it. Second, we might look at ourselves and how we react to provocation.

The other’s shoes

I am 23 years old. I am poor. The “elite” in my country live in luxury and shop in fancy boutiques in London and New York. They fly in and out, while I trudge across the city in broken shoes to save the bus fare.

This elite sends its children to schools in Switzerland and universities in England and America. I studied hard and earned good marks—until I dropped out to try to bring a little more money into the household, as my parents can’t make ends meet on their own.

My parents, God bless them, learned to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. They learned the hard way. My uncle was imprisoned and tortured. We’ll never know what happened to him. He wasn’t the only one. I’ve been beaten up by the police, just because they could.

I am unemployed, in a world in which even those with jobs can’t make ends meet. My tomorrow promises only odd jobs and idleness. Without work I have no hope of getting married, of having children.

The Arab Spring, if it came here (and mostly it didn’t), has not brought me any material benefits—not yet, though I still sometimes hope. In the meantime, I look at my parents still scraping out an existence. I can’t even do that.

In short, everything about my life tells me that I am worthless. Everything except my religion. My religion gives me dignity and community. It tells me that I am a human being.

Why are you surprised, then, that I react with anger when you insult my religion?

This portrait is surely an over-simplification and perhaps a little sentimental, but I do think that trying to imagine how it is to live inside another person’s life is a useful exercise in understanding.

Perspective and introspection

We of the European tradition had a Renaissance and an Enlightenment. We left the Middle Ages behind long ago. We know that the best thing to do about a third-rate movie or crude cartoons insulting our beliefs is to ignore them. They’ll soon be forgotten.

And we’ve learned tolerance. I’m rather less sure about introspection or perspective.

Perspective would help us remember, before we start on about the intolerance of Islam, that every religion, as every society, has its saints and its monsters, and the most of us in between, and that no one has a patent on righteous hysteria.

Perspective might also help us remember, for instance, that until the middle of the last century Jews were the majority in Salonika (now Thessaloniki in Greece) largely thanks to an influx of Sephardic Jews fleeing the embraces of the Inquisition, and had thrived under the (very Muslim) Ottomans. Perspective might also help us remember how this population was destroyed and by whom. Hint: it wasn’t the Ottomans.

For a bit of introspection, we might ponder how the “West” reacts when provoked. As a proud Canadian, I suggest we start with the 2011 Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver, provoked by a … hockey game!

We could also look at the reaction to 9/11, the terrorist attacks eleven years ago that killed some 3,000 innocents.

There is no question that these were heinous, morally reprehensible acts. But did they warrant the level of violence with which America and its friends lashed out?

We are still at war in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein (a monster of the first order, but formerly our friend) is hanged, and a few trillion dollars and some 650,000 dead later, neither Afghanistan nor Iraq knows any peace. And the great American economy, which only a generation ago had spent the Soviet Union into its grave, is on its knees, bled white by the War on Terror.

The same, I fear, may be the fate of our cherished democracies. Try to imagine the world as it was on 10 September 2001, before there was a terrorist under every bed. We did this to ourselves.

Who’s hysterical?

Who’s hysterical here? The men who burned the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, certainly. The men (and women) who lashed out after 9/11, certainly as well I think. The chief difference I see is that the mobs egged on by the imams are poor and disorderly; they are not governments and businesses with all the apparatus of state and enterprise channelling our anger and our hurt into orderly and methodical destruction for profit.