Just for you, I got plastered again so that I could respond in the proper spirit. Actually, that's a lie. I got plastered BECAUSE THIS SHOW SUCKS SO HARD- Anyway. Disquitioning again: I first heard about Edward Said back when he died. NPR was all bent outta shape about it, while all the Rethuglicans were spitting on his grave because apparently you aren't somebody in the conservative intelligentsia until you shit on Edward Said. Then more than ten years later, Audible was doing one of those "buy a shitload of stuff for $5 sales" and Orientalism was one of them, and I figured I ought to read it. It took me maybe six months to get around to it, and then oh my god it took like 3 months just to get through it. Orientalism is byzantine enough to make Name of the Rose read like Da Vinci Code. BUT I'm incredibly glad I read it. It has shaped a lot of my thinking of late. And his message is pretty simple, and basically backed up by a bunch of dry facts in extremely ornate language. The central tenet - the only tenet - of Orientalism is this: Westerners do not study the Middle East except to (A) determine how the West is superior (B) determine how the East is corrupt and (C) reinforce the dominant paradigm that the Middle East is best served by being a vassal state to the great powers of Europe. And it was clearly pretty goddamn influential, and its influence hasn't gone far enough yet. Said points out that the way we regard "the orient" is pretty much the way white folx regarded black folx until Martin Luther King, and he's right. At the core of it, all this confusion over ISIS comes down to "why are these darkies being such a problem." No attempt is made at discussing the fundamental tenets of Islam because we really want to just be told why we're better. Look - fundies gonna fund. Western power structures and Eastern philosophies are gonna clash, plain and simple, but the patronizing and paternal approach we take to the "middle east" ain't helping. At some point, goddamn Middle America is going to have to wake up and wrap their heads around the majority religion of the world. They're going to have to acknowledge that everything we know about the time before the Renaissance is largely known because of people who say "salaam aleikum" to each other. They're going to have to understand that there's a billion gajillion people whose prophet was human but whose words were godlike and that covering your head and not eating pork doesn't make you a terrorist. I just hope we do it in time.
Relevant Free Market Terrorism I'd like to point out that it did take until 2011 for these guys to figure this one out: "In 2011, Campus Crusade for Christ in the United States changed its name to Cru, a shortening of 'Crusade', since many members already refer to it as Cru for short, and also due partially to avoiding the negative connotation of crusade from the historical, bloody Crusades (particularly to Muslim communities) and that much of the organization's work was no longer limited to college campuses.[2]" That quote might be one of those sentences providing a glimpse into the wars of information being waged on Wikipedia. The "since many members already refer to it as 'Cru' " clause was particularly curious. Yeah man. Me too. :/At some point, goddamn Middle America is going to have to wake up and wrap their heads around the majority religion of the world. I just hope we do it in time.
It's funny - at my school, all their signs said "CCC." There'd be a bunch of white kids, most of them leaning towards the redneck persuasion, holding up these signs saying "CCC" and chanting about abortion or some shit. We figured it was because they didn't have the sack to write KKK. "Know another great book?" sober me says. "Tamim Ansary's 'Destiny Disrupted.' Ansary says he was prompted to write the book back when he used to write textbooks for 'a major American publisher' and it took all the fight he had in him to get the publisher to put in a chapter about Islam. He never got it; the best he was ever able to do was a single chapter covering the Byzantines and Islam." God, that's a wearing literary affectation. Anyway. The book covers the history of the world as if the perspective that matters is that perspective that got one third of a chapter. I shit you not - the first 5 Caliphs make for a more engaging story than fuckin' Star Wars. You wanna see how big our blind spot is? And in that history, the Crusades don't really fucking matter. They don't. From a "middle world" perspective the Crusaders were a bunch of barbarians that poked into the periphery three times over the course of a hundred years and left without leaving any cultural impact. The overwhelming majority of the Muslim world never saw a Crusader, never fought a Crusader, never broke bread with a Crusader, never traded spices with a Crusader. The Crusaders were slightly less important to Islam than the Visigoths were to Rome, assuming the Visigoths never made it to within 500 miles of the capital. Islam cares about the Mongols, who basically shattered their divine hegemony and let the fundies take over the narrative. The Mongols overran real territory and killed a bunch of people, changed the power structure and rearranged history. Know what I didn't know? Before the Mongols, the Turks weren't Turkish. Muthafuckin' Turks, Huns, Cathars, Parthians - they all be Mongols. And "Rome" was Byzantium, which didn't fucking fall, but kept right on truckin', no cultural dislocation, no tragedy, no collapse, until Fourteen Fucking Fifty Three. How's that for perspective? "Yeah, you run the world now but that whole 'and then Nero played a fiddle and all civilization plunged into darkness until the Renaissance' line is total BS. Actually, the Empire moved east, left your ancestors behind and your clans spent a thousand years eating mice and berries until you figured out three-field rotation and horse collars. The rest of the world, meanwhile, figured out all that science that your peepz appropriated once they'd created an economy that functioned primarily on raiding." Tell you what. It sure fucks with "manifest destiny" and the Monroe Doctrine. Why is the West so exceptionalist? Because we're dicks.