Ghost of a flea

Starry wisdom

I fail to understand an argument that runs (with variations about the Crusades) as follows: contemporary representations of "Arab violence" are unfair because they fail to take into account Arab scientific and cultural achievements at a time when Europeans were "struggling to emerge from the Dark Ages". Some worthy display of such achievement usually follows; for example, this Time article acknowledging the Institute of the Arab World's "Golden Age of Arab Sciences" in Paris.

Some thoughts:
i - I am not one of those people who accepts there is such a thing as "Arab violence" in the first place. Specific communities living in squalor or brainwashed by this or that tin-pot fascist, most often propped up with arms and financing by this or that Western democracy, have certainly been involved in violence ranging from street thuggery to open warfare. An argument following the form introduced above achieves (at least) two pernicious ends: first, it reduces such violence to a problem of representation, and; second, it represents "Arabs" as a single, homogenous community. Rape in Darfur, it seems to me, is not a problem that will be addressed by an appreciation of Arabic translations of Aristotle.
ii - Turning contemporary problems of violence away from their political and economic entanglements and into problems of representation is not a new trick. Many governments, both historical and contemporary, in a rush to change the subject from such entanglements have played up to a romantic, glorious and often entirely fanciful past. One might just as well say the rape of Nanking should not be held against imperial Japan because, after all, the Japanese developed lovely tea ceremonies and landscape gardening hundreds of years before such unpleasant events.
iii - Finally, and this is my personal favourite, a small note to the Institute of the Arab World: when staging an exhibition vis a vis the superiority of Arab scientific achievement you might consider using a different astrolabe in your advertising. The plates on your signature piece are marked in Hebrew.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at January 10, 2006 09:55 AM

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Posted by: Jay Currie at January 11, 2006 02:48 AM

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