War on Errors

Edward Said war für mich immer eine Stimme der Vernunft, des Sachverstandes und viele, auch ich, vermissen ihn schmerzlich.

Besonders solche Stimmen, die sich zu kontroversen Themen notwendiger Weise kontrovers äussern müssen, weil es die Redlichkeit verlangt, werden nach ihrem Tod gelegentlich von extremen Stimmen aus allen Lagern missbraucht. Was würde X sagen, wenn er heute noch leben würde? Darauf folgt dann oft ein aus dem Kontext gerissenes Zitat oder eine gedankliche Vereinfachung mit dem Ziel, den Verstorbenen für die eigene Sache in den Zeugenstand zu rufen. Besonders gern wird das gemacht, wenn den eigenen Ausführungen zu viel Pathos und zu wenig Logos inne wohnt. So kann man den eigenen Gedankenbrei wenigstens noch mit einer Prise Ethos würzen.

Edward Said lebte aber noch lange genug, um sich über den Krieg der Neocons gegen den Irak selbst zu äussern. Und für das, was da vor sich ging und bis zum heutigen Tag anhält, fand er klare Worte:

"I have been criticised recently for my anti-war position by illiterates who claim that what I say is an implied defence of Saddam Hussein and his appalling regime. To my Kuwaiti critics, do I need to remind them that I publicly opposed Ba'athi Iraq during the only visit I made to Kuwait in 1985, when in an open conversation with the then Minister of Education Hassan Al-Ibrahim I accused him and his regime of aiding and abetting Arab fascism in their financial support of Saddam Hussein? I was told then that Kuwait was proud to have committed billions of dollars to Saddam's war against "the Persians", as they were then contemptuously called, and that it was a more important struggle than someone like me could comprehend. I remember clearly warning those Kuwaiti acolytes of Saddam Hussein about him and his ill will against Kuwait, but to no avail. I have been a public opponent of the Iraqi regime since it came to power in the 70s: I never visited the place, never was fooled by its claims to secularism and modernisation (even when many of my contemporaries either worked for or celebrated Iraq as the main gun in the Arab arsenal against Zionism, a stupid idea, I thought), never concealed my contempt for its methods of rule and fascist behaviour. And now when I speak my mind about the ridiculous posturing of certain members of the Iraqi opposition as hapless strutting tools of US imperialism, I am told that I know nothing about life without democracy (about which more later), and am therefore unable to appreciate their nobility of soul.

Der vollständige Arikel ist hier zu finden

Lesenswert, wie alles von Edward Said, ist auch The Appalling Consequences are Now Clear - What is Happening in the United States?

“In an essay […] I attempted to show how it is secularism, rather than fundamentalism, that held Arab Muslim societies together, despite the wild exaggeration of the sensationalist and ignorant American media, most of whose ideas were taken from anti-Islamic, careerist publicists who had found a new field for their skills in demonology. At the very least one should say that in the contest between the Islamists and the overwhelming majority of Muslims, the former have by and large lost the battle. […]"

But such reasoned, well-researched views have been barely in evidence; the market for representations of a monolithic, enraged, threatening, and conspiratorially spreading Islam is much greater, more useful, and capable of generating more excitement.”´

“[...] anyone can learn about either ‘Islam” or the world of Islam and about the men, women, and cultures that live within it, speak its languages, breathe its air, produce its histories and societies. At that point, humanistic knowledge begins and communal responsibility for that knowledge begins to be shouldered."

"‘Islam’ defines relatively small proportion of what actually takes place in the Islamic world, which numbers a billion people and includes dozens of countries, societies, traditions, languages, and, of course, an infinite number of different experiences. It is simply false to try to trace all this back to something called ‘Islam,’ no matter how vociferously polemical Orientalists [...] insisted that Islam regulates Islamic societies from top to bottom, that dar al-Islam is a single, coherent entity, that church and state are really one in Islam, and so forth. My contention in this book is that most of this is unacceptable generalization of the most irresponsible sort, and could never be used for any other religious, cultural, or demographic group on earth. What we expect from the serious study of Western societies, with its complex theories, enormously variegated analyses of social structures, histories, cultural formations, and sophisticated languages of investigation, we should expect from the study and discussion of Islamic societies in the West.”

“I am not saying that Muslims have not attacked and injured Israelis and Westerners in the name of Islam. But I am saying that much of what one reads and sees in the media about Islam represents the aggression as coming from Islam because that is what ‘Islam’ is. Local and concrete circumstances are thus obliterated. In other words, covering Islam is a one-sided activity that obscures what ‘we’ do, and highlights instead what Muslims and Arabs by their very flawed nature are.”

Wer eine kleine Lese- und Denkübung zur Ertüchtigung mag, der findet sie hier Macht euch nen Kopf, auch darüber, inwieweit diese Ausführen in der Gegenwart zutreffen und tauscht euch aus:)