By: David Barsamian
 |
Dr. Eqbal Ahmed was born in Bihar, India in 1933. He migrated to Pakistan in 1947. He earned his PhD in Political Science and Middle Eastern History from Princeton. He taught at University of Illinois at Chicago and Cornell University. In the 60's he became known as one of the earliest and most vocal opponents of American policies in Vietnam and Cambodia. Dr. Ahmed died in Islamabad on May 11, 1999.
According to David Barsamain, Eqbal Ahmed was a rare combination of scholar and activist. He not only shared his knowledge with progressive movements for social change but he participated in them. He cared about people and he cared about justice.
David Barsamian is the producer of the award-winning syndicated radio program Alternative Radio. He is a regular contributor to The Progressive and Z Magazine. He interviewed Dr. Eqbal Ahmed in August 1998. Following is an excerpt from an interview with him.
Where do you trace chronologically when Islam, Muslims, Arabs become targeted as a threat or an enemy of the West?
 |
This is not a completely new phenomenon... In the tenth century, for the first time you saw a certain notion of demonizing Islam. At that point, it wasn't so misplaced from the European point of view, because Islam was an expansionist civilization, and therefore considered...a threat and a menace. The Crusades witnessed the first instance of demonization along religious lines, that is, demonization of Islam itself rather than of Arabs or Turks... Next you notice it in the period when British and later French colonialist encountered Muslim resistance.
There was the case of the Mahdi, who besieged and killed General Charles George Gordon in 1885 in Khartoum. That particular moment saw a great deal of emphasis on Islamic fanaticism. Colonial battles were never remembered unless a Custer was killed or a Gordon besieged. Millions of people may die, but the memories are of Custer and Gordon.
This third time... in the last 1,400 years that there is this organized attempt to demonize Islam. This time it's more organized and sustained, because the means have changed. Today there is mass communication.
Does this process of demonization come from a shared consensus that is not articulated? Or are people meeting at Harvard and saying, "OK, we have to get together and demonize Arabs and Muslims?"
I don't think there is a conspiracy... Great imperialism needed a legitimizing instrument to socialize people into its ethos. To do that it needed two things: a ghost and a mission. The British carried the white man's burden. That was the mission. The French carried la mission civilisatrice, the civilizing mission. The Americans had manifest destiny and then the mission of standing watch on the walls of world freedom, in John F. Kennedy's ringing phase. Each of them had the black, the yellow, and finally the red peril to fight against. There was a ghost and there was a mission. People bought it.
After the Cold War, Western power was deprived both of the mission and the ghost. So the mission has appeared as human rights. It's very strange mission for a country, which for nearly a hundred years has been supporting dictatorship in Latin America and throughout the world. Chomsky and Herman wrote about this in The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism.
In search of menace, they have turned to Islam. It's the easiest, because it has a history.
No comments:
Post a Comment