Demystifying Islam, Can TV help?

While surfing the net recently, I came across some articles about TV programs on Islam and Muslims in the West. I found two of these TV shows particularly interesting, especially against the backdrop of the current political situation, where Muslims are considered guilty until proven innocent; as these shows aim to demystify  Islam and its followers.

One of these is All-American Muslim, which is a reality TV show, following the lives of five families living in Dearborn, Michigan; and the other one is Little Mosque on the Prairie, a six series sitcom set in the small fictional town of Mercy in Canada.

I decided to watch a few episodes of each show, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. All-American Muslim focuses on Arab Muslim families within a large community of Muslims, the largest in the US. I think that Americans value family life, and the support and stability that it brings, probably more than Europeans do, due to Americans’ strong Christian roots. So, following the lives of families rather than individuals was done purposefully to engage viewers who might otherwise ignore such programs entirely.

Despite its benign nature, the show was surrounded with controversy. Lobbying groups put pressure on a company which was going to sponsor it, because they believed that the show was an Islamist propaganda meant to whitewash Islam, which, in their opinion, is an imperialist/violent religion. I find it quite sad that some Americans praise their country for its democratic values and freedom of speech, and at the same time try to prevent shows like these from airing.

The sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie satirizes the lives of a group of Muslims, living in the fictional prairie town of Mercy, in Canada. I watched the first few episodes, and found it quite funny although not hilarious. It tackles issues within the Muslim community in the West, which could also arise in families and communities in the Arab/Muslim world.  I think that comedy is a great tool for opening up debate and breaking stereotypes. The director of the show is Muslim and although I have not watched the show in its entirety, I believe that it is set to educate rather than to offend, shock, or create controversy.

I hope that these shows will help dissipate the negativity associated with Muslims/Islam at least among those who watch them.  

I know that some Muslim readers think that we are always trying to defend ourselves against accusations, and we are trying hard to prove to the Western world that we are not terrorists, which we should not have to do. To them I say, in the words of the scholar Hamza Yusuf, who quotes Foucault, it is the powerful that define things and set norms,  and right now, the Western world has an immense amount of sovereignty in the world, so it has framed a discourse and we Muslims have to define ourselves within the model that the Western world has set up.

I have been reading comments posted recently on both British and American newspapers websites regarding Muslims, and what I read shocked me.  These papers are usually read by well-informed Americans and Brits. It is quite sad to come across so much hatred and insults of a religion and over a billion people who follow it.  

I know that sometimes no matter what you do, some people will never open their eyes to see. Voltaire says: « Il n’est pire aveugle que celui qui ne veut  pas voir ». However, I believe that it is our duty to defend our religion in all ways we can and prevent it from being hijacked by some extremist nihilists who do not value life. These TV shows are a step in the right direction. I hope many more will follow. 

He had acted alone

"He had acted alone". This is what we always hear when a white Western man commits a crime such as the one committed by the American soldier who went on a shooting rampage leaving 16 Afghan children and women dead (he set some of the bodies on fire), or when  the Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 innocent people, white Norwegians like himself, or when some white teenager shoots some other kids in some state in the US. The latter have become quite commonplace in the US, but we never hear anyone talk of influence or some secret circles behind these white men committing such atrocities. Most of the time, they are referred to a psychiatrist to assess their mental health and in most cases they are pronounced unstable, out of touch with reality or crazy.

Why are these people always acting alone? Is it because these white men from civilised countries are clever enough to commit crimes without being instructed to do so. Or is it because they are programmed to kill just like Terminator but there is no programmer, they are born with the genes that lead them to commit crimes.  So, it is innate in them and it is not the influence of the surrounding environment in these white-majority civilised nations that turns one into a mass murderer. But if that were true, why are they proclaimed unstable, or crazy. Is it because white men cannot do such a barbaric thing unless there is something wrong with them. There must be a lot wrong with Bush and Blair who led the ‘coalition of the willing’ to kill masses of Iraqi civilians.

So these white civilized crazy murderers could not have been under the influence of anything such as the media which keeps demonising their to-be-victims and turning them into deserve-to-die people, they are definitely not influenced by politicians’ speeches who blame every problem in white nations on immigration from inferior less civilized nations. How could they?

Now, when a non-white man whose 5^th or 10^th great grandfather hails from a non-civilized  Muslim country, commits a crime,  the story is very different. This average Mo who has never seen a mosque in his life and does not know what Islam is, suddenly turns into a devout Muslim who ain’t acting alone.  He is instructed to commit a crime by some obscure group headquartered in some exotic Afghan place. Names like Kabul and Kandahar spring to the surface. The media digs deep to find out where his 10^th great grandfather comes from.  If he isn’t white then they have to find out his origins. That’s how journalism works, don’t you know? So, after we find out where his roots lie, he is referred to as Mo a European or American of [Muslim country origin]. All newspaper have to do that, they couldn’t leave the right-wing papers enjoy the exclusivity of mentioning the origins of a mass murderer [or a shop-lifter].  Left-wing and right wing papers differ on many issues, but in this department, they shake hands and leave all their differences aside.

I am no sociologist nor an anthropologist, but I would like to know the relationship between skin-colour and religion on the one hand and acting alone when it comes to crime on the other. Why do people whose origins are non-white never act alone when committing a crime? but white men always act alone. Do people of Muslim origins show more solidarity even when it comes to a murder. After all Islam emphasizes the importance of solidarity. Could it be that people of non-white non-Christian origin are not clever enough or brave enough to act alone. Or could it be that these people are so human, so kind, so angel-like that they cannot commit a crime without being under the influence of an evil group based in Afghanistan. The latter explanation has not been circulated in the media, I wonder why?

Israel and the Wall of Silence

Three unconnected events deserve our attention as they  reveal yet again the absurdity of the Israeli defense mechanisms and their isolation from reality. These are about a poem, a Big Brother contender, and a song.

Last week, the German poet and winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in literature, Guenter Grass, was declared a persona non grata in Israel after composing a poem in which he criticized the world for its silence over the Israeli nuclear program and alluded to the double-standards of the –powerful-Western world vis a vis the Israeli  and Iranan nuclear programs. The western world which seems to only see through the beer goggles of Israel and thus concentrate on Iran.  This Iran has always been months away from acquiring a nuclear bomb, this was the case three or four, wait even five years ago.  The Israeli propaganda machine is in full swing now, digging deep in the past of the German poet and his nation and other Western nations to resurrect the Holocaust and the anti-Semitic tape that we have become all too familiar with. It is sickening how this spoiled brat of a nation has built a bulwark around itself made of lies, threats, and victimization. It has silenced the world over its illegitimate policies and practices. By being silent, the majority has become an accomplice in the spread of injustice in this world.  

The poem:

But why have I kept silent till now?
Because I thought my own origins,
Tarnished by a stain that can never be removed,
meant I could not expect Israel, a land
to which I am, and always will be, attached,
to accept this open declaration of the truth.
Why only now, grown old,
and with what ink remains, do I say:
Israel's atomic power endangers
an already fragile world peace?
Because what must be said
may be too late tomorrow;
and because – burdened enough as Germans –
we may be providing material for a crime
that is foreseeable, so that our complicity
wil not be expunged by any
of the usual excuses.
And granted: I've broken my silence
because I'm sick of the West's hypocrisy;
and I hope too that many may be freed
from their silence, may demand
that those responsible for the open danger we face renounce the use of force,
may insist that the governments of
both Iran and Israel allow an international authority
free and open inspection of
the nuclear potential and capability of both.

The other event  is about the Israeli  version of Big Brother “HaAh Hagadol’ and how, much to the dislike of the majority of Israelis, one contender , Saar Szekley,  voiced his opinion on live TV about the injustice of Israeli IDF action in Palestinian territories and its illicit occupation of Palestinian land. He was attacked by fellow roommates in the Big Brother House, and was the subject of denigration.  He was threatened with gruesome acts of assaults and facebook pages have been dedicated to the matter; he was ostracized. Poor him, he thought he was in democratic nation, the beacon of the Middle East.

The last but not least is about an Arab girl, Nissren Kader, who by being a sycophant to Israel, thought she may be accepted by fellow Israelis. She took part in a Pop Idol-like contest singing in Hebrew and praising Israel and claiming that she was proud to be Israeli. Like all traitors in history, she was rewarded with countless complaints by REAL Israelis to the channel that DARED accept an Arab girl to sing on Israeli TV and hurt the sensitive ears of Jewish citizens.

50 years down, when is the UP?

Yesterday marked the 50^th anniversary of the signing of the Evian Accords to end the eight-year war of Independence that the Algerians started in November 1954 to oust the French after over 100 years of French colonial occupation of Algeria. The Evian accords paved the way for a referendum on Algeria’s independence, which was held in July 1962 and in which the Algerian people were asked to vote on whether Algeria should become an independent state cooperating with France.

A bilateral ceasefire was declared to stop the bloodshed; however, a terrorist organization named OAS , which was created with the aim to prevent Algeria’s independence, waged blind terrorist attacks between March and July of 1962 against civilian Algerians and even against French citizens on French territory and in Algeria. Although the independence became inevitable some time before the Evian treaty, this organization felt a lot of bitterness and decided to adopt the scorched earth approach to destroy the existing infrastructure. Also, OAS was hoping that the FLN would retaliate and break the ceasefire. 

This occasion has been marked by media coverage and exhibitions in France; the French public national  TV channel France 2 decided to air a two-hour documentary, which was a first in the history of this channel, and the history of France. For a long time France decided to put the Algerian war of independence or “la guerre d’Algérie” in the drawers of amnesia and classify it as taboo. For a long time, the French authorities and history books decided to call this war les événements d'Algérie (incidents  of Algeria) a mere keeping of public order in Algeria. Sending 400,000 soldiers and losing 30,000 of them  in battlefield, and the killing of hundreds of thousands of Algerian civilians, in the opinion of the French, does not qualify for war. This reflects France’s uneasy relationship with its colonial past, which showed a dark, and violent side of this ’civilized’ nation,  the land of the French revolution which was a battle to achieve equality and remove oppression.  Only this equality was reserved for those who were of European descent and Christian faith.

This documentary presented the French view of the conflict, which is quite different from the way it has been portrayed in  Algerian media. I must admit that the documentary showed  an even-handed picture of the conflict. It was well prepared and well researched. It has opened my eyes for the first time  to the impact  this war has had on French politics (the collapse of the Fourth Republic) and on Metropolitan France, which was the scene of many armed attacks. One of these is an attempt to kill President DeGaulle and the overthrow of the French government on a couple of occasions,  by the OAS.

However, as if in an attempt to counter the balanced view of the documentary the channel decided to hold a debate and invited: an Algerian who was a member of the FLN, the revolutionary body that led the  war, he was also an ex-MP and minister in 1970s and 1980s; a priest, who was a soldier posted to Algeria  during the war, three pieds- noirs, one of whom is Benjamin Stora a leading authority on Algerian history from 1830 to 1962 (the period during which Algeria was under French rule and was part of French territory); and a woman who was the daughter of a harki. Harkis are Algerian traitors who decided to side with the French during the war and who were later abandoned by the French to meet their fate at the hands of angry Algerians in act of revenge. Of course, inviting one Algerian who was denied the freedom of speech on multiple occasions and was attacked by the others who felt that the story should concentrate on the violence of the Algerian side and ignore the violence the French committed for 130 years of rule says a lot. One of the pieds- noirs decided to justify the violence of this war, by the fact that Algeria had been violent by nature during thousands of years, and that it had been a terra nullius without rule of the law...

Anyway, after watching the debate, the admiration I had for the French for coming clean about their past vanished. I thought to myself how naïve of me to expect this nation and its citizens to discuss their colonial past openly on TV without trying to repeatedly interrupt a citizen of the old colony and prevent him from airing his opinion. I also felt sorry for the man, he was alone trying to justify why Algerians wanted to be independent from a nation which left the country impoverished on all levels, and left a country with 98% rate of illiteracy, and a population living in shanty towns. The French want Algerians to apologize for having started a war to say to the French no we cannot continue to live like animals, whilst the minority Europeans are exploiting the resources to enrich themselves and France.

Having said that, Despite all the flaws of this nation and its evasiveness about its past history vis a vis Algeria, It had the guts to talk about it openly in the documentary. Nevertheless, I am still skeptical given that this is an election year and Sarko  wants to lure immigrants of Algerian descent and the French leftists by showing his non-racist side; he is after all opening dossiers that remained top secret for a long time.

On the other side of the Mediterranean, however, our rulers have decided that this event is not worthy of any attention and took a very low-key approach to the event. They probably were instructed by their superiors in France to leave it to them to show history as they see fit.  Or, be it an election year, they are afraid that a celebration may remind young  Algerians of their revolutionary past, induce the expression of  a dormant revolutionary gene in the population, or ignite a spark , which would lead to an uprising of the population i.e. an Algerian spring. Our rulers maintain power through revolutionary legitimacy. This means that they are the sole authority fit to run the country because they fought for its independence over 50 years ago. So we will have to wait until they die to hold democratic elections and open the door for the new generation to have a say in the way their country is run.  

It is ironic how our rulers keep reminding the new generation of thier heroic past and their 'zealous' patriotism, and at the same time receive their orders from France regarding many issues. The French are considered top tier in our rulers’ eyes. They are the ones who benefit from investment contracts. It does not matter that there are other countries willing to enter this market and do better than the French, who still regard us as a dominion country. It is also sad to hear claims of patriotism in French, this language that our rulers decided to make the only foreign language worthy of study and use. Algeria remains one of the few countries in the world where movies, which are a mean of learning the English language for some, are dubbed in French. Also it is the sole country where rulers use foreign and French media to address their citizens and prefer to do so in the French language, the language of the 'elite' -or so they believe.

Western Sahara: What's in it for us?

It is not my intention to present all the details of the conflict, but since it is one of the main reasons halting the unification of the countries of the Maghreb, I believe that it deserves some attention.

I came to learn about this conflict when I was a child, camping in one of the coastal towns of Algeria. I was surprised to see a group of children, who did not speak our language, benefit from luxuries we would have never dreamed of in the camp. Driven by curiosity I decided to visit their dormitory to watch a cartoon on TV (it was a luxury to have a TV in a camp in the eighties). The kids and some adults who accompanied them explained to us that they were from Western Sahara, a colonized country, and they used to talk of torture and war. I was very surprised to learn that the enemy was no other than Morocco.

The conflict has its origins in the seventies (some Moroccans claim that it goes back a long way), when the Spanish decided to hand over the power to the Polisario. Both Morocco and Mauritania seemed to have historical claims over the country. The same argument used by the 19th century colonizers of "terra nullius" or un-owned land was used by Morocco and Mauritania to annex the country to their territories. Major incidents in this dispute include the march of 350,000 Moroccans into Western Sahara, and the armed conflict between Polisario and the Moroccan army, which started in 1975 and ended in 1991.

A UN mission, which was sent to Western Sahara, announced that the Sahrawi people were in favor of independence. However, this has not materialized. The Houston agreement suggested holding a referendum on independence, or unification with Morocco. It still puzzles me that to this day, no referendum was held, but useless negotiations are held sporadically from time to time which lead to no tangible results.

After Mauritania dropped its claims over the country, the parties in conflict remain Morocco and Western Sahara. However, Algeria has pledged it full support for the Sahrawi people to gain their independence. It remains a mystery to many, including myself, as to what Algeria will gain from the conflict. The following are possible reasons, reiterated by the Algerian government, and views of people in forums:

1. Algeria, a country that suffered from 132 years of colonization, which left the country impoverished economically, culturally, and socially, rejects all forms of occupation and supports the right of people to decide their own destiny. Following its independence in 1962, Algeria supported various countries to gain their independence. Therefore this claim is in line with the Algerian policy, which it adopted in 1962 and still stands today.

2. The Moroccans (both rulers and people) believe that Algeria's support for the Sahrawi cause is a demonstration of bitterness felt by the Algerian generals "who were bitterly defeated in the war of sands". The war of sands was between Algeria and Morocco over the borders. The Moroccans waged an attack on Algeria in 1963, a few months after the country gained its independence, claiming that Tindouf  and Bechar were Moroccan territory and that France annexed it to the then French Algeria. It is believed that the Algerian president Ben Bella used his famous “hagrouna” which means we are being bullied to  describe the action of the Moroccans.

3. Another claim circulated by the Moroccans and adopted by some Algerians in the street is that Algeria wants fishing concessions and access to the Atlantic Ocean.

A program on Aljazeera was dedicated to the issue. This program featured an academic from a university in Mauritania, who seemed quite Knowledgeable on the subject, But he was careful enough not to present any facts that would offend any side in the conflict. Interestingly, he claims that in the seventies (cannot quire remember the date precisely) Boumediene was about to drop his support for the Polisario and accept the division of the western Sahara between the two countries (Morocco and Mauritania), however, something happened that no one seems to know, which made him change his mind radically and drop his original agreement to the solution proposed then.

I find it interesting how the average Moroccan in the street views the conflict and how the Moroccan people fully support their government's decision to annex the country. Even the so called "intellectuals" often criticize the Algerian government for supporting the Polisario. One cannot deny that Algeria has fully supported the Polisario in this conflict; but at the same time, Morocco is not short of tricks either. By using the media in the West and the support they get from the US and France, Morocco seems to have held the upper hand in the conflict so far. In addition, they have waged a media war on Algeria, with the latter not failing to respond but in its usual cold manner.

Regardless of the gains or losses that will be incurred by the Algerian government, following a solution to this problem, I fully support the idea of a fair referendum; the Sahrawi people have the right to decide their own destiny. If they decide to be annexed to Morocco, then let it be.  This conflict has been dragged on unnecessarily far longer than it should have been. It is high time a solution is found that will satisfy the parties concerned.