Orientalism: the East systematically misrepresented and exploited to suit the ideology and purposes of the West. Here’s a prime example, from the BBC: ‘Hospitality in a suspicious world’, by BBC Middle East correspondent Kate Clark. It comes from a long-established BBC Radio Four programme called ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ which sits somewhat outside the constraints of regular reporting. The programme, writes one distinguished BBC journalist, offers BBC reporters the chance to ’say things you cannot say anywhere else. You are freer to be yourself … to react, draw broad conclusions and even step over that barrier so many BBC correspondents set up and say what you really feel about what you are doing’.
‘Hospitality in a suspicious world’ begins with an account of Clark’s conversation with a taxi driver in Kurdish Iraq. He told her his woes: ‘”Rent,” he said, “had gone up five-fold and petrol prices 20-fold since 2003″‘. No mention of what else might have changed for him as a Kurd in Iraq since 2003, but taxi drivers aren’t known for accentuating the positive. Anyway, moved by what he told her, Clark apparently ‘paid him a bit extra’. His reaction? ‘He called me back to argue over the money because he thought I had paid him too much’. This, we are led to conclude, is a noble soul. Mired in economic hardship that is the West’s fault (everything is much worse ’since 2003′, don’t forget) he nonetheless refuses to take more than his fair share of Ms Clark’s UK-taxpayer-funded expenses account. And, the report makes clear, this is not unusual: the Middle East is full of this kind of selfless generosity.
‘Why do you go to such dangerous places?’ people often ask me. They mean dangerous, Muslim countries. I usually report from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East.
‘Do you have to wear a headscarf?’ I’m asked.
‘Do you ever feel threatened as a woman?’
It is difficult to explain that the sort of generosity and open-heartedness shown by the Kurdish taxi driver is very compelling and very normal across the Islamic world. It is generally a good place to be a guest.
Ms Clark does indeed appear wearing a headscarf in a picture illustrating the article, and later admits to feeling nervous ‘just walking down the street in Kabul’. But that isn’t allowed to distract from her central point: the people of the Middle East (the people of the Muslim Middle East) are generous, hospitable, welcoming, noble, and if they aren’t, it’s our fault.
But it has become more complicated.
Bin Laden’s war and the US-UK military response, and the polarisation between the Western and Islamic worlds mean such ordinary human encounters have become more difficult.
Western journalists are now targets for some Muslims in some Muslim countries. And it does not matter what we actually do or believe, we may be considered enemies.
Before 2001 in Afghanistan ’there was very little anti-Western sentiment, not even from the Taleban’ whereas now ‘many Afghans, including some friends, speak darkly of Western conspiracies to oppress the Umma, the global Muslim community’. You see, it’s not just extremists who express anti-Western sentiment. Even friends of BBC journalists feel that way. But only since 2001, when we suddenly started being horrible to them.
Afghanistan, says Clark, is ‘a place where strangers offer you tea and a bed for the night, where proverbially, people say that, when faced with guests, what is important is not how big your house is, but how big your heart is’. The Taleban weren’t very hospitable: they threw Clark out in March 2001 because her reporting ‘was not based in reality and conflicted with the Taliban way of thinking’. In a report on her expulsion published in The Daily Mirror on 20 March 2001 Clark described a Taliban hitting her in the shoulder with the butt of his Kalashnikov:
‘He assumed that I was an Afghan woman who shouldn’t be where I was with my face uncovered. I yelled back at him, “How dare you? I’m from the BBC.” As soon as he realised who I was he was very apologetic - he kept smiling and saying sorry’.
Had she been an Afghan woman he would not have stopped at one blow, and smiles and apologies would, one imagines, have been in short supply. That particular Afghan’s heart was clearly not big enough to accommodate hospitable feelings for the women of his own country, only for foreign women working for news organizations.
Clark then moves on to her experiences in East Jerusalem and the West Bank during ‘the first Palestinian intifada’ which, she helpfully reminds us with the impartiality for with the BBC is famous, was ‘the uprising against Israeli military occupation’. She recounts an occasion when, in a Gaza refugee camp, ‘an adult carefully explain[ed] to a small child who had picked up a stone to throw at me, that this would be shameful - I was a guest’. If she’d been an Israeli - man, woman or child, soldier or civilian - stoning would have been fine and honourable. But no - Kate Clark was a guest, and a guest of a particularly useful kind, so to stone her would have been ’shameful’. Just as in Afghanistan, those hospitable hearts are not quite big enough.
Yet the Palestinians were wonderful, apparently: not a gun or a rocket, not a bomb or a riot to be seen. They bought her cans of cola, even though they couldn’t afford to. They were hospitable, generous, and, Clark tells us with a flourish of self-hating post-imperial guilt worthy of Robert Fisk himself, they graciously forgave her for being British and therefore, along with every other Westerner, responsible for their current plight:
Palestinians were generous despite their bleak, constrained lives. Lives which, they were usually too polite to point out, my country was historically, partly responsible for.
Yes, once again, it’s all our fault. Their ‘bleak and constrained lives’ are our fault - not their fault, for consistently rejecting peace and resorting to violence and terror, not the fault of their fellow Arabs, for doing nothing to ease their plight and exploiting them for their own political ends, not the fault of their corrupt, incompetent and thuggish leaders. Our fault. Politely, they refrain from blaming us, however, and we should be grateful to them for their civilized restraint.
‘You want to find out what is going on’, as a journalist, says Clark.’ And you particularly want to hear from the marginalised and powerless’. It’s strange that the marginalised and powerless so often occupy the centre of the stage for the Western media and dictate the script from which its representatives read.
Clark ends by telling us that visiting Iraqi Kurdistan was a ‘treat’. ‘It is Iraq and it is safe’, she declares. And that is thanks to who exactly? She doesn’t say. She then returns to her taxi driver:
When I eventually managed to pay the Kurdish taxi driver his extra fare, I thought, ‘this wouldn’t happen in London’.
But actually it does sometimes.
If the driver is Afghan or Pakistani or Iraqi and we chat about his home country, I do quite often end up trying to drive the fare up, while he endeavours to drive it down.
This glibly patronizing little tale is very hard to believe. For a start taxi fares in London are rigidly regulated - there’s no scope for haggling. And what if they’ve chatted about the driver’s home country and disagreed? If he’s a secularist Afghan, or a Pakistani Christian, for example (to name two truly ‘marginalised and powerless’ groups)? Does the same apply? But that wouldn’t happen, because we’re not dealing here with real people with diverse views: we are dealing with an orientalist stereotype, devised to flatter the self-lacerating sensibilities of a guilt-ridden, self-hating West.
Edward Said could never have predicted the intellectual back-flip that ‘orientalism’ has performed. Conceptualized by him as an ideology through which the West oppresses the East, it has become a means through which the West can oppress itself. Yet it still draws upon the same roots of caricature and stereotype: not least, a sentimentalized and romanticized view of the Middle East as a place inhabited by modern versions of the noble savage, who shame the decadent West with their generosity of spirit and their innate sense of hospitality. Meet the new orientalism, even more misleading and dangerous than the old sort.
