the greycat blog

The very welcome news of Gillian Gibbons’s release has fed the light of tolerance and fair-mindedness that ever burns on BBC News ‘Have Your Say’ pages.

‘She should have served her sentance’ scrawls Mike from Colwyn Bay. ‘If you break the law you should expect to be punished’, he goes on, apparently thinking this both clever and relevant, and ends with a point that obviously weighs very heavily with him (heavier than ‘justice’ or ‘humanity’ for example): ’This must have cost a small fortune. She was only jailed for 15 days - she should have served her time (its not like it was 15 years!!)’.

An idiot from Edgware opines that ‘She deserves two or three lashes - if just for her naivéty’. ‘Common sense has prevailed’ says Chris W, ‘but had it been used in the first place and the teddy bear not been named it would never of happened in the first place.’ Never of happened? By your clueless illiteracy shall the value of your comment be judged, Chris.

Of course, in the end these things are all our fault, as MisterXY of Leeds reminds us: ‘Have you forgotten that we once rulled these countries and sucked out their resources? Or went into countries and bombed them to oblivion?’

Then there is Carla, from Norwich. Words fail one when confronted with the likes of Carla, from Norwich. Carla, from Norwich, is the sort of person who leaves one questioning whether all the effort that went into human evolution was really worth it. Here’s what she says, in full:

I am horrified that Ms. Gibbons has been let off so lightly. Even I, an average white Brit know that it is blasphemy in the eyes of Muslims to name something like a Teddy after their Great Prophet. I would NEVER disrepect another person’s belief’s in this awful way. Surely it is clear that it could be and would be seen as offensive. Ms. Gibbons claims to know about Sudanese culture and to respect it but she has committed an offence in their eyes - one that surely she must have been aware of. I say she should shut up and serve her 15 days then lead a quiet life elsewhere. We need to respect and understand the faiths of others if we want our own to be respected!

Where does one start? It’s very difficult to engage meaningfully with someone who thinks being dragged through the courts for a non-existent crime, threatened with public lashing, deprived of liberty, and having mobs calling for your execution, counts as ‘being let off so lightly’. As for all this respect Carla is so keen on, if respect is to be worth having it has to be earned; simply having it demanded of one is not sufficient. If those Muslims who think Gillian Gibbons’s treatment was justified (and many, many Muslims fervently disagree with them) want respect they have hardly gone the right way about earning it. Fortunately I do not judge Islam by the standards of the bigots of Khartoum, any more than I would wish others to judge Great Britain by the standards of an idiot in Norwich. 

It seems Gillian Gibbons, the Sudan Teddy Bear Teacher, is to be freed. This something about which we should be very glad, but it is not something for which we should be grateful.

Apparently she has been ‘pardoned’ by the Sudanese president. That can hardly be the case; only someone who was guilty would need a pardon.

The interactivity of the web is all very well, but having comments facilities on news reports is a very dubious notion: just look at what happens over at CBS News. The BBC, so committed to fawning over user-generated content that one wonders why they need all those very expensive newsrooms and journalists at all, is, of course, in love with the idea. Those bulging ‘Have Your Say’ pages hang like monstrously distended parasitic growths from many BBC news stories, and the fact that the comments are moderated only makes the prevalent ignorance, offensiveness, smug stupidity (and illiteracy) of the contents all the more disturbing.

The Have Your Sayers have been Having Their Say about Gillian Gibbons and the Khartoum teddy bear crisis (see my earlier post), and the results are truly revolting. For the full grisly picture see ‘The self-loathing Brits who think teddy bear teacher deserves her fate’ at The Monkey Tennis Centre, but make sure you take a sick-bag.

(Some choice comments have been added since the Monkey Tennis Centre’s post. Steve from Derry declares that ‘She went to another country, broke the law, and insulted an entire religion’, that ‘calls for her to be executed are welcomed’ and he hopes that ‘even if she just gets the poor sentence of 15 days, there will be a strong revolt outside the prison upon her release’. What a nice chap. ‘I think we should take a step back and be thankfull that we are all luncky enough to live in a multi cultural society that welcomes any person of any race or religion’, says optimistic James Taggart of London. Glad you feel luncky, James. From sunny Southend, Ken reminds us all (twice, in identical posts - what’s that moderator doing?) that ‘You can’t look at this with western values, this is a different culture and it has to be respected’. Personally I find it hard to respect that kind of respect.)

Today hundreds of demonstrators have flooded Khartoum’s streets protesting about the leniency of Mrs Gibbons’s sentence and demanding that she go before a firing squad.

Above: Lord Kitchener of Khartoum (1850-1916), victor of Omdurman. He’d know what to do.

The quotation in the title of this post, ‘Astonishing backwardness, oh people!’, is from a posting, in Arabic, at The Sudanese Thinker, as quoted by the BBC in their review of blog responses to the Teddy Bear Crisis.

Gillian Gibbons, the British schoolteacher working in Sudan who called a teddy bear Muhammad after the name was chosen by her pupils, has been jailed for fifteen days for ‘insulting Islam’.

Rats in this affair include the Sudanese government, judiciary and religious authorities, and Sarah Khawad, secretary at the school where Gillian Gibbons taught, who made the original complaint. But also Robert Boulos, head of the school, who reacted to the verdict by saying ‘It’s a very fair verdict, she could have had six months and lashes and a fine, and she only got 15 days and deportation’.

Among the weasels, Catherine Wolthuizen of Fair Trials Abroad, who blames the victim: ‘I think she is not someone who has sought to cause offence, she’s not someone who’s acted foolishly, but she perhaps hasn’t necessarily understood the extent to which some of the parents might have been sensitive to the use of this name’; the Right Rev James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, who cringes and simpers like a true multiculturalist: ‘deep disappointment because this was clearly a mistake and I know that the Muslim community here in Liverpool will be as disappointed as anybody. I think, too, a real anxiety that something like this so badly handled in this way won’t do anything to build up good relations between the faith communities’; and the UK Foreign Office who have responded by quavering: ‘We are extremely disappointed with the sentence and Foreign Secretary David Miliband has summoned the Sudanese ambassador to explain what has happened’. Miliband himself has been mainly concerned to stress British respect for Islam, much good has it done him (or Gillian Gibbons).

Praise where due, however: both the Muslim Council of Britain and the American Islamic Congress have condemned Sudan in forthright terms.

Thanks to Candace de Russy and Campus Watch I’ve found a moving cri de coeur from Juan Cole, professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan. Cole is disturbed at the recent establishment of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) by academics dissatisfied with the existing Middle East Studies Association (MESA), and by the increasing signs that outside interests are trying to exert influence on the academic world for ideological reasons of their own. He sees these developments as symptomatic of the politicization of Middle East studies.

Outside groups, non-specialists, intervene because they don’t like the conclusions. The politicization of scholarship is very dangerous. Scholars are like canaries in a mine. They are on the cutting edge of research, and most sensitive to dangers in a society. If you silence them, you’re poking out the eyes of society.

This view of the importance of scholars to society surely owes more to vanity than it does to reality. Leaving that aside, how credible is Juan Cole as an opponent of the ‘politicization of scholarship’? Well, I haven’t read his latest book, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East, but I have a very clear idea of what it’s all about because the author has spelled it out:*

French Egypt and American Iraq can be considered bookends on the history of modern imperialism in the Middle East … There are many eerily familiar resonances between the two misadventures, not least among them that both began with supreme arrogance and ended as fiascoes. Above all, the leaders of both occupations employed the same basic political vocabulary and rhetorical flimflammery, invoking the spirit of liberty, security, and democracy while largely ignoring the substance of these concepts.

Nothing politicized about that, then. Of course not: the politicization that suits us is never perceived as politicization (as post-modernists are always keen to tell us). On 11 September 2001, Cole reports, he had written about half the book. ‘I had no way of knowing then’, he writes, ’that a book on such a distant, scholarly subject would prove an allegory for Bush’s Iraq War’. As if it had the slightest chance of ending up as anything else.

As for the poor canaries, they were taken down mines because of their high sensitivity to carbon monoxide, which they ‘detected’ by breathing it in. Their eyes had nothing to do with it.

* For a thorough dismantling of Cole’s tendentious and politicized version of history, see Martin Kramer’s ‘Juan Cole loses head’.

I know that I said my last post on Nadia Abu El Haj would be precisely that, my last post on the matter, at least for a while. However, as the following is of considerable interest for anyone who has been following the Abu El Haj controversy (and consists not of my views but of an exchange of views by others), I think I can be allowed to stretch a point. 

Larry Cohler-Esses, editor-at-large of The Jewish Week, is a journalist who has reported the Nadia Abu El Haj controversy in some detail. Following the publication of an article in which he was critical of the campaign against Abu El Haj, he was contacted by a Columbia University faculty member who took issue with his position. A very interesting and enlightening exchange of views took place, so interesting that Larry has - with the permission of his correspondent, on condition of anonymity - asked for it to be published in full here. What follows consists entirely of the text of the exchange between Larry and his anonymous correspondent (’XXX’), as Larry has forwarded it to me. As the whole thing makes for a long post, I have put the transcript itself under the cut. (more…)

The current (Fall 2007) edition of The Current (’A journal of contemporary politics, culture, and Jewish affairs’ published at Columbia University) has a special focus on ‘Studying Middle East Studies’, sparked by the Nadia Abu El Haj controversy. Three essays relate Abu El Haj’s work to wider currents in contemporary anthropology and Middle East studies. They are all well worth reading, but I would particularly recommend David Rosen’s discussion of Facts on the Ground.

• David Rosen, ‘Searching for Facts on the Ground‘
• James R. Russell, ‘Ideology over integrity in academe’
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Is truth attainable?’

This will probably be my last posting on Nadia Abu El Haj for a while. I think it’s time to let her get on with her work and see what she comes up with - not, I suspect, that it will contain many surprises.

The new Edward Said mural (dedicated last week: for earlier posts see ‘What would Edward Said have said?’ and ‘That mural again’) is, to be fair, no uglier than the other murals decorating the Cesar Chavez Student Center at San Francisco State University. You can read all about them here on the Student Center website.

A little detail of the Malcolm X mural caught my eye. To quote the Student Center’s description: ‘An image of the continent of Africa engulfing the United States is shown in between the images of Malcolm, and is based on the Mercator projection, which conveyed the relative size of Africa compared to the U.S.’ This is bizarrely wrong. Leaving aside the question of what exactly pointing out that Africa is bigger than the United States is supposed to prove, the muralists seem to have their cartography confused.

The world map on the mural does not use the Mercator projection. If it did, the effect would be precisely the opposite of that claimed: America would be made to appear disproportionately large compared to Africa, as Mercator maps distort land area so that the further you get from the equator the larger places appear. The map on the mural appears to use the Peters projection, which sought to overcome this distortion, and, supposedly, also serve the cause of global social justice by removing the Mercator map’s supposed bias towards the rich North American and Eurasian countries. In the mural, however, this projection is used with one significant alteration: Africa is grossly distorted to appear much larger than it ought to be, even by the standards of the Peters version. The United States, by contrast, is left at its (relatively smaller) correct size. The three images below show the results clearly: from top to bottom, Mercator, Peters, Malcolm X mural.

So, in the name of correcting an alleged distortion that didn’t suit their ideological position the makers of the mural deliberately introduced another that does, while claiming that their distortion was not a distortion.

Edward Said is in good company here.

[Map images from here (Mercator) and here (Peters); mural detail taken from here.]

‘Was Nadia Abu El Haj Treated Fairly?’ is the title of an article of mine published by History News Network today. Here’s the direct link.

The Edward Said mural at San Francisco State University (see earlier post) has been unveiled. Apparently this crass piece of kitsch with its clutter of leadenly literal imagery ‘honors Palestine’ and ‘celebrates the struggles of the Palestinian people’. The Party for Socialism and Liberation says so, anyway. Cinnamon Stillwell begs to differ: read her critique at Campus Watch.

A detailed description of the mural can be found here, at this likeable blog. Marvel at how the artists have cleverly symbolized Said’s contribution to learning through his books by depicting … his books.

[UPDATE 9 November 2007: Cinnamon Stillwell further considers the Edward Said mural, and the Said phenomenon more generally, here. Highly recommended reading.]