Hell Is Not The Other

As US pressure mounts on UN security council members for tougher sanctions against Iran, the western press, largely subservient to corporate and western governments interests, has been busy at the same time forging a dehumanised picture of the country Israel and the US want to punish, destabilise and eventually attack. The mainstream politico-intellectual elite has also joined the fray. 'Reading Lolita in Tehran' and 'The Caged Virgin' are such books, a genre in the service of empire, they pretend to speak about women's issues in Islam while presenting a biased and external (western borrowed) perspective on these issues.

We have to reverse this curse, the curse of biased information and arrogance about other cultures, the curse of feeling irresponsible as citizens in the stigmatisation and the dehumanisation of the Other.
I know how it feels to be misperceived, stigmatised. I am an immigrant women who crossed three cultural barriers and married a western man. I am not religious, neither from a Muslim upbringing, but I lived in Lebanon, a country made of a mosaic of religions, among Christians, maronites, catholiques, orthodoxes, and Muslims, sunnis, druzes and shias. I lived part of the civil war and realised that the radicalisation of public opinion is dangerous, that it is always made for belligerant political purposes, that sectarian wars are ugly, that there is individual responsibility in contributing to the stigmatisation of the Other, that there is always more effort to display in order to understand the Other than there is to exclude him, that summary condemnation of the other is a lazy intellectual approach, that applying our standards to the Other and asking for total compliance is pure arrogance, that in every political and military tragedy there is individual responsibility, that our responsibility now as western citizens toward what is going on in the ME is to be first and foremost critical, not of Muslims, not of Iran, not of Shias, not of Sunnis, not of Iraq, not of Afghanistan, but of our own actions and the actions of our governments, otherwise we are making ourselves complicit of our governments illegal wars and the human rights violations and the murderous radicalisations that go with them.

I think as citizens and intellectuals, all we must look for is to understand before we condemn, before we join the chorus that will be responsible tomorrow for what is going on today.

With this perspective in mind I invite you to read and watch the following:

My critique of a prominent Muslim basher

Dove's Eye View: Maria Golia Talks Back To Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Read Golia's essay on Hirsi Ali here.

Muslim Americans are denied official representation in their country.

Why 'Reading Lolita In Tehran' is not good for your understanding of women issues in Iran.

Was I a good American in the time of George Bush ?

Inside Tehran (an excellent BBC documentary, 1h30')