There are moments in social life when an idea or trend crosses a threshold, tips and spreads everywhere. We have seen that happen in music, in fashion, in cuisine, in literature, in technology and, yes, in this case, in political discourse as well.
It has become quite popular in recent weeks to criticize or, put more colloquially, to bash, Saudi Arabian culture in the American media. Why? And why now? Search me. Suffice it to say that commentators these days, left and right, progressive and conservative, have formed a cat’s cradle of grudges against anything Saudi. And never mind that these commentators have little feel for the depth and complexity of cultural, political and religious norms in Saudi society, and of the many modalities, in the history of that society, that make it what it is today.
To be sure, these commentators’ writings evince a sense of their own absurdity (for that’s how outrageously off-track they are) but that doesn’t prevent their inherently comic and puerile approach to the subject from being presented in a seriousness so solemn as not to be ignored.
The leader of the pack here — its alpha mate, as it were — is Thomas Friedman. He actually wrote this drivel in his column in the New York Times on Dec. 12 as he directly addressed, in an imaginary memo, Saudi Arabia’s minister of Islamic affairs: “You have a problem with the American people, who, since Sept. 11, have come to fear that your schools, and the thousands of Islamic schools your government and your charities are financing around the world, are teaching that non-Muslims are inferior to Muslims and must be converted or confronted.”
It’s no less than insane to imagine that any Muslim parent, much less a minister of education, would approve a curriculum for school children that instilled in them the notion that “non-Muslims are inferior to Muslims and must be converted or confronted.”
Needless to say, Friedman, who we understand spent many years filing stories as a New York Times correspondent in the Middle East (an experience that doesn’t seem to have rubbed off on him) did not cite the title of a single textbook, taught anywhere in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, that promoted such racist ideas. He did not do so because no such textbooks exist, and the reason they do not exist is that, very simply, no such ideas can be found anywhere in the Islamic Holy book, the Islamic tradition or the Islamic culture, all three of which embody the foundation of Saudi society — including its educational system.
To besmirch Saudi Arabia in such an underhand manner is egregious enough, but to impute to it the notion that its schools are deliberately indoctrinating students in racist values is, well, insane.
But bashing Saudi society is now fashionable.Colber King, a usually sympathetic columnist who writes for the Washington Post, wrote one of those I-am-hot-under-the-collar pieces recently about how women, and American women in particular, are discriminated against in Saudi Arabia when they — hold on to your funny hats — patronize establishments such as Pizza Hut, Starbucks and McDonald’s by being “relegated” to sections in these establishments “reserved only for women.” He called it, a la South Africa of the old days, “gender apartheid.”
Oh, puleeez, Colbert, you can find better things to get hot under the collar about, can’t you? How about, for example, the increasingly humiliating practice of racial profiling inflicted on minorities, including the one that you belong to? That’s surely a worse kind of discrimination, is it not? But, more than that, how about showing some respect for the norms of another culture with a right to be different from yours?
And there was the case of Lt. Col. Martha McSally, which received front-page treatment in the Style section of the Washington Post, who had been posted to Prince Sultan Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia in November 2000. While there, she objected to the idea that female personnel should wear the customary gown, traditionally worn by Saudi women in public, when she had to travel off base. For that she has now sued Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, contending that the policy is “unconstitutional.”
Unconstitutional in the US, not in Saudi Arabia. When you’re in another country you go along to get along. And we all know what those who were not Roman did when they arrived in Rome.
The end result of the inflammatory way the Style piece, along with dozens of other pieces dealing with the issue, was written (shame on the Saudis, as it were) was that, well, it inflamed people.
A reader wrote the Post on Jan. 12: “Every person in this country should feel outrage at this lack of respect and unnecessary humiliation of our women in Saudi Arabia by the US armed forces. It is gender apartheid.”
Has anyone asked Saudi women themselves if, beyond being irritated at certain restrictions in their daily lives — not unlike those that other women in other societies feel are directed against them — if they were oppressed?
Actually, someone has.
Hugh Pope, a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, filing from Jeddah two weeks ago, interviewed a successful Saudi women, Sihan Abu Rashid, a very articulate interior designer, who was quoted as saying: “It’s rubbish that we’re oppressed. I’ve lived both here and in the West, so I should know.”
The ideal public discourse, of course, is one that develops as an autonomous method of intellectual inquiry, or debate, that genuinely disengages itself from the constraints of subjecting sentiments and, for American commentators, from the Eurocentric tradition (enshrined in the work of modern Western macrohistorians like Toynbee, Webber, Marx, Braudel and Spengler, and before them in the work for what has come to be called Orientalists) that exalts Euro-American culture over that of others.
Saudi Arabia is not only the ancestral birthplace of every Arab, but the place whence this Arab’s culture, religion and history originated. Imagine, then, that Thomas Friedman would, as he did in that infamous piece of his, dismiss it as a “big gas station to be pumped and defended but never to be taken seriously as a society.”
That my colleague on this page, Khaled Al-Maeena, vehemently took issue with this unspeakably insulting identification in a recent column in not surprising.
The whole thing is insane.
But what do you expect when the inmates are in charge of the op-ed asylum?
