Some Arab countries in recent weeks have chosen to bar Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” from being shown in their theaters. Other countries opted to permit its release after “offending parts” were excised. And others still, after some hesitation and much ado, allowed it to play.
My, my, and all this brouhaha over a movie! Have we nothing else to worry about in our part of the world? Is our officialdom so insecure that it would ban an otherwise immensely satisfying documentary because it is seen as “offensive to Arabs”? Should our public be denied access to a genre of film — recognized worldwide as legitimate a voice in the public debate as that we find in the op-ed pages — because the authorities disagree with its message?
This is not a review of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” an irreverent, viciously funny and in places incendiary box office hit whose main editorial intent is to bash Bush, not to proffer a jaundiced view of Arabs. My column today is rather about censorship and its crippling implications for our region.
Imagine a society that bans all effusions of literary expression, cinematic art, theatrical production and political discourse that are critical of the status quo, and you would be conjuring up the image of a mute, stultified society moving around the treadmill of archaic tradition, unable to meet the challenges of modernity or comprehend the ever-changing vocabulary of the global dialogue of cultures. A nation’s leaders who insist that citizens think in lockstep with them, meanwhile using maximum force to quell the adversarial current, rule over a community that will remain stubbornly unfree, with its members sporadically giving way to their unappeasable discontent by resort to violence.
The fragile plurality of human nature and conduct is defined by the interaction of opposing views — views that by their interplay illuminate our social condition and by their contrast point to a synthesis in our human life — not by governmental fiats, hurled at us like divine thunderbolts of certitude, demanding from the individual the unfailing politeness of a wine steward.
It takes the adversarial voice in a community to thrust it beyond its fixed meaning, to jolt it out of its complacency when it becomes too complacent for comfort. Those who speak in it are not — and trust me on this one — subversives bent on nihilistically bringing down the temple on themselves and their enemies, but cultivated folk imbued with a passion for ideas, a passion they want to transmute to others.
Drawn as they are not only to the countercultural but also the counterfactual, they embody the zestful ethos of the classical world of Arabs that Ibn Khaldoun, in his seminal work “Muqaddimah,” called “assabiyah,” a sort of life-giving force derived from intellectual inquisitiveness and the free flow of knowledge in society, unimpeded by restrictions from above.
Who are these censors in our world who ban books knowing that the first word in the Koran enjoins us to “Read”? And who hold us back from watching a documentary film that would have enabled us to discover for ourselves what some Americans are thinking these days?
Look, Fahrenheit 9/11 is clearly an advocate movie, and Michael Moore, as the New Yorker review had it, is “too slipshod intellectually to convince many except the already convinced, too eager to throw another treated log onto the fire of righteous anger.”
Conservatives hated the work because it showed George Bush as a bumbler, and liberals loved it not only because of that but also because it berated the media for failing its role as a genuine watchdog, say, investigating the former president’s sexual shenanigans with greater zeal than the current administration’s claim of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Whatever.
Americans, willing to fork out $8.50, were free to go see it in their neighborhood Cineplex and make up their minds about it (and who the devil would’ve dared deny them their constitutional right to do so, in the first place?) whereas Arabs were told by censors that their minds were already made up for them.
I don’t know how intellectually astute these folks are, but I wonder if they know that when they ban a film, or burn a book, or incarcerate an intellectual because they disagree with his views, they are indirectly but perversely paying tribute — a sinister tribute to be exact, but tribute nevertheless — to the power of ideas in human affairs.
Sad world ours, no?
