Hollywood has made a film called “X2: X-Men United.” I hope this is the title since I really don’t understand it. Muslims are angry. They probably have a genuine grievance, but I can’t judge since I haven’t seen the film, and probably won’t. I’m sure most of America will say that people have the right to say what they want. That is true, but remember that last year no less an authority than the State Department complained officially to the Egyptian government about a television series that they deemed anti-Jewish.
I don’t want to talk about Hollywood nor about the apparent hypocrisy of the State Department; I simply want to ask about the right to make noise. Do we have equal rights to blow our tops as we want, regardless where we live and where we come from? According to Arab history, the answer is no. During the Mamluke era in Egypt (Middle Ages or thereabouts) there were laws that allowed only the nobles to have private bands. The higher the rank, the more musicians one was allowed to have. Considering that nobles used such bands to march in front of their noble progress from one street to another, the amount of noise produced was a sure reflection of power and social and political status.
Using this logic, we can say that, since Hollywood is the biggest show in town (literally), it has the right to blow its top as it wants. It also has to have its villains, be they Red Indians, Soviet agents, or Arab terrorists. With Bin Laden making such an easy villain, no reasonable person would expect fickle Hollywood to pass on the prey. Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and wonder what it is exactly that he and I might have in common? I can’t find much, not even a common religion, but there you have it: To Hollywood, he and I are of the same ilk.
Misconceptions abound; and they are not the realm of Hollywood alone. More alarming is the misconceptions we have about ourselves. A Saudi pundit, on an English television station, was pontificating about me, him, and all that is Saudi. He said: “Saudi Arabia is not a producing country.” I thought he meant the country was not an industrialized country. It was a live show so I put in an e-mail to that effect. The pundit insisted on using the term “producing.” I had to disagree.
How can he say this about us and claim to be an expert? We are not an industrialized country, that is a fact, but we certainly produce. We produce, for example, more managers than we have laborers. Where else in the world would you find an office of seven employees, three of them managers? For every one-and-one-third employee, there is a manager. Where else would you find writers who produce endless copy without having read a book in the last decade? We proudly produce them in abundance. We produce children at a terrifying rate, yet we import people to bring them up and take care of them. Surely, the pundit should have considered that achievement.
President Bush wants to change our world for the better. Perhaps he does, but if he does not take into account our homegrown production, he will not succeed. I’m sure American universities will produce the curricula he wants us to teach around here. But does he know about the teachers we produce? Books without competent teachers are like his B-2 bombers without pilots. A young Saudi teacher had a squabble with his British supervisor the other day about the material used to teach English. The Saudi thought it his God-given right to tell the Brit off. They exchanged memos. The Saudi teacher, realizing that the Brit was right, could not come up with anything better than “I am a Muslim and you are not.” It is amazing that the Saudi belongs to a people who were exposed to Plato and Socrates (and Greek logic altogether) five hundred years before the Brit knew they existed. An argument has its protocols, and they hardly change from one culture to another. Yet we produce a teacher whose logic is warped. We also produce the savvy traveler. Take your choice: Either a young man with a ponytail and a baseball cap, or a young man with an embarrassingly short thobe and a magnificent beard. They both, however, travel to Paris twice a year and have never stopped at the Louvre.
One could go on, but the point I think is made: We might not be an industrialized nation, but we do produce. There are bands that are authorized to make more noise than I do, but one should not be ashamed of a pair of cymbals.
- Arab News Opinion 15 May 2003
