Barry Ferst
Philosophy
Carroll College
The most ridiculous thing I ever carried during my travels in Islamic countries was John Stuart Mill's Essay on Liberty.
It was early July, and I needed to prepare my fall lectures for Political Philosophy. So here I was riding along in this little red Peugeot my wife and I had leased in Nice, and with Louise driving across the flats of northwestern Algeria, I thought I would read a bit of modern liberalism.
But then you think of the souks, those maze-crazed marketplaces, with their noises, their smells, their whirl of drab colors, and the general decadence of the culture, and reading Mill, Kant, Locke, Voltaire, or Montesquieu is as out-of-place as tropical fish in a Montana trout stream. The Enlightenment with its ideas of civic equality, individualism, division between secular and religious, and making it on what you know not who you know has no place in Marrakech's Place Jemaa del Fina where men sit at fruit crates with teeth and pliers on display to announce their trade as dentists, or the snake charmers, or the sixty-year-old male belly dancer grinning with orange-yellow lips as he tried to kiss me after his dance.
"Tea? My friend."
"Carpet? My friend." --Louise calls these "the flies."
And the scariest thing I ever carried in a Moslem country was a product stamped, "Made in Israel." At the Algerian border the guard questions, "Do you have any products made in Israel?" And what if I said "yes" or "maybe"? Would I be put in jail? And what of my three oranges that I bought in Spain and I think still carried the label "Product of Israel"? Oh god, where were my eyeglass frames made? Or the computer chip in my camera?
My wife and I, and now daughter Sophia, are travelers and explorers, only tourists when we do Christmas in Provence. I am who I am when I am in the lands of the Roman Empire--walking where Apuleius was redeemed by Isis, Ovid was exiled, and Zenobia ruled over her desert Palmyrene kingdom. I suppose that my academic specialty is the Greco-Roman world, and I have visited this world on fifteen trips of various lengths. My wife, who like her husband has an advanced degree in philosophy, researches pre-medieval Mediterranean gardens. Sophia studies the unicorns, hippogriffs, and other such beasts on carousels. Our papers are in order, and no "Made in Israel" goods are carried in our automobile to be confiscated or worse by border guards in Arab lands.
As with so many educated Americans, I know so very little about Islamic culture. I suppose that I have read a few books on the topic, though the only thing that has stuck with me is the second sura of the Koran about Mary and Jesus. So, I guess that any insights that I might have come from my travels in Turkey, Syria, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and that recently lost bastion of hated multiculturalism, Yugoslavia. This leaves me far from expert status, but with a little cultural history under my belt and a good number of first hand impressions of Mediterranean-Islamic life, maybe I can say something that most of the time will not be misleading about Mediterranean-Islamic culture.
(Oh, now that I think of it, I have also read The Satanic Verses, but only while safely hidden in a basement closet illuminating the text with a very small flashlight. However, just to keep things in perspective, given the recent slough of Letters-to-the-Editor castigating the "blatant Satanism" in Harry Potter, when under an alias I rent the video for my daughter, I will demand that she view it only in the basement closet.)
"Tea? My friend."
"Carpet? My friend."
Mohammed, a merchant from Mecca in Arabia, founded a monotheistic religion in 622 AD. Carried forward by a warrior class, within a hundred years the Islamic faith spread from distant Afghanistan to the Pillars of Hercules at the Atlantic entrance to the Mediterranean. Two thirds of early Medieval Christian lands fell to the followers of the Prophet Mohammed. However, the triumph of Islam was due to more than just the force of a faith militant; many Christians and pagans thought the strict monotheism of Islam and the social and moral precepts of the Koran were worth believing.
(A word on "strict monotheism": I certainly would agree with many Islamic scholars that God as both three and one is a puzzle that could have issued only from a Sphinx hell-bent never to be answered no matter how great the Oedipus Rex. To paraphrase Mohammed and Patrick Henry: "Give me one god or give me polytheism.")
When I was in Morocco I quickly learned that my American vision that all Moslems were Arabs was terribly wrong. Moroccan Moslems are insulted if you call them Arabs. Rapidly, I learned that Arabs were still viewed by Moroccans as the conquerors and occupiers of the land of the Maghreb Berbers.
"Tea? My friend."
"Carpet? My friend."
In Algeria most people are Moslems--how disorienting to see a church bell tower refashioned as a mosque's minaret--but even after the revolutionary/civil war with France and the assertion of strict Islamicism, entre to the upper-class demands one know and speak French. My French is bad, but once identified as an American, it is assumed I am wealthy and so my bad French is quietly accepted.
(And yet the Koran must be written in Arabic, which in some sense makes all Muslims Arabs, as we might have said about Roman Catholics that they were all Latins before Luther, King James, and the post-Vatican II church.)
In Turkey, many if not all mosques, have become nationalized, something on the model of the Catholic cathedrals in France during the French revolution, and of course Turks are not Arabs, but hail from the Turkoman empires of central Asia. The Turks under Ataturk, Father of the Republic of Turkey, a country less than a century old, replaced Arab lettering with Latin and outlawed the demeaning fez and the radical Dervishes. In Istanbul and Ankara there are women carrying briefcases and they wear pants, and there are women in chandras walking several paces behind their husbands. This is because in Turkey there are two kinds of people: those who face West and those who face East.
I like women; I like to look at them. Some have long hair, others short, some are thin as vegetarians, other zaftig. So it is disconcerting to be where I cannot look at females. How disconcerting to walk in Aleppo or Damascus and see women covered in long black sheets from head to toe--not even eyes to be seen. At Palmyra a native pointed out to me a pre-Islamic carving on a temple of Baal that showed a woman covered in a long sheet from head to toe, saying, "See, it was not Islam that imposed this on women."
(To this day I am still unsure what I was to make of that wondrous observation. Did it mean that women have always been covered and so it was fine to continue the tradition? Or did it mean that since woman were covered before Islam, Islam had been forced to carry on that tradition?)
"Tea? My friend."
"Carpet? My friend."
I like women. I like to think that some are strong, some are weak, some forceful, others resourceful. As a teenager I knew there was the perfect female out there waiting for me. As an adult I knew one day I would find a young woman who would want me as her husband and I would have her for wife. It follows like night follows day that it was disturbing to check into the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul and stand next to a man reserving rooms for his four wives. And I had only always thought about one, one who in complete equality would build with me a life. How astonishing to see wives and female offspring walking five paces behind husbands and fathers.
(Louise becomes invisible in Moslem countries--she becomes a woman who doesn't exist.)
I like to talk to people that I am not afraid of. I like to talk to hotel desk clerks, waiters, gas station attendants, even forensic scientists and college professors. I ask about their lives and they ask about mine. Some of the exchanges are pleasant, and some are not.
At dinner one evening in Ankara a young woman asked me, "Why do you allow college students to hang posters of naked women on dormitory room walls?"
"Well, only the males do that," I said, thinking what a great riposte.
"Do not your females have any sense of shame?"
Now I ask you, what do you say to that? And so I joked that the best program on American TV was "Baywatch."
And I hope against hope that the response I got was equally light-hearted, "Do all American men commit adultery in their hearts as frequently as they actually do it?"
And for dessert, "Just what is serial monogamy?"
"Tea? My friend."
"Carpet? My friend." (I am being tead and carpeted to death.)
Of course, there were also more heartening questions. In a hotel lobby in Damascus, I was confronted with a thought-provoking cross-examination. "Are you a Christian?" followed immediately by, "Why do Christians hate Moslems?" "Why do they want to kill us?" "Why does Christian America, the only country outside Israel run entirely by Jews, bomb everyone?" And this probing, which I have faced many times, has a traditional denouement, "Say friend, "How can I get papers so that I can go to America?--I want to see Hollywood and Disneyland, maybe get a job, Allah willing."
I know I should be more understanding of a culture and religious socialization radically different from mine--I am a card-carrying liberal, you know. I read and have taken to heart Mill, Locke, Kant, and the rest of that crowd. Okay, so how is this: It is all the fault of the United States and its racist Zionist ally, Israel. America is a Christian nation run by a handful of Jews. The United States is a nation of sex-crazed commercialism fueled by a military-industrial complex supported by Texas oil merchants, Hollywood Jews, and New York intellectual Jews. Israelis must leave Palestine immediately and go back to where they came from. Americans must stop plundering Arab oil. Only in this way will there be Peace on Earth and Good Will toward all Men.
(I do not believe anything I just wrote, but if World Peace depends on it, hell, I might even burn my copy of Essay on Liberty.)
The Mediterranean Moslem appears to me to suffer under a terrible contradiction: in lands glorious with date trees, figs, tomatoes, aubergines, olives, grapes, and flocks of lambs, and lands that could overflow just as surely with milk and honey as they do with oil and spilt blood, upper-class families wait in line to order a greasy double cheeseburger and super-sized fries at MacDonalds. Making matters worse, the vast lower classes press their faces against the windows, huddled outside looking in. This engenders a great deal of hate toward all those who have what one should not so terribly want.
"Tea? My friend?"
"Carpet? My friend."
"American...you want Hashish? Kat? Exchange money?"