Ahmed Zaoui: All children of the book

COMMENT

The end of the Cold War and the events of September 11 have engendered an intense and ever-increasing focus from academics and observers about the heterogenic and conflictual relations between the West and Islam. At the same time the powerful Western media machine has produced selective coverage of the Muslim world that has emphasised only its negative aspects: absence of democracy, human rights abuses and terrorism, all manifestly defective in any nation yet all demonstrably legacies of the Cold War and of post-colonial states that have failed to achieve development at all levels.

Sensationalist headlines and unbalanced commentaries in Western media are evidence of a systematic failure of critical thinking about how to deal with a large portion of the world's population, one that has, over the centuries, contributed ... to the human and scientific development of Western civilisation itself ...

It is one of the illogical ironies of current debates on geopolitical issues that those people who own intelligence, control the production of information and claim objectivity are the same ones who adhere to zealous and empty slogans that serve only the vested interest of arms conglomerates and other business predators.

It is likewise illogical to place Islam, which is a monotheist religion, comparable to Christianity and Judaism, in opposition to the West, which is, by turns, a strategic region, an arbitrary geographical division of the Earth's surface, or a metaphorical expression of an ill-defined agglomeration of political and economic values.

In his 1990 Tanner lecture, "Europe and Islam", Bernard Lewis talked of some of the difficulties presented by the two opposed terms in the title. Islam, he said, is not a geographic location; it is a religion. But for Muslims the word "religion" connotes something different than it does for Christians. The word itself ... is derived from the Latin "religio", a pre-Christian term for the cult and rituals of pagan Rome. The comparable Islamic term is "dín", a term originally Arabic, but which has been adopted in all the many languages of Islam and in common with its cognates in other Semitic languages, notably Hebrew and Aramaic, it means law.

So for Muslims, Islam is not simply a system of belief and worship ... it is the whole of life, and its rules include civil, criminal and even what we would call constitutional law ...


There is no doubt that truth is the first casualty of this war. It is a war that targets not only bin Laden and his few followers, but it will be a persistent pretext to muzzle opposition groups that choose a democratic path to express their projects.

In my opinion the war on terror is only another deal between the West and Arab dictators aiming to secure cheap oil in exchange for a continuing silence concerning human rights abuses, as has happened and happens still in Algeria.

The late European MP Sir James Goldsmith once observed in his book The Trap, commenting on Algeria after the putsch during the 90s: "Virtual silence has greeted the reversal of a democratic election in Algeria. The West cannot understand a democratic rejection of its ideas. For the West such a rejection is a sign of either dementia or evil."

Moreover, Oliver Roy, the French expert in political Islam, addressed the hypocrisy of the West towards democracy in the Muslim world by saying: "When the West has to choose between democracy and secularism, as happened in Algeria and Turkey, it will always choose secularism and not democracy."

I was born in 1960 in the village of Al-Idrissiya, in Algeria, where my grandfather was a Sufi preacher. I remember very clearly the year of 1967, when animosity between Israel and the Arab countries, under the leadership of Egypt, was at its height. The mood within the Arab countries was tense, and Algeria was no exception, since the Algerian people used to follow the speeches of Nasser attentively.

At that time I was very young and I used to go to the only football pitch available in my home village. There was a Jewish cemetery close to the football pitch, and sometimes the soccer ball would bounce into the cemetery. I and my fellow players took as much care as possible not to walk on any grave out of respect for the dead, since Islamic traditions prohibit such acts, or any other kind of disrespect for any dead.

Looking back, it strikes me, wasn't that a beautiful example of tolerance? Despite the inflamed feelings against the state of Israel, the principles that my little buddies and I had been taught to hold dear never let us cross the line, or led us to act incorrectly against the symbols of another religion.

Now I am older and a lot wiser about the ways of the world but the soccer games in Al-Idrissiya came back to me when I read what Edward Said wrote in his book, Orientalism. He made the point that Muslims, even when they were extremely angry, had never dared to insult the prophets of ancient Israel. We need to recall these things now, as many in the West see Islam as the enemy of civilisation and a byword for religious intolerance.

In an interview, 20 years after the first publication of Orientalism Said noted that the situation had, if anything, worsened: "The West's almost obsessive emphasis on terrorism and fanaticism in the Arab world is a form of exorcism. They see it in Islam so they won't have to recognise that the same elements exist in their own societies" ... .

The recent confrontations since September 11 tend to obscure the tentative steps we have made together. The beginning of the 20th century did witness the first, fledgling attempts to address a history of tragedies and confrontation between the monotheist religions, and this dialogue also included the representatives of Buddhism and Hinduism. In more recent times, the most encouraging stage of this process occurred in 1965, when the Catholic Church formally renounced the ancient crime held against the Jews for killing Jesus (peace be upon him).

This step underlined the fact that the Catholic Church had inaugurated a new era, in which dogmatism and history were no longer a barrier to dialogue between the sons of Abraham. Later on, various European countries such as Belgium and Scandinavian countries recognised Islam as a national religion.

Such recognition, however, was not unanimous. France, in contrast, is still caught up in its colonial legacy, as exemplified by its decision to place Islamic Affairs under the authority of the interior ministry in blatant contradiction of its secular principles. To Muslims, the practice seems to be the continuation of the colonial practices in Algeria, when the French authorities used to control mosques, name muftis and administer the Islamic properties until independence in 1962.

Historically, Islam pioneered the reciprocal recognition of the monotheist religions, Judaism and Christianity ... The Holy Koran called for constructive dialogue with the people of the book, which is itself a respectable designation for Islamists, Jews and Christians. For centuries, the Arabic and Eastern churches were involved in discussion and building bridges with Muslims. So it should come as no surprise that today there are more than 10 million Arab Christians living side by side with their fellow Muslim countrymen.

We forget this common heritage at our peril ... Yet there are numerous verses in the Koran that not only contain the names of the prophets of the Old Testament, but express praise for them, and for their actions. Furthermore the Holy Koran contains more than 120 verses about Jesus and the Virgin Mary, including details of the birth and early childhood of Jesus that do not appear in the Holy Bible ...

We share the same impulses to worship, our prophets walked the same lands in the Middle East. We are all children of the book. It is a matter of fact that the Jewish and Christian presence in North Africa, to be precise in Morocco and Algeria, precedes the Islamic presence ... .

Near where I grew up was the Trappist Monastery of Tibherine, where monks of Our Lady of Atlas had lived in respect, peace and honour for centuries. Alas, in 1996 seven of these monks were kidnapped, used as bargaining tokens and beheaded by the GIA, a crime that has an unhappy familiarity today. The international community condemned the barbaric criminals, as did the villagers for whom the monks, like the statue of the Virgin Mary that overlooked our village, had simply always been part of our community. But the prior of the martyr-monks did not condemn, instead commending their friends of the final moment to God whose face I see in yours - the God of both of us.

Unfortunately, these bonds between us are all but forgotten, as politics interferes in the dialogue between religions. This is especially so since the Cold War ended, a finale that gave birth to many ethnic unrests and fundamentalisms which, to be fair, are an understandable enough response. They represent the attempt to preserve national identities that are being threatened by the bulldozer of globalisation.

We need to be on guard that this quest to defend our identity does not become the justification for pre-emptive action against others ... Dialogue is more important than ever, especially now that Islam has a visible presence in the West ...

The value of dialogue is easy to under-rate. It seems slow, and its achievements so much less dramatic than the deadly outbursts of conflict. It consists of the patient building of bridges ... dissolving otherness and constructing an understanding based on common interests and a shared history.

As a Muslim I have always believed in dialogue with anyone and everyone who shares a readiness for dialogue and peaceful co-existence. We have to persevere. We have to show tolerance. And we must be prepared to set aside any resentment we may feel at treatment that seems unjust.

Salaam. Peace.

* Ahmed Zaoui was formerly a lecturer and tutor at the Religious Faculty of Algiers University.

* Vivienne Crawshaw's family law column will appear tomorrow.

Herald Feature: Ahmed Zaoui, parliamentarian in prison

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