The Myth of the Other

                                                   The Myth of the Other

             "Terrorist polices may also be implemented, fear and compliance may be 

            sought or achieved, through the construction of a collective enemy, through 

              decisively dis-placing threat to one or more distant Others, through scare 

           stories and fear-mongering. Through successfully perpetrating "imaginative           

               geographies" of Their Terrorist/Arab/Muslim space and Their uncivilized, 

            subhuman barbarism. Through successfully folding distance into monstrous 

            Difference. Through successfully insisting that They are a pervasive military 

                  threat to Our Civilization, to the security of Our way of life.  Through 

              successfully implanting a just-below-the-surface sense of fear by way of 

              redundant representations strewn across the paths of everyday life. This 

            subject outside of the "safe" space of the quotidian is not merely a subject 

              of an imagined geography, however, but also an "imagined body" and an 

                                                        "imagined culture."

           Taken from an article written by Sara Upstone in a collection of essays which 

          examine and deconstruct media, culture, and life in America since "everything 

          changed," since 9/11, titled Reframing 9/11: Film, popular Culture and the War 

       on Terror." Most of the quote was written by, and properly attributed to, Allan Pred's          

                                       "Situated Ignorance and State Terrorism."

Sitting at a small, round, outside table at a coffee shop in a small shopping mall about a kilometer from the KFUPM campus, sipping a double Turkish coffee, smoking a hand rolled cigarette, my goal for the day near completion. I love salt water. Today was the ordained day for me to touch the shore of the Arabian Gulf. No, here it is referred to by that moniker. Seventy miles away, across the gulf is Iran, a country decidedly not an ally in any sense of the word of the Arab gulf states. Over there, in Persia, and in the western world at large, it is the Persian Gulf. But not here. I left my flat at noon, walked and walked and made the corniche, the seawall, if you will, by two thirty. The distance is about eight plus klicks, say about five miles. I stopped here at this same mall on the way there to see if I could buy some water and some bread and cheese and to also attempt to use some of my remaining USD (dollars) at the Fred Meyer type store known here, really, as Hyper Panda. I could and I did. I also found out that they will not accept USDs minted more than a few years before.

The Saudi gentleman in his Thobe ordered precisely the same as I, and when the South Asian man makking the coffee tried to serve it to him in a paper cup he balked and said, laughing, in heavily accented, slightly hesitant English, "Maybe the Turkish people will be angry if we use a paper cup." He grinned at the man and then at me, warmly. I chuckled. "I also ordered a Turkish coffee," I said, smiling broadly. 

The sun is about to set. The maghrib prayer, the sunset prayer, is ten minutes away now, as I sit in the stiff Gulf breeze, the air temperature hovering around seventy, seventy two degrees. Shortly everything will close down for a half hour to accommodate said prayer time. I have an app now on my iPad, one that shows the prayer times for each day as the times float up and down with some calculus that I have yet to ascertain. There is a constant wind here. With the wind comes much airborne sand, so that often the city is obscured as though a smog has accumulated, and the late sun takes on the magnified, muted appearance of a harvest moon, or a sunset seen in Los Angeles.

I made it to the Gulf and it was a glorious sight. On the edge of the water I sat and rested and read and I stared silently at the water, at its qualities, at the seagulls, at the families playing and laughing. I ate and I meditated on the novelty and the wonder of this place, still as yet so new to me. Walking down the busy six lane road to the water I noticed that Saudi people do not walk places. They walk in malls and they walk from their cars to their destination, but they are a people of the automobile. Why this is I can not say, but that it is is more than evident. And nice cars. Lexuses (Lexii?), flashy SUVs, Mercedes Benzes, Ferraris, sleek, always polished, always new cars with flashy rims, exceeding speed limits and honking their horns with a frequency that I have heard only in Manhattan.

There it is. The prayer call, the azaan, voiced by the muezzin. Cascading across and around. Floating on the wind from the somewhat tinny sounding PAs mounted on all four sides of every one of the seventy thousand mosques across the land. 

Then I walked back, taking side roads between the rows of walled houses, streets empty of people. The only people that I passed or see outside of shoppers entering and exiting places of business are members of the serving class. KSA has a population of about twenty-eight million persons, eight million of which are imported laborers who make about four to six hundred SR a month, about one hundred to one hundred and fifty USD for their seven day a week work, including personal drivers who live in closet sized rooms next to the family's gate or carport, grocery store workers, restaurant employees, and construction workers who toil in the one hundred and twenty-five degree summer days. As contrast, I make that amount in a day in my air conditioned office and classroom and I get four months of paid vacation a year, including the hot months of the summer.

At the heart of the Saudi state is the union of the al Sa'ud, the royal family, as KSA is a non-constitutional monarchy with no elected governmental members capable of creating or enforcing any legislation, and the strict, fundamental form of Islam known as Wahabism. In 1744 Muhammad ibn Sa'ud, ancestor of Ibn Sa'ud, formed a pact with the religious imam Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahab in the al Sa'ud home village centered around a handful of date groves, Ad Dir'iyyah, in the area in the center of the peninsula called Najd, in 1744. Having been thwarted time and again to co-opt the region's bedu tribes to recognIze his suzerainty over them, he decided that by giving sanctuary to al-Wahab, who had been driven from his own village due to the severity of the proselytization of his fiery brand of a no nonsense, stripped down interpretation of the Q'uran, he would be in a better position to pursue his goals of conquest.

The practical, desired affect of the union between the two men worked. The Wahabist creed forbade music, gravestones (as they became places where people paid devotion to ancestors or saints, thus breaking the Wahabi notion of worshipping only one god, Allah), and any form of bid'a, innovation, modernization, heresy. The religious warriors, the zealous followers of al Wahab, became known as the ikwhan, the brotherhood, and they ferociously augmented al Sa'ud's tribal militia members, raising the game to a whole new level of effectiveness. Thus enhanced, the combined might of the sword and the book succeeded in bringing under control the majority of Najd, and laid the foundation for the first Saudi kingdom, which existed as such from 1744 to 1818. Taxes were placed upon the subjugated, money which was dispersed amongst the tribal leaders of the various clans now hierarchically subservient to al Sa'ud for purposes of allegiance and fealty. This practice, akin to a welfare state, is the basic dynamic which exists in KSA today.

During this time Muhammed Ibn Sa'ud and his raiders subdued the religious minority Sh'ia and others whose popular forms of worship differed from the ascetic, male dominated practices of the Wahabists, leading them into the Hijaz region, the most prosperous of the four main regions on the peninsula, the north western part of the peninsula including the greater part of the Red Sea coast. Here they came against the Banu Hashim, the Hasemites, the people whose lineage became the modern heads of state for both Jordan and Syria after being forced out of their native Hijaz AT&T he end of World War One. This first attempt at conquering Arabia ended decisively upon the incursions of the Ottoman Turks in 1818.

One of the inescapable facts of the culture here is how much safer and less threatening it is than living in the United States. Not even close. This is not the slanted cognitive dissonance of some neo-liberal people of color apologist talking. The is both subjective perception and objective fact. I have not seen a police car or officer since my arrival here two weeks ago. The security personnel on campus do not carry guns. The only guns I have seen are mounted around the US Consulate, located on the edge of the KFUPM campus. This country has an incredibly disproportionate number of deaths by automobile, but gunshot victims, murder victims, do not seem to happen. They are not in the newspaper for sure and people who have worked and lived  in this country for two plus decades don't tell of any violent crimes that they know of, nor does anyone here speak of young toughs in the city streets or muggings, or home invasions. If you leave your knapsack on the park bench it s almost certainly still there when you do remember to come back and look for it.

Certainly I have felt no animosity or threat of any knd when I have walked for miles in the urban areas of Dhahran  or Al Khobar. Having spoken about this topic with other Amercans that have lived in other parts of KSA before moving here, I have only heard of how safe they feel, more so than living, specifically, in Seattle. No, the constant portrayal in the Western media of the Muslim hatred of the "freedom loving" Americans is a public relations firms campaign, nothing more. Having worked with foreign students in the US, I can tell you many, many specific stories of ethic based harassment that have been perpetrated upon quite a number of my past students in Ellensburg. In Ellensburg, yes. Our government, for example spent ten million tax dollars to hire a PR firm to create a campaign during the latter Bush presidency to convince Amercans that, as George W. said, "If you quit using drugs, you help fight the war on terror." Think about it. As though the Other, the Muslims, are drug dealing and yet we all know that most all of the illegal drugs in the US come either from south of the US border,  in the Americas, or from inside of the border itself.

Another article in the book mentioned in this blog's beginning quote looks specifically at the use of sound in film to negatively portray persons of Middle Eastern descent. The muezzin, the prayer call, now features prominently in films and television programs to symbolize jihadist, terrorist attacks or evil deeds or persons. The prayer call of an entire religion spanning the globe, followed and practiced by the better part of two billion inhabitants of this planet. Imagine the reverse, a Christian hymn used to signify bombings, random terrorist attacks, etc., when, to the best of my ability to recall, never has the muezzin been broadcast before any well known, or otherwise, terrorist event.

One of the historical, geographical advantages of the United States is its location, separated from the other great powers by oceans, great bodies of water that effectively form moats. Strategically, at least in any military sense, it is an undeniable blessing. In other, cultural, metaphorical aspects, however, this great distance, this isolation, has allowed for an insular drift. Like an only child of a wealthy family reared in a secluded manor house,a tended by a staff of servants, grown accustomed to hearing only "yes" and receiving any toy or any delight that he may wish. Just so the collective American mind has no learned to play properly with others, has not evolved to take and to hold only what it needs and to respect the rights and the wishes of the other boys in the neighborhood. The kind of nation that, when it doesn't get its way or when it wants some coveted item that another boy may have, goes running to its mommy telling lies to manipulate the situation in order to have its way. The child who "tells" mommy that the other boy hit him, pushed him down, only to get that boy in trouble, to show that boy the power that he has, to ensure that next time the boy should just hand over the shiny toy. And so we as a nation perpetuate cultural myths of the Other, the wetback coming to steal our jobs and our cars, the towel heads wearing suicide vests coming to take over our taxis and convenience stores, the slants coming to snap photos and take over our math and science jobs and our slots at prestigious universities. And there will be readers who will say, ok, but those statements are true. They will take our jobs, our slots in god schools. To which I respond, of course they will, because we either don't want them, the restaurant jobs, the taxi driving jobs, the lawn care jobs, the owning of a mini-mart, or because we fail any longer to have the drive or ambition to work hard enough to earn those spots in school. Grow up, get out a little, mix with others and leave your preconceived and, frankly, petulant, belief structures at home.

A nation proud of its pluralism, its cultural heritage? A melting pot. A salad. A fortress on a hill. I read some time back the Facebook posting of a mother from my home community remarking how beautiful it was that after a recent high school football game the boys from the victorious side, our side, joined together with the youths from the other team to have a prayer session together on the field. It struck me that even given our country's founding on religious freedom and pluralism, she would not have been quite so teary eyed, so gosh bless this country, if six of the football players, the Muslim ones, held their own prayer session in the other end zone, prostrated, kneeling, and pointing east towards Mecca.