Book review: Whose World Is It Anyway? The Fallacy of Islamophobia

[Jacaylbaro]

Written by: Shamis Hussein

 

Reviewed by: Bashir Goth

 

 

Given the deluge of writings prompted by the war on terrorism or the Clash of Civilizations as some may like to believe, I could have easily dismissed the above title as another cliché of one of the countless hordes of Muslim apologetics and Al-Qaeda sympathizers who see light in every crime committed by Muslim extremists and evil intention in every action that comes from the West.

 

But one thing that enticed me to flip through the pages of the book before I even committed myself to seriously reading it let alone reviewing it was the author’s name: Shamis Hussein, a Somali woman’s name. It is therefore the idea of a Somali woman taking on the neo-conservative heavyweight thinkers and modern scholarly connoisseurs such as Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer to mention only a few that raised my curiosity.

 

Another catching point was the author’s claim of objectivity in an innovative way by describing herself as being a daughter of a judge imbued with an egalitarian background and a strong sense of law and justice. Equally appealing also was the way she set the tone for her ensuing argument with a classical Somali poem that vividly describes the disastrous results of arrogance, which in the author’s eyes is symbolized by Bush-Blair alliance against the Muslim world.

 

“Oh men, pride brings disaster; let that be remembered,” says the poem, ending with a resounding prophesy:

“…Watch silently, Muslims, and see how those who prosper lose their souls.”

 

The fact that she described her work as a modest contribution of a“ Female, Somali, Muslim, African, Arab affiliated and British citizen,” in that order with her British citizenship coming at the end, did not escape my attention as well.

 

Shamis opens her arguments with a premises that all wars in the 21st century must have been presumably fought in search of justice and equality, but she quickly asserts that “…each age presents its strata of domination…”, leading to wars ending up in economic and cultural domination, citing colonialism as an example and affirming Africa’s poverty as a legacy of such policy of domination. She claims that the sense of justice for all, responsibility, equality and the sharing of world resources that are the soul of free market economy have been torpedoed by an urge for subjugation of the weak by the powerful through their exclusive clubs such as the IMF, the World Bank and others.

 

In her attempt to refute what she calls “The Fallacy of Islamophopia”, Shamis presents a panoramic view of recent and distant history of the Islamic civilization and sheds light on the West’s historical quest to rob and confiscate Muslim culture and wealth. In current history she puts Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia and other hotspots as part of the West’s old war of domination and struggle for supremacy against the Muslim world.

 

She argues that bringing Islam into the equation and launching wars to stem out the threat of Islamic fundamentalism against Western civilization was nothing but a façade aimed at glossing over the centuries-old monopolistic objectives of the West against the Muslim world.

 

Shamis showcases the closure of the Somali Barakat Hawala (money transfer company) after 9/11 despite the USA’s failure to provide evidence on the company’s involvement in financing terrorism, as a classic example of an imperialistic policy of eliminating the rivalry of a successful Muslim money transfer company against the Western Union, questioning, “…what makes someone’s financial bodies legitimate and others’ illegitimate.”

 

On Iraq, she advances the idea of what she calls Bush-Blair war was purely to plunder Iraqi’s oil and cultural wealth. She quotes Blair as saying, “…why we must never abandon this historic struggle in Iraq…the wealth of that potentially rich country, their wealth, their oil.” She also quotes Wolfowitz: “…let us look it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically we just had no choice in Iraq. The country is swimming in oil.”

 

In Palestine, Shamis accuses Israel of coaching Western countries by denigrating the Palestinian struggle for liberation as “…a threat to democracy and against western values.”

 

She claims that the Jews had enjoyed their full rights during the heydays of the Islamic civilization after centuries of Greek and Roman persecution. “…You have the old undercurrent of the original anti-Semitism still lingering in those European countries,” she reminds the Jews.

 

She cites that in Andalusia Jews had the rights to practice their religion and had high-ranking political representations. “…Indeed Judaism and its Hebrew language developed their ‘golden age’ under aegis of Islam. Hebrew acquired its first grammar, the Torah its jurisprudence…” She therefore tacitly accuses Israel of using Islamic fundamentalism card as a deception to garner Western sympathy, describing it as “…hasha geela cunta ee haddana cabaada (The she camel that bites camels yet screams for help). She cites Christian figures within the Palestinian struggle to support her argument of Islam not being part of the Palestinian liberation agenda, concluding, “…Therefore, what is most disturbing is not only to disguise the Palestinian plight as Islamic Jihadist, but also to lump it with the new war of terrorism and the Al Qaeda mystic, of the post cold war phenomenon.”

 

Under this context, Shamis conveniently ignores Islamist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad who are bent on destroying the state of Israel on religious grounds.

 

Shamis devotes the chapter “Who Civilized Whom?” to disprove Bush-Blair’s hackneyed string of justifications of protecting western values against the barbaric forces of Islamic fundamentalism. She makes a sweeping survey of the ancient and Islamic civilizations of the Middle East to show how the region always led the whole world in cultural civilization and tolerance. Apart from the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, Babylonians and the Assyrians, Shamis demonstrates the cultural, architectural and commercial wonders built by the enlightened Islam of the Abbasid and Ummayad Dynasties, the Fatimids, the grand Mamlukes and the Ottoman Empire.

 

Comparing Islam’s cultural superiority, peaceful co-existence, accommodation of other faiths such as Judaism and Christianity during its heydays with current western arrogance and confrontational policies on the basis of religion, Shamis presents one of her strongest arguments by accusing the west of cultural exhaustion and backwardness contrary to their bravado about superior values:

 

“…the revisionism of religious battles of old, within or between faiths, is displaying an exhaustion of modernity and a reversal of civilization; a civilization based on combustion and continuity, in which no group has the monopoly of righteous claim for its totality. It is a dangerous venture of backwardness to evoke religious paradigms and faith-based confrontations in the twenty-first century.

 

“To pick up Islam as the new enemy in the place of then Warsaw Pact is a rather obscure venture, partly because there is no Islamic empire to overthrow, as was the case during the Ottoman reign,” she writes.

 

She even lashes at what she believes is the western media’s lopsided freedom of press that only serves to fuel existing cultural prejudices, “…paradoxically, when some of the western media air programmes that criticize both Arabs and other ethnic communities, those acts are to be seen as freedom of press but, when it is from the other side of the fence, it is propagated as hate incitement and threat to the ‘national security’”.

 

In her defense of Islam’s treatment of women, Shamis falls into the same conventional trap of name-calling and accusing critics of lacking sufficient knowledge of Islam by subscribing to the conventional conspiracy theories.

 

“To suggest that Islam is a religion that oppresses women is either lacking knowledge of Islam or in a position of ultra motives or selective bias against Islam or all three,” She laments.

 

In wrapping up her polemic, Shamis extends her unequivocal support for Islamic militancy or terrorism, depending on one’s interpretation of the issue, by asserting that it was historically urban terrorism and guerrilla warfare that eventually defeated colonialism and that neo-imperialism would not be any different.

 

She also accuses Israel of trying to do to the Palestinians what the Christian Byzantium and Hitler did to the Jews, “…no nation can be easily extinguished,” she warns them.

 

Shamis equally derides the Americans that “…the hanging of Saddam Hussein echoes when the crusades use to return with the heads of Turks,” reminding the readers of Bush’s “…crusade war” gaffe.

 

In general, one gets the feeling that despite the complex issues that it attempts to cover; the book lacks a central theme and a coherent voice and style. The different chapters do not have a common thread and appear as a patchwork of opinion pieces or impressions written in a hurry and propped up with sketchy research and one-sided anecdotal quotations. Although it fails to live up to its weighty and provocative title, the book provides useful albeit scattered and unrelated historical facts to the patient reader. The author also deserves admiration for her ambition and conscientious intellectual awareness of the ongoing cultural debate.

 

 

By Bashir Goth.

[FatB]

lol truly i think i only understood half of that entire piece....

[Jacaylbaro]

better than nothing ,,,,,,,

[Fabregas]

nothing new in her views, same old, same old........

Islam is peace and better than the Western system, ppl are getting tired of that mantra!