As I’ve written in “On Pain,” I’m struggling with some health issues and taking some time to finish large projects. I’m also trying to get some much-needed rest and understand how to adjust my work schedule to the constant and unpredictable bouts of pain, so I won’t be writing as many longer essays for a couple of months. However, I will be producing slightly bloggier works, where I quickly expand on a thought or an idea inspired by current events. This is one of them.
The internet is buzzing with a clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. making bigoted comments about Arabs and Arab Americans that included these words: “There’s five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.” The Secretary of Health and Human Services made his remarks during a campaign stop in support of U.S Senate candidate Mike Rogers (R-MI), running in a close race against Dr. Abdul El-Sayed who, if he wins, will become the first Muslim and first Egyptian-American Senator. As we might expect of such a race in the United States, Republicans have been unashamedly blatant in their Islamaphobia. At one point, Republican Senator John Kennedy (LA), campaigning for Rogers, claimed that El-Sayed “sleeps in a Bin Laden jersey,” apparently unbothered by the possibility that people might wonder how he knew. Rogers only laughed along. Given his religion, it was always inevitable that El-Sayed would be dogged by such rank prejudice and, to his credit, he has been expert and suave in responding.
Not unexpectedly, Kennedy is being called out for his extreme prejudice and for being just plain wrong. Reactions include lists of contemporary Arab writers, scientists, and mathematicians, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has demanded that Kennedy resign immediately, stating that “Anyone who holds such blatant contempt for an entire ethnicity has no business leading a federal agency meant to serve all Americans.”
In the current climate, it makes sense to issue such responses and to state the facts about Arab accomplishments. There is, however, a more pressing problem: Kennedy’s critics end up reinforcing the same kinds of prejudice they claim to be against. Responding with counterpoints about the historical brilliance of Arab culture may be necessary, but what is the end result? To put this differently: what if RFK Jr. were right?
In RFK Jr’s seemingly quite febrile mind, worn down by years of cocaine-sniffing and various disorders that include a worm in his brain, the “Arab” is at best a nebulous concept. For him and too many others, “Arabs” are little more than a threatening mass of dark potential overlords poised to steal and rape white women and install an even more ill-understood idea, “Sharia Law,” in corridors of power. As he sees it, “Arabs” are uncivilised creatures who live in caves, barely able to read and write, perhaps surviving on the most basic grains and plants they might grow.
What if all that were true? What if there had never been an Ibn Battuta, or Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, or an Assia Djebar or a Nawal El-Sadawi? What if Arabs had produced no culture or literature at all and did in fact live in caves without any technology? Would that justify the annihilation of a people and their culture?
Recall that Arabs and those identified as being similar to them have long faced threats of being bombed “back to the stone age,” as deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage is supposed to have said to Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharaff in 2001. In the contemporary Western imaginary, the Arab can never occupy modernity and is always only a threat to it. In a tight political race and during these fraught times when politicians feel free to be openly, nakedly prejudicial and phobic in their statements, counterpoints might seem like the only option, but we have to develop different ways of tackling the problem of dangerous and racist speech. The response to comments like those made by RFK Jr. should simply be, “What if they were? What, exactly, are you implying?”
We can list every single accomplishment of the “Arab world” and the effort might take years in the telling, certainly, but to engage in this exercise is to implicitly — perhaps, really, explicitly — to state that those who cannot lay claim to what some consider civilisation can in fact be annihilated because, after all, the logic goes, they are of no value to anyone. Defending and listing the many contributions of the Arab world is easy. The hard question is: If it were true that Arabs have no civilisation, could we simply bomb them with impunity?
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. I make a point of citing people and publications all the time: it’s not that hard to mention me in your work, and to refuse to do so and simply assimilate my work is plagiarism. You don’t have to agree with me to cite me properly; be an ethical grownup, and don’t make excuses for your plagiarism. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
