Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World by Fatima Mernissi, Mary Jo Lakeland Page B

The only idea they had of Germany was of a rich country where the strength of the deutsche mark caused the people to seek pleasure rather than brood over the fate of the poor. And suddenly here they saw them, animated by a feeling so familiar, so visceral, so fundamental, the yearning for justice and freedom that they thought to be solely the preoccupation of the excluded: “Allah! The Germans feel just like us. They love their poorer brothers and are freeing them,” c Ali, a merchant in the Suq al-Sabat, the shoe market in the Rabat me- dina, kept exclaiming. 2 He bought a black-and-white television set for his shop three days after the fall of the wall: “Just in order to see the world, Ustada [professor], just to see.” The West that we believed to be anesthetized by its luxury and libertinism opened up to emotions forgotten since the humanizing wave of 1968. An unforeseen Europe flashed onto Arab television screens: “ Kafir [infidel] and humanist. Allah is great,” murmured c Ali, one eye on his shoes, the other on the screen.
    In the days following the crumbling of Berlin’s hijab, just before the bombing of Baghdad, Europeans emerged for the Arab masses as promoters of the democratic credo, which would solve the problem of violence and reduce its use. And then the powerful wave of universal hope raised by the Europeans’ song to freedom and the promise to condemn violence was rudely and brutally dashed by this war. It was a war in which the nonplussed Arab masses witnessed in a few months, like some bad twist in a tale in the Arabian Nights, the putting to sleep of those humanistic European youths who had been singing of nonviolence. What they saw on their television screens was the appearance of another breed they had forgotten about: old generals with kepis and medals just like those of the colonial army, generals who enumerated with pride the tons of bombs they had dropped on Baghdad. Two weeks after the beginning of the bombing, c Ali sold his black-and-white television set and gave the money to the Moroccan Red Crescent to buy medical supplies for Iraq: “I don’t understand anything, Ustada. This is a matter between the big shots. They just have to settle it between themselves. The shoe merchants of Baghdad are not in it. Why bomb the people? Can you imagine what would happen if they dropped a bomb on the Suq al-Sabat? A mere firecracker would send the whole medina up in flames! I am forty-six years old. The last time I saw a kepi on a French general I was ten years old. It was in 1955, on the eve of independence. But the Americans with their machines—it’s like in the movies! Except that—God help us—it is our brothers who are the target. I have nightmares. My wife forbids me to look at the TV.”
    Violation is obscene. But violation, just after having flaunted before the eyes of the victim the hope of a new era in which violence would have no place, is more cruel than anything the human mind can describe. It is this ambivalence of the Europeans toward violence which has created confusion in people’s minds (I am speaking in ethnic terms, for the Gulf War has thrown discussion back to the most archaic level, that of two tribes who camp on the two shores of the Mediterranean). I have never felt my colleagues in the North so frozen in their Europeanness and I so frozen in my Arabism, each so archaic in our irreducible difference, as during my trip to Germany and France during the war to participate in discussions that were supposed to establish a dialogue, but that in fact established nothing but our pitiful inability to breach the boundary between us, to see the other in all his or her difference without letting that difference threaten and frighten. For as long as difference is frightening, boundaries will be the law.
    I was born in a harem, and I instinctively understood very young that behind every boundary something terrifying is hiding. It is fear, or rather fears, that I want to speak about