The Pathologisation of Muslims As Everything That is Wrong With Europe

A long extract by someone named Fess: I’m sure Farish didn’t intend to open up a debate about the middle east and all that entails, and I’ve certainly avoided that subject thus far, but as Ida brings it up, ostensibly to have a, all too predictable poke at the jews, I consider myself granted license to respond. Take this particulal nugget: “If the word muslims were to be replaced with jews (note the lower cases), the Press Complains Comission will be very busy.”

If if if if. Well if Jews were blowing up buses and underground stations, flying planes into skyscrapers, butchering fellow soldiers etc etc then I think it’s accurate to say that the press would report such stories with as much, if not more, gusto as they do the bad news Muslim stories. Stop shooting the messenger.

If British Muslims don’t want the press to cover such stories then the best advice I can give them is to bring about the level of change in their communities necessary to deny the oxygen which allows such extremism to flourish.

Jews don’t get this sort of press in Europe because there doesn’t exist any pattern of Jews behaving like this in Europe. If Muslims are so affronted by the press coverage then the rational advice anyone would offer them is to, and I know this is a real choker, do as the Jews do, which is to say do as practically every other religion and ethnicity does. Be citizens, identify yourself with the country you live in, WITHOUT QUALIFICATION, educate your children to accept as equals, again without qualification, their classmates and other kids in the neighborhood and allow happen what happens to every other community which migrates to a new land, BECOME PART OF IT!!! Ida Bakar, another thing the US is a republic with strict constitutional separation between church and state. It isn’t a “christian country” it is a republic where the majority of the population are christian.

As regards Gaza I think that is another front and although I’m greatly tempted to take you on about that I’ll restrict my response to this: why no mention of the HAMAS rockets which targeted Israeli civilians exclusively? Why no mention of the fact that civilian martyrdom is both a tactic and a goal of the Palestinian leadership? I don’t want to clog up this blog with link the the relevant footage, go look for yourself, but this is am incontrovertible fact! To paraphrase Golda Meir: The Israel Palestinian issue will be solved easily once Palestinian parents learn to love their children more than they hate the jews.

Ida conveniently mentions US interventions in Irag and Afghanistan but avoids the more troublesome US involvement in Bosnia. Troublesome for Ida because there was no motivation other than to save the Bosnian Muslims from the Serbians which goes a long way towards scuppering the notion that these represent christian wars against Muslims.

I note also that Ida states that Muslims contribute large number of doctors to the British Health Service. Do these Muslims arrive in the UK with their skills honed and offer their services? No, they don’t. The Muslims in question, and quite righty too, take advantage of an educational system which is open to all. It doesn’t, as is done in Malaysia to the non Malay (read non muslim) minorities, set a higher bar for Muslims to vault than it does for others. Doesn’t this reveal a somewhat level playing field rather than expose some plot to hold the Muslims back? Which takes me to another point of Farish’s which really does need taking on, head on:

“I sadly note that in all the years that I taught in Europe, I did not have a single Arab-Muslim student to supervise at Masters or Phd level. The stereotype has become a self-fulfilling prophesy.” says Farish. Indeed.

Well Farish, is the situation really as you seek to imply? It seems you’re rather having your cake and eating it too. You offer nothing to back up the conclusion you’ve drawn, and shared publicly here, other than the conclusion itself plus some dark hints at European racism. Why not offer something more than that? If you really believe that Arabs find themselves educationally discriminated against by European academic institutions, or European societies in general and given that your own academic achievements are, virtually without exception, European, by now, you must have a storehouse full of examples of this discrimination. Yet you offer nothing save your observation that you’ve “yet to have a single Arab-Muslim student to supervise at Masters or Phd level.” Do you really expect anyone, except perhaps your students, to treat such a comment seriously? To draw the conclusion you seek to proffer?

There are myriad alternative conclusions to draw from the rather impoverished data you offer. I’ll offer a couple, they might be right or they might be wrong, likely they’re part of a causal matrix of contributing factors, but at least they offer a more enriched set of explanations, or part explanations, than does your own, rather pat, hand crafted one.

1) Arab parents are less interested in rather abstract fields like your own and prefer their children to acquire more traditional professional qualifications such as (thanks Ida Bakar for reminding me) Medicine or Engineering. As a Dubliner this makes sense to me given the amount of Arabs enrolled in the Dublin Royal College of Surgeons. It’s possible there are a large, rather hidden, population of Arab students in UCD’s or Trinity College’s humanities departments but I’ve yet to hear of it.

2) The amount of book titles translated into Arabic, on an annual basis, is known to be notoriously low. The accounts I’ve read, and I admit I can’t rule out completely a degree of exaggeration being used, is that there are more books translated into Spanish on an annual basis than have been translated into Arabic in the last hundred years or more. I don’t know, and I won’t pretend otherwise, why this should be the case but I do know that this isn’t the fault of Europeans or Americans. (Farish, would you care to step up to the plate on this one? It seems you’re not interested, or are perhaps otherwise occupied, in engaging in the hand to hand combat of the comments section but perhaps you might like to take this one on in a future article.)

Whatever the explanation it hasn’t stopped Farish from completing a BA in Philosophy & Literature at the University of Sussex in 1989, before studying for an MA in Philosophy at the same University (University of Sussex) in 1990, then an MA in South-East Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, before completing his PhD at the University of Essex in 1997 in the field of governance and politics. Notice something here? Notice a pattern? I do and it’s not a pattern which supports any argument which advances Farish’s thesis: “The Pathologisation of Muslims As Everything That is Wrong With Europe”

Maybe we should be debating the Muslim world’s, apparent, hostility towards the humanities (this is quite overt in Iran at the moment where the regime are threatening to shut down the humanities departments within their Universities completely). Why don’t we have a chat about that? I don’t know but my best guess is that such discourse offers Farish scant opportunity to imply that the Europe which educated him, and which equipped him with his formidable rhetorical tools, is run by a pack of racists and bigots.

I know that Farish’s point was specifically made about Arabs. However I believe that having made it he could perhaps do this Arab demographic a great service by explaining how he managed to thrive in such academic environments. Maybe Farish was obstructed at every step he took. maybe his story is one of heroic triumph over adversity. A Muslim in a rather hostile “abroad.” If that’s so, I’m sure I speak for all his readers when I say, this then is a story we want to hear about. Then again maybe he didn’t. Maybe his actual experience offers little by way of supporting narrative of racism in European educational institutions. Indeed maybe he found himself in vibrant and ecumenical educational environments where all you had to bring to succeed was your intelligence and a capacity for hard work.

In any case Farish dropped a rather big accusation disguised as a casual observation. So casual that perhaps it seems rather unsporting of me to treat it so seriously. I’m sorry if that’s the impression but with so many other, and I contend, more compelling explanations than Farish’s preferred one I think he should be glad of any invitation to support his own contention.