Since I was raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition, I had a firm historical grounding when I taught my Hebrew Bible course last year. However, I have no such grounding for Islam. The history of the Middle East was not taught in my school, as we focused more on US history, even in World History class, where the entire subject matter revolved around what had affected us directly. When I was in school, the Ayatollah Khomeini was considered a grave threat to the US, and so Donald Rumsfeld and his buddies were stockpiling weapons for Sadaam Hussein. But of course, we didn't know that then.
I wasn't old enough then to keep up with the news, so my memories of that time are cloudy. I remember the hostage crisis that drove Carter out of office, and I remember the day that the hostages were released. I remember long lines at the gas pumps, and I have vague images of Muslim clerics all in black (always shouting, when they were on the news) and Iranians burning American flags in crowded streets. When I look back on those memories now, they make more rational sense, but in my pre-adolescent mind at the time, I saw the Muslim world the way that Bush & Co. want us to see it now. I wondered why they were so angry, why they hated us so much, and what terrible things they were going to do to my family and friends. Muslims weren't really humans to me then - they were a kind of monster, more scary than anything that lived under the bed.
Amazingly - though I have to believe I was not alone in this nightmarish vision of the Islamic world - this was never counteracted in any way. There were no Muslims in my small town, and whenever the issue emerged in class, the mousy teachers were invariably drowned out by vocal students repeating what their Confederate-flag-waving daddies had to say on the subject. While I am proud to be a Southerner in many respects, those daddies don't typically present a balanced point of view.
The next significant experience I had with Islam came during the first Gulf War. I was at boarding school then, and had immersed myself in enough literature by that time to become a pacifist. When the war broke out, I still didn't know anything about Islam, and I wasn't aware that Sadaam was so powerful because we had made him that way, but I firmly believed that war was always wrong. I had just seen the Berlin Wall come down without a shot fired, and I had cried with the rest of the world when the students in Tiananmen Square were mowed down so cruelly. I had arrived at the naive but necessary stage where I believed all conflicts could be resolved through compromise - and I was entirely uncompromising on that point.
So when the reports of the war came on - right at prime time each night - I watched, horrified, as atrocities were presented like video games. You have to remember that this was the first time that a war had been presented with theme music and graphics, and the reports of each day's bombing filled our common room with whoops and hollers, like a football game or a wrestling match. I sat in the back corner, with my black armband, the butt of many jokes to which I could not intelligently reply, since I still knew nothing about what was really going on. (Of course, I have since learned that intelligent replies don't work either.)
All I knew was that the war had to be about oil - not human rights, as advertised - since the US did nothing about Tiananmen Square or Tibet, and that it was wrong to say that only 147 people died in battle, because no one mentioned the 20,000 Iraqis who died. The sanitizing of the war offended me, as it still does today, and the theme music and graphics and WWE mentality horrified me. [I've included a side note about this at the end of this post.]
9/11 brought Islam to the attention of everyone in the US, but still in that nightmarish form based entirely on fear and anger. The black robes of the Ayatollah were now the dingy camos of Osama bin Laden, but the perception was much the same. There were very vivid faces of Islam all over the news (and the Most Wanted Playing Cards you could pick up at the local bait shop), but there was still no heart. And finally, I realized that if I was going to find the heart of Islam, I was going to have to search for it myself.
***
Side Note: Gulf War Theme Music
This quote from Peter Fish, who composes music for CBS, is particularly striking, and came from Harper's Magazine.
I wasn't old enough then to keep up with the news, so my memories of that time are cloudy. I remember the hostage crisis that drove Carter out of office, and I remember the day that the hostages were released. I remember long lines at the gas pumps, and I have vague images of Muslim clerics all in black (always shouting, when they were on the news) and Iranians burning American flags in crowded streets. When I look back on those memories now, they make more rational sense, but in my pre-adolescent mind at the time, I saw the Muslim world the way that Bush & Co. want us to see it now. I wondered why they were so angry, why they hated us so much, and what terrible things they were going to do to my family and friends. Muslims weren't really humans to me then - they were a kind of monster, more scary than anything that lived under the bed.
Amazingly - though I have to believe I was not alone in this nightmarish vision of the Islamic world - this was never counteracted in any way. There were no Muslims in my small town, and whenever the issue emerged in class, the mousy teachers were invariably drowned out by vocal students repeating what their Confederate-flag-waving daddies had to say on the subject. While I am proud to be a Southerner in many respects, those daddies don't typically present a balanced point of view.
The next significant experience I had with Islam came during the first Gulf War. I was at boarding school then, and had immersed myself in enough literature by that time to become a pacifist. When the war broke out, I still didn't know anything about Islam, and I wasn't aware that Sadaam was so powerful because we had made him that way, but I firmly believed that war was always wrong. I had just seen the Berlin Wall come down without a shot fired, and I had cried with the rest of the world when the students in Tiananmen Square were mowed down so cruelly. I had arrived at the naive but necessary stage where I believed all conflicts could be resolved through compromise - and I was entirely uncompromising on that point.
So when the reports of the war came on - right at prime time each night - I watched, horrified, as atrocities were presented like video games. You have to remember that this was the first time that a war had been presented with theme music and graphics, and the reports of each day's bombing filled our common room with whoops and hollers, like a football game or a wrestling match. I sat in the back corner, with my black armband, the butt of many jokes to which I could not intelligently reply, since I still knew nothing about what was really going on. (Of course, I have since learned that intelligent replies don't work either.)
All I knew was that the war had to be about oil - not human rights, as advertised - since the US did nothing about Tiananmen Square or Tibet, and that it was wrong to say that only 147 people died in battle, because no one mentioned the 20,000 Iraqis who died. The sanitizing of the war offended me, as it still does today, and the theme music and graphics and WWE mentality horrified me. [I've included a side note about this at the end of this post.]
9/11 brought Islam to the attention of everyone in the US, but still in that nightmarish form based entirely on fear and anger. The black robes of the Ayatollah were now the dingy camos of Osama bin Laden, but the perception was much the same. There were very vivid faces of Islam all over the news (and the Most Wanted Playing Cards you could pick up at the local bait shop), but there was still no heart. And finally, I realized that if I was going to find the heart of Islam, I was going to have to search for it myself.
***
Side Note: Gulf War Theme Music
This quote from Peter Fish, who composes music for CBS, is particularly striking, and came from Harper's Magazine.
The creative brief in the first Gulf War had more to do with the conflict of cultures and ideologies—it was the Islamic or Arabic East versus the West, and so the conflict was set in those tones. The second time it was more like they were trying to promote the war the same way they would promote Terminator 3—it was like “Battle of the Megaheroes.” So the first time what I delivered was vaguely militaristic and vaguely Arabic simultaneously. And the second time it was just Techno-Ali vs. Frazier-IV, we're-going-to-knock-the-crap-out-of-them music.
—Peter Fish
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