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Written By: Mona Sarkis *
Article Date: May 7, 2008 - 4:24:31 AM
Georges Corm is convinced that as long as the West pursues double moral standards and applies international law unequally, its attempts to establish dialogue with the Muslim world cannot be taken seriously. Mona Sarkis, a freelance journalist, spoke to the social scientist and former Lebanese finance minister:
Question: Mr. Corm, in your most recent book, “Histoire du Moyen Orient” (History of the Middle East) you devote a lot of attention to what you refer to as the geographic “arabesque” that historically characterizes the Middle East, by which you mean the present Arab territories, the Mashriq, Turkey, and Iran. Why devote so much space to this concept?
Georges Corm: Because talk of “Muslim society” – as if it were one unified ethnic or national body – is out of touch with reality and I just wanted to show the diversity that has existed at the geographical level since ancient times. Persians, Turks and Arabs are not a homogenous group that is held together by religion. It is absurd to view Moroccan and Iranian society as one and the same. This presupposes that Islam is a living, unified being that exists in a precisely defined territory.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, authors like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington have done their best to make the world believe in the existence of mega identity blocks such as “Islam” and “the West” – and unfortunately their efforts have been quite successful – but that is precisely the reason why reality must be quoted again and again.
In fact, Islam is – as scholars of the caliber of Michael Hodgson, Jacques Berque, Maxime Rodinson, or Ernest Gellner have demonstrated – only one aspect of the development of what is referred to as “Muslim societies.” The fact that numerous potentates exploit it in order to preserve their power is not the fault of the religion.
Among these potentates I not only count dictators or emblematic Muslim fundamentalist leaders, but also the successive governments of the United States. In the final stages of the Cold War, a young generation of radical Arab Marxists made the United States worry that the resource-rich region might fall under Soviet control. To prevent this, they encouraged the political Islamic activists, thereby setting in motion a dynamic development that can no longer be stopped.
Q: Yet you disagree with the concept of “re-Islamicization”...
Corm: Because it underpins the notion that Islam is a monolithic block. Until the 1960s, Iraq, Egypt and Syria all promoted secular nationalism, but they failed altogether with the collapse of pan-Arabism. Pan-Arabism was then replaced by varieties of pan-Islamism that were not uniform, but were shaped by either Shiism or Sunnism. The difference between the two was responsible for the devastating eight-year war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s.
This in itself reveals the limitations of Huntington’s concept of a “civilization” as a coherent political and military unit. Nevertheless, the West continues to address the “Muslim region” with this concept. The United States, for example, classifies Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea as the “axis of evil” despite the radical differences between these very different countries, political regimes, and cultures.
* Mona Sarkis is a freelance writer based in Berlin. Georges Corm is former Lebanese finance minister and the author of, “Histoire du Moyen Orient” (History of the Middle East). This abridged article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews). The full article can be found at www.qantara.de.