Black soldiers are a particular target. "To have Negroes occupying us is a particular humiliation," Abu Mujahed said, echoing the profound racism prevalent in much of the Middle East. "Sometimes we aborted a mission because there were no Negroes."Sounds plausible to me. In law school, I became friends with an LLM student who was about 40 years old, and who was a Sudanese Christian. He had lived for several years in Saudi Arabia before emigrating to America. He said that out of 7 years in America, he could think of 2 or 3 incidents where he thought that someone he met had a racist attitude, but that he had experienced that many incidents every day in Saudi Arabia. The way he described it was this (a close paraphrase from memory): "In Saudi Arabia, they didn't like me because I am African, but they just barely tolerated me as long as they thought that I was Muslim. But when anyone found out that I was a Christian, I was lower than dirt."
Sunday, September 19, 2004
"Negroes" in the Middle East
Via Avery Tooley, comes this quote from a South African paper's interview with an Iraqi insurgent:
Wowwww. There are some dynamics at play that we just don't know about. Thanks for the heads-up.
ReplyDeleteDid you read what my Sudanese friend said in comparing his treatment in Saudi Arabia to his treatment in America? It's not really possible to turn that kind of statement around.
ReplyDeleteBijan, I don't think you have the American attitude to Arabian folklore (genii, flying carpets, Ali Baba, Aladdin) quite right. Don't you understand that the West uses these things (yes, even humorously) to amuse and enchant itself because they are magical tales out of a distant place? The place itself doesn't matter; but the Arabian Nights (or, more properly, the Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night) fixed Arabia in the Western imagination as a place full of magic and marvel, and so it remains.
ReplyDeleteJorge Luis Borges wrote a marvelous little essay on the Western translations of the Nights, the first of which appeared in the eighteenth century and had a very substantial impact on Western art and literature from then on. ("Ali Baba" and "Aladdin" don't belong to the original, but I gather they got thrown in with Burton's amazing edition and have been popular ever since.)
Michelle Dulak Thomson