- Welcome, morning all.
Thank you for braving the exceedingly odd
and cold weather to get here.
We are especially delighted that our guest today,
Doctor Anouar Majid was able to make it
from none other than New England.
(laughing)
Not quite sure how he made it here but he did.
Biggest travel came once he was at--
(mic disturbance)
The cab driver couldn't find UMBC,
couldn't distinguish it from UMB.
UMAB, where else did you go Anouar.
- [Anouar] Hmmm, UB I guess.
- UB, not another college park I hope.
Alright, so we are very very pleased to have him here today.
This is off course the lecture
on the Post-Adalusian condition.
Islam in the rise of the west.
Today's lecture is sponsored
by the Dresser Center for Humanities off course,
as well as the Global Studies Program
and I am Virgid Starky,
Associate Director of Global Studies.
And is also co-sponsored
by the Department of Modern Languages,
Linguistics and Intercultural Communication.
Thank you for your co-sponsorship.
I feel that we could not have a more relevant,
a more appropriate lecturer here today,
if someone had been
dropped out of the sky for us, literally.
The research of Doctor Majid is heavily involved
in the history of Muslims.
The forced expulsion of Muslims from various places
around the world.
The truly, his research is truly global,
in that it connects those events,
those historical events
and experiences with those that are happening
to other communities including Latinos
and Muslims, again, in today's international system.
And he works across disciplines,
across regions,
it is truly the essence of global research, global work.
Doctor Majid I mentioned comes to us from
the University of New England
where he is the director
for the Center for Global Humanities.
He's also the vice president for global affairs
and communication.
A professor of English.
Which is by the way how he comes to also be the author
of a very well received fictional novel
in addition to his academic works,
his fictional novel C Yusuf has been very well received
around the globe.
He's also, he wears so many hats.
He's also the co-editor
of a Moroccan American magazine endeavor
Magazine on culture and ideas of joint effort
called Tingis.
Let me just mention, I don't wanna take away from his time,
he has a very extensive resume,
but let me mention a few of the true highlights.
Amongst his books, he has written
with Duke University Press in 2000.
Unveiling Traditions, Post-Colonial Islam
in a Polycentric World.
With Stanford University Press in 2004,
Freedom and Orthodoxy, Islam Indifference
in the Post Antholusian Age.
With Romitta Little Field in 2007, Islam in America
and I believe that's been updated
and perhaps need to be updated again.
And, with University of Minnesota Press
We Are All Wars, Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims
and Other Minorities, in 2009.
Doctor Majid is a frequent guest
on very high profile programs
including Bill Moyer's Journal,
National public radio,
and Al Jazeera amongst many others.
If I had to encapsulate his message,
I would say he argues against faith based prejudices.
He does this through the telling of personal stories
interwoven with historical stories,
which makes his methodology and his work
very accessible but also
of the highest intellectual pursuit.
So I would like to welcome on behalf of UMBC
Doctor Anouar Majid.
- Thank you.
(audience applause).
Okay we're done.
(laughing)
Good evening, or good afternoon.
Okay, I know the camera's watching me
and I don't wanna take away from the aesthetics,
cup of coffee.
So thank you for inviting me, thank you Jessica,
thank you, thank you for Global Studies
and the Dresser Center
and all the faculty and the students
who braved the weather.
It's very cold in Baltimore by the way,
I wasn't expecting this kind of weather.
And welcome to join me in a reflection
about Islam, the West and the post-Andalusian condition.
The book that was published by Stanford University Press
is called Freedom On Orthodoxy.
But initially, I wanted to call it Post Andalusianism.
And the editor, very very nice guy,
told me that the word does not exist
in the English Language.
And I said well, let's try to create it.
Let's create a new expression
or concept and, just like orientalism
has become a widespread concept in the literature,
call it Post-Andalusianism.
And the reason why I choose that word,
now it's in the subtitle of the book nevertheless.
So the reason why I choose that
is because something very dramatic happened in 1492.
I mean symbolically, it's symbolic for sure,
but something very dramatic.
It was the last bastion of Islamic presence in Spain
was defeated.
The keys were also rendered to the monarchs of Spain,
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.
And Christopher Columbus, the Jews were expelled
from Spain and so they had to find refuge
in other parts of the globe.
And Christopher Columbus finally undertook his voyage
in quest of Asia through the Atlantic Ocean
and then here in this continent
and opened up this world to new explorations,
new conquests and therefore changing,
thereby changing the rest of the world
and world history.
What's interesting in Spain to me,
and I grew up very close to Spain, in Tangier
which is nine miles away.
You could see Spain, you could see Spain the horizon,
you could see the mountains
almost everyday in clear weather.
What is interesting to me about Spain
is it gets forgotten in this discussion
about what's happening in the world today.
And because we are so anglo-centric
or so anglophone in our approach
to cultural stories, to theory, to post-colonial studies,
that very few, except for those
who do Latin American studies
or Spanish studies, Hispanic studies,
tend to pay attention or tend to closer attention to Spain
and its impact.
But we seem to forget that it was Spain,
(coughing) sorry,
that opened up this continent for explorations.
Christopher Columbus was dispatched
by the Spanish monarchs to undergo
or to explore to find this new world of Asia
which eventually ended up being the Americas for them.
And the first conquistadors,
the first conquerors who came to the Americas
were Spanish.
Mostly from ended up from southern Spain
and many of whom had participated in wars against Muslims.
And so it is no wonder when the conquistadors,
or when the conquerors, so oh my gosh,
let's stick with the word conquistadors.
When they came to the America's,
they found people that reminded them of the Moors,
back home.
And so they launched a war on them.
Forced to convert them into the Christian faith,
otherwise enslave them.
And the end result was a genocide
of a massive scale.
About something like 80% of the indigenous population
of the Americas perished in the first century
after the discovery by Christopher Columbus.
So it is, by any measure that would be called a genocide.
And the imagery they used to describe the Indians
was reminiscent of the ones that they had used
to describe or to deal with the Moors.
Now the Moors is a very, a morphous, ambiguous term.
When I, in Morocco for example, I'm a native of Morocco,
people do not know how to translate it.
I once wrote a piece, thank you so much,
I once wrote a piece, (sneezing)
sorry, I once wrote a piece and somebody said,
instead of saying we are Moors to say we are all Moors,
said we are all Moroccon.
But in Arabic it doesn't translate well.
What it means is really Muslims.
So it's one of the expressions applied to Muslims
in Spain, but also in other places
Muslims would be known as Turcos, as Turks
and you would not find in the middle ages
many people calling Muslims Muslims.
At least not in the literature that I was dealing with.
Also they are the Saracens, in older times
and the Ishmaelites in even older times.
But let's, for our purposes,
it's the Moors and the Turks
and for our purpose is the Moor.
And it is an interesting episode in Spanish history
because
Spain, the process, as you know,
just a recapitulation of the history,
the Muslims came into Spain in the eighth century,
they conquered Spain progressively
till they dominated most of it.
And then, soon after,
the Catholic forces
began to regroup in Northern parts of Spain
and began a process called the Reconquista
or the reconquest of Spain from Muslim domination.
So by the 13th century, most of the process was complete.
There remained a few bastions
of Islamic presence here and there,
until they were finally eliminated in 1492,
very interesting year in history.
And it was the culmination of a process
of consolidating a Spanish identity,
because Spain is really a nation of many nations.
Different languages, different histories,
different memories, the Basques, the Catalans,
the Andalusians.
And so it ,was an attempt to unify this diverse society
into one nation.
So in 1492, Catholicism became you know
was decreed to be the official
religion of the state.
And so there was a tremendous insistence
on what's called the purity of faith.
At the same time the Castilian language
has just been, the grammar or lexicon
of the Castilian language by Manco Nebrica
had just been published
and explicitly to accompany Spain
in its imperial ambitions.
So you have the creation of one ideology
which is the Catholic faith
based on the Catholic faith
or the unity of faith
and you have an emerging language,
the Castilian language which is gonna be the language
of empire.
And we have a racially pure nation as well.
Because in the 15th century, the 1400s,
the law was established called, known as
the Limpieza de sangre, the purity of blood.
And therefore there was a step instituted
to extricate or to eliminate any influence,
initially from the Jews.
But eventually it was applied to the Muslims as well.
So anybody eventually after 1492,
when the Muslims were initially given their full right
and promised that they would have equal rights
in the Spanish society.
Eventually, they were reneged on that very quickly
and there began a prosecution of Muslims.
Was very intense prosecution of Muslims,
the Muslim way of life
and then tremendous pressure was applied on them
to convert to the Catholic faith.
And even when they converted to the Catholic faith,
they remained suspect
because they were not genealogically Christians
if you could believe that.
It's something that went against the papal idea
or the Pope's idea of conversion.
But eventually the Pope himself,
went along with this in the middle of the 16th century
and sort of blessed this approach,
especially using the inquisition.
So you could not,
even if you converted to the Catholic faith,
you were not fully Christian or Spaniard
because you're not genealogically Christian.
You're not genealogically Catholic.
So notions on national language,
racial purity and unity of faith
were the three ingredients established by Spain,
earlier than any other nation in modern history
to establish what we nowadays what we call
a national identity.
In other words you need to be of a certain race,
to speak a certain language
and to have a certain kind of ancestry.
And so it is that model that became the premise
or the basis of nationalism, of modern nationalism
and eventually lead to all kinds of horrors
in the 20th century.
I talk about them in my books, when the
the racial policies of the Nazis were reminiscence
of Spanish policies of the purity of blood.
The insistence on a national language,
also still to this day is very much alive.
And racial overtones in the description of national identity
are still with us today.
So it is Spain that created the template, if you will,
for what constitutes a nation.
For better or worse, it's good to remember
that Spain prestige,
was a powerful nation in the 15th century
and the 16th centuries.
And then off course, it's no longer,
nowadays, Spain went through other kinds of histories
and it's in a different place now.
This kind of pressure was applied both in my book
Freedom on Orthodoxy on native Americans
after the conquest of the American continent
and on Muslims in different parts of the Islamic world.
And in both cases as I looked at these two civilizations
and how they dealt with European hegemony,
European imperialism, European colonialism.
As I looked, as I studied the reaction
of both peoples let's say to this situation,
you could see both Muslims and Native Americans
retreating into what we now nowadays call orthodoxies.
They're going back to their own identities.
Hanging on to what they think are the authentic selves,
authentic histories.
Authentic cultures, authentic traditions,
in order to fight back the domination of alien cultures.
And that process hasn't stopped yet.
So the reason why the book is titled Freedom on Orthodoxy
is, you on one hand, you have Christian missionaries
or Christian conquistadors
or European imperialists or European colonialists
going out to save the natives of the world
from the sunken conditions they are in
or they are trying to go out
and give them a better way of life
and sometimes, and often introduce them
to the Christian faith in order to save the natives
from themselves and so on.
The natives would say how about our own cultures
and traditions, we have our own ways of life,
why should we follow yours?
So the Christian missionary work
was a way to exercise a domination of Europe
over other nations
and eventually the formula over time.
It was at one time Catholicism
and then another time, it would be
in the name of science and civilization,
sometimes in the name of the enlightenment,
and sometimes, for freedom.
So there were all kinds of reasons
why the Europeans tried to impose themselves
in other people's and cultures
and had a very disruptive impact on them.
Alright so this is the story of the villainous West.
This is, when we talk about the West, Europe,
We always, it is very customary in American universities
and European universities
to see it as the villainous other.
But that, in other words if you are Muslim
or Native American or another,
somebody who is not associated genealogically
and otherwise with Western or European civilization.
But this is a narrative that also simplifies
the nature of human history.
Now I'm not talking about the book I wrote in 2004,
but I'm talking about trying to relate
that history to the present.
And I know a lot of people today have a lot of questions
about the relations between the United States,
or Europe or the West with Muslims, Latinos
and people from the African continent, et cetera.
And off course,
(stammering)
when I was looking at this condition
in 2004, I was
advocated what's called provincialism
which is a way to create a system, a world of cultures,
each one of which would have its own authentic identity
but all interacting together and living together
in a form of perpetual dialogue and interaction.
I'm beginning to find that probably it's easier said
than done.
And I think, because one of the things
we always underestimate is the powers of capitalism
to homogenize world civilizations.
And I think Eric Hobsbawm, it's interesting,
somebody I discussed to some extent in the book.
He talks about the three revolutions, Industrial Revolution
but also the American Revolution and the French Revolutions.
And if you look at them very closely,
now we have moved away from the age of Spanish conquests
and the age of discovery to talk about a new age of Freedom
in the name of universalist ideals.
The first one is the American rRvolution.
American Revolution, and these are things
that Edward Sahid in his book Orientalism
and his work doesn't pay enough attention to
and that's why I wrote this book called
Post-Andalusianism or a book with, or the current
title of Freedom on Orthodoxy.
'Cause, if you look very closely at these Revolutions,
let's say the American Revolution for example,
the American Revolution was about liberating people
from a variety of operations.
Of course there was slavery,
of course women didn't have their full rights,
of course native American rights were not met.
But it created a system, a new way of thinking
about the place of the individual,
the free individual in society or a citizen.
For the first time in history,
we have a system of divided sovereignties or powers
and off course, for the first time since Roman times,
there is a republic, no king.
For the first time, first time we have a constitution
that's still in effect today.
That outlines the role of each branch of government.
And who is qualified to serve in this government?
Muslims theoretically are.
And so, and then this revolution, intellectual revolution,
a political revolution which is a combination
of ideas of the enlightenment and something very English,
very practical that comes out of the English tradition
of politics and self government.
And also, there's some elements of religiosity in it
but not too visible in the constitution.
Because Jefferson played a significant role in some of it
and others as well.
What you have is it unleashed,
people began to talk about a new era.
A new vision of the world.
A new vision of freedom.
So it unleashed the powers of conversion.
Americans fanged out across the globe
to convert people into their own protestant faith.
Many of them went to the Middle East.
They didn't have a lot of success
and some of the people who came out of that tradition
ironically enough is Edward Sahid
because his family became a Protestant,
converted to Protestantism.
But in other words there was an idea,
the American way of life is best for everybody.
And it wasn't necessarily, it wasn't necessarily
it didn't come out of a very malicious intent.
It came out of a euphoric, a euphoric celebration of life,
the idea that the future is limitless.
I was just reading Brock Whitman recently
and you get that same sense in Whitman's poetry.
It is the idea that the homo-Americanos,
the new species of humanity has the power to unlease
freedoms around the globe.
And off course yes,
other people would see it as trespassing on their rights,
as infringing on their freedoms and so on
but that was the power of the American Revolution.
The French Revolution had the same effect
even more dramatic than that.
And more transformative in many parts of the globe.
Again in the name of the same principles
and the same ideas.
When I was looking at the declaration of independence
for example which was published in, issued in 1776,
50 years after the publication of the issuance of
the Declaration of Independence,
many countries, many others began to issue
their own declarations.
And in the 20th century a lot of nations too
began to copy the American model
and pen their own declarations of independence.
Declaration of Human Rights for example
is another, it's another sort of act or gesture
of indebtedness to the great principle of freedom
that helped come out of the American Revolution.
How then do we deal with the impact of this revolutions
given that they are not necessarily
driven by vile sentiments, not necessarily.
And there's a lot of elements of freedom embedded in them
and if specially in the case of the Arabs and Muslims
for example.
Up to the middle of the 20th century,
the United States was considered to be a beacon of freedom.
And in fact, polls taken
in the early part of the 20th century in the Middle East
came out saying that the people of the region
would rather have the United States,
an American mandate over them
than be subject to the French or the British.
So America was seen, in much of the Arab or the Middle East,
and of Africa in some cases
as a Revolutionary force.
As a place, as a country that had defeated
the great imperial power of its time, Great Britain.
And then off course, it was, it had an eye,
it supported other freedoms around the globe.
Nowadays this history gets forgotten.
And I'm saying,
so, the question,
so lets go back to again, to the story.
So there colonialism,
there was imperialism,
and now we came to a new era in the history
of this relations between the West and East
or between Muslims and Europeans
or Euro-Americans, but the circumstances have changed.
And how are we gonna respond to these new circumstances?
For example, when I talk in one of my books,
when I look at what's happened today,
let's say around the issue of immigration,
I see, I have mentioned this, We are Almost,
We Are Almost, the book that deals with this issue.
How Muslims are problematic in Europe
and Latinos are problematic in the United States.
And so how does one begin to read this history.
Are we gonna use the same lens as we used in the past?
And I did.
For example I saw that, I started comparing what happened
in Spain and what's happening in the United States
and I wrote, I published the book in 2009
on the 400th anniversary on the decree to expel
all people of Muslim descent from Spain.
It was April ninth, 1608, we are almost,
the anniversary is almost upon us
but it's when the King of Spain decided to expel
massively, like the same kind of junk
that's happening in some circles today.
All people of Muslim descents from Spain.
It took a huge effort, four five years
of military operation that combined all the forces
from Europe to take out three percent,
three or five percent of Spain's population
and scatter it around the globe.
Many came to Morocco, some came to Tunisia,
Algeria, some to Turkey and some to France.
So it was huge, it was a horrible event in history.
And it was not even remembered to celebrate it
or reflect upon, on the 400th anniversary
when it came upon us, that's why I wrote the book in 2009.
But are we reliving the same circumstances or not today?
I don't think so.
I think they, I think humanity
has moved to a different level,
I don't know exactly what it is,
but that's why I need to have a conversation with you.
I don't think anyone in his right mind
will want to expel the estimated
12 million illegal immigrants in the United States.
It would be an impossible military operation.
It would be just, it won't be feasible.
Or do the same thing in Europe,
for the Muslim populations in Europe.
So I think what's happened now,
we are in a different world order,
we are in a different set of mind.
And I think the theories we've been using,
I have been using in my early career,
I don't think they're suitable enough now.
See the thing is, when we are academics,
we start writing on the subject
and we start theorizing about things
and then we feel obligated to stay with
our then theoretical model,
for the rest of our thinking career.
But now at some point, to me, I began to realize
or I began to see things differently.
I mean we can have a conversation about that too.
But it's, I think what is happening now
is well we have a genuine clash
and I hate to use that expression
because it has maligned and we know the author and so on
so it's a genuine clash of civilizations
and I wrote about Sammy Hutington and others before.
What it is is people see the world differently
and people are attached to visions of the world
that makes a dialogue, a common reflection,
nearly impossible.
We see it on a global scale,
and we see it on a local scale.
It's becoming worse and worse,
I mean nobody is listening to anybody else.
We just live in bubbles and tie both
on the national level on a global level
people live in their cultural bubbles
and they have become increasingly incapable
of having a conversation with people
whose ideas differ from theirs
and I think that is a bad sign for the future.
That's what worries me now the most.
(stammering)
In the case of Islam and I wrote about Islam
in relation to the west for a long time.
In the case of Islam, I'm no longer concerned now,
personally about who did bad things to Muslims
in the last 500 years.
And I think that's history happened.
In the course of history, stronger nations
always dominate the weaker ones.
Stronger people always commit violence against weaker ones.
It is a pattern in all of human civilization in history
so, I cannot be too, way too moralistic about it
because this is what life has been.
If you look at human history,
without sentimentalizing it or without moralizing it,
it's a record of unremitting violence from day one.
So, and our societies, our civilization has reached a place,
think of examples talk about it,
that we are in fact less, we are becoming more peaceful
and less violent.
And, if we keep that history in the past
and begin to look at the present and the future,
what do I see?
Personally what do I see?
I see a variety of Muslim majority nations,
from Morocco to Iraq, to Syria, well out of Syria to Iraq,
even all the way to Indonesia and beyond,
who are for the most part,
especially the Arab speaking ones,
I would, except for a couple of exceptions,
Morocco actually may be an exception,
I'm not saying because I'm native Moroccan,
they are failed states.
They are absolutely failed states.
There is nothing good in them.
You can't even think of something that's you know.
They are deficient
and this is by the account of a group of Arab intellectuals
who got together in early part of this century
and wrote several reports for United Nations
accessing the condition in the Arab world.
There is no good education,
no proper health, no research and development,
no freedom of speech, no journey on women's rights
and no industry.
And there is, on the other hand, a lot of religion.
Now, what does that tell you?
This is the condition,
as I said in the past,
in the colonial period, one could have said well,
it's the fault of colonialism,
it's the French people who came to these religions
or the British who came to impose their way of life
or inflicted these kind of damages on them.
Yes maybe.
Maybe at that time, it was possible and reasonable
to explain one's condition in those terms.
Even though others had different opinions about that
before then.
But today, nowadays,
it's becoming harder to make.
You cannot say Spain is the reason why
Northern Morocco is underdeveloped.
You cannot say France is the reason why
Algeria is in trouble.
You could say that, or you cannot say
England is the reason why Egypt is a mess.
Or you cannot say, England is the reason why Iraq is a mess.
So what I'm saying is we are past that period,
for better or worse,
maybe memories never die, I don't know.
National memories never die, I don't know.
But what we know for a fact
is that this is a Muslim majority societies
are in big trouble at every level of development
that we can think of
and religion is not gonna get them out of there.
And now, and so how then
do we begin to approach the problem.
The problem is now I'm going back to an idea
that initially emerged out of Europe in the West
and had a big influence on the making
of the American Revolution,
which is the enlightenment.
It is when in the 18th century,
European thinkers in Scotland, France,
and other places in England began to get away from religion
and began to rely more and more on their reason
or on scientific discoveries to make sense of the world.
And therefore, by merely doing this,
it was a process, but it was facilitated rather briefly
or by a very prominent Arab philosopher in Spain,
Averroes, Averroes.
But he was prosecuted by Muslims,
his books were burned by Muslims.
Meanwhile his work, which are very sophisticated
interpretations of Aristotle's philosophy,
eventually were very jarring to the Catholic church.
But he had his defenders in the European Continent
and eventually, his dual method, you know, stayed
and even fluorished and had a huge impact
in the transformation of the pursuit of knowledge in Europe.
Such thing, meanwhile the Muslims burned his books
because the Muslims had lost in a battle in Spain
and they thought the reason was because people
got away from the faith.
Every time a catastrophe befalls religious people,
they think they are not religious enough
and that's why they are loosing.
And so they begin to condemn and chastise and prosecute
anybody who is not faithful
in the way they want to see them.
And so nowadays we find ourselves in the situation
and we have a conversation going on in the media,
in the press, in politics
and the question, it's unavoidable is how,
what do we do with Islam?
What do we do with Muslims?
And off course, everybody, we all wanna protect
everybody's rights in the United States,
actually model is more beneficial than the European model
because in the United States the Revolution
was not anti-clerical.
In other words, it waw not an attempt
to discredit the church
but it simply separated,
it simply separated religion as a private affair
from government, which is a public one.
And so everybody has a right to their own religion
provided that the government has no role whatsoever
except by maybe granting tax exemptions
to religious organizations.
But how do then, aside from this then how do we begin
to make sense, how do we begin to have a conversation
that is fruitful.
We know that
in Muslim majority nations,
it's nearly impossible to find a constitution
that doesn't proclaim Islam to be
the official religion of the state.
So if you lived in any of these countries
and if you are not Muslim,
you have no chance of ever becoming,
let's say the leader of that country
or to have, or to be taken very very very seriously.
Because it is proclaimed in the constitution.
When the United States went into Iraq
after they defeated, after they broke
Saddam Hussein's regime,
they came up with a constitution for the Iraqis
and the Afghanis and they could not get away
from this provision.
Islam has still, is the official religion of the state.
How does one, then, because the Muslims believe
very firmly that sovereignty belongs to God
and that we are here to serve the will of God.
And in a democracy, in a democracy,
people are agents of their own destinies.
Sometimes, they don't contradict each other,
but sometimes they do
and so this requires a good healthy conversation.
This conversation's not happening.
You find, notions, I always get,
I gave a talk recently about in Morocco
and we're talking about the same issues
and then you find Islam's organizations saying
oh, we need, we need the democracy or we want to establish
a republic and so on.
But both concepts and you know this,
from Bernard Louis's both in the vocabulary of Islam,
have no existence in Islamic political thought.
There's no such notion as democracy.
I have actually or republic.
So there is the caliphate, which you heard a lot about
recently or you can find about the Imamates
or the Imam as a ruler
or you could find some other forms of government
or this, I call the Moroccan form of government,
the Sultanic, a Sultanic democracy.
It's interesting because the concept doesn't exist.
Democracy we need to remember,
emerged in a polytheistic society.
Ancient Greece which had many religions
and so people could get together
and everybody was fine with everybody else's religion.
But not in a monotheistic society.
Monotheism implies the rule of one person,
one God.
One God eliminates all the other gods
and that God has the absolute power over everybody,
everything and everybody.
And we are all at the service of this God.
This is a notion,
this has a huge impact on the intellectual
and psychological life of Muslims.
And so, Muslims find it very difficult
to reconcile this notion of themselves
with the notion of a sect that emerges out
of a secular democracy.
Where one is an agent of one's own destiny
and then gods may or may not exist
and that is irrelevant to the political process.
When I wrote, I once wrote a piece,
it came out of one of my older books
and for the Chronicle of Higher Education,
not long after 9/11, and I talked about a literature,
African novels mostly, of Muslim protagonists
who are very talented and very promising
and they are kind of prodigies in their own societies
and tribes and they go to Europe
and they get totally confused.
And they get, they begin to experience psychological trauma.
Some kill women.
Some women go into prostitution of some kind.
And they usually come back home, completely scarred.
And sometimes they die too.
So it is a very, the transition from a traditional Muslim
society specially for young people,
going to college, into,
and you can see that in the literature
from the 1960s and 1970s and 80s,
if you read some African novels, you can see that,
it's one of the major themes in them.
And so when incidents like this happen,
when you have situations in Europe emerge.
All you could do is go back to this literature,
it is there.
It is a trauma for people to move from this kind of society
to another one.
And so that trauma results in all kinds of situations,
not least of which, or at least including,
gravitating towards extremist views
and committing acts of violence and terror.
So,
(stammering)
the point I'm trying to make is, we need to be
very aware of historical forces
that shaped the modern world.
So to understand the notion of minority,
I personally, in the modern world,
I go back to Spain.
Understand how Spanish identity was created,
even though not successfully
on the backs of minorities like Jews
and the Muslims, the Moors.
And because a nation state, you cannot have an identity
without excluding somebody else.
We only identify ourselves in relation to somebody else.
So when I'm in Maine, I tell my students
and they kind of nod their heads knowingly
sort of approvingly said, we are Americans
because we are not Canadian.
They get it.
And if I were in New Mexico,
I would say we are Americans because we are not Mexican.
They get it too.
So, and so on and so forth.
You need the other.
Unfortunately, I mean we have psychologists here,
professors of psychology who can help us with this.
To form a national identity, somebody else
needs to be excluded,
because you can only define your national identity
against another person's identity
that is not part of your vision.
And this applies at all levels.
The racial level, the national level, cultural level,
even at the personal level.
I am me because I am not you
and you are you because you are not me.
And so it is this our identity is sometimes
an act of exclusion.
It is by necessity an act of exclusion.
Although, the positive side of more optimistic people
than I am would say,
no, let's find what we have in common,
instead of what we have that's different.
So there's two ways to look at it.
But it seems to me that once you create,
manufacture an identity,
you always automatically exclude something.
And so religions are part of a process.
Monotheistic religions.
You know, they have, they are, not all religions,
but monotheistic religions, in my view
are the worst offenders.
And I'm including Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
They have a view of the world that is,
if you are not part of our religion,
you are fallen or you are not chosen
or you are going to go to hell
and so on and so forth.
And so it becomes the duty of the believer
to either convert the other, if you are in a religion
that is given to this kind of activity
or to believe it yourself,
to think that I am part of a chosen nation
and the others, they are basically like sheep or something,
they are second class citizens.
And that is one of the problems.
I think, and I think so,
what I'm saying is given this cultural
context, and this political climate we live in,
we need to have a conversation.
And in my experience, American Universities
or European Universities or Moroccan Universities
are not doing it.
We are entrenched in our disciplines.
We actually, we have an investment in kind
of perpetuating the pennant f discipline
of our belief systems, the belief systems we had
when we were in graduate school or undergraduate school
or when they are young faculty members.
But I think the time has come to rethink
a lot of our assumptions.
Because we live now in a different kind of world
and we need to begin to have a conversation,
what kind of future do we envision.
Not for Muslims, not for Americans,
not for Mexicans, but for humanity.
The idea that we are a combination of discrete groups,
each one with its own peculiarities may be a good one.
Maybe can be consoling, but it's not useful
to have all of us, all of us
to have a common vision for the future.
And I think that's what's lacking in our conversation.
So in the case, in the case of,
in the case of, I'm gonna talk about Islam.
In the take of Islam, it is my belief
and I wrote a book that is not included
in these descriptions or in my resume,
included in my profile.
It's called a Call For Heresy.
Why?
Dissent is vital to Islam and America.
Why do we need heretics>?
And I published the book in 2007
because I could see it coming.
What we need to have is courageous people
who are endowed with intellect and intelligence
to begin to question the dogma that has shaped their lives
since birth.
Whether it's in Muslim majority nations
or whether it's in the United States
or whether in Mexico or on any other place on earth.
Whether you are Christian, Jewish or Muslim.
I think Christian in Europe and United States,
are ahead of the Muslim majority nations.
You cannot raise many of these issues
in a lot of these countries.
You cannot debate, you cannot question the orthodoxies
of Muslim belief, of Islamic belief.
Because there are still laws in the books
that punish people who do.
Apostasy is a crime
and sometimes punishable by death in a lot of places.
Now in to in all cases,
there is some attempt at reform in some places.
But if somebody one day gets up,
so you get up one day and say I'm no longer a Muslim,
I wanna be Christian, or non-Christian an atheist,
you either do that in hiding for the rest of your life
or you are in big trouble.
Not just from the government but socially.
You've heard about blasphemy laws in Pakistan.
You read about people being killed and prosecuted
in other places only because they dare
express their own feelings
about their own beliefs.
It's a huge problem.
It's a huge human rights problem.
It's no longer a question of diversity
of people having their own right to their culture.
But culture becomes oppressive in itself.
So I recently wrote piece for a collection on orientalism
and I cited with Karl Marx,
because Karl Marx is very often blamed
or at least, he confused, he puzzled Edward Sahid
when Marx supported British colonialism in India.
Not because Marx was a big fan of British colonialism
but because he said it's an inevitable course in history.
Cause you're moving from oriental despotism,
which is, it's not that people had a lot of rights before
British colonialism, but it is, we are making,
it's like capitalism,
it is the last expression,
the last manifestation,
the last system in a series of system
that may eventually lead to a better society.
So, we need to be courageous enough
to question our own belief systems,
our own traditions,
and I talk in Muslim majority nations now.
And because the other kind of activity is a habit,
it's easier to do in the United States and Europe.
And to question everything that goes along with that.
To give you an example,
after the event of Charlie Hebdo a,
the satirical newspaper, in France, in Paris,
30 Moroccans published a book, I was one of them
in response to that, condemning the event.
And I was invited, some of you may know
Tahaj Bjane Loon and others.
And, I asked the question, can Muhammad be French.
And then people didn't know what to make of the question
but I wrote a whole chapter on that saying,
what does it take, it's a good question.
It's a legitimate question to have.
Can a Muslim with a fully believe in Muslim
be comfortable living in a fully French society?
There would be a lot of crashes experienced daily
that can be traumatic to the individual.
And so how do we manage the situation.
And I think it's, there's no other alternative to me.
And I don't think, maybe you have other ideas,
except separating religion from public life.
Let people live their social lives
and if you have a faith of any kind,
Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, whatever you have,
just practice it.
If you have a relationship between you and your creator
and the God who created you,
then you don't have to impose that on me or on you
or on somebody else.
When you begin to do that by law,
with the power of law behind you,
you become, you move the way
from a divine spiritual relations
into a dictatorship.
Into an ideology.
And when people say nowadays,
I'm foaming out this remarks.
Maybe hopefully, so that you may have questions afterwards.
Nowadays when people talk about Islamophobia.
Well I know that the first,
the one that when I looked at it,
the first time it was a used expression
it was in relation to Spain actually,
in regard to the Moors.
You can find it in one of my books.
Nowadays it's become something else.
It's compared to Anti-Semitism and so on.
But Islamophobia is not a racial category.
It's people being accused of not liking Islam.
Well what's wrong with not liking Islam?
It's like saying I'm being accused
of not liking communism.
But what's wrong with not liking communism?
What's wrong with not liking capitalism?
What's wrong with not liking Nadihism?
Or with Hinduism or Judaism or whatever it is.
Because these are not people, these are ideas,
these are ideas, these are ideologies,
these are ideological systems.
You're not disliking a person,
you are disliking an idea.
And there's absolutely nothing wrong
in disliking an idea.
And I think people shouldn't be embarrassed
or ashamed of it
because you are only exercising your rights,
your intellectual abilities,
your critical thinking,
to decide whether this is a good system for humanity or not.
I just happen to think
that a lot of these archaic religions,
Judaism, Christianity and Islam
are no longer useful for the human race.
But, some people may disagree with me.
Maybe some know there's that some duty in them
and some divine justice,
and look at the cathedrals in Europe and so on and so forth
and people otherwise would be barbaric
if we didn't have religious faith, okay.
But I personally don't think they are useful.
I think these are people, these are religions
that were created at a certain time in history,
they were attributed to three men,
who lived in no less than the same area,
apparently only these three men had access to God
and nobody else did.
And, so now we are beholding, 2000 years later,
we are beholding to their belief systems
and we are supposed to live by then
or otherwise something bad will happen to us.
(stammering)
It doesn't make any intellectual sense
as we sit here at UMBC to still think
that those ideas are valid today.
For the public good, they may be valid
for your own personal good, like poetry is,
you know some people love to find psalms,
some people like yoga.
There's nothing wrong with yoga.
But what I'm saying is are they good for human civilization
in this day and age?
I personally don't think they are
and I think this discussion can be easily had
in Europe and the United States
but nearly impossible to have in Muslim majority nations.
And I think we should try to have these discussions there
as well.
Because I do.
And not simply saying everybody has a right
to their belief systems,
even if you don't know what the belief system consists of
and, which is very often the case by the way.
And just say, no let's discuss this,
what is this about, and what does it entail.
How does it affect the future of society?
So when I tell you about all of this,
it's not like I am trying to be provocative
and I look at a couple of people
that are in the back from Morocco,
I am really care about my native country of Morocco.
I want that country to develop.
I want them to have good educational systems.
Good research facilities.
Good
freedom of expression and writing, within limits
I understand that.
We need to have freedom of conscience.
You have absolutely your right to your own conscience.
Nobody, we should eliminate any kind of punishment
just because you happen to believe something
that's contrary to the majority.
And unleash the powers of innovation and creativity.
The only country that seem to have some power
in the Middle East are the oil ranchers
the Saudi Arabias and the Gulf States.
We pump up a lot of oil from the ground
and sell it and make money that way.
That is, these are parasitical societies,
they have absolutely nothing to show for their wealth.
They buy everything.
They buy American know how, Japanese know how,
European know how
and servants from the Philippines and Pakistan
and other places.
And you cannot name one single thinker
from Saudi Arabia today
or from Kuwait or from the gulf or from Qatar,
you can't think of one.
I can spend to five minutes, maybe you can think of someone
and I'm sure you won't.
They don't generate any intellectual value.
Compare that to Israel, this tiny little state
and has incredible intellectual power, scientific power
and it's not an oil power in the world markets,
but it has an incredible.
What is the difference?
It's the thinking.
It is the way the Israeli democracy functions.
And when I was commenting on the Arab Spring,
I used, I used I said I knew they were gonna fail,
all those movements throughout
the Arab world were gonna fail
because there was no vision.
They were all protest movements.
They all rose against corruption, against injustice,
against all kinds of bad things
but there was no vision for the future.
Not the kind of vision that Theodore Hexel expressed
in his Jewish State, published in the late 19th century,
when there was no Jewish State.
He wrote a little book
and imagined the state in what's now in Palestine
and it would have these characteristics,
these features, this society,
a very liberal society by the way.
But I don't know 70 to 80 percent of that vision
actually came to be, happen.
But instead, these protest movements in the Arab world
and Muslim majority nations
were about going back to some purer version of Islam.
Going back to the seventh century,
when Islam was powerful.
Or trying to say that it was,
we had the golden age in Baghdad
when the libraries of Baghdad were munificent
and attracted all kinds of scholars from around the globe.
Or maybe when Andelush was a flourishing place,
it's always a refuge in the past.
The word in Arabic for alienation is Sahrib
and the word in Arabic for the West is Rarb.
So it's alienation in the West, alienation in the past,
alienation in history, but no confrontation,
no dealing with the present and the future.
And I think if our institutions of higher learning
do not begin to approach the subject from this perspective,
instead of vocalizing it
or falling in love with it
with Islamic literature and Islamic culture and history
and so on and so forth
or romanticizing it as often happens
in departments of Middle-Eastern studies and other places,
it's not gonna have any positive impact on those peoples,
in Muslim majority nations.
It will make our careers comfortable.
You will become more knowledgeable about this or that,
but you will not have a palpable impact,
a liberating impact on the people of the Middle East,
North Africa or people who live in Muslim majority nations.
And I think, I would ask that anyone, Muslim or none Muslim
try to pursue this path
unless you believe that Muslim majority nations
are doing fine, which I don't see how
anybody can make that claim.
As I said, there are statistical reports,
the indices and no one, none of these countries
are doing fine.
I often, when people go to places
and usually back in Morocco,
when I give a talk like this
and people start complaining,
I usually will say well if you had the choice
of studying in France or Saudi Arabia where would you go?
They all say France.
Nobody wants to go to Saudi Arabia.
Everybody wants to study in the United States,
everybody wants to study in the UK,
everybody wants to study in Germany,
and yet that trauma I mentioned it's like okay,
we are here by necessity,
because at one level, they recognize that these countries
are advanced, there's more freedom,
there's more opportunity,
there's more kindness, there's more trust.
And yet there's a side of that psyche
that keeps saying well they're not Muslim,
so therefore they are not as perfect as we want them to be.
In 2004, I gave a talk in Boston
and somebody said, after 9/11,
we were very concerned about a young man
and we offered him protection,
we took care of him to make sure he's not being
badly treated by the population.
And so that guy was, he said the man was so grateful,
he was so joyous,
he couldn't, he was just absolutely
overwhelmed with gratitude.
And then he said to them,
if only you could become Muslim.
And so, you could see the impulse.
Again, instead of saying great, thank you,
that's enough, 'cause that part of his brain,
the part of their mind, always is in the end,
is if you are not Muslim,
you haven't arrived yet.
I'll stop here and I'll see if people have questions.
We can discuss in relation to what I said.
Thank you. (audience applause)
- Are there questions, comments.
- Thank you very much for raising these points.
I have two questions.
Some people might call them self-provoking,
some others might call them provoking.
The first question is about the idea
of majority Muslim nations being furious.
And I'm thinking why don't we look beyond the Arab nations,
the Muslim out nations to other nations that are Muslim
as well.
That's one question.
So there's a lot for you to talk about.
Second question is about the issue of xenophobia really,
in most of Europe these days.
It's not new.
But we see it really, Northern Europe, Southern Europe,
Western Europe, Eastern Europe.
And I'm thinking is it because is there something
in European cultures and I don't want to generalize,
is there something that is kind of averse to looking
at other ways of being?
That, in my expression, be it in terms of race
or religion or culture?
That is kind of, we need to look at,
I'm not seeing anything written about that at all.
Maybe you have.
Does that kind of give us a clue as to why is it
that we have so many manifestations of really
a rejection of the Arab.
- Yeah.
Well this brings me back to that conversation
about identity.
I don't know, at the risk of being politically incorrect,
the last movie I saw it's called Get Out.
I don't know whether anybody saw it.
(laughing)
And it's interesting from a racial point of view.
It's like in United States,
African Americans have no clue about the psychology
of white people basically.
For those who saw the movie, raise your hands
if you saw the movie, anybody.
Would you agree with this?
Identity.
African Americans in the move seem to be totally
befuddled by the behavior of white people.
They don't get it.
And the white people are depicted in this film
as basically vampires.
Literally.
They're cold blooded vampires who kind of prey
on the energy of black men.
Of athletic black men.
Right?
I recommend it only from a,
again those people who are interested in psychology
and American race relations would find it very interesting,
it's all done in the guise of a suspense movie,
a spooky movie.
But it really highlights or touches
on some of these very issues
that we normally (mumbles) so that's a core idea
that whites will never get blacks
and we will never have the.
So the question there is racial
and I am very reluctant to believe
that there is a racial element involved
in discriminatory policies.
I think it's mostly aesthetic.
People may get used to people with similar skin colors
or different names
or food orders or cuisines.
But I don't think there is something genetic
that has made the Europeans that say,
because they are the ultimate villains,
among peoples of the third world,
the Europeans are somehow exclusively, uniquely racist
in relation to other nations.
I think and I was, I think personally,
I think some of the most racist people in the world
right now are the Arabs.
And, I'll tell you why.
I mentioned in one of my books, you'll see that,
you'll see how the Arabs, first of all this notion
of Sub-Saharan, African, North African
doesn't make any sense,
probably a legacy of colonial heritage.
And Africa is defined by its skin color
which is the foundation of hundreds
of academic departments in the United States.
It doesn't make any sense but there it is.
In many Arab nations you could be an immigrant
for generations.
You could be of decent for three or four generations
and never be entitled to citizenship.
And if an immigrant in France,
if they don't get their papers
within a short period of time,
they protest and they complain about Islamophobia
and so on and so forth.
So here's one, a country that looks bad in the news
and here's Saudi Arabia which never grants
citizenship to anybody including Muslims
and Arabs and so on and so forth
and nobody is saying a thing about them.
So we are, it's interesting, it's how the double standards
operate in the way we think about oppression
and exploitation and injustice
and I think it's same happening in North Africa
and other places.
So you're right.
Senegal for example and other African countries
are models actually of co-existence
and how Islam is practiced in the Sufie tradition
and it's not the strain fundamentalism
and extremism that many have inherited from Saudi Arabia
and other similar places
but you can see it coming into Nigeria and other places
and maybe infiltrating Nigerian child and it's coming,
it's happening even in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Recently you probably are reading about the stuff,
extremism, the kind of Isis like Islam
or Isis is rising in places like Malaysia and Indonesia.
So it's something to worry about
and it's causing all kinds of trouble.
So I think you are right
to allude to the differences
but I think at the end of the day,
we are all confronting the same problem in some ways.
I mean you may be in a better position,
but I think eventually in the long run,
if we don't do anything,
I think all of, even in the United States,
we are confronting the same, even the same issue.
Yes.
Yes, yes, you.
- I just want to bring you back to the success of Israel,
- [Majid] Yes.
- The Jewish state.
- [Majid] Yes.
- What if we invest.
The US or the West invests the same amount of resources
that it invests on Israel, for example on Palestine
or on our part of the world in Morocco
on education on changing how people think
because what happened is in growing up,
in our countries we always see the West, I mean the US
as this great nation,
but when we come here, we see for example,
you bring Saudi Arabia and we buy oil from Saudi Arabia
but in reverse what do we give them?
We sell them arms.
We never invest on what's really our population,
our nations want.
I mean the people in Morocco want education.
They will pay everything and anything to come
to the US and study.
- [Majid] That's right.
- We know.
We are among the ones who are lucky
because you paid for your education
or your parents have the money to come here,
but for the majority.
So if we invest the money or the resources on people
instead of giving them on the government,
which you know what they do with all these resources
that eventually don't get to the population
and by that I mean, education changes how people think
and how people see the world,
I think if we invest the same amount on our young people,
then they would not go and join the French,
like ISIS and such.
- I agree.
We need education.
But okay let's go back to Israel.
Israel established a Hebrew university
a decade before they established the state in 1948.
They moved to Israel, to the Palestine
and built a university.
That's how passionate they were about education,
it's still one of the top universities in the world today.
And the early founders by the way,
when the Jews migrate from Europe to that land,
many leaders of the Arab movement recognized the usefulness
of the Jews coming back to their ancestral lands.
And they said we are like lost cousins
and you are bringing with you a lot of knowledge
that we need.
Things changed later on but there's enough to show
that relationships between the Jews or the Israelis
and the Arabs could become incredibly successful
if they knew how to think about each other.
And so the problem, I had a very prominent speaker,
I run a forum in Tangier called the Tangier golden forum.
Last year I heard a Daniel Siboni
who is one of the greats psychiatrists in France
and author of many books, 40 something books,
among them books in Islam and Judaism and stuff like that.
He was born in Marrakesh, he speaks Moroccan,
he speaks Hebrew, he knows the Quran.
He's a psychiatrist.
I don't whether you, psychologist I should say,
I don't know whether you heard of him.
He's actually, he worked for years
with Jacque La Quan, the great psychoanalyst,
the French psychoanalyst.
Ane he came to Tangier, a Moroccan guy.
A Moroccan Jew, came instead and he said,
the image in the Quran of the Jews is very negative.
How do we overcome that?
And people would say, well no, we are very tolerant.
Islam is all about tolerance.
He's like, I understand that, Islam is about tolerance
but if you look at the verse in the Quran,
the Jews are represented very negatively,
they are compared to pigs and stuff
and it's not,
the image is simply not a flattering image
in the Quran.
I know if you believing Muslim
and you believe the Quran is the word of God,
how do we overcome that?
He basically stymied the audience.
They kept thinking and scratching their heads
and said you know but we like the Jews,
but we have a problem with Israel,
but someone said forget about Israel.
The Quran doesn't talk about Israel.
It talks about the Jews.
So as an interesting, the Muslims sometimes,
what they are very often, not sometimes, very often,
they try to evade the question by blaming Zionism and Israel
and say we have nothing against Jews,
but Islam has a lot against Jews.
It's in all the literature.
It's in the Quran, it's in the Hadid, it's everywhere,
so we need to find a way.
That's why we have to begin to think critically
about our traditions,
and I say who said that, where does Hadid come from?
Where did that verse in the Quran come from,
et cetera, et cetera.
We don't dare touch those issues,
because we think that if we do,
we will become apostates.
We will get out of the faith
and something very bad will happen to us personally
and maybe even socially.
So there is a lot of fear involved in this.
It's interesting.
When I give talks like this,
one of the frequent questions I get,
is aren't you afraid?
Afraid of what?
Because people know that if you speak your mind nowadays,
you know some Muslims could do bad things to you.
They can hurt you.
They can, they kill people.
They bomb places.
And so Islam has become synonymous
with intellectual terrorism.
In other words if you cannot,
you cannot sprite what you want,
you cannot say what you want
for fear of somebody doing bad things to you
or to your mother back in the neighborhood,
your brother, your sister, or somebody else.
So it is an interesting culture.
It's a mafia like culture actually in some ways,
because you have, you cannot speak your mind freely
without worrying about being hurt
or something bad happening to you,
and that is, that is, something to consider.
Now in Morocco, I don't know whether what part of,
I mean, when I go there, and I'm going there
this Saturday, when I speak like this,
people nod approvingly.
They said yes.
I mean there's some disagreement, there's some,
but you find less of that in the west.
The feeling hardens here.
For those that come to the west and migrate
because they become increasingly more defensive
about their cultural tradition,
it's harder for them to do.
Somebody raise their hand again.
- Yes but on the other hand,
what you do criticize is real, you often get
accused of Anti-Semitism.
So there's a, you know,
something about parallel there.
I don't, I never understand that
'cause besides the state of Israel
without being Anti-Semantic.
Nope some that criticize are Anti-Semantic,
but there should be a way to make a distinction.
Also your notion of Islamophobia,
you know you said something provocative I think
when you said what's wrong with being
sort of Islamophobic or in fairness you said
phobic of Christianity or any of these religions,
but what strikes me as that
speaking about America, there's not enough people
who know enough about Islam
to really know whether they're being Islamophobic
or Muslimophobic.
And they are being Muslimaphobic I think,
when they, but we're using the term
to connote the religion when we're really talking about the
ethnic/religious distinction.
So I think it's a little diabetogenous to say what's wrong
with being Islamophobic.
Because it's now being used in a way that
is the exact analogy of Anti-Sematic to me.
(stammering)
- Probably it's a term that's been used
and I'm trying to remind people that
if you do not like Islam,
it doesn't mean that I don't like you.
If you're a Muslim and I don't like Islam,
I can still like you,
but I don't like your ideology.
I don't like the belief system.
I don't like the, I don't like,
the Islamic literature for example.
It's my right not to like that religion
according to my thinking.
So in people's view nowadays,
in people's view, that makes you somewhat Islamophobic.
It's not.
It's like I am not, I don't believe in that.
So I still like you,
but I don't agree for example,
if you wear some sort of dress, a garb, I don't know,
but people have a right to have their own opinion
without being called names.
Without being called Islamophobic or Anti-Sematic
if you criticize the state of Israel,
or Anti-American.
Let's go back to Anti-American.
Now you said people don't know enough about Islam.
Well I'm willing to bet, that more Americans
know about Islam than Muslims know about America.
Because Americans, people in the Muslim majority nations
or the Islamic world, they know America through television.
They watch TV shows, movies, and wars.
That's all they know about the United States.
They don't know American history.
They know nothing about the foundations.
They never read.
I know a lot of engineers who graduated PhDs,
who graduated from American universities.
They never took a class in American Literature and Culture.
They never read American literature to speak of.
They never read a book about American,
a serious book about American history,
except when they had to take their citizenship test,
so they live in the United States, but their entire
knowledge and experience of the United States
is what they see on television, in the news,
and that's it.
So I think Americans are far more knowledgeable,
and the students in this university,
there's no department of American Studies to speak of
in a lot of these countries.
There are no department of Jewish studies
in most Arab universities.
Morocco is beginning to get some.
Persian studies.
You know, that kind of thing.
Chinese studies.
I mean there's almost no knowledge,
not to mention knowledge of history that precedes Islam.
It doesn't exist.
It's all the age of ignorance.
It's all the fallen nations of preceded the coming of Islam,
Judaism, Christianity, and the civilization
that preceded them.
So when you ask, the magazine that I publish
called Tingis on purpose.
It's the name of a mythical figure from Greek culture,
who was associated with Hercules,
who was also associated with the giant Antaeus,
which part on part of Moroccan history.
The city of Tangier where I come from
comes from a Roman name,
associated with Roman mythology anyway,
but people forget this stuff.
Because Islam erases everything that comes before it,
and everything you have to pay attention to.
That's why we are very badly deficient
in all the history of ancient civilizations and so what.
And without that knowledge we'd never be able to understand
the future of how Islam came to be.
And so one example would be
that a lot of the words in the Quran are of Aramaic origin.
I mean there's no knowledge of Aramaic
in most Muslim majority nations,
and those who know Aramaic, I know one of them,
is hiding in Germany, because he reads the Quran differently
and of course I know people who specialize
in the Sematic languages.
You know, Aramaic you know
Hebrew,
you know understand the origins of Arabic
and where it came from.
Such knowledge doesn't exist.
And of course not to mention the history
of the making of the religion.
Which is what the magazine I do is dedicated to
is how Islam became to be.
Instead of an angel appeared to a man in a cave,
you know that's one way to see Islam.
But intellectually it doesn't make any sense.
You have to understand how a religion emerge in history.
What influences, who wrote it?
Where the books came from?
How it eventually was shaped into something nowadays
we call Islam.
But in the believers mind, it was a man in a cave,
who was meditating and there was an angel
who descended on Haman and said and forced him to read.
Now we know, this is not a discussion we can talk about,
but these issues that are almost never raised
in these nations because of the fear
that everybody has of losing their faith,
or of questioning the wisdom of God.
But if you are a critical thinker,
if you are a scholar, if you are a historian,
and you don't do thins kind of work,
then you might as well live in the mosque.
Because there were Muslim scholars by the way.
Muslim intellectuals in the 9th century in Iraq.
Very prominent who questioned these notions.
And they questioned the notion of prophecy.
And they're very famous.
Some of them like Abdullah Lazievi.
Abdullah Lazievi is a famous physician.
He didn't buy the notion of God choosing a guy
and speaking to him and we're all supposed to believe
that person, that man who's speaking to us.
So it's a long story.
But it's a, you could see the discomfort
people would have around this issue.
Yeah.
- I understand how you made this connection
between the desire to carve out another
as part of building an identity,
and then sort of jump to religion
as such a iconic baggage to the word,
but version of othering right?
But in this, in America
we have what to the outside world must look like in a way
one white ethnicity that is so divided right now
it's unbelievable.
You know we have a huge cultural divide among
people who must look to others
as one ethnicity if not similar cultural background.
So isn't this human proclivity to create another
more resilient than just religion?
I mean is it deeper than that?
Is there a neural substrate to it?
I mean is this a bigger interdisciplinary?
- That is a question you raise,
and that is a question I said needed a psychologist.
I don't know.
I mean people need to differentiate themselves from others.
I think maybe, maybe that's the
that is the human psche,
that is how human psychology operates.
You know the need for differentiation
is very powerful maybe.
But you know, but also there is a need
for absolute conformity.
And this is what, this is some of the effect
also of ideology.
You know to be one of the same, to be indistinguishable
from the other, and have the same beliefs, the same names,
eat the same foods, and so that you can feel
you're part of a community.
There's a very interesting forces
that work against each other.
I don't know.
I don't know.
At that level, I don't know how much we can do.
But I think, I think
to go back to the question you raised, you asked,
I mean I, you know,
I don't care honestly, I don't care what
Joe, Sue, Fatima, Aisha, Muhammad think about this and that.
I only care at the end of the day
about what I think about this.
Because when I speak, when I talk,
people say well
people are not going to understand you.
Or people are going to say, well most people
do not understand that
and usually I get these kind of comments from colleagues
from university and other places and I say well,
well forget about the people, how about you?
Do you get me?
I mean, people find refuge in the ignorant other.
And they go, well Joe Smith is not gonna get this,
so I might as well not go there,
because it's going to be a waste of time,
and that is not productive.
I think we should go there if you feel,
first even if you're alone in this,
if you feel like it's something worth pursuing and doing
despite the noises surrounding you,
go ahead, go for it.
Because something is driving you there.
Your intellect, your mind, your curiosity,
and go and question it.
The worse thing for a thinker to do
is to buy wholesale what others told him,
what your father told you, what your grandfather told you,
what your great grandfather told you.
When I usually speak about religion,
religions are very interesting and curious
intellectual tradition, because you know I gave a,
many years ago, I gave a talk in Washington
to a group of lawyers, Muslim lawyers,
Muslim law students and lawyers.
And so I said in the course of speaking I said I
I don't believe.
I said I am not,
my whole family, I come from a Muslim background families,
but I don't believe in the theology.
I am culturally a Muslim because I grew up in Morocco
in Tangier, but I don't believe in the stories of the caves,
and stuff like that.
And so I thought something bad is going to happen,
but yet there was a long line of people asking questions.
And one woman came to me and said,
I totally understand what you said,
but I can not betray my parents.
And I said well, your parents are sending you to
the American University in Washington DC,
the American law school,
and then they expect you to have the same ideas they have
and their grandfather had,
and your great, great, grandfather had,
and the person that lived in the Middle Ages had.
So in other words, what good is it for you
to get an American education in law,
and have this exact same beliefs
a peasant in the Middle Ages had?
- [Man] Job training.
- Job training yes.
- I'll be the last question. - Okay.
- You spoke of Israel about the emphasis on education,
on intellectualism, on free thinking, et cetera.
But Israel is a Jewish state. - Yes.
- So really are what your saying about Islam,
'cause you said states should not have an official religion.
- They shouldn't. - Is it really that,
that Islamic states should be more free thinking?
They should be empathizing religion.
They should be emphasizing innovation.
They should be emphasizing intellectualism,
because it doesn't have to do with the fact that
there's a state religion.
It has to do with the whole mentality of looking at things
to be the free thinker, the intellectuals, the educated
et cetera.
And not to go on what you were just talking about.
That old path with the backwards.
- You know we talk about education.
What do we talk about?
I mean I can, I can open a school today.
I can have give me money and I'll open a school,
and I can hire the teachers,
and have great classes and labs.
But that school is as good as what you teach in it.
What kind of curriculum you put in there.
What kind of pedagogy you institute, you establish.
I mean you can have the most beautiful
and most expensive schools.
You can hire people from around the globe,
but if you separate the genders and if you ask people
to teach a certain kind of religion within,
and don't deviate from the certain kind of thing,
then you're always in the same place.
You're not going to go very far.
So there is plenty of education.
I mean the gulf states have great schools.
They have education cities.
They have education cities in Kathar for example.
I mean what do they produce though?
I mean it's that kind of situation we're living in
right now.
Where you can have an education.
The question is not what kind of education,
whether you have an education, but what kind of education
are you giving to young people.
And I think, I think again
this is where we are, we have a problem.
I think it's a,
you're right, we shouldn't have, states shouldn't have
a religious identity.
And in my last book, Islam In America,
and I eluded to this in the last chapter
and I spoke about this,
so the danger of not establishing peace
between the Palestinians and the Israelis
is eventually going to end up with
one state for both peoples.
And which is increasingly becoming the more and more
likely scenario, and then what happens next?
And it's going to be a difficult situation.
But if you wanna have.
You know but what I was talking about is Israel values
the kind of creative education,
the critical thinking education,
in fact, even in the armed forces from what I read,
even soldiers can question their superiors.
Everybody is questioning everybody else in Israel.
And so the result, the result is a very creative
powerhouse.
Read a book for example, Good Start Up Nation.
I mean every major company in Silicon Valley
has a branch or something, who has somebody
connected to Israel, because that's what innovation
is coming from.
They don't have petroleum.
They don't have a lot of resources.
And they have the brains.
And if the, if the Arabs and the Muslims
want to do the same,
they will go farther away from what they are doing now.
Unfortunately we have a lot of religion.
Very little creativity and innovation.
(audience clapping) (laughing)
For more infomation >> Here & Now for Monday 10 April 2017 - Duration: 59:48. 
For more infomation >> Search for Delphi killer continues - Duration: 2:56. 
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