http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/05/13/149003.html
The distance between the northeastern tip of Africa and the northwestern territory of the Indian Subcontinent is pretty long; cultural, historical, or political similarities are quite unlikely. Nevertheless, the blasts that shake Pakistan send a chill down the spines of Egyptians who in every passing breeze detect an all-sweeping monsoon that is bound to uproot them from their soil, blow them into the air, and shatter them to pieces. Today—Friday, May 13—was no exception.
The scores who lost their lives in Peshawar at the hands of Taliban militants felt like our own compatriots and the bombing has indeed added one more crack to the fragile walls inside which we seek an illusory protection that grows fainter by the hour.
Back in 1996, we were glued to the screen as we watched bearded militants take over Kabul, declare the creation of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and issue a series of edicts that seemed as unintelligible as the questions Arabs are sometimes asked in Europe and North America like “Do you go to work on a camel?” Banning music and cinema, criminalizing greeting cards and fashion catalogues, restricting education, work, and sports to men, and declaring nail polish and firecrackers un-Islamic were just a few examples of what looked like the main articles in the constitution of a state founded a few centuries after the Middle Ages.
We followed the news with a mixture of awe and—I have to say I am ashamed to admit that—amusement. We waited everyday for updates on the Taliban’s latest and greatest like Mexicans who are nowhere to be found in streets at 9:00 p.m. because it is time for the evening “telenovela.” The sight of bearded, sullen-looking men in turbans, who summoned up the visual image we created as children of the 40 thieves in Ali Baba’s tale, “shooing” women off the streets and beating men with hair longer than dictated made us watch the whole thing with the aloofness of movie audiences who know that no matter how scary, bloody, or disturbing the film is, they will be back home in a couple of hours relishing a warm meal, laughing time away in a family gathering, and enjoying the feeling of being so far away from all the “bad guys” that do not seem to have a chance of crossing the silver screen into the real world.
Now, we are realizing how superficial, self-centered, and insensitive we had been, and it saddens me to admit that we only came to this realization when we felt that South Asia feels closer than Sudan and that I, for example, might be in the same boat as those Afghani women who were not allowed to peep from the window and whose appearance in any public place was treated like a descent of Satan from hell.
Though precipitated by a purely selfish fear of the direct damage that could be inflicted on us if a similar scenario in reenacted in Egypt, this moment of illumination opened our eyes to the fact that fanaticism knows no boundaries and bigotry carries no passports. We were snatched from the bubble in which we confined ourselves and given the chance to rise above the “as long as it’s not me” slogan that had been controlling our reactions to tragedies in what we alleged was the land of wonders and fairy tales.
This reminds of a story my mother told me when I was child and I wonder how different I would have felt had I made the connection a few years ago. The story dates back to 1961 when Congolese independence fighter and Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was arrested after a coup staged by Chief of Staff Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko and specifically to a footage of Sese Seko’s men forcing into Lumumba’s mouth copies of his speeches right before executing him.
Moved by the humiliation to which a freedom fighter was subjected at the hands of a bloodthirsty tyrant, my mother started crying. A very close friend of hers who was watching with her was extremely bewildered by her emotional reaction and said something she has never forgotten since then: “If it’s not happening to you, why bother?” Even though more than 20 years had passed since this happened, she was never able to forget those few words that made her see this friend in a totally new light: “Things were never the same between us after that day,” she said.
I wonder if when in 2001 we lay on our couches again munching on some cheese crackers or sipping apricot ice tea while watching the Taliban embark on the long and perseverant process of shelling and dynamiting the gigantic 6th century Buddha statues in Bamyan Valley it ever occurred to us that the Karnak Temple, the Sphinx, or Abu Simbel might face the same fate. Of course we did not. Indiana Jones’s Temple of Doom will always be nothing but a fantasy.
Have we been wise enough to start changing our minds when a group of extremist Islamists set out to destroy several Sufi shrines on the grounds they constitute a novelty prohibited by the Salafi school of thought? How about when one of the Salafi clerics—he is in fact known as the Taliban sheikh—announced that monuments in Egypt are idols and that destroying them is a duty ordained by God? How about another cleric—Taliban-educated, too, no doubt—who argued that any man who is capable of controlling a woman can be president of Egypt? How about the burning of churches and the attacks on Copts? How about increasing calls for depriving women of the right to unconditional divorce?
If it tires your mind and eyes to look all the way to Afghanistan and Pakistan, why don’t you just embark on a little journey to the south of our own “stan” and take a little walk down memory lane as you enter Luxor’s Deir el-Bahari where an unforgettably horrendous massacre took place and where even 13 years later you still get the shudders the moment you set foot into the mortuary temple complex whose constructors had never imagined facing such challenges to their immortality. Even though it was human beings who were targeted in the Luxor killing spree and it was the economy and the government, rather than the monuments that the perpetrators of this crime aimed at destroying, it is time we stop making literal comparisons and start looking at the bigger picture.
It is also time we keep remembering; for forgetfulness is lethal to any nation that might for a split of a second think it is an island—even if it actually is. If you have a weak memory and 1997 seems too far away, how about September 11, 2001? They say that several Americans had not been aware before that day that Manhattan was surrounded by water from all sides… I just hope their eyes were opened to much more than that!
If globalization has any benefits at all, I bet it is terrorist organizations that would emerge as the most prominent beneficiaries. Violence and extremism turned out to be much easier to export oversees than tolerance and coexistence, and “no one is safe,” to quote the taglines of several action movies. Only now it is no longer a movie and we are no longer sitting comfortably in red velvet seats eating caramelized popcorn and thinking of where to go for dinner afterward.
I know that the idea of a world without boundaries was not meant that way, but I have just realized this is the only context in which we can use it at the moment, especially when the positive connotation this concept initially represented has never been able to materialize.
I hope now you can take a fresh look at the illuminated world globe you have on your desk, the atlas you kept since high school, or—even quicker and much easier— lonelyplanet.com. Maybe then you will realize that the Aussie kangaroo can hop to the Himalayas and the Andean condor can find plenty of prey in Mount Kilimanjaro.
Follow