"Twenty years ago Amnesty International was criticizing Saddam Hussein’s human rights abuses at the same time Donald Rumsfeld was courting him. In 2003, Rumsfeld apparently trusted our credibility on violations by Iraq but now that we are criticizing the United States, he has lost his faith again.” - William Schulz, Executive Director, Amnesty International USA ("US Human Rights”)

Reports that US soldiers at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility had desecrated the Qur'an resulted in an outpouring of popular Muslim anger from Mauritania to Indonesia. Thousands took to the streets to denounce the desecration of Islam's holy book, clashing with security forces as they staged anti-US protests, spitting on the American flag, throwing tomatoes at a picture of President Bush, and burning the US constitution. Waving copies of the Qur'an, demonstrators across the Middle East and Asia demanded an apology from the US, as well as punishment for the perpetrators. Unsurprisingly, the White House denied the Bush administration’s responsibility, accusing a few people of violating policy, and the media for blowing "isolated incidents” out of proportion ("White House”).

Despite Newsweek's retraction of its earlier story, which reported that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushed a Qur'an down the toilet to get inmates to talk, the Pentagon confirmed on June 3rd that more than 13 cases of "alleged mishandling of the Qur'an by Joint Task Force personnel had taken place. Ten of those were by guards and three by interrogators,” ("Pentagon Confirms”). Incidents involved kicking or stepping on the holy book, throwing water balloons into a cell block to cause an unspecified number of Qur'ans to get wet, and a guard’s urine splashing on a detainee and his Qur'an ("Pentagon Confirms”).

Numerous former detainees had previously complained of incidents of Qur'an abuse or mishandling. Aryat Vahitov told Russian television in June 2004 that "they [Americans] tore the Qur'an to pieces in front of us, threw it in the toilet,” and Abdullah Tabarak told a Moroccan newspaper in December 2004 that the Americans had trampled the Qur'an underfoot and had thrown it in a "urine bucket,” (Greenway). In its harshest criticism to date, Amnesty International labeled the United States the number one human rights offender, calling the Guantanamo Bay detention facility the "gulag of our time”—reminiscent of the extensive system of Soviet prisons in which thousands of political prisoners died of hunger, cold and physical abuse (Dodds).

The Trail of Bigotry

Many in the West fail to appreciate that the concept of religion in Islam is not a private, individual matter, but rather a communal affair that involves the global Muslim community, or Ummah. The Qur'an represents the core of an all-encompassing belief system that is regarded by Muslims as the eternal source of guidance for all mankind. It represents the main source of authority for all intellectual disciplines of Islam (Kafrawi). Even the art of Qur'anic recitation (tilawah) and inscription or calligraphy (khatt) has been deemed of great value in Islamic culture. Hence, the desecration of the Qur'an is more significant and consequential than other forms of abuse in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. The former amounts to the spiritual, emotional, and psychological torture of all Muslims, whereas the latter—though equally shameful and traumatizing—represents the physical and psychological abuse of a few Muslims held in captivity (Khan). In either case, successive incidents of humiliation and desecration should not be seen as isolated incidents committed by a few "rotten apples," but rather as the ultimate result of the pervasiveness of an Islamophobic discourse that permeates the upper echelons of decision-making in the US administration, military command, and certain intellectual and social circles affiliated with influential policymakers in the United States.

In 2001 and 2002, leading evangelical figures affiliated with Christian-Zionist circles regularly insulted Islam and Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing be upon him) with impunity. Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson described Islam as "wicked, violent and not of the same God,” and called the Prophet of Islam a "terrorist” and a "pedophile.” In November 2002, John Ashcroft, then the US attorney general, got away with similar bigotry when he said that "Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him,” while "Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you,” (Safi). In October 2003, Lt. Gen. Willian G. Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, was allowed to retain his job despite telling church gatherings that the Christian God is "real,” whereas the Muslim God is an "idol” (Safi). At a time when the United States has been urging Muslim governments to shut down madrassas, or religious schools, for their alleged "anti-Jewish” or "anti-Christian” teachings, Rumsfeld defended Boykin’s remarks by citing the latter’s right to freedom of speech.

More disturbing is the prevalence of justifications for the US occupation of Muslim lands based on condescending, arrogant, and racist foundations; reformulations of the "white man’s burden” thesis that seek to magnify the essential "otherness” and incurable deficiencies of the Orient vis-à-vis an enlightened, progressive West. Central to neo-conservative thinking in this regard is Raphael Patai’s book entitled The Arab Mind (1973).

The Arab Mind was catapulted into the limelight when Seymour Hersh, investigating torture at Abu Ghraib, claimed that it was the "bible of neocons on Arab behavior,” (Hersh). Patai, a Hungarian-born Jew and an ardent Zionist, describes the Middle East as a monolithic "cultural area,” with no plurality of differences, and portrays Arabs as evasive, shifty, indifferent, deceptive, and careless individuals, who are exceptionally and intrinsically susceptible to humiliation and indignation. The same mind-set is apparent in a work by Douglas A. Kupersmith, published by the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, wherein it is argued that the "Arab culture commonly exhibits a strong disdain for manual labor and to leave things undone until the last possible minute.” Kupersmith enthusiastically cites Patai, arguing that the situation in the Arab world is one of "a handful of nations paying cash for the best military hardware, while relying heavily on outside expertise to keep their modern forces operational” (O’Neil Ortiz). Thus, the US occupation of Muslim land is seen as essentially picking up where intrinsic Arab weakness left off. In other words, because Arabs are lazy and passive, it follows that all "colonization of industry (or of nations themselves in the Middle East) are in fact provoked by those who cannot help themselves,” (O’Neil-Ortiz).

Norvell B. De Atkine, Director of Middle East Studies at the JFK Special Warfare Center and Military School at Fort Bragg, and Patai’s greatest champion, admits that "At the institution where I teach military affairs, the ‘Arab Mind’ forms the basis of my cultural instruction. Over the past 12 years, I have also briefed hundreds of military teams being deployed to the Middle East.” (O’Neil-Ortiz). De Atkine authored an article in the Middle East Quarterly entitled "Why Arabs Lose Wars,” in which he attributes Arab military defeats in the modern era not to contemporary political or military specificities, but to a "culture that engenders subtlety, indirection and dissimulation in personal relationships... and the often-paranoid environment of Arab political culture,” hinting at the possible role of Islam’s "inherent fatalism” in encouraging a defeatist mentality among Arabs, (De Atkine). More seriously, the "Area Studies” Branch of the World Religions and Cultures Department of the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center distributes an "Area Manual” to soldiers and private personnel in various war theatres that is replete with ethnocentric and utterly flawed notions of presumed "typical Arab behavior,” ("Working and Training Guidelines”). Again, the manual depicts Arabs as passive, fatalistic, indecisive, incompetent, tribal, primitive, and opportunistic. Even positive characteristics, such as "Arab generosity,” are portrayed, not as a humanitarian attribute, but rather the result of an innate desire to induce loyalty through indebtedness, and thus strengthening one’s family and/or kin, ("Working and Training Guidelines”).

Given the dissemination of such essentialist and outright racist notions in the military, it is obvious why US military personnel in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, or Bagram Air Base would torture their Muslim captives by using specific methods designed to shame and humiliate, since the writings of Patai teach them that honor envelops "the Arab ego like a coat of armor… the smallest chink can threaten to loosen all the loops and rings,” (Wyatt-Brown).

Orientalism Resurrected

For centuries Orientalism provided the intellectual justification for the military conquest and subjugation of the Orient by European powers. In Orientalist discourse, Westerners were seen as fundamentally different from, and culturally superior to, Muslims. Maxime Rodinson eloquently illustrated how mainstream Western thinking in the nineteenth century about the Orient regarded Homo Islamicus or "Islamic man” as a distinct type of human being, essentially different from "Western man,” (Lockman 74). Judging by the modern day expansion of direct US military and political influence in the Muslim World, coupled with a series of US abuses, we seem to be witnessing the resurfacing of Orientalist modes of thinking that are being used to justify, and indeed encourage, imperial encroachment upon Muslim lands, and the trampling of Muslim dignity and honor.

Consider the way in which the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been conducted, with repetitive misinformation, multiple accounts of abuses and torture, and little to show in terms of prosecuting the perpetrators. No senior US official has yet been indicted or tried for his/her responsibility for the trail of deceit that led to the Iraq war. The low-ranking officers declared guilty of abuses have been tried within the US judicial system, rather than by a competent international tribunal. This sends the message that since the United States is the global policeman, it will continue to assume the self-proclaimed role of judge, jury, and executioner, without intervention from or accountability to any international judicial authority.

By regularly dehumanizing Muslims and demonstrating contempt towards the cornerstone of the Islamic belief system—the Qur'an—the US has given credibility to all those in the Muslim world who believe that Bush’s "war on terrorism” is another Western crusade against Islam. It also gives America’s so-called "friendly dictators” in the Middle East a green light to continue to abuse their own citizens.

Perhaps the main function of these abuses is to serve as a "trial balloon,” to gauge the extent and duration of Muslim and Arab anger and make policy predictions on future Muslim responses. But with Muslims seemingly satisfied with limited outbursts of condemnation and anger in response to the desecration of their holy book, many have been left wondering if the reaction would be much different if Jewish extremists were to carry on their repetitive and explicit threat of demolishing the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Palestine, to erect the Temple Mount in its place. That is a question only the coming months will answer.

WORKS CITED

De-Atkine, Norvell B. "Why Arabs Lose Wars,” Middle East Quarterly Dec. 1999

Accessed: 6 June 2005

Dodds, Paisley. "Amnesty Takes Aim at ‘Gulag’ in Guantanamo,” Washington Post 25

May 2005. Accessed: 6 June 2005

Greenway, H.D.S. "Why Muslims Distrust the West,” The Boston Globe 28 May 2005.

Accessed: 5 June 2005

Hassan, Ghali. "The Resort to Torture,” Online Journal 15 Mar. 2005. Accessed: 7

June 2005

Hersh, Seymour. "The Grey Zone,” The New Yorker 15 May 2004. Accessed: 7 June

2005

Kafrawi, Shalahuddin. "Muslims Revere Qur'an as Direct Divine Revelation,” Morning Call

20 May 2005. Accessed: 8 June 2005

Khan, M.A. Muqtedar. "Qur'an Desecration : Far Worse Than Abu Ghraib,” Common Dreams

19 May, 2005. Accessed: 5 June 2005

Lockman, Zachary. Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of

Orientalism (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2004): 74

O’Neill-Ortiz, Javier. "Raphael Patai, Military Arab Studies, and Leftist Academia,”

Penumbral 18 Apr. 2005. Accessed: 7 June 2005

Safi, Louay. "Can the United States Lose the Whole World and its Soul Too?” Insight

24 May 2005. Accessed: 6 June 2005

"US Human Rights Abuses” News From Russia 3 June 2005. Accessed: 6 June 2005

"White House : Qur'an Abuse Isolated,” MSNBC 4 June 2005. Accessed: 5 June,

2005

"Working and Training Guidelines,” Area Studies : Middle East (2004) Accessed: 8

June 2005

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. "The Sad Parallels Between Iraq and Reconstruction,” History

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** Kareem M. Kamel is an Egyptian analyst based in Cairo, Egypt. He has an MA in International Relations and is specialized in security studies, decision-making, nuclear politics, and Middle East politics. He is currently a PhD candidate at the American University in London, and a teaching assistant to the Political Science Department at the American University in Cairo.

Source: IslamOnline.net, 16 June 2005
http://www.islam-online.net/English/Views/2005/06/article02.SHTML