Post-9/11 literature encourages religious small-mindedness

World politics has entered a new stage since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Discussion of division and annihilating the other has grown in literature of "belongings." A few theorists, such as the British historian Paul Kennedy, Samuel P. Huntington, Benjamin R. Barber and journalist Robert D. Kaplan, have devoted their writings to alarm against an imminent threat. They divide the world into good entities and bad entities, as in Barber's book title "Jihad vs. McWorld." This dualistic approach of reducing cultures into single entities has been severely aggravated with the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001. A picture of the "West vs. Rest" is a powerful avenue through which media propaganda has been conducted against the "other," triggering the aggressiveness of U.S. policy-makers. A quick look back at the last decade two devastating wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, terrorist bombings across major cities of the world, popular rage and discontent, violation of human rights, freedom and liberties have skyrocketed in the name of national security. Feelings of mistrust among cultures have grown massively. No matter what form or shape terrorist acts might take, they are undeniably irreligious and irrational, but as the saying goes "when there's smoke there's fire." Oftentimes one misses questioning the fire's cause and contents oneself with "from the smoke comes wonder." We fail to address the effectiveness of American interventions around the world and the abandonment of intellectual responsibility from academics. The "why do they hate us?" rhetoric launched massive publications, lectures and documentaries about Islam, Muslims, Jihad and the Middle East. This infatuation has been accompanied by the growth of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, not only in U.S. institutions but also around the world. What is disheartening is the presentation of selective, partial and decontexualized themes of some Islamic literature. Choose whatever is appropriate, and apply it to your convenient context. It is as if more than a billion Muslims scattered across five continents are only one person, speak one language and have only one concern, which is plotting how to destroy the West. Is this the best way to understand the world we live in? Is it wise to produce a simplified map of the world and hand it to generals and policymakers? Doesn't it mobilize nationalistic and chauvinistic feelings of annihilating the other? Shouldn't we question our actions in the light of whether it aggravates or mitigates hatred? Serious attempts exist to revive the mutual understanding and exchange between the nations. Yet Wayne Bell, author of "We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids' Book of Freedom," has a

different stance. It's filled with depictions of iconic pictures from 9/11 and widens the gap between the media and Muslims. Bell said his book is meant to be "a memorial tribute ... and an informational piece to help educate children on events on 9/11." He added that it is "a simplistic, honest tool." These words did not mollify the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) representatives, such as Dawud Walid, who described the book as "more than just coloring in the lines." "Little kids who pick up this book can have their perceptions colored by those images ... it instills bias in young minds," Walid added. What is really problematic and inappropriate is the implicit attitudes that breed a psyche of fear, hate and dismissal of the other and particularly Muslims. A phrase like "radical Islamic Muslim extremists" is used at least 10 times to instill certain parts of a political agenda into the children's psyche. Do the children need such materials to find common grounds to unite with others? What kind of attitude would they adopt at an early age toward more than 1 billion Muslim around the world? Does this profound skepticism come to terms with the other in a cosmopolitan culture? Such work whips up feelings of hostility and antipathy against a sizeable minority in the United States and more than a billion people worldwide. The least accurate thing to say is to describe the Islamic world as full of terrorists and fundamentalists, and different and irrational compared to us. It's important to mention that certain small groups exist in any given religion who try to speak in the name of the group or in the name of God and give themselves the right to act on behalf of the group. This intellectual violence, entrenched in this tiny group's mind, is bankrupt and should not outweigh everything else. The world today is in fact a world of mixtures, of crossings-over, of migrations, of boundaries traversed. No culture or society is purely one thing, there is no such thing as insulated cultures, and any attempt to build xenophobic ideologies does damage to the variety and the sheer complexity of others. The more consistent in dismissing and boxing in one group, the more inaccurate we are about ourselves and about others. As Aim Csaire once put it "the work of man is only just beginning, and it remains to conquer all the violence entrenched in the recesses of our passion, for no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force. And there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory."

So, major steps must be taken toward bringing back the hijacked commonalities that unite us. One needs to recognize the existence and the complexity of the other. Plus, denationalizing education from the intellectual cleansing of the other makes it possible for people to understand our complex and mixed world. We must train ourselves to look beyond the monochromatic world of stereotypes, authoritarian and dogmatic principles, to see a world that is full of vibrant colors and textures, a world of depth and dimension.