Copyright © 1994 -2006 ِAli Darwish. All Rights Reserved.

From Salaam to So Long[1]

The Journey of a Word, the Contribution of a Nation: Dimensions of a Stereotype

Ali Darwish
 

he contribution of the Arabs to modern civilization is usually glossed over, if not totally ignored in the West. The Arabs are frequently portrayed as bloodthirsty, sword-wielding, desert dwellers obsessed with women and camels.  On the one hand, images from the Arabian Nights, or One Thousand and One Nights, are engraved in the subconscious of almost everyone in the West. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Sinbad, the Flying Carpet, the All-seeing Eye, the harem, belly dancers, and a god that is misunderstood — Allah Akbar!

On the other, sinister pictures of terrorism and fundamentalist extremism, of crowds of black-breaded youths bashing their blooded heads with razor-sharp swords while marching down the streets of Beirut send shudders down the spines of television viewers and fill them with disgust. At the far end of the picture, white-robed sheikhs dealing and wheeling with petro-dollars in the middle of the desert to a backdrop of camels and sheep, and black-robed women getting out of chauffeur-driven limousines outside shopping centres in New York or Bentleys outside Harrods in London make people turn green with envy.

 Hollywood and the media have played a major role in propagating and reinforcing these stereotype portraitures, sometimes intelligently blending romanticism and fantasy with barbarism, backwardness and lunacy, and often blatantly attacking the Arabs in a fragmentation of reality and out-of-context treatments. Even to this day, futuristic science fiction movies such as Star Trek (The Perfect Mate episode) deal with themes of female bondage and harem indoctrination, and children’s programs such as Bugs Bunny’s 1001 Rabbit Tales reinforce similar images in impressionable minds. These stereotypes are so much ingrained in the psychological makeup of almost everyone to the extent that even some Arabs gladly participate in propagating them. It takes only an international or domestic event related to the Arabs to rake up these deep-seated stereotypes and bring them out in the open in the most vicious and venomous fashion. During the first gulf war, images of navy officers wearing white bath towels on their heads and mocking Islamic prayers on board warships en route to the Arabian Gulf were broadcast live into the homes of millions of viewers across the world. Suddenly, political correctness disappeared from the hearts and minds of those perpetrating such racist acts and those justifying them as aberration confined to ignorant "few bad apples". Other prejudices take more subtle forms. [continued]...

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