It might not look like it but the sun is shining up there. Here’s a screenshot from the Star Chart app, my favourite app, looking east, note it uses some of the original Arabic names.
Let’s face it they mapped the stars while we were all running round in loincloths, ok I exaggerate a bit, but their “golden age” overlapped our “dark ages.” What follows is the result of a morning freewrite, though I added the links later, as I pondered why this knowledge erased from history.
I suggest that when the west colonised the Islamic countries in the 19th Century and early 20th century, simultaneous with the “scramble for Africa”, it was necessary to portray these societies as primitive and undeveloped and bury this history.
In Morocco when the French occupied they established what they called a cordon sanitaire – a santitary corridor – around the old cities, implying the residents were disease ridden and unsanitary. This can still be seen today in the layout of cities.
In Hollywood Arab men have been portrayed relentlessly as hook nosed characters not to be trusted or worse violent and barbaric. The 1922 film The Sheik being a good example.
It seems to me all this prejudice resurrected big style with Bush’s “axis of evil” and the eventual invasion of Iraq 19 years ago. We saw the growth of Islamophobia on an unprecedented scale.
Yes the regime of Saddam Hussein brutal but worse than the 45th, Bolsonrao, Orban, Erdogan? Many of the people knew it, I suggest how different Iraq would have been today if the people had brought Hussein down established their own democracy.
Instead we saw the Iraqi people hacking pointlessly at a fallen statue while the overlords installed themselves in the Green Zone and crushed under the tracks of their tanks irreplaceable artefacts from ancient Mesopotamia circa 3000 BC.
Yet even back then in the era of Mesopotamia the lands on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates were passed from empire to empire. Seems to me the entire history of humanity has been one of war and domination, empires rise, empires fall, borders are redrawn, even as far back as that.
Isn’t it time to recognise our common humanity? To honour the achievements of all societies? To stop the cycle of endless war and its justifications?
We face a crisis now, the climate emergency, which we will overcome if we unite as one human community. The biggest obstacle I see is corporate power and the governments in their pockets. Those that still pursue the profits of the black gold; oil, coal (and gas.)
They dehumanise, discriminate against and murder those who stand in their way. Often indigenous peoples who embody the experiences of poverty, racism, misogyny, the theft of their land, the degradation of their land, it’s eco systems and carbon sinks from the Amazon to Canada to Siberia to Australia. They are at the frontlines.
Seems to me it’s a form of neocolonialism that casts these people as ignorant and savages. Loggers in the Amazon tied an indigenous teenage girl to a tree and burned her alive.
I figure the meek won’t inherit the Earth we will have to fight for it, stand up for it. Put aside our differences, honour out differences, there no place for “these are our people, these are not,” based on human made borders carved out 100 years ago.
One world, one people is a long way off, but we do have one responsibility. I figure we in the west must standing solidarity with those on the frontline, amplify their voices, recognise their wisdom, we, like they, need to Think Global and Act Local the fossil fuel companies have their hands in all our pockets. They pollute and potentially rob us of our future.
The way I see it is another world is not only possible but absolutely necessary if humanity is to survive.
A blog post by Anne Enith Cooper
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