By Adam H. Becker

On February 21 Syrian-American psychiatrist, Wafa Sultan, gave an interview on al-Jazeera television in which she criticized the Muslims of the world for wallowing in a resentful Medieval past. Her stark arguments were further articulated by an extended comparison to the Jews, who, according to Sultan, have demonstrated their virtues through their intellectual efforts and hard work, making something of themselves even in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Sultan’s interview on al-Jazeera is only the most recent example of a tendency to employ the Holocaust as a key interpretive device and yardstick for correct socio-political etiquette among nations. Moreover, this interview has been passed around the internet to such an extent that the website containing it received over a million hits prior to the March 11 article on her in The New York Times.

Dr. Sultan identifies herself as well as what seems to be the essence of her argument when she proudly boasts: “I am a secular human being.” Although she says that she is not promoting a “clash-of-civilizations” thesis, what she argues maintains a similar logic as Samuel Huntington’s notion that the core conflicts in the post-Cold War era will be based on cultural difference and not economics or ideology. She embraces a standard European temporal model for understanding cultural difference by characterizing contemporary Islam as medieval.

“The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations,” Dr. Sultan said. “It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality.”

Why a psychiatrist’s statements about social, cultural, religious, and political issues are considered important is not questioned in The Times article, nor by those circulating the link to her interview. Her secularist critique of certain Muslim extremists who serve for her as an exemplar of all that is wrong with contemporary Muslim and Arab culture is unoriginal. Typical of irate secularist and modernization discourse, her argument consists of the standard flustered response to religion that we have heard since the Enlightenment: you are backwards and ignorant, grow up and get over it! This is perhaps appropriate to her disciplinary background in psychiatry: in Dr. Sultan’s view some cultures are less mature, less developed than others. It also corresponds to the dominant ideology of the socialist, secularist Syria in which she was born and educated.

The fathers of anthropology and the history of religions in the late nineteenth century, such as E.B. Tylor and James Frazer, held similar positions and numerous scholars have noted how this way of thinking served as the ideological accompaniment to European colonialism. Scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century thought that when they studied non-European cultures they were in fact examining their own culture’s past. Part of this past was the religiosity labeled as superstitious and backward next to the more modern form of religion found in Protestantism, which was understood to be the most evolved of the religions due to its focus on the individual and personal morality and its avoidance of awkward public displays full of pomp. Such rationalist and individualist approaches to religion completely fail to recognize the complexity of religion or its irreducibly social character and its deep imbrication within concrete and specific historical conditions.

Dr. Sultan did not think these views up on her own. In fact, her position regarding religion is standard secularism, but, as Jeffrey Stout argues in his recent book, Democracy and Tradition, we should distinguish between secularization and secularism, one a historical process that we are still trying to understand, the other, an ideology that confuses this former process for an obligatory political project. In the Middle East the latter has been foundational to Kemalism in Turkey, Arab nationalism in Syria and Egypt, and the Shah’s government in Iran. It is this flawed, often elitist political project that Islamists in the region are fighting against.

Two striking and not unrelated features about Dr. Sultan’s statements are the role the Holocaust plays in them and their rapid dissemination across the internet. The Times writes:

Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, “The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling.” She went on, “We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people.” She concluded, “Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.”

Yes, of course, Jews did not blow up German restaurants. (They had all been destroyed by allied bombing raids). The analogy is an anachronism and the historical conditions of these two events are apples and oranges. Furthermore, Jews did bomb, burn, and destroy: not German homes, but Christian and Muslim Arab ones. In fact, much of the respect that Israel has received by many since its foundation has been specifically inspired by the Jewish state’s capacity to harness violence. This is something many Jews would not blush to admit. Israel, as it was imagined by many Jews, was a Jewish entity which would hit back when attacked, or “throw bricks when gentiles threw pennies at them,” to quote an angry Zionist I argued with last summer.

Related to her use of the Holocaust to critique Muslims is the way that Dr. Sultan’s comments have been mediated. Not unlike the recent cartoon crisis, her words have zipped around the internet with such speed in part because they confirm what everyone already thinks. The link to her interview was being passed around the internet especially by Jews (I received it myself several times). As the Times points out:

Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. “We have been discussing with her the importance of her message and trying to devise the right venue for her to address Jewish leaders,” said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director of the organization.

In her Al-Jazeera interview Dr. Sultan went on to discuss the great achievements of Jews in the sciences and arts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. No wonder this interview was passed around. It is confirmation of the logic of the game that we Jews love to play: Who’s a Jew? That a statement made by “the enemy” is being passed around at first brought to mind Christians in the Middle Ages finding Trinitarian statements in the Talmud, a practice whereby Christians could make themselves feel better by knowing that even the Jews’ books acknowledged that the Christians were actually right. Frankly, her statements are nothing new and people have only taken an interest in her because she is an Arab woman, which bestows her with an authenticity as vivid as her image on the computer screen. If a white psychiatrist from California said the same things, would her statements be passed around the internet like a celebrity sex video? In turn, and predictably, Dr. Sultan has been condemned and threatened by some extremist Muslims and/or Arabs for her statements. The logic of the clash of civilizations is being confirmed by mutually constitutive responses to inflammatory speech. It would have been interesting if the Times had gone into further details on the event that Dr. Sultan described as generative in the development of her ideas. Her anger at Muslim extremism derives from, according to the Times article, a traumatic experience she had when in medical school.

But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government ofPresident Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.

This would be a traumatic experience for anyone. The targeting of a university professor is shocking and brings to mind the targeting of public school teachers by the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey or the numerous deaths of academics in contemporary Iraq. However, it is a selective critique of contemporary Arab politics and society to linger on the assassins of state university professors and suicide bombers, both responsible for comparatively far less deaths than the corrupt, undemocratic, and inefficient governments of the Middle East. Would Dr. Sultan label the brutal (and secular) government of the late Hafez al-Assad “medieval”? Is it modern? If not, then we have a paradox: medievalists fighting medievalists. Slowly the “clash of civilizations” logic implicit in her modernization/secularization rhetoric is revealed and central to Dr. Sultan’s argument is the correct understanding of the Holocaust.

This is not the only recent example of the Holocaust serving as an important category in the discussion of the Arab and/or Muslim world. Robert Ferrigno, once a writer of garden variety thrillers, has recently published Prayers for the Assassin, a novel of alternative reality about a dystopian America after the “evil doers,” to quote our president, win the “War on Terror.” Scribner produced an alternative reality news website to coincide with the publication of the book, featuring the daily events and concerns of the U.S. in 2036, Republic World News.com. “Holocaust to be Taken Out of Textbooks in Cleveland,” declares one of the fake-news headlines. It turns out Islamic terrorists nuked New York and Washington in 2016, but when this cataclysm was blamed on the Jews, it became known as “the Great Zionist Betrayal” and led to the mass expulsion and murder of American Jews. An article in the Faith section of the news is titled, “New Betrayal Museum Opens,” while another article in the World News feature section is “Tasmania the Last Refuge for Jews.” Clearly, things don’t look good for the Jews in Ferrigno’s imagined future. Perhaps we’d be better off in Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series, where we at least have the option of converting to Christianity to avoid being exterminated.

President Ahmadinejad of Iran, whom many think also lives in an alternative universe, recently declared that Jews “have created amyth in the name of the Holocaust and consider it above God, religion and the prophet.” He went on, “if someone were to deny the existence of God…and deny the existence of prophets and religion, they would not bother him….However, if someone were to deny the myth of the Jews’ massacre, all the Zionist mouthpieces and the governments subservient to the Zionists tear their larynxes and scream against the person as much as they can.” Ahmadinejad’s statement is more interesting than ordinary Holocaust denial in that he is arguing that the public recognition of the Holocaust is exemplary of Western culture. God can be denied, but not the Holocaust. Perhaps his view was confirmed when an Iranian paper announced a contest for the best Holocaust cartoons. In response to mockery of the prophet it was the Holocaust that came to mind as a Western equivalent. The Holocaust has become a tit for tat item: You make fun of the Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him, and the Holocaust is fair game. Again, as with the case of Dr. Sultan, inflammatory speech, in this case the Muhammad cartoons, led to the mutual constitution of positions within a “clash of civilizations.”

However, perhaps our familiarity with the Holocaust makes us forget: One in three Jews were killed in the Holocaust. In Europe. By Christians. The Christian anti-Jewish tradition, which goes back to early Church history, formed the “theological roots of modern anti-semitism,” to quote from the subtitle of Rosemary Radford Ruether’s classic Faith and Fratricide. The nasty polemic Christians engaged in for centuries took root in modern European notions of race; and then a thoroughly modern European state implemented, in numbers, the greatest crime ever committed against humanity. This is all textbook knowledge. And yet considering how the Holocaust is introduced into public conversation of late one might confuse it for one of the many virtues of “Western civilization.” Somehow this event has been taken up as a tool to attack Muslims; in response, reactionaries like Ahmadinejad, instead of taking this event up to criticize Europe, deny it as “myth.”

How is it that the Holocaust, which at first was a sign for some Europeans of the essentially flawed nature of “Western civilization” and certainly an event inspired at least in part by Christianity, has become a means of praising “the West” and establishing a standard, even a mark, which other cultures must attain before we can take their gripes and concerns seriously? By Holocaust I don’t mean only the event itself. Rather, I refer to the ritual lip service of acknowledging that the Holocaust occurred. For the meaning of the Holocaust is now generally assumed and more emphasis is put on acknowledging and condemning it than on thinking about its causes and the multiple meanings we can take from such an event. In both Ferrigno’s book and Sultan’s ranting (as well as Ahmadinejad’s Jew-baiting) our coming to terms with the Holocaust differentiates us from the Muslim world. However, implicit in this standard is the notion that denying the Holocaust is as bad as perpetrating it. Of course, our mantra “Never Again” demands the retelling of the story, but such hand wringing did not save many Rwandans.

One explanation for the dynamic that has developed whereby the Holocaust represents “the West” and Muslims who deny the Holocaust stand outside the pale of political legitimacy is offered by examining how this event has been marshaled to serve the political project of Zionism, and thus, at least in part, has become a not so secret code word for Israel. For example, the story of the Holocaust often ends in Israel. The film Exodus, which includes a critique of diasporic Jewish culture, begins where Schindler’s List leaves off, Holocaust survivors on their way to Israel. In the academic realm this can be seen in certain scholarly approaches to Jewish history. The historiography of the Jews in modern Europe as well as in more ancient times, especially when it has been written by Israeli scholars, has emphasized the difficulty, even the impossibility of life in diaspora. In this model of Jewish history the Holocaust is the inevitable result of living among gentiles. The logic of this historical model appears in the Yad Vashem law, which extends posthumous Israeli citizenship to all the Jews who died in the Holocaust, and on the theological level in the view, understandably offensive to many, that the Holocaust was God’s punishment of the Jews for not living in the land he had promised them.

In this environment people’s assessment of the Holocaust often stands correlative to their support of Israel. When contemporary Muslims and Arabs hate Jews and deny the Holocaust, their sentiments are often closely tied to anger at what is seen as the injustice of Israel, while for many Europeans and Americans, whether Christian or not, acknowledging the Holocaust functions as an implicit form of support for Israel.

Furthermore, critics have noted how an event central to European history has somehow become part of American history. The Holocaust museum in our nation’s capital attests to this. In its Americanization the Holocaust links us to Europe, and the special claim we have on it allows us to be part of European history and, in turn, world history since Europe commonly functions as the core force in models of world history (another survival from the Age of Empire). For this is also what the Holocaust does for us. It allows us to feel modern inasmuch as modernity is a self-conscious positioning and awareness of the past. However brutal we are, those who will not acknowledge the Holocaust are worse since they belong to an eternal medievalism that fails to understand the truth of its own violence, a truth which removes all responsibility.

Like Christianity, Islam has had a long history of imagining the Jew. This corresponds to the social status that Jews and other non-Muslims were expected to be subject to within Muslim society through the Middle Ages. As a friend put it to me, “The simple fact is that Islam has its own Jewish question, one configured entirely differently than that of Christian Europe.” The roots of the contemporary influx of European-Christian anti-Semitism into the Middle East go as far back as the 1930s. Moreover, it was not only the pope and many Protestant religious leaders who acquiesced to the anti-Semitism coming out of Germany, but also certain political and religious leaders in the Arab world.

The question arises: to what extent does it behoove Arabs to come to terms with their own traditional notion of the Jew and with how that notion has been affected by ongoing links with the virulent anti-Semitism of Nazis. However, I wonder how necessary coming to terms with our pasts actually is. It seems to be an impossible act, and sometimes it is perhaps best to forget the past, not constantly invoke it. Most Christians have still not come to terms with the theological roots of anti-Semitism or the nasty repercussions of Christianity’s often ardent supersessionism, and nor have most Jews come to terms with the ethnocentrism of Judaism. Each religion has its own tendency which in certain situations functions as a key element in an oppressive system of religious compulsion or xenophobia. However, the problems of the world do not derive from a lack of reconciliation. Many individual Jews will not go to Germany and continue feel antipathy towards Germans, but this has no political relevance. Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine do not have to be completely reconciled with the injustices each side feels they have suffered from the other over the past decades before political solutions to political problems can be found.

We do not all have to get along or even like one another. Provided that political, economic, and social equalities exist, whether we truly love our neighbor or think he is a silly goy or an infidel is of less significance. From the French revolution to the American Civil Rights movement, political progress did not consist of transforming people’s attitudes; rather it depended on the demands for a social transformation that made those attitudes irrelevant. Journalists and critics should not take for granted the need for reconciliation within politics nor should we allow religion’s inner notions and myths of itself, including the religion of secularism, dictate the norms of politics. The use of the Holocaust as the culturally imagined differentiating point between “the West” and “the Muslim world” is a red herring. What has anything got to do with the Holocaust? Nothing at all.

Adam H. Becker is an Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at New York University. He is the author of Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia and last wrote for The Revealer about “Imam Ali in Sadr City” and “Apologetic Islam.”