brilliant analysis by dabashi.
These travelling metaphors of racially profiled acts of violence – that violence is always perpetrated by “others”, and not by “oneself” – now metamorphosing as they racialise the transnational revolutionary uprisings in our part of the world are a disgrace, a nasty remnant of ancient and medieval racism domestic to our cultures, exacerbated… to demean and subjugate us by European colonialism to further their own interests, and now coming back to haunt and mar the most noble moments of our collective uprising against domestic tyranny and foreign domination alike.
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The roots of Arab and Iranian racism towards each other, and of both Arab and Iranian racism towards “black Africans” are too horrid and troubling to deserve full exposure at these magnificent moments in all our histories. Aspects and dimensions of these pathologies need to be addressed only to the degree that they point to a collective emancipation from the snares of racism transmuting into cycles of racialising violence.
On the Arab side, as Joseph Massad has demonstrated in his Desiring Arabs (2007), in the course of Arab nationalism, the trope of “Persian” was systematically racialised and invested with all sorts of undesirable and morally corrupt and corrupting “sexual perversions”, and thus a “manly” and “straight” heteronormativity was manufactured for “Arabs”.
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The pathology of Iranian racism has a different genealogy. Engulfed in the banality of a racist Aryanism, a certain segment of Iranians, mostly monarchist in political disposition, has been led to believe that they are in fact an island of purebred Aryans unfortunately caught in a sea of Semitic ruffians, and that they have been marred by Arab and Muslim invasion and need to reconnect with their European roots in “the West” to regain their Aryan glory.
The external and internal racism then comes together to manufacture a fictitious “Persian” marker that is the mirror image of its “Arab” invention. The binary Persian/Arab, rooted in medieval history and colonially exacerbated, in turn becomes a self-propelling metaphoric proposition and feeds on itself.
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Racialising violence is the very last remnant of colonial racism that knew only too well the Roman, and later Old French Republic, logic of “divide and conquer”, or “divide and rule” (divide et impera or divide et regnes), a dictum that was ultimately brought to perfection by Machiavelli in his Art of War (1520).
The criminal record of European colonialism in Asia and Africa is replete with this treacherous strategy.
The old colonial adage has renewed imperial usages. Soon after the US-led invasion of Iraq, a US military strategist, Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, wrote an off-the-cuff analysis on the Sunni-Shia divide, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam will Shape the Future (2006). He effectively blamed the carnage in Iraq on ancient Sunni-Shia hostilities and linked it to the strategic hostility between the Islamic Republic and Saudi Arabia – a well thought out strategic intervention that turned the US, in the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, into a good Samaritan and entirely innocent bystander.
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Today beyond the reach of these colonial and imperial treacheries, we as a people have a renewed rendezvous with history – and if these revolutions are allowed to be assimilated backward into outdated and dreadful racialising elements evident in pan-Arab, pan-Iranian, pan-Turkic, ad nauseum frames of references, we will all be back where we were two centuries ago and all these heroic sacrifices will be for naught.
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