Although we can easily provide a social political analysis of the main factors for which Sunni countries discriminate against Shi’a minorities (in the case of Iraq, former subordinated majority), we have also to acknowledge the existence of a certain ideology, widely spread among Sunni Muslims, which dehumanizes Shi’a Muslims. In the best of cases, Shi’a Muslims are tolerated and in the worst they are threatened and killed. This does not mean that there is noShi’a terrorist movement. Yet none reaches the level of aggression towards civilians seen in the case of the Sunni.

The death toll and the atrocity of the actions against Shi’a Muslims (often pilgrims and devotees visiting holy places) is shocking and difficult to make sense of. Yet even that level of violence does not shock me as much as the majority of Muslims’ silence, which I can only precisely label through a particular, politically charged, Italian word: “menefreghismo” (which, although not perfectly, translates as “an uncaring or couldn’t-care-less attitude” or even better, “I don’t care-ism”).

If a considerable number of Sunni Muslims are conducting jihad (all rather violent) against Shi’a Muslims, by the tongue, by the hand, and in particular, as the numbers show above, by the sword, the great majority of Muslims in the world are conducting another jihad, one that is not mentioned in any Islamic tradition or scholarly interpretation, but still one of the most used: the menefregista jihad, expressed by not expressing. It is characterized by a vile silence of unprecedented proportions.

You need only to compare this to the worldwide reactions of millions, both in real lives and in virtual ones, to cases such as the Sudanese teddy bear blasphemy case, the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy  or the Minaret controversy in Switzerland. All these events cost lives or created disruption. Yet today the fact that Shi’a Muslims are turned into ‘halal meat’ apparently does not deserve burned flags, screams and passionate protests. If they are lucky, the Shi’a have among Sunni Muslims few and, inevitably, feeble voices of support.

Although there are several political and historical reasons for the carnage, we cannot avoid noting the target of shrines, places of worship, mosques and so forth. The target has a clear symbolic value (and indeed even al-Qaeda attacked the Twin Towers, not the Vatican). There is one element that many scholars discussing the sectarian violence affecting Shi’a Muslims tend to underestimate and avoid discussing: tolerance.

We can clearly state that within Muslim communities in various places, a particular process is taking place. This process is vocally opposed by a certain number of Muslims, but not by a comparable number that, for instance, opposed the above mentioned controversies. This process is what I call a globalization of intolerance;  something which is surely new in the history of Muslim communities around the world.

The Worldwide Association for the Study of Religion is intended to be a forum that is extremely wide in scope for scholars in the humanities and social sciences as well as biological and evolutionary sciences, such as cognitive neuroscience. The Worldwide Association for the Study of Religion is a non-profit organization.

One of the main reasons for which I have started this association is to close the gap between scholars working in developing countries and those in the West. Indeed, although there are many national and international associations, which tend to have high fees for memberships and are limited in the use of new online conferencing technology that can avoid costly travel,  it is increasingly difficult for some scholars and students to partake in the annual conferences of mainstream associations, especially in these times of widespread university budget cuts that affect funding available for conference attendance.

The Worldwide Association for the Study of Religion will use innovation and affordable technology to achieve unprecedented networking, including that which can facilitate the contact between job seekers and academic and non-academic employers as well as scholars and publishers.

The intention is not to replace organizations like the American Academy of Religion, but rather to provide a different environment. The Worldwide Association for the Study of Religion is still a work in progress, and you can join this fast growing community and help to shape this association. We are using a bottom-up approach to build our scholarly home.

At the present you can join (sign up requested) the wiki-project page as well as the Facebook Group (upon membership request) for updates.

If you are an international member, you are marginalized despite paying a higher membership fee (for the postage of the journal) and have little or no chance to benefit from the membership in any realistic way. Personally I have tried engaging and being active within the AAR in general and particularly within my ‘section’, the Study of Islam (but also within the study group ‘Contemporary Islam’), and the result has been that my abstract was rejected for the annual conference and my candidature (even for the section Contemporary Islam!) was unsuccessful together with my application for small research grants.

I decided to check with other colleagues, whom were or are AAR members but are not “American” academics (i.e. not affiliated to any US university or institution). I was not so surprised when I discovered that their experience was rather similar to my own.

I have to note that no reasons for the rejection of abstracts were ever provided to me or some of my colleagues whom were AAR members– no transparency system was or is in place (such as public shortlists, or statistics with nationality, affiliations and so forth provided).

I decided to use a more ‘scientific’ approach and analyze the AAR (which by the way until recently was not even so ‘friendly’ to anthropologists or sociologists). I tried to receive answers to some basic and rather statistical questions which I report below:

1. How many proposals came from non-US based scholars who were not pre-arranged in panels?
2. How many non-US based scholars’ papers (not pre-aranged in panels) were accepted?
3.  How many panels were organized by non-US based scholars?
4.  How many panels organized by non-US based scholars were accepted (if any)?
5. How many members of the overall  steering committee were from non-US based organizations?

I did not receive a single answer other than one message which confirmed that, in the AAR Islam Section, all seven of the current steering committee members were from US-based institutions (personal communication 10/04/2011, Assoc. Prof Kecia Alli, Study of Islam Section co-chair). My questions were copied to Prof. Robert Puckett, the Director of Meetings. Up until today, I still do not have his answer or viewpoint.

I decided to check information about the ‘research grants’ and a quick scroll among the winners of each year confirms that nearly all of them are from US based universities and institutions. I became curious and decided to conduct an experiment. I decided to apply to the 2011-2012 research grant and use a research that I wanted to conduct in any case.

The idea was to test a research proposal on a rather important topic for which the AAR had shown interest before (in particular feminist scholars), a topic relevant at UN level and extremely sensitive, which would be conducted in a place where it had never been conducted before and where there was virtually no data.  This, I suppose is called innovation.

I can acknowledge now that I have completed the research and I am currently writing an article based on it. Yet my research proposal on female circumcision, which some prefer to refer to as genital mutilation, in Singapore was not supported by the AAR and was rejected with very little explanation other than an email informing me that the selection was difficult and, despite that my topic was interesting, there were more relevant topics in this round. 

So let us see some of the research proposals that have been founded (the entire list is here):

• Martin Nguyen, Fairfield University: The Social and Textual Landscape of a Medieval Muslim Scholarly Community
• Shin-yi Chao, Rutgers University: The Revival of Communal Religion in Present Northern Rural China: The Worship of Lady Wei (251–334 AD) as  Case Study
• G. William Barnard, Southern Methodist University The Sacred Drink of the Forest: An Exploration of the Santo Daime Tradition in Brazil Shin-yi Chao, Rutgers University

I leave to the reader to consider my topic above and the ones mentioned and their relative ‘priority’ and ‘relevance’ to the AAR. Yet let me observe again that all the winners are from US academia.

I think that I have some good evidence to question the AAR’s reputation as an ‘international’, fair association and I have no qualms to say that non-US based academics are fully discriminated against.

The AAR remains also rather technologically limited: despite being a modern US association with a quite healthy budget, the only way to partake in annual conferences and other events is to travel to the US and pay for expensive hotels and conference dinners. Yes, in 2012, teleconferencing is still a technology of the future for this association. In times of crisis, with university budget cuts and also considering all the pollution that international air travel generates, the AAR is not able to organize a videoconference presence for its annual conference.

I think, as an anthropologist working on Islam and Muslims and also as a founding editor of an international journal and a book series, that today we have the possibility to build a real international, not US dependent, association that is genuinely open and affordable for all scholars (also scholars in developing countries) thanks to the technology available today.

As I have announced, I wish support the initiation of such worldwide association and I will be happy to discuss this project with those young and more senior scholars whom also feel that the AAR (but also the American Anthropological Association, which suffers very much from similar issues) is not a place where real independent and international  collaboration can be achieved and enjoyed.

This killing in Italy did not catch me by surprise. During my visits in Italy I became aware of how a certain anti-Muslim rhetoric, which Fallaci powerfully expressed, has found not only sympathizers and fervent believers, but also the attention of a general public for which anti-Muslim attitudes posses a cathartic function within a country condemned to a populist political and economic decline. Among the millions screaming in forums, in newspapers and on blogs against the immigrants, Muslims and the now fully implemented (it appears) Shari’a in Italy, there will always be some who dream of being a ‘hero’.

Such people, in the name of the Italic supreme race, or in the name of Jesus, or both (as is often the case), will fantasize about taking matters into their own hands and spilling the hated blood of the ‘Saladin’ in order to bring Europe back to Christendom.  Some will depart from fantasy and take a step further and plan actions. On the 13th of December, Gianluca Casseri succeeded in what was planned as a ‘suicide’ terrorist action.

Although many are the differences between Breivik and the more mysterious Casseri, many are also the similarities. The isolated lonely life, the love of fantasy literature (Casseri published some books), the Celtic imaginary tradition (so dear to the Lega Nord), and the reference to heroic resistance to Islam through more or less mythological heroes. In the case of Casseri, this ‘hero’ was the cruel Dracula whom historically in 1461 killed every Turk and Muslim he could find in southern Walachi.

Analyzing some of the messages left by members of radical far-right forums, we encounter again the Nazi imagination which is full of a mix of pagan symbolism and empty Christian rhetoric and the need of an enemy other, in this case the Muslim rather than the Jew. The similarity, in those forums, of the rhetoric praising Breivik and Casseri is impressive. Both them have been mythologized in a similar way to how suicide bombers or jihadi fighters are.  Perhaps most striking is the evident hate of the ‘different’ and an impressive lack of empathy. Empathy is indeed the key to understanding these incompressible acts of hatred.

Racism, or attitudes of hatred towards the so called ‘out-group’, which often is the main cause of radicalism, as I have suggested in my last book, is better explained through processes of identity and emotions. Recent psychological, neurological and even endocrinological behavioral studies (to which anthropologists have paid too little, if any, attention) have shown what I call a ‘natural‘ bias that we have for the ‘other‘, in particular when phenotypical traits are involved (such as skin colour for instance).

Just to mention some of these studies, Matteo Forgiarini et.al (2011) have investigated ‘the existence of a racial bias in the emotional reaction to other people’s pain and its link with implicit racist biases.’  The study confirmed, while testing Caucasian people, ‘a reduced reaction to the pain of African individuals was also correlated with the observers’ individual implicit race bias’.  Alessio Avenanti et all (2010) studied the empathic sensorimotor resonance with other-races as far as pain was concerned, and again this study found that  although ‘human beings react empathically to the pain of stranger individuals [...] racial bias and stereotypes may change this reactivity into a group-specific lack of sensorimotor resonance’.

More recent studies, interestingly, have even challenged that the famous Oxytocin is a bit more sinister than the ‘hug hormone’ we knew, and found, as Carsten K. W. De Dreu et al’s study (2011) has shown, that it may have a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence. Yet this seems not enough to explain the actions of Gianluca Casseri. Indeed, there is another element that we have to consider: dehumanization. Now, for a long time social science, and in particular anthropology, has discussed the dehumanization of certain groups as merely a cultural process.

Yet the reality again becomes more dramatic when we combine what we know from interviews with what neuroscience, through fMRI studies, can tell us. Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske (2006) have shown that dehumanization is not just an attitude, but rather something that is clearly identifiable within brain functions – such as the absence of the typical neural signature for social cognition, as well as exaggerated amygdala and insula reactions (consistent with disgust) and the disgust ratings they elicit.

I could provide other evidence of the fact that all of us, as human beings, have these ‘natural’ biases, yet the difference is that the majority of us is able to control them, to see them as stereotypes which we have been educated to reject or at least challenge. Yet the above ‘natural’ characteristics, as they can be controlled, they can also be reinforced and transformed into a cognitive lens through which to make sense of the world. Paranoia is surely the result and it is clear that both Casseri and Breivik were and are paranoid, but not crazy. Indeed, they are the result of certain rhetoric, ideology and culture – what in other words is becoming, to use Dan Sperber’s epidemiological model, a robust replication system.

Casseri needed his victims’ blood to become the mythical hero of those Italians (but also Europeans, Americans and Australians) whom have decided to live in the darkness of their ignorance and believe that they are fighting a civilizational war; a belief marked by an explosive mix of mythology, religion and fantasy. Casseri is at the same time the extreme product of such robust replication system and another ‘infectious’ agent. Like in the case of terrorism perpetrated by Muslim fanatics, Cessari’s fantasy can only be the nightmare of the too often silent moderate majority; the only force that can stop the system from replicating beyond return.

In this first work I discussed through an anthropological approach how we can make sense of violent actions perpetrated by a minority of Muslims. I try to show why these Muslims may ‘feel’ the necessity of be part of a violent movements or engage in isolate violent actions. Yet the book is also a strong criticism of how anthropologist have understood Muslims (discourse continued, developed and expanded in The Anthropology of Islam) and even the concept of personal ‘identity’ and culture. In the book, I have observed that in many aspects we, human beings, are still the same. Despite the ‘evolution’ from Homo sapiens to ‘Homo technologicus’, we still depend, as most of our ancient ancestors did, on those bodily changes and reactions that our relationship with the environment provokes. In this book, following Damasio’s observations, I have called such automatic reactions ‘emotions’ and explained how they are perceived in the form of feelings that may affect the human self (Chapter 3).

I have argued that emotions and subsequent feelings are fundamental to an understanding of Muslim interpretations of jihad, because jihad can only exists within a mind and without consciousness the personal mental object we call ‘jihad’ would never have existed.
Today, a minority of individuals feel that to be Muslim allows one to fly planes against buildings, kill children on their first day of school, blow them- selves up among innocent people at a tube station and call it jihad. At the same time a majority who feel they are Muslim reject and condemn these actions and call them mass murder.

In Jihad beyond Islam, I have argued that it is only by focusing on that ‘feeling to be’ rather than the ‘Muslim’, that we can go to the root of these tragic events. Traditionally, social scientists have studied societies. Anthropologists, for instance, have relegated the individual to the far-flung parts of their interpretations. For a long time, any attempt to foreground an individual as part of a composite society would expose the adventurous scholar to the denigrating label of being ethnocentric. In the study of jihad this lack of focus on individual identities has, to use a Batesonian (2002) expression, facilitated the mistake of seeing the map as the actual territory.

Many religious, social, political and economic factors have been suggested for the different understandings of jihad among Muslims. Yet by starting from the viewpoint of individuals, in Jihad beyond Islam I have demonstrated that some radical Muslims do not speak of and act for ‘jihad’ because they are Muslims but rather they feel Muslim because of jihad (see Chapters 4, 5 and 6).

I have suggested that many Muslims today may be subjected to a schismogenetic process that I have called ‘the circle of panic’. Through contacts with different emotional triggers, such as pangs of guilt about the status of Muslims and Islam, rejection from host societies (Chapter 4); shocking images and particularly TV reportage of Muslim tragedies around the world (Chapter 5); challenges of identity and loyalty (Chapter 6); emotional dynamics of gender relationships (Chapter 7); and fear of Westernization (Chapter 8), the idea has arisen that Islam (seen as religion but also as an element of identity) is under attack from ‘the circle of panic’.

The circle of panic, being schismogenetic, changes the relationship between the autobio- graphic self and identity, so that to stop the identity crisis an ‘act of identity’ becomes required. The rumour producing this circle of panic not only sug- gests that Crusaders are attacking Islam but also that the West is spreading jahiliyya among Muslims, weakening Muslims’ Islamic identity. 

In Chapter 8, I have explained how the fear of jahiliyya plays a role in the anti-Semitic attitudes of some Muslim immigrants and Western-born Muslims. Rejecting essentialistic theories, which tend to scrutinize the Qur’an to collect evi- dence against Muslim anti-Semitism, I have suggested that some Muslims interpret the creation of Israel and the support it receives as the final evi- dence of the endogenous Western incapacity for justice.

So, accepting the distinction between stereotypes and chimeria that Langmuir (1990b) has advanced, in Chapter 8, I have concluded that anti-Semitism is not thereason for Muslims’ jihad. This does not mean that some Muslims in the West, while trapped within the circle of panic, have not used anti-Semitic language.
In conclusion, the rhetoric of jihad, in certain contexts, becomes the most suitable act of identity to break the schismogenetic circle of panic. I have shown in this book that Muslims do not need to know very much about Islam at the theological level to develop their rhetoric of jihad.

Today our global world subjects us (Muslims and non-Muslims alike) to unprece- dented schismogenetic processes. 

Every morning, millions of us wake up waiting for the next suicide bomber, war, extradition, kidnapping, Guantanamo bay, Abu Ghraib torture, shoot-to-kill (the wrong man) policies, unjustified arrests, Islamophobic attitudes and terrorist threats. The jihads that are inflaming our cities and countries are beyond Islam but part of one of the many ‘circles of panic’ into which people are sucked.
Please, feel free to leave your comments about the book here. I will try to answer your questions and engage in the debate (traveling allowing).

In this short contribution, I wish to instead focus on more positive elements. The majority of the teenage girls I have met, some of whom were residents within welfare homes, are not passive recipients of ‘re-education’ models, but rather extremely active in rethinking their position as an agent in their own lives (Grobe et al., 2001). During my research, however, I noticed two main risks, if not obstacles, within this positive process. Briefly, I shall address them here.

The first element is linked to ‘expectations’ and the second to ‘self-stereotypes’. Singapore is a multiracial country in which what Goh has called the ‘racial grid of state multiculturalism’ (2009: 217) maintains the ethnic and religious harmony that this city-state enjoys and strives for.

Yet as I have highlighted elsewhere (Marranci 2011), it inevitably brings the state and the society to compare and contrast communities, and consequently the individuals within them, against one another, with the most statistically successful, the Chinese, being the point of reference. Meritocracy is the instrument that Singapore adopts within the ‘racial grid of state multiculturalism’ to avoid that one particular community may be advantaged (Tan, 2008).

Surely meritocracy has social benefits yet there are also risks and ‘side effects’, as any social cultural tool. One of these is the facilitation of utopian expectations, or the discussion about the ideal, perfect system, the ʻwhat-should-beʼ vis-à-vis the ʻwhat isʼ. In other words, social meritocracy cultivates a rhetoric of ‘achievers’ versus ‘nonstarters’.

Malay teen girls from disadvantaged backgrounds, like many other young Singaporeans, use what I call an epistemological framework to make sense of their social and cultural environment and to position themselves within it. Part of this framework is the idea of continuous individual progress and improvement as a contribution to the development of the community at large in the ‘competition’ of social meritocracy.

Hence, personal ‘failure’ in these girls’ epistemological framework is perceived as equal to failing their community, in this case the Malay Muslim community, which although improving overall, is still struggling according to the statistical measurements applied to the ‘racial grid of state multiculturalism’.

This process, my research suggests, facilitates a feeling of unfulfillable responsibility in many of these Malay girls, more so than in the case of teen boys in similar situations. The reason is that, as my research has shown, the Malay community perceive these girls as the future mothers of ‘must-be successful’ Malay generations. This gender specific pressure is uneven and clearly underestimated in the scarce academic literature but also in social intervention initiatives.

Another important phenomenon, linked to the above, which has a rather negative impact, is self-stereotyping. My research has suggested that Malay teen girls from disadvantaged backgrounds employ self-stereotyping more than other teens. Gordon Allport (1954) has noticed that one consequence of prejudice is that people often apply cultural stereotypes to themselves (i.e. self-stereotyping).

Research has suggested that self-stereotyping results from cognitive associations and social-identity salience (Sinclair et al. 2006: 529). George Herbert Mead (1934) has suggested that self-concepts are formed and regulated by adopting otherʼs perspectives on the self. Hence Sinclair has been right in observing that ʻbecause stereotypes about the groups to which one belongs represent commonly shared perspectives on the self, self-evaluation may be influenced by the stereotypes associated with oneʼs most salient social group membership, consistent with popular contemporary theories that implicate cognitive accessibility in self- understandingʼ (2006: 530).

I will not go into detail here, but self-stereotyping was particularly evident among teenagers and young adults (aged between 13-22 years old). The stereotypes were used to read themselves not only as individuals but also as a part of Singapore. Many of the stereotypes–based on well known and unfortunate representations of ‘the Malay’–  helped to justify the difficulties they may have encountered both at work or at an educational level.

Family problems, or in certain cases even explanations of criminal behaviors, were often read through stereotypes frequently projected onto the Malay/Muslim ʻcommunity.ʼ The main issue is that some of these young people seemed to be unaware that they were actually employing stereotypes and accepted them as part of a supposed ‘Singaporean’ epistemological framework.

It is important that when addressing educational needs, planning activities and assistance, social workers and youth educators, as well as politicians, are familiar with these often hidden negative dynamics. Indeed, they may explain the recurrent and pernicious difficulties that some of these girls have in their path towards a successful adulthood; difficulties which too often are instead judgmentally blamed upon the character of the girl.

Next Friday, the Palestinian Authority will present a bid to become a full member state at the United Nations, where it is likely that the US will veto the request. The chances of success are very slim, and the Palestinians may opt for other solutions, such as the so called ‘Vatican option’. In any case, the attempt to ‘force’ a recognized state through legitimate, but more symbolic than resolutive means, has its perils, not only for the Palestinians but also for the Israelis. Let us observe some important points.

First of all, Palestine is far from being a viable state. This is not only the result of the Israeli occupation, Israeli settlements that are fragmenting and stealing the Palestinian territory together with the infamous wall, the lack of water resources, which are mainly controlled by Israel, and endemic poverty.

Sure, I can add other damaging effects of the Israeli social-political strangulation of Palestine, yet, although maybe over optimistically, these kinds of issues may be resolved with a real peace treaty, since many are caused by Israeli policies. There is another aspect that damages the Palestinian hope for recognized statehood: a divisive and sectarian political life and society – the internal, rarely discussed, tensions (may I say wars?) between secularists and those, including Hamas, who dream of the Islamic state of Palestine where violence to impose shari’a may easily take root.

Lack of space prevents me from discussing the particular internal issues that in reality are a major threat to the Palestinians’ hope for statehood. The reasons for which these internal problems pose a significant threat is that they will not disappear the day Israel accepts a full Palestinian state; actually they may possibly worsen to a level of open conflict.

Another obstacle is the simple fact that even the state of Israel is an anomalous one. It is a country forced to be in a never ending state of self-defense as well as in conflict with international resolutions, a state that has remained politically and democratically underdeveloped for the last forty-two years, where the politicians and prime minister are relics of a history that can no longer understand the new Israeli Jewish and Arab generations, a state that risks, no less than Palestine, to become what I call a theo-polis marked by a restricted idea of “Jewishness” of the nation, increasingly controlled by un-censurable religious delirium.

Israel without the fear of Palestinians, Muslims and Islam, would have to face its own dark side, its own intra-Jewish racism, its own class struggles and injustices. Israel, post-conflict, may look much more like its Middle Eastern neighbors than the ‘European state’ it appears to aim to be. I leave aside, again for lack of space, the issue of an increasing criminality, including a stronger than ever local Israeli Mafia.

I am not surprised that while speaking to an American diplomat about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I was told that Israel prefers a status-quo of the conflict for internal reasons: a kind of frozen reality where the ‘fear’ of the ‘evil’ Palestinian, the occasional skirmish and the annoying Flotilla may hide from the Israeli public the increasing social-political, and even religious, crises.

There exists a degree of similarity between the Palestinian authorities and the Israeli government which can be observed in the use of what I call the “ideology of dystopia”. To understand this, we need to start from ‘ideology’. I wish to quote Robert Higgs to define ideological expressions:

The persuasive power of ideological expression arises for the most part from neither logic nor facts [...] Ideological rhetoric usually takes a highly figurative, quasi- poetic form. Metaphor, analogy, irony, sarcasm, satire, hyperbole, and overdrawn antithesis are its common devices. Ideological thought is expresses in intricate symbolic webs as vaguely defined as they are emotionally charged.

We exaggerate only a little if we say that in ideological expression imagery is everything [...] Ideologues, hoping to attract those who lack the time or capacity for extended reflection, encapsulate their messages in pithy slogans, mottoes, and self-ennobling descriptions. When these terse war cries produce the desired effect they mobilize large numbers of diverse people. The secret of their success lies partly in their evocative moral appeal and partly in their ambiguity and vagueness, which allow each person to hear them as lyrics suited to his own music.” (Higgs, 1987, p. 48)

It is within this ‘ambiguity and vagueness, which allows each person to hear them as lyrics suited to his own music’ that both the Palestinian authorities and the Israeli government introduce the ‘dystopia’, which allows them to maintain the desired status-quo, the immutable reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Raising hopes, denying hope that has been granted before, and providing solutions with no real content are all methodologies of that ‘ideology of dystopia’ so loved by both political sides.

Hence we can now make sense of the Palestinian authorities impossible bid for statehood. It is not just a desperate attempt to force Israel into a peace process as this attempt, as some have noticed, may even make real negotiations more difficult because it can easily provoke violence (from the frustrated Palestinians if the bid fails, from the Israeli settlers and then Israeli military if for any reason it succeeds). Moreover, UN recognition would not change a single comma in the everyday life of Palestinians: it will not remove the wall, nor will it move a single settlement or even military check point.

Yet the bid will allow the ideology of dystopia to continue and to maintain that conflict so vital for a political world increasingly surviving on the grounds of an ethos of death.

Before getting to the core of my argument, let me highlight some points about the commemoration of 9/11. First of all, I think it is important to realize that despite the impact that the fatal Tuesday had on our world history, 9/11 is remembered and has become an ‘event’ mainly through its mass media commemoration, which increasingly resembles a collective periodic ritual. Although not a scientific tool for statistics, Google Trends can help us to see such a reality: check 9/11 (or various spellings like September 11 or September 11th) and you will clearly see (at least since 2004 when Google Trends started) that 9/11 is exactly that: a ‘ritual’ performed each time for its anniversary. Beyond that, 9/11 (at least as shown in Google Trends), seems not to attract special interest.

Another important factor that we need to remember about 9/11 is that the commemoration is multiple, in a sort of meta-discourse. I wish to start from the ‘individual’ dimension. Although displayed as part of the ‘show’, 9/11 principally represents the pain and sorrow of the victims’ relatives. That date is full of real emotional, personal meaning for them. The fact that 9/11 also has, through the consequential War on Terror, claimed many innocent victims who will never be globally commemorated and whose names will never be carved in stone or steel, is beyond the argument of this post. Sadly, few really care about the personal dimension beyond, as I said, the apparent ‘show’ of public sufferance captured immediately on film.

Then there is, as I was mentioning, another less ‘individual’ dimension: the economic one. The commemoration of 9/11 has an economic value and not just for Rupert Murdoch and other mass media tycoons, but florists, organizational companies and many others, whom directly or indirectly make a profit out of 9/11. Finally, there is the political aspect: particularly for the US. For the US, in a time of poor image and damaged reputation, the commemoration of 9/11 and the sympathy that it attracts globally provides some much needed oxygen to an increasingly suffocated, economically, socially and in particular politically, Uncle Sam.

The fact that the global celebration of 9/11 has little, if anything, to do with the actual tragedy and loss of human lives can be easily demonstrated if you stop one of your local politicians taking part in the celebrations and ask him or her to name one of the nearly 3000 people who died that terrible day. I suppose, this is not new. That the actual global commemoration is not because of the high number of lives lost it is easy to show: have a look at the number of people killed by natural disasters in the world. Do we globally commemorate those lost lives?

Hence, I think that now I have enough grounds to suggest that the global commemoration of 9/11 has a very special position. Indeed, I suggest that what we celebrated yesterday, as during the past decade, is a collective ritual that is aimed at reinforcing and maintaining an increasingly worrying ‘civilization rhetoric’ in a historical time in which ‘the civilization’ seems to face strong challenges from all social-political and cultural domains. As such, 9/11 is a ritual which, through the symbolic value of the US as the new cradle of ‘civilization’ (the old one was, in this rhetorical discourse, of course Rome) reaffirms its centrality.

Sociologists, and then anthropologists, have devoted much time in attempting  to understand what rituals are. Durkheim indeed suggested that ritual is best understood as an internal act of a group that celebrates itself – or, in other words, a social narcissistic act which reinforces the cohesion of the group in particular during times of crisis.

The anthropologist Leach suggested that in ritual, in contrast to a music recital, ‘the performers and the listeners are the same people. We engage in rituals in order to transmit collective messages to ourselves’ (1976:45). But as other scholars have emphasized, this is not the only ‘function’ of rituals. Van Gennep (1960), an important author in the study of ‘rituals’, understood them as reformational or transformational actions that facilitate changes within societies, particularly during periods of crisis. This same idea is elaborated upon by another anthropologist, Victor Turner, who defined rituals as

“a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors’ goals and interests. Rituals may be seasonal, hallowing a culturally defined moment of change in the climatic cycle or the inauguration of an activity such as planting, harvesting, or moving from winter to summer pasture; or they may be contingent, held in response to an individual or collective crisis” (Victor Turner)

Turner has suggested that during ritual people experience dimensions of space and time which are different from the ordinary and produce a liminal state. In such a state, the group starts to embody the polyvalent symbol in such a way that the ‘ritual leader’ can facilitate or impose a particular worldview, or part of it (such as a list of instructions in how to behave, what to believe and so on).

Turner has suggested that rituals are used to either elevate a particular person’s status or celebrate temporal cycles. The teleological function of rituals is to form communitas, in other words to transform the partakers into members of a cohesive group which remains meaningfully so even when the members go back to the normal, everyday post-ritual space and time.

Even from a classic anthropological viewpoint, it is not difficult to recognize in the commemoration of 9/11 a ritual that is repeated, from its New York epicenter, in different places. The worldview that aims to be imposed is the idea that ‘the civilization’ is challenged and ‘civilizers’ need to defend it. In a certain sense, the ghosts of the two twin towers are today the totem of such rhetoric. Interestingly enough, if bin-Laden’s intention was to hit the towers to symbolically destroy what he perceived to be a ‘Satanic’ civilization, he ended up opening a Pandora’s box of western ‘civilization’ discourse, starting a ritual, a myth and an ideological utopia of the West (Judeo-Christian in its imagined community) as ‘the perfect’ teleology of human morality and advancement.

Indeed, Bonnet (2004) in his book ‘The idea of the West’ has provided an interesting, and provocative, reading of ‘the west’ as a concept. He has suggested that the historical development of the modern idea of the West cannot be understood in isolation, but rather as part of the cultural and political effort to differentiate human society. The key, according to Bonnet, is to observe the change in fortune of another powerful European myth, the superiority of the white race. If today the expression ‘Western civilization’ is widely used and accepted, ‘one only has to look back some hundred years or so to find that something called “white civilization” was once also taken for granted’ (Bonnet 2004: 14).

Bonnet is very careful not to directly connect the decline of whiteness and white solidarity with the development of the modern idea of the West. He has, however, rightly observed that the fading of the former has made the latter central to the European discourse of superiority since, ‘the idea of the West helped resolve some of the problematic and unsustainable characteristics of white supremacism’ (2004: 36).

Starobinski has correctly observed that then, ‘Civilization itself becomes the crucial criterion: judgement is now made in the name of civilization. One has to take its side, adopt its cause. For those who answer its call it becomes ground for praise. Or, conversely, it can serve as a basis for denunciation: all that is not civilization, all that resists or threatens civilization, is monstrous, absolute evil’ (1993: 30).

In other words, the rhetoric of ‘civilization’, reinforced by the ritualization of  the commemoration of 9/11 produces a social myth – a kind of ‘social utopia’, which goes beyond rationality and becomes a real force that provides people with symbolic elements to form their idea of ‘our way of life’. Through the ritualization of 9/11, the ideology of civilization is normalized and transformed intp a powerful symbolic tool of moral superiority.

The ritual offers a way to overcome the crisis that western societies are facing by providing, through the ritualization, the creation of a new social order in which the concept of civilization not only remains central, but also empowers each partaker of the ritual to become a ‘civilizer’, an agent of historical development. As Starobinski has finally noticed:

“because of the connection with the ideas of perfectibility and progress, the word civilization denoted more than just a complex process of refinement and mores, social organization, technical progress, and advancing knowledge; it took on a sacred aura, owing to which it could sometimes reinforce traditional religious values and at other times supplant them. The history of the word civilization thus leads to this crucial observation: once a notion takes on a sacred authority and thereby acquires the power to mobilize, it quickly stirs up conflict between political groups or rival schools of thought claiming to be its champions and defenders and as such insisting on the exclusive right to propagate the new idea.” (Starobinski 1993: 17)

After further discussion with Lamin, it was clear that he was extremely racist. It was through Lamin that I came to know of a tragic event in recent Libyan history that international mass media had barely documented. In October 2000, Libyan black African migrants and the nearly one million black citizens suffered racist violence that erupted after being triggered by an economic crisis and long-simmering widespread racism. This was not the first (nor the last) time that the blacks of Libya suffered mistreatment and racism, but in the year 2000 there was a clear attempt to ‘clean’ the country of them.

Despite Gaddafi’s claims of pan-Africanism, his regime espoused Arabization and Arabs were educated for years to feel superior to the black Libyan population. Although not all Libyans are racists, even in Libyan forums and discussions there is a general perception that a major section of the society is, particularly within the Misrata region. Indeed, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) expressed concern several times about Libya’s alleged “acts of discrimination against migrant workers on the basis of their national or ethnic origin.”

In 2004, the CERD by rejecting “Libya’s categorical denial of the existence of any racial discrimination within its borders” asked the Libyan government to effectively track racial discrimination. Gaddafi’s government answered, “[i]t is possible to state categorically that there is no racial discrimination of any kind in Libya. The fact that all Libyan citizens share a common origin, religion and language has undoubtedly been a determining factor in the absence of racial discrimination in the country.”  Since Libyan society is “free from racial discrimination, it has not felt the need to enact special legislation to combat the phenomenon.” Today, we can see the result of such a decision.

As I have mentioned in my previous post, while the actions of Gaddafi’s army were scrutinized and NATO officially intervened under a UN mandate to protect the Libyan civilians, the new rebels’ actions, intentions and values have never been questioned by the western powers– blinded as they were by geopolitical and economic interests. Hence, as I have also explained in one episode of my podcasts, Libya has faced not one but two revolutions.

One revolution was very similar to other Arab Spring revolts, like for instance that of Egypt or Tunisia. This first revolt was popular, supported by young people, and it crossed the tribal, religious and ethnic lines. Gaddafi was successful in crushing it. Then, starting from the initial one, tribal leaders took a more violent approach and felt that it was time for a military struggle since many western countries would be sure to support it.

This second revolt was far less innocent being that it was tainted by tribal related issues, divisions and aims together with the involvement of extreme Islamic groups and imams as protagonists (some of whom, as part of their interpretation of the Shari’a, support enslavement -including the sexual enslavement- of non-Muslim polytheists, as some African migrants are).

This second revolt has reopened many wounds in Libyan society, and anti-black propaganda was one of these. Although in Gaddafi’s army there were both some black mercenaries from Sudan and Chad in particular, black soldiers from the Libyan population were common. When rebels started to spread stories of the horrific actions of black mercenaries, it provoked a real man-hunt where any black African may be considered a ‘mercenary’ and duly killed, tortured or detained in inhuman conditions.

Meanwhile the many white European mercenaries, often in charge of the operations and responsible for the worst crimes, were left untouched by the ‘anti-mercenary’ rhetoric and many of them, if not the majority, were able to leave the country unchallenged, which sporadically mass media have reported (see a well presented video here).

Clearly we cannot believe that, knowing the modern history of ethnic troubles in Libya, the rebels’ claims that all blacks arrested or killed were ‘mercenaries’ — as indeed more and more evidence shows.  The reality, which major mass media in Europe, Arab countries and the US do not want to show, is that what it is at work in Libya today, with the full support of the US and European countries, is the same feeling that brought many Libyan Arab citizens to organize anti-black pogroms in 2000.

The revolt has offered the perfect cover to do a dirty job in a ‘clean’ way with the blessing of the world. Intentions are clear in the fields but the members of the National Transitional Council, in their  suits and ties and luxurious hotel rooms paid for by EU tax, will never admit what graffiti in Libyan cities openly declare.

However racism is not just on the other side of the Mediterranean. Indeed while migrant workers from other countries, like China, were evacuated often in cooperation with other nations, many black-African migrants were left to their horrible destiny. Some left the Libyan coasts in dangerous boats in the hope of reaching Italy or Malta. The majority of these desperate people were black Libyans and African migrants, many of whom NATO left to drown at sea.  The real nature of those boats were never explained to Italian and European audiences: they were not just refugees escaping from war, they were the result of the beginnings of an ethnic cleansing.

Timid calls are now made for the Libyans to restrain their racist attacks and for the NTC to pass from beautiful words to action. However I have little hope (also because of the precedent of Darfur) that, even if mass media and bloggers start to show the dreadful reality in Libya, the EU and NATO would sacrifice their interests, which by proxy are helping Libya to be a white Arab and possibly radical-Islamic country.

The much-championed principles of human rights, freedom of religion and expression, together with anti-racism, appear fragile when economic and geopolitical interests are at stake. The risk that in the new Libya the national black population will be dispersed and African migrant workers directly or indirectly killed is not a remote possibility but rather a reality which is progressing even while you are reading these words.