Phoenix-like Saddam Hussein Rises from the Ashes (the Serious Side to the Crusades Theme)

[muninnhuginn]

Courtesy of LeMonde.fr's daily emailed headlines, we came across this: Saddam Hussein est-il un nouveau Saladin ?. It's talking about Enter the new Salahuddin in the Internet edition of Dawn. As ever with Le Monde it's taken its time to comment. So the (military) details of Ayaz Amir's piece are a little dated (not hard in the middle of a war, of course). The sentiments, and the different perspective, are still valid, however.

The original article gives us a reminder, if another wre needed, of the long dark shadow thrown by history, especially for the side that in some way perceives itself as having been the loser. (Who did win the Crusades? I'm not quite sure myself.) It kicks off:

"Since the Crusades the world of Islam has awaited the arrival of a new Salahuddin--the Saladin of Christian legend--someone who would redress its wrongs and redeem its lost honour."

This may come as a surprise. From our Christian/post-Christian (I guess the latter camp is where a lot of us stand: the non-(brought-up-as-)Christians living in a secular, but historically Christian, culture) standpoint we have had our saviour. Without him, we wouldn't have tramped off to the Holy Land to recover Jerusalem in the first place. We are, for all our post-imperial guilt and, in the case of the individual ex-colonial powers of Europe, decline, still of the winning side. It is our culture that has overrun the world; it is our economic might that still exploits the weaker regions for our material comfort. We might not feel like the top dogs most of the time, but to others that is what we are. I don't think we generally, societally, feel that we have wrongs to redress, or would care much about lost honour. Others do. We forget this at our peril, until the ancient struggles in the Balkans, for example, force us to see how hatreds can simmer for centuries.

And after the waiting, phoenix-like

"...from the smoke and ruins of America's aggression against Iraq arises a Salahuddin in the unlikely form of the dictator of Baghdad."

The image (I feel it's implied, if not explicitly stated in the article) seems entirely appropriate. A brilliant fiery bird, its talons the atrocities of suicide bombers, its beak open to spew its anti-western sentiments to its eager chicks, rises above the devastation. A ressurrection, indeed.

From a Pakistani point of view (and it is only one perspective from presumably as many differing, individuated, views on the other "side" as there are on "ours": hence the aside about Qatar and the contrasting reactions to Turkey and Pakistan vis-a-vis the US), it is understandable. The war of words is going in Iraq's favour, the western allies' lies/propaganda have been seen through. The twists in terminology (cf Robert Fisk's twisted language of war in the Indy) are seen as the "comic" counterpoint to the "brutal war" (though I still hold to the fear that the coalition's choices of nomenclature for their opponents is part of an attempt to evade potential legal obligations with regard to recognized military combatants and hence not a laughing matter at all).

The conclusion is intriguing. One of the same, rather motley, crew of "good guys" of the west, the Pope, is named. Others could have been cited, Nelson Mandela for instance, Jimmy Carter, but the effect would have been lessened. The representative of the traditional (religious) enemy of the Muslim world is one of the few voices to accord with the writer.

And what of the French take on all of this? The article, translated, is reproduced almost in full, with little comment. Crucially, however, the piece is there. I've not seen it referred to in the English language press. I'd not even heard of Dawn prior to this.

And in the meantime, a further skirmish in our own western war of words leads to this: Irak: appel au boycott des expressions anglo-saxonnes en Allemagne (link found in the Grauniad's Informer).