My adventure with photography

"In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it. So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation. The photograph itself is in no way animated (I do not belive in "lifelike" photographs), but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure." (Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida)

Photography used to be an `adventure' for me because I was not sure of the consequences. I made some mental calculations about light and then selected the shutter speed and aperture. It was pre-digital age. So you had no way of assessing the quality of the pix you took immediately after you pressed the shutter release button. Here is a pix of my daughter when she was a child. I don't recall the date when I took it, but it is one of my precious photographic adventures.
What is attractive about this photo, for me, is her hair, her big eyes and her surprised expression. That was the time when I sat her on my lap, played with her, made fun of her, kissed her. Now she is a grown-up girl, more independent and a potential feminist. Here she is making fun of the photographer. She was unlikely to have felt that I was waiting for this funny moment to be immortalised. She was so natural and spontaneous while I was very serious about what I was doing: the shutter speed, the aperture, the light...

At that time, I was also obsessed with capturing stillness of life. Photographing events is still an anxiety-triggering venture for me. I am at home with the environment where nothing happens. Look at this pix which I keep as one of my favourites.

Those classic-looking seats, the pavement, the laterite brick wall and the sea still make me happy.

Critique of Edward Said

A few years ago when the twin towers of New York were still there, a friend of mine, a journalist working for a newspaper run by an Islamic organisation, knocked me for a loop when he linked the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 and the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979. How could Prof. Said, one of my intellectual heroes, have inspired an event that gave a new lease of life to radical Islam? I felt that my friend, who is as staunchly (though stealthily) secular as I am, was naïve to connect the book with the Iranian revolution. Today, I feel that the idea of that linkage is worth exploring.
Prof. Said was a cult figure to my generation, especially to those who studied on Leftish campuses. I avidly read Orientalism during my post-graduate days and saw how the orient is a colonial construct of the West. This influential book, we were told, revolutionised the way we studied the East, especially the Middle East. Orientalism as a discipline, according to Prof. Said, is a body of knowledge that perpetuates pre-conceived notions and stereotypes about the people living in the Middle East and about Islam. He argues that the knowledge we have acquired about the Orient is not objective because it is the product of a process that reflects certain interests and notions.

Stripped of all intellectual paraphernalia, the book says that the West looks at the Arabs through a distorted prism. The central theme of the book is that the discipline of Orientalism is the Western imperialism’s way of understanding and representing and thereby taming the peoples it has conquered. Prof. Said’s idea of the Orient which he places in the history of the European colonialism was a perfectly simple way of understanding the world divided in black and white into the coloniser and the colonised with no grey areas in between. This charmingly uncomplicated model would have remained unquestioned for many more years, if there had not been 9/11 which has blown the lid off the claim that Arabs and Islam have been victims of the imperial West. The terrorist attacks on the United States have uncovered the cataclysmically dangerous potential of political Islam. Grey areas have emerged more prominent and blurred the black and white divisions since then.
Post-9/11, my friend’s observation continued to embarrass me though I revered Prof. Said and read his essays on the Middle East no less passionately. That continued till I found to my surprise that Orientalism was one of the most favourite books among fundamentalist Islamic circles. The break came when I started re-reading the book and found the apologetic tone of his Afterword to the book’s 1995 printing (by Penguin Books) exposing his own sense of uncertainty about the certitudes he espoused in his book.
Denying the charges of anti-Westernism and pro-Islamic fundamentalism often levelled against him by his critics, Prof. Said demolishes the neatly divided black and white world that he has conjured up in is book:

“Yet Orientalism has in fact been read and written about in the Arab world as a systematic defence of Islam and the Arabs, even though I say explicitly that I have no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient or Islam really are.”(sic) (p.331)

Perhaps this gesture of repentance betrays Prof. Said’s deeper sense of the Islamist rage against the West that his book has fuelled. An entire industry of the Anti-West critique this book inaugurated has lent credence to the view that the plight of the Arab people in the Middle East would not have been what it is today had it not been for the colonial adventures of Europe in the Middle East. He blames the European awe of Islam’s territorial expansion for the Orientalist representation in which Islam has “come to symbolize terror, devastation, the demonic, hordes of hated barbarians.” (p. 59). His argument is that European authors who internalised this fear of Islam showed no interest in the ‘high culture’ of Muslims:

“After Mohammed’s death in 632, the military and later the cultural and religious hegemony of Islam grew enormously. First Persia, Syria, and Egypt, then Turkey, then North Africa fell to the Muslim armies; in the eighth and ninth centuries Spain, Sicily, and parts of France were conquered. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Islam ruled as far east as India, Indonesia, and China. And to this extraordinary assault Europe could respond with very little except fear and a kind of awe.” (p. 59)

The Christian Europe that has failed to understand the magnificence of the conquering Muslims later started representing the Muslim, Ottoman or Arab as “a way of controlling the redoubtable Orient”. (p. 60) It is a way of political domination of the Orient, Prof. Said says in his book. The author who is obsessed with the European colonialism and its ‘distorted’ representation of the east shows very little interest the conquests of Islam which are always glorified in Islamic circles. Islamic expansion of the past is still part of the folklore of the golden age of Islam. The underlying theme of Orientalism is the myth of a ‘magnificent’ culture that Prof. Said conjures up to marginalise Islam’s own history of colonial expansion. Author Ibn Warraq in his critique of Prof. Said shows how an entire generation of Arabs have been taught the art of victimhood by the book:

“Said's emotionalism about Western imperialism's evils belies the real overall historical background of the region. The French presence lasted less than four years, being ignominiously expelled by the British and the Turks. The Ottomans had been the masters of Egypt since 1517, a total of 280 years. Counting the British and French protectorates, Egypt was under Western control for 67 years, Syria for 21 years, and Iraq for just 15. Saudi Arabia was never under Western control. Contrast this with Southern Spain, which was under the Muslim yoke for 781 years, and Greece for 381 years. The splendid new Christian capital that eclipsed Rome—Byzantium—is still in Muslim hands. At last report, neither the Spanish nor the Greeks have taken up the politics of victimhood.”

It is time Muslims disabused themselves of the belief that Islam would have been a glorious civilisation it once was had it not been for the pro-Zionist and imperialist West.
Writers like ibn Warraq are rendering great service to Muslims by making them understand history through historical analysis and not through concepts whose proponents would have us believe in conspiracy theories. My friend may not be accurate in academic sense about the relationship between Prof. Said’s book and the Islamic Revolution in Iran. But his understanding of that relationship shows his deeper observation of the destructive influence of Orientalism on political Islam driven by a revolutionary zeal.

(Read Warraq interview on his new book here)

Free Speech vs Censorship

It is an old question that still divides people. Anything that raises this question draws sharp reactions neatly divided into divergent positions articulated so passionately that even any appearance of fence-sitting looks ridiculous. The question of freedom of expression always brings to the fore a deeper and fundamental attitudinal rift. Either you are for the freedom of expression or you are against it. Opinion is always divided and there is no middle ground.
You can always count me as one who will always remain steadfast to the cause of free speech and stick my neck out to defend freedom of expression which may be deliberately offensive, provocative, well-intentioned or innocuous. Democracy is hollow if there are no democratic institutions as also a democratic public sphere which is a kind of free market of opinions, views and ideas.
Expectedly, opinion is divided on `Fitna’, a 15-minute film produced by Dutch member of Parliament Geert Wilders who is described as a right-winger by the media. The film is deliberately provocative, however strongly Wilders says that it is not his intention to offend anyone even as he admits that it might offend some people.
While Wilders will defend to the hilt his right to question, provoke and ridicule Islam, Muslim perception will see it as an attempt to demonise the religion as it contains hate speech by Islamist preachers and leaders, quotes from Quran and heart-wrenching visuals including those of 9/11, Madrid and London bombings, the beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl and the body of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh who was killed by a Muslim youth for making a short film `Submission’ in collaboration with Ayan Hirsi Ali.
The film ends with the message that Muslims should tear out some verses from Quran that it argues promote terrorism, and that the Islamic ideology has to be defeated as fascism and communism were defeated earlier.
The film `Fitna’ (Arabic word which means discord), I believe, is yet another Dutch way of testing how far the concept of freedom of expression can be stretched. The film `Submission’ and the cartoons of the Prophet are examples of this Dutch trait. The Dutch have their own concerns which may be as unfounded as some of the Muslim concerns. The film `Fitna’, for example, raises a spectre of fear (Netherlands under the spell of Islam) in the minds of Christians by showing figures of the growth of Muslims in Netherlands: 54 in 1909, 1399 in 1960, 4,58,000 in 1990 and 9,44,000 in 2004.
Let us hope that this film will trigger a healthy debate on issues including the question of free speech. Any sign of getting provoked will justify the argument that Islam is an intolerant religion. Let us first acknowledge that freedom of expression may hurt. But what, then, is the alternative? Censorship?