Approach to Islamophobia: Political or Religious Ideology?, José Sarria

I want to begin my participation in this table with a quote that belongs to our Cordovan philosopher Abu-l Walid Muhammad ibn Rush, better known as Averroes:

“Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, hatred leads to violence. Here is the equation”

Phobia is, according to the dictionary of the RAE: “The exaggerated aversion to someone or something”. That is, the irrational, obsessive and distressing fear of certain situations or people, which can lead to rejection. And, without a doubt, at the origin of any phobia (fear), there is ignorance and ignorance. According to the Council of Europe and the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Islamophobia is: “[…] a form of racism and xenophobia manifested through hostility, exclusion, rejection and hatred against Muslims, especially when the Muslim population is a minority, something that occurs with greater impact in Western countries.” But Islamophobia is nothing more than a manifestation of the different phobias (fears) that we find today: xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny, etc.
The dominant group has, historically, the objective of seizing, stabilizing and expanding its power through the creation of an invented reality (taking advantage of the ignorance and ignorance of societies), through the construction of an otherness different from oneself and one’s society, and that can endanger my society.
The Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade[i] said that there is a constant in supremacist societies that reaffirm their identity in an exclusive way.
For them, there is always a clear difference between their own territory, between the known world and the indeterminate space that surrounds it: “… the first (says Eliade) is the World (that is, “our world”), the Cosmos. The second is another world, a strange, chaotic one, populated by larvae, demons, foreigners (strangers)…” [ii].
En estas sociedades la otredad se presenta como un sentimiento de extrañeza frente a aquello que no es asimilable a lo conocido; de ello resulta un rechazo fundado en el miedo a lo ajeno.
Es, prácticamente, el mismo silogismo de la cita de Averroes: “La ignorancia lleva al miedo, el miedo lleva al odio, el odio lleva a la violencia. He aquí la ecuación.”
El concepto de identidad es fundamental para comprender la situación social contemporánea.
Esta noción se ha impuesto a causa de los importantes y profundos cambios culturales y sociales que vivimos, provocados por las profundas modificaciones que acontecen a nuestro alrededor, a partir de la globalización.
La identidad (síntesis que cada uno hace de los valores y de los indicadores de filiación al grupo social) es el centro de las acciones indispensables para el equilibrio psíquico de la persona.
Es por ello que el vértigo que produce esas modificaciones sociales conlleva la necesidad de acentuar la identidad como método de defensa y protección frente al cambio que se está produciendo.
A través del ensalzamiento de estos valores identitarios se consigue la cohesión de un grupo y de toda una sociedad, tanto más, cuanto el otro, el diferente, puede llegar a poner en riesgo mi mundo, mi orden.
Y, volvemos a Mircea Eliade: “el primero es el Mundo (es decir, “nuestro mundo”), el Cosmos. El segundo es otro mundo, uno extraño, caótico, poblado de larvas, de demonios, de extranjeros, de extraños”.
La pretendida superioridad y supremacía de los pueblos toma como fundamento todo aquello que acentúa los procesos identitarios, que no deja de ser un artificio, una mentira aceptada, porque la identidad real no es lineal ni estática, sino que es compuesta, dinámica y evoluciona con los procesos históricos.
Existen dos momentos trascendentales en la configuración mental del concepto del otro, de la otredad, en Europa y, de otro lado, de la propia identidad nacional española:

1. On the one hand, the colonialist European discourse, cemented throughout the nineteenth century, contributed, in a definitive way, to the establishment of the discourse of otherness, the discourse of the unreal enemy by creating an ideological and sentimental barrier, non-existent until then.
   And this is what has remained in the collective European social imagination.

As Professor Susana Murphy (University of Argentina) has pointed out, a “mythical (fictitious) story” of otherness has been elaborated, through which it has been accepted that the West has its origin in the classical world (in Greece and Rome).
History, our history begins, miraculously, with Herodotus, eliminating the influence and the “contagions” with the other world, without connection with Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia or Babylon in that replacement of reality the myth of democracy, politics, reason, the Christian religion and Western culture is exalted in a continuum, in a particular space that is Europe and that will mean our world, the cosmos, harmony, in the face of the disorder and pandemonium that settles in the East.

2. In the domestic sphere, in Spain, the contemporary Spanish collective imaginary is the one that has been forged over the last 500 years, on the basis of the identity of the so-called purity of blood, based on the supremacy of the so-called “Christians or old Castilians”.[iii]who defends (following the theories of Sánchez Albornoz) that Spain was and is, above all, Christian and Western: “Spain is contemplated from Castile”.
   General Franco’s regime will use and emphasize Sánchez Albornoz’s exclusive identity concept of “Spain”.

However, an objective and unbiased analysis, such as that offered by genetics, provides some interesting answers.
Scientists from the University of Leicester (United Kingdom) and the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona carried out a study in 2008 in which they analysed the Y chromosome, present in men and transmitted from father to son, in a sample of 1,150 peninsular individuals and compared it with samples from North African and Sephardic Jewish individuals to reach the objective conclusion that one in three Spaniards has North African or Jewish ancestry.
In other words, indelibly, 33% of our genetic fingerprint has these characteristics.
Andalusia (and Spain), beyond a territorial demarcation, is the magma of the peoples and civilizations that were linked to this territory, a melting pot of cultures, a mixture of peoples, the result of ethnic and racial eclecticism (Tartessians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Byzantines, Almohads, Almoravids, Andalusians, Nasrids, Jews, Aragonese or Castilians), making it “the oldest civilization in Europe” (in the words of Moreno Navarro) [iv].
Decía Américo Castro que el problema del Gobierno de Isabel II fue que “Carecía de un tiempo cultural propio”.
Toda época, nuestra época, precisa de un discurso propio que la acompañe.
Recordamos que el discurso (en el área de influencia de Occidente) de los siglos XIX y XX fue el discurso europeo colonial, que llega hasta nuestras puertas, y que se apoya en el discurso del enemigo inventado (Oriente) y que esto es lo que ha quedado en el imaginario colectivo social de la Cultura Occidental.
Pero hoy, estamos llamados a reflexionar acerca de nuestro destino.
Hoy, avanzamos, en este preciso momento, como humanidad, de manera inexorable, hacia una nueva época.
En el AÑO 2006, un grupo amplio y multidiscilplinar de investigadores, encabezado por Paul Raskin[v], publicaba, de la mano de la CEPAL [vi]an ambitious sociological analysis that tried to interpret what was happening.
The report concluded that the great transition had begun; A planetary society will be configured, under a new world order, over the next few decades.
The journey has begun, but the outcome is uncertain.
Current trends determine the direction at the beginning of the journey, but not its destination.
And this era, our time, needs its own discourse to accompany it, its own cultural time, which has nothing to do with that outdated postcolonial discourse of supremacisms.
At this crucial moment in our global history that humanity is going through (according to the ECLAC report), it is necessary to have new ways of thinking, acting and being.
New forms that meet (and I claim) in the crossing of gazes between East and West, new forms of thought that exist in the universal and prehumanist proposal of the CONCILIATION OF OPPOSITES, by Ibn Arabi [vii], a great antidote to all kinds of phobias and fanaticisms, when he writes: “People have the most diverse beliefs, but I profess them all: I believe in all beliefs …/… There was a time when I rejected my neighbor if his religion was not like mine. But now my heart has become a receptacle for all religious forms: it is a meadow of gazelles and a cloister of Christian monks, a temple of idols and a Kaaba of pilgrims, tablets of the law and sheets of the Koran. Because I profess the religion of Love and I go wherever your horse goes. For Love is my creed and my faith” (from his book
Converted Heart).
Thought that resurfaces in the European Renaissance (three centuries later) through Humanism and that becomes Humanism in Solidarity with Thomas of Vio, when he proposes the idea of PROFOUND UNITY OF HUMANITY (or unlimited acceptance of otherness).
The time has come to think, as the former Uruguayan president, José Mújica has indicated, in terms of the human species, at a global level and to recover from history the currents of thought that unite the individual and the collective in the same feeling.
And that thought is found, as I said, in the best OF THE APPRECIATIVE GAZE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, in whose ideological intersection is the most sublime of humanity, whose capacity must elevate a new education of subjectivity, a new social feeling, a new language that accompanies humanity, in the line of thought of the verses of the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, when he teaches us that: “The earth is my homeland. Humanity, my family.” The philosopher and researcher Luis Castellanos has taught us that: “If you take care of words, they take care of you”.
Words have the ability to construct a story, a discourse, our story, our discourse, and they forge our personality, they forge our gaze, our ability to see the world, of our gaze.
We build our personality phoneme by phoneme, word by word, phrase by phrase, thought by thought.
That is why the words of the colonial and postcolonial discourse, which began in the nineteenth century and reached the gates of the technological revolution, have shaped the gaze, the personality of Europe and of the entire Western world, on the basis of the concept of the other, of otherness, and that has contributed, in a definitive way, to the establishment of the discourse of the non-existent enemy (the East). creating an ideological and sentimental barrier that does not exist in reality: Islamophobia and all other phobias.
This great lie has forged, for a century and a half, fear and hatred, if not violence.
Our gaze (our existential posture), our way of being in the world manifests our belief system.
If we were able to have an appreciative gaze, without prejudice, if we were able to abandon the received discourse and concentrate on discovering the goodness and virtues of the other (of course, without falling into do-goodism or abandoning critical discourse: manifesting all the abuses, both of the West and of the East), if we could free ourselves from the erratic inheritance of beliefs about what surrounds us and about ourselves, we would be much closer to something fundamental, which is reality. It is necessary, at this crucial moment in our global history that humanity is going through, to recover, from an appreciative point of view, reality (which is as much as telling the truth) and the deepest capacity of the human being: the capacity for empathy, that capacity that sublimates us as living beings and that makes us occupy the place of the other. to understand their vision of reality, their position and their opinions, free of all prejudice.
Marcel Proust said that: “Even if nothing changes, if I change, everything changes”.
Reality is what it is, but our willingness to change (from an appreciative point of view) leads us to perceive it, to understand it, to interpret it, in a different way, far removed from the mythical stories that others have raised.
And that is when the equation of which the great master Averroes spoke begins to fracture: “Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, hatred leads to violence. Here is the equation.” Let us destroy, then, ignorance, through an appreciative gaze and we will be destroying fear, hatred, violence and all kinds of phobias.
Today, as we are gathered in Seville, I want to end this contribution with a quote from one of the most universal Sevillian poets, the great master D. Antonio Machado: “Your truth? No, really; and come with me to look for it. Keep yours.”JOSÉ SARRIA Sevilla, 03/11/2018 Socio-Intercultural Association of Andalusia – ASIA — [i]Mircea Eliade (Bucharest, 1907-Chicago, 1986).
Philosopher, novelist and historian. [ii]Eliade, Mircea. Le sacré et le profane. Paris.
Gallimard.
1989, p. 32. [iii] Old Christian or pure Castilian, is an ideological concept that was intended to designate the majority segment of the population of Spain and Portugal, after the Reconquest of the Catholic Monarchs, as opposed to the New Christian (who was supposed to be of converso descent of Moorish or Jewish origin. [iv]Isidoro Moreno Navarro, professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Seville, founder of the discipline at the University of Seville. [v] Paul Raskin (Tariq Banuri, Gilberto Gallopín, Pablo Gutman, Al Hammond, Robert Kates and Rob Swart. [vi]Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, dependent on the United Nations. [vii]Muhammad ibn Ali ibn al-Arabi, known as Ibn Arabi, was born in Murcia in 1165 (taifa or independent kingdom) ruled by Ibn Mardanis (the famous Wolf King) and in full Almohad rule of Spain.
He is buried in Damascus, where he died in 1240, at the age of seventy-five.