This a letter to Mark Steyn.
SHANIA YES, DARWIN NO
Further to the recent controversy over The King Fahad Academy and its slightly less than culturally sensitive depictions of 'repugnant' jews and porcine Christians, a further insight into how some parts of the Islamic world see their fellow peoples of the book. As a teacher of English as a foreign language I've taught a large number of students from the Muslim world over the last few years. In conversation with a particularly radical (although perfectly nice, if you kept him off the subjects of politics, race, women, sexuality, drugs, pop music etc) young guy from Jordan, I decided to spice up our one to one conversation class by asking him his views on Darwin. After a spot of sardonic laughter he explained to me in the tone usually reserved for wilfully ignorant three year olds, that Darwin was basically wrong on every count, as we are of course Allah's creations. However, after a second's reflection he then caveated this by adding that there was one small element of truth in Darwin's theory. There is, it seems, one group of people who are indeed descended from apes. This group is, of course....drumroll....the Jews !!! Apparently, as a punishment for using drift nets to catch fish on a Saturday Allah turned them in to monkeys for a few thousand years, allowing them to slowly develop back towards humanity (a “scholarly” analysis of this claim in the Koran can be found at: www.memri.org/bin/articles ). Now there's nothing new or surprising in an Islamic extremist believing that Jews come from apes. What was so interesting in this guy's case was that to all intents and purposes he was an intelligent, scientifically minded guy who was fairly open to the west. He had two degrees - one in physics and one in mechanical engineering. He also had a Mickey Mouse watch and was a big Shania Twain fan. And yet he was quite happy to believe this lunatic tale of simian shenanigans from the big hand in the sky. Ever since meeting this guy, I've made a point of raising this story with other Islamic students, and although some are more forceful than others in maintaining the truth of it, there's not a single one who's been prepared to agree with me that it is clearly complete and utter nonsense, even among the most chilled and liberal students who, lunatic beliefs aside, are thoroughly nice chaps. Just a little something to bear in mind next time you hear mention of “moderate” Islam...
Dan Vesty
Shrewsbury, United Kingdom
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I guess I'd rather be Jewish. I wonder what Allah punished them with.
Got into a fight here, AA. Help me out. What do Chinese believe that just ain't so about themselves? You've said things about this before. I'd like some more flesh.
Well, you mean about their past? I hesitate to say "Chinese" because most of those are mainlanders and under the communists may have all sorts of extra things they think are so which are not. But from the Nationalist Taiwan version, particularly pungent in the late 1980's, it was stuff like this.
"China's is the world's most ancient culture" [also stated as saying there is 5,000 years of Chinese history]. When I'd point out the Egyptian or Middle Eastern [Sumer, Babylon, for example] they'd be pretty irked. For the "5,000" year thing I'd point out that history, the entrance of civilization into written records, put's a limit of around 3,500 years for China's [the earliest recorded written symbols, found on "oracle bones", are from roughly 1500 BC . And writing is not common at all until within 1000 BC . Sort of on par with the Greeks, I'd say]. Of course I'd point out that calling this "Chinese culture" only makes sense as a convenient labelling for the land mass of what is today China, as many disparate civilizations and realms flowed and ebbed before the rise of the Han dynasty ;following the unification of the major kingdoms under the first, and only, Chin emeperor [the man who the assassin fails to kill in the movie "Hero" of a few years ago] That was circa 200 BC.
Other stuff was "China is the most moral society on earth". For example, Chinese family life was the most virtuous. Chinese were not corrupted by western sexual decadence, etc.... [discussion was mucho intense here. After all, the ancient arts of ho-dom were long gung-ho in China]
"China's Confucian system led to a harmony between ruler and people no barbarian could ever know" [then they would quote Confucius' famous analogy of the grass [the people] bowing before the wind [the ruler]. Mention of the never ending rebellions against imperial rule [as is true today] would fire things up quicktime.
"Western barbarians--particularly the British-- pillaged and ruined China unlike no other" Here I would ask them to compare the predations of the Chim emperor, or the Mongols, or the Manchus, or of the Taiping rebellion, or of the 20th century stuff, with the most heinious example they could think of with Westerners..... not that it would be remembered the day after.
Other stuff included:
"It was China, not the Americans, that defeated the Japanese in WWII" [asking them to name one major battle won by Chinese forces before the end in 1945 would bring a beautiful stunned look that just stayed and stayed].
"Taiwan is an ancient part of China" [trust me on this, it ain't at all an ancient part of China]
"Ancient Chinese science and mathematics was the greatest on Earth" [this was often helped by their profound ignorance of ancient western science and math]
"The Chinese writing system is the most perfect on earth" [have fun with that one!]
"Genghis Khan was a great Chinese" [when they resisted my claims he was a foreigner, it was helpful to ask them to point out which chinese scholar from that era referred to the conflicts with the Mongols as anything other than a foreign invasion]
"China is a peaceful nation and has never sought to expand at the expense of others" [here I'd remind them the Great Wall was the border of China in ancient days, and then have them draw that wall in a current map, and then ask them how did peaceful unaggressive China happen to have such a vaster border today then then]
"China has been robbed of her lands, and should be Da Dzung-guo [Great China]." Here the claim was that if anyone had ruled China at one point in the past, and also ruled land X, then land X belonged to China. Thus, over the Millenia, places as disparate as Saigon, Burma, Tashkent, Lake Baikal, and some even further, became marked as "should be Chinese".
Yes, these last two claims are inconsistent. But one and the same group would clutch onto both.
There were many others, held by a few, but the above were most of the "commonly held " notions. Again, JJ, there is the caveat that this was under the rule of a Nationalist dictatorship, and today, China as expressed on Taiwan, is much freer and more varied in its sense of the past and present.....But then there is Mainland......
had a silly girl try to tell me she was more culturally akin to the Chinese postdocs in her lab than stupid creationist Kansans.
I thought it kinda funny. For her to be mocking her own culture sounds very unChinese to me, but I am an ignoramus on the subject.
JJ, North Dakotans mock Kansans all the time (at least every time we flush our turds down the Missouri River — eventually Pepe gets them, filtering through in particle form into his drinking water).
...AA, is Bozeman within the Missouri River watershed?
AA, I hope you don't mind, but I forwarded your Chinese myth and history comments to a friend in Mongolia, and to his dad in Boston.
no problem at all. Living in Mongolia he surely is aware of the charming gap between what "China" says and the past.
AA and JJ, here's more on the Chinese, this time from the perspective of an ex-Pat living in Mongolia:
"Several years ago, while riding on the Trans-Siberian railway somewhere between Ulaanbaatar and the Chinese border, I met my first real Chinaman, that is, one from Jun-gao ("Central Country"), and not one from Jun-gao town, Boston. I spoke to him with the help of a translator, a corpulent Chinese-Canadian who, it seemed to me, was a homosexual (after an extended stay in Mongolia many "foreigners" seem like queers; I'm told I seemed like one: a certain looseness in the wrists and a tendency to smile too much). Onward. I was promptly told that China was and always has been the greatest country on earth: An unbroken and grand history spanning at least the last 5,000 years. This, I guess, passes for breaking the ice with a foreigner in China. I will not rehash (nor could I) what [AA] so knowledgeably wrote of, except to add: the Mongols ruled China for 250 years, and by the logic "that if anyone had ruled China at one point in the past, and also ruled land X, then land X belonged to China", it follows that Vienna, Kiev, Seoul, Moscow, Bombay, and a good deal else as well belongs to China. The paranoid news-stories with titles like "China Rising" or "The Rise of China" aired nightly on CNN and Fox gain some credibility from this
perspective. They've already reconquered Beijing and Shanghai! (The Mongolians, of course, were eventually assimilated into China, that is, they became rice-eating, back-biting and civilized - also
delusional). Onward.
My Chinaman looked as if he wanted to kiss the ground when we disembarked at the border. Had he done so, he would have kissed a dried lugey, likely spat there
earlier that day by a crouched old-man wearing a wife-beater t-shirt, his hands forever held behind his back despite a cigarette. I had told my Chinaman that I liked Mongolia. Why? he had asked. Because it's great. This was a good answer. He proved to me that China is and always has been the greatest country on earth by buying the three of us enough food and beer for 10 hungry Mongolians, or 25 hungry Chinese. Point well taken. Shzii shzii.
The giant graffiti which adorned the side of a building in central Ulaanbaatar stating, in English,
"Don't kill people, kill the Chinese," has been sand-blasted or painted over.
A taxi-driver asked me today whether there were any "Ho ja nar" (derogatory for "Chinese") in my hometown. When I answered that there is very few, he was so
pleased he laughed and approvingly jabbed me in the ribs with his elbow. That there are very few
"niggers" in my hometown didn't seem to please him as much.
Sumo-update coming soon."
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