Cultural Heritage is an Ideal Imposed from Above

Governments increasingly looked to remains of the distant past to bolster national identities and a sense of greatness, or to marginalise disfavoured groups. Saddam Hussein used the ruins of Babylon to spread ideas of Iraq’s greatness as well as his own, even portraying himself as a modern Nebuchadnezzar. China’s leadership has used archaeology to project national greatness onto the distant, semi-legendary past. Today, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has worked to use archaeology to prove that modern Hindus can trace their descent from the earliest inhabitants of India.
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Alongside the language of nationalism, international organisations also associate cultural heritage with universal values. They argue that cultural heritage belongs not just to individual nations but to all of humanity. UNESCO, for example, promotes ‘Unite for Heritage’, a popular social-media hashtag campaign. The UNESCO World Heritage List presumes the universal value of heritage. At first blush, the universalist trend seems to be a new one that directly challenges older nationalist ideas. But, in fact, it is neither new nor a challenge. In the 19th century, Europeans often spoke about Egyptian antiquities, as Elliott Colla points out in Conflicted Antiquities (2007), not in terms of the political or commercial interests of their nations – as they did with other aspects of Egypt – but of civilisation in general. When in the 1820s Jean-François Champollion, the French decipherer of hieroglyphics, was questioned about his plan to hack painted reliefs from an ancient Egyptian royal tomb, he replied that he was doing so as a ‘real lover of antiquity’. That Champollion worked for the Louvre, his country’s national museum, and the reliefs would be deposited there, was mere convenience. The French elite saw themselves on a civilising mission to ‘barbaric’ Africa, an altruistic enterprise benefiting humanity that just happened to include ancient Egyptian monuments and artifacts as their country’s reward. ‘If Africa becomes humanised, if civilisation ever flourishes again on its shores, where the monuments of Roman grandeur lie,’ according to one writer in 1836, ‘the glory must come back to France.’
**

Universalist language serves a double purpose. It justifies the urges of the developed world to acquire, often in effect to loot, heritage from developing nations. And it does so while presenting those same developing nations as less enlightened. But this characterisation of developing nations runs counter to the actual history. In 1989, John Henry Merryman, professor emeritus of law and art at Stanford University, questioned ‘[t]he deference still routinely given to state claims to their “national cultural patrimony” in international affairs’. At the time, European and American powers had just begun taking the antiquities laws of developing nations seriously. Western scholars love to critique and mock the image of Hussein as Nebuchadnezzar, but it is not qualitatively different from Napoleon’s depiction as a Greek god or hero, defeating the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and bringing civilisation back to the country. In Europe and America, nationalist use of heritage is depicted as an aberration. It’s what others do. The West rarely holds itself up to the same mirror.

source

https://aeon.co/essays/why-cultural-heritage-benefits-the-rich-and-powerful-above-all?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=atom-feed

The "Muslim World"

By Cemil Aydin
Full version if this article is originally published as What is Muslim World? by aeon.co on 1 August 2018.

Nearly a fifth of the way into the 21st century, however, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism seems to have vanished but Pan-Islamism and the ideal of Muslim world solidarity survives. Why? The answer lies in the final stages of the Cold War. It was in the 1980s that a new Muslim internationalism emerged, as part of a rising political Islam. It was not a clash between the primordial civilisational traditions of Islam and the West, or a reassertion of authentic religious values. It wasn’t even a persistence of early 20th-century Pan-Islamism, but rather a new formation of the Cold War. A Saudi-US alliance began promoting the idea of Muslim solidarity in the 1970s as an alternative to the secular Pan-Arabism of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose country allied with the Soviet Union. Any ideas of an ‘Islamic’ utopia would have floundered if not for the failures of many post-colonial nation-states and the subsequent public disillusionment of many Muslims.

The notion that Pan-Islamism represents authentic, ancient, repressed Muslim political values in revolt against global Westernisation and secularisation was initially a paranoid obsession of Western colonial officers, but recently it comes mainly from Islamists. Western pundits and journalists have erred in accepting at face value Islamist claims about Islam’s essential political values. The kind of Islamism that’s identified with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood or Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran did not exist before the 1970s. None of the Indian Muslims meeting Wilson, nor the late Ottoman-era caliphs, were interested in imposing Sharia in their society. None of them wanted to veil women. On the contrary, the first Pan-Islamist generation was highly modernist: they were proponents of the liberation of women, racial equality and cosmopolitanism. Indian Muslims, for example, were very proud that the Ottoman caliph had Greek and Armenian ministers and ambassadors. They also wanted to see the British Crown appointing Hindu and Muslim ministers and high-level officials in their governments. None would have desired or predicted the separation of Turks and Greeks in Ottoman lands, Arabs and Jews in Palestine, and Muslims and Hindus in India. Only the basic form of early 20th-century Pan-Islamism survives today; the substance of it has, since the 1980s, transformed completely.

The fact that both Lewis and Osama bin Laden spoke of an eternal clash between a united Muslim world and a united West does not mean it is a reality. Even at the peak of the idea of global Muslim solidarity in the late 19th century, Muslim societies were divided across political, linguistic and cultural lines. Since the time of prophet Muhammad’s Companions in the seventh century, hundreds of diverse kingdoms, empires and sultanates, some in conflict with each other, ruled over Muslim populations mixed with others. Separating Muslims from their Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Jewish neighbours, and thinking of their societies in isolation, bears no relationship to the historical experience of human beings. There has never been, and could never be, a separate ‘Muslim world’.

All the new fascist Right-wing anti-Muslim groups in Europe and the US obsesses over Ottoman imperial expansion in eastern Europe. They see the Ottoman siege of Vienna of 1683 as the Islamic civilisation’s near-takeover of ‘the West’. But in the Battle of Vienna, Protestant Hungarians allied with the predominantly Muslim Ottoman empire against the Catholic Habsburgs. It was a complex conflict between empires and states, not a clash of civilisations.

The Hindu nationalism of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi promotes the idea of an alien Mughal empire that invaded India and ruled over Hindus. But Hindu bureaucrats played a vital role in India’s Mughal empire, and Mughal emperors were simply empire-builders, not zealots of theocratic rule over different faith communities. There are also Muslims today who look back at the Mughal empire in India as an instance of Muslim domination over Hindus. It is notable and important that anti-Muslim Western propaganda and Pan-Islamic narratives of history resemble one another. They both rely on the civilisational narrative of history and a geopolitical division of the world into discrete ahistorical entities such as black Africa, the Muslim world, Asia and the West.

Contemporary Pan-Islamism also idealises a mythical past. According to Pan-Islamists, the ummah, or worldwide Muslim community, originated at a time when Muslims were not humiliated by racist white empires or aggressive Western powers. Pan-Islamists want to ‘make the ummah great again’. Yet the notion of a golden age of Muslim political unity and solidarity relies on amnesia about the imperial past. Muslim societies were never politically united, and there were never homogeneous Muslim societies in Eurasia. None of the Muslim dynasty-ruled empires aimed to subjugate non-Muslims by pious believers. Like the Ottoman, Persian or Egyptian monarchs of the late 19th century, they were multi-ethnic empires, employing thousands of non-Muslim bureaucrats. Muslim populations simply never asked for global ummah solidarity before the late 19th-century moment of racialised European empires.

The term ‘the Muslim world’ first appeared in the 1870s. Initially, it was European missionaries or colonial officers who favoured it as a shorthand to refer to all those between the ‘yellow race’ of East Asia and the black race in Africa. They also used it to express their fear of a potential Muslim revolt, though Muslim subjects of empire were no more or less rebellious to their empires than Hindu or Buddhist subjects. After the great Indian Rebellion of 1857, when both Hindus and Muslims rose up against the British, some British colonial officers blamed Muslims for this uprising. William Wilson Hunter, a British colonial officer, questioned whether Indian Muslims could be loyal to a Christian monarch in his influential book, The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? (1871). In reality, Muslims were not much different from Hindus in terms of their loyalty as well as their critique of the British empire. Elite Indian Muslims, such as the reformist Syed Ahmad Khan, wrote angry rebuttals to Hunter’s allegations. But they also accepted his terms of debate, in which Muslims were a distinct and separate category of Indians.

The growth of European nationalisms also found a useful enemy in Muslims, specifically the Ottoman sultan. In the late 19th century, Greek, Serbian, Romanian and Bulgarian nationalists all began to depict the Ottoman sultan as a despot. They appealed to British liberals to break the Ottoman-British alliance on behalf of a global Christian solidarity. Anti-Ottoman British liberals such as William Gladstone argued that Christian solidarity should be important for British decisions with regard to the Ottoman empire. It is in that context that the Ottoman sultan referred to his spiritual link with Indian Muslims, to argue for a return to an Ottoman-British alliance thanks to this special connection between these two big Muslim empires.

In his influential book The Future of Islam (1882), the English poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt argued that the Ottoman empire would eventually be expelled from Europe, and that Europe’s crusading spirit would turn Istanbul into a Christian city. Blunt also claimed that the British empire, lacking the hatred of Muslims of the Austrians, the Russians or the French, could become the protector of the world’s Muslim populations in Asia. In patronising and imperial ways, Blunt seemed to care about the future of Muslims. He was a supporter and friend of leading Muslim reformists such as Al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, and served as an intermediary between European intellectual circles and Muslim reformists.

Around the same time that Blunt was writing, the influential French intellectual Ernest Renan formulated a very negative view of Islam, especially in regard to science and civilisation. Renan saw Islam as a Semitic religion that would impede the development of science and rationality. His ideas symbolised the racialisation of Muslims via their religion. Of course, Renan was making this argument in Paris, which ruled over large parts of Muslim North Africa and West Africa. His ideas helped to rationalise French colonial rule. Al-Afghani and many other Muslim intellectuals wrote rebuttals of Renan’s arguments, while being supported by Blunt. But Renan enjoyed more success in creating a distracting narrative of a separate Islamic civilisation versus a Western, Christian civilisation.

European elites’ claims of a Western civilising mission, and the superiority of the Christian-Western civilisation, were important to the colonial projects. European intellectuals took up vast projects of classifying humanity into hierarchies of race and religion. It was only in response to this chauvinistic assertion that Muslim intellectuals fashioned a counter-narrative of Islamic civilisation. In an attempt to assert their dignity and equality, they emphasised the past glory, modernity and civility of ‘the Muslim world’. These Muslim opponents of European imperial ideology – of the white race’s civilisational superiority over Muslims and other coloured races – were the first Pan-Islamists.

During the early 20th century, Muslim reformers began to cultivate a historical narrative that emphasised a shared civilisation, with a golden age in Islamic science and art, and its subsequent decline. This idea of a holistic Muslim history was a novel creation fashioned directly in response to the idea of a Western civilisation and the geopolitical arguments of Western/white racial unity. Like the early generation of Pan-African and Pan-Asian intellectuals, Muslim intellectuals responded to European chauvinism and Western orientalism with their own glorious history and civilisation. Throughout the 20th century, the great Muslim leaders such as Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Nasser in Egypt, Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddeq and Indonesia’s Sukarno were all secular nationalists, but all of them needed and used this notion of a glorious history of Muslim civilisation to talk back against ideologies of white supremacy. Nationalism eventually triumphed, and during the 1950s and ’60s the idea of Islam as a force in world affairs also faded from Western journalism and scholarship.

Pan-Islamic ideologies did not resurface again until the 1970s and ’80s, and then with a new character and tone. They returned as an expression of discontent with the contemporary world. After all, gone were the heady days of mid-20th-century optimism about modernisation. The United Nations had failed to solve existential issues. Post-colonial nation-states had not brought liberty and prosperity to most of the world’s Muslims. Meanwhile, Europe, the US and the Soviet Union showed little concern for the suffering of Muslim peoples. Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan appeared, maintaining that the colonisation of Palestine and the tribulations of poverty required a new form of solidarity.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 proved a historic moment. To condemn the status quo, Khomeini appealed to this new form of Pan-Islamism. Yet, his Iran and its regional rival Saudi Arabia both privileged the national interests of their states. So there has never been a viable federative vision of this new Pan-Islamic solidarity. Unlike Pan-Africanism, which idealised black-skinned populations living in solidarity within post-colonial Africa, Pan-Islamism rests on a sense of victimhood without a practical political project. It is less about real plans to establish a Muslim polity than about how to end the oppression and discrimination shared by an imagined global community.

The calls for global Muslim solidarity can never be understood by looking at religious texts or Muslim piety. It is developments in modern intellectual and geopolitical history that have generated and shaped Pan-Islamic views of history and the world. Perhaps their crucial feature is the idea of the West as a place with its own historical narrative and enduring political vision of global hegemony. The Soviet Union, the US, the EU – all the global Western projects of the 20th century imagine a superior West and its hegemony. Early Pan-Islamic intellectuals developed Muslim narratives of a historical global order as a strategy to combat imperial discourses about their inferiority, which suffused colonial metropoles, orientalist writings and European social sciences. There simply could not be a Pan-Islamic narrative of the global order without its counterpart, the Western narrative of the world, which is equally tendentious as history.

Ideas of Western and Islamic worlds seem like enemies in the mirror. We should not let the colonisers of the late-19th century set the terms of today’s discussion on human rights and good governance. As long as we accept this tendentious opposition between ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’, we are still captives to colonisation and the failures of decolonisation. In simply recognising and rejecting these terms of discussion, we can be free to move forward, to think about one another and the world in more realistic and humane ways. Our challenge today is to find a new language of rights and norms that is not captive to the fallacies of Western civilisation or its African, Asian and Muslim alternatives. Human beings, irrespective of their colour and religion, share a single planet and a connected history, without civilisational borders. Any forward path to overcome current injustices and problems must rely on our connections and shared values, rather than civilisational tribalism.

Batı'da Entellektüel Kalmadı

Bir durum tespiti olarak şu hususun altını çizmekte yarar var: Batı’da entelektüel kalmadı; dünya yeni bir döneme adım atarken geçmiştekine benzer “kurucu zihin” ortaya çıkmıyor, kurucu zihinlerin mirası üzerinden gidenler de yavaş yavaş tarih sahnesinden çekiliyor. Şu anda Batı düşünce hayatına siyasetine, maddi ve iktisadi evrenine yön verenler, sosyal bilimciler, politikacılar, uzmanlar ve stratejistlerdir. Fonksiyonel değerleri inkar edilmese de, bu zümre içinde yer alanlar entelektüel sıfatını almaya hak kazanmazlar.

Teknoloji, ekonomi, strateji ve politika, yeryüzü ölçeğinde hayatı giderek yoksullaştırmakta, acımasızlaştırmaktadır. Sosyal bilimcilerden filozof veya yüksek düzeyde fikir adamı çıkmaz; sosyal bilimlerin suyunun derinliği bir karışlıktır, bilimlerin sularında sadece ayaklarınızı ıslatırsınız. Entelektüel, okyanusun derin sularına dalar, derinliklerde hikmet incileri arar. Söz konusu dört düzeyde -teknoloji, ekonomi, strateji ve politika- tabiat tüketiliyor, istifçilik gelişiyor, bedenin organizmaya ait istekleri öne çıkıyor. Tabii bunun arkasından da pragmatizmin ve başarı tutkusunun tetiklediği, hegemonik bir kültür yeryüzününün genelini istila ediyor.

Zamanımızda sanat, edebiyat ve felsefe alanında inanılmaz bir zaaf söz konusu. Kurtarıcı paradigmayı inşa etme gücünde olan din, deizm ve nihilizmle atbaşı giden sekülerleşmenin etkisinde özelleşiyor, marjinalleşiyor ve izafi alana çekilmek zorunda bırakılıyor. Din adına hüküm süren iktidarlar dini sekülerleştiriyor. Bu sebepten sürecin anavatanı Batı olduğundan entelektüel çıkmıyor. İyi bir entelektüel ancak dinin evreninde mümkün hayat bulabilir. Hıristiyanlık, Yahudilik, Budizm de entelektüel çıkarabilir, fakat en iyi ve en kâmil anlamdaki entelektüel örnekler sadece İslam’a özeldir ve bu manada sadece İslam entelektüel çıkarabilir. Şu var ki, sahih entelektüel geçmişte olduğu gibi bugün de “zenginlerin (ulusal ve küresel kapitalistlerin) sofrasından ve sultanın sarayından uzak” sade, mütevazi ve çileli bir hayat tarzını seçmeyi göze almalı.

Ali Bulaç, alibulac.net

Kelt Rüyası

1888'in Aralık ayında, Stanley'in demiryolu inşaatında bir yılını tamamlamadan istifa ederek, Ngombe Lutete'de misyonerlik yapan Bentley çiftinin yönetimindeki Vaftizci misyonunda çalışmaya gitti. Bu kararı, Matadi'de yerleşimcilerin mahallesindeki evlerden birinde, oraya yolu üstünde geçerken uğramış olan bir kişiyle yaptığı, akşam alacakaranlıkta başlayıp günün ilk ışıklarıyla sona eren bir sohbetin ardından ani olarak almıştı. Theodore Horte, İngiliz Donanmasının eski bir subayıydı. Kongo'da Vaftizci bir misyoner olmak için İngiliz Donanması'nı bırakmıştı. Doktor David Livingstone Afrika kıtasını keşfe ve orada İncil'i öğretmeye çıktığından beri Vaftizciler oradaydılar. 

Palabala'da, Banza Manteke'de, Ngombe Lutete'de misyonlar açmışlar, Stanley Göleti yakınlarındaki Arlhington'da da yeni bir misyonun açılışını daha yeni yapmışlardı. Bu misyonları ziyaret etmekte olan Theodore Horte, vaktini birinden ötekine yolculuk ederek rahiplere yardım etmekle ve yeni merkezlerin nasıl açılabileceğine bakmakla geçiriyordu. Yaptıkları o söyleşi, Roger Casement'ta ömrünün geri kalanı boyunca hatırlayacağı, 1902 yılının ortalarında üçüncü sıtma hastalığının nekahet döneminde olduğu o günlerde de tüm ayrıntılarıyla yâd ettiği bir izlenim bırakmıştı.

Theodore Horte'u dinleyen hiç kimse, onun meslekten subay olduğunu ve bir denizci olarak İngiliz Donanması'nın önemli askerî harekâtlarına katıldığını aklının ucundan bile geçirmezdi. Ne geçmişinden söz ediyordu ne de özel hayatından. Hali tavrı terbiyeli, kibar görünümlü bir adamdı. Mat adi’de, ırmağın sularına yansıyan yıldızlarla donanmış, ne yağmur ne de bulutların olduğu bir gökyüzünün altında, saçlarını uçuran sıcak bir rüzgârın hışırtısının ara sıra duyulduğu o sakin gecede, Casement'la Horte, yan yana asılı iki hamağa uzanmış olarak yemekten sonra sohbete başlamışlar, Roger ilk başta bunun akşam yemeğinin üstüne ancak uykuları gelene kadar sürerek unutulup gidecek olan o alışıldık söyleşilerden biri olacağını sanmıştı. Ancak, sohbet başladıktan kısa bir süre sonra, kalbinin alışıldıktan çok daha fazla çarpmasına neden olan bir şey oldu. Rahip Horte'un sesindeki yumuşaklık ve sıcaklığın kendisine ninni gibi geldiğini hissetmiş, iş arkadaşlarıyla, hele hele amirleriyle -belki bir defa Herbert Ward'in dışında hiç kimseyle- asla paylaşmadığı konularda konuşma arzusuna kapılmıştı. Sanki uğursuz şeyler söz konusuymuş gibi gizlediği kaygılar, üzüntüler, kuşkulardı bunlar. Bütün bu olanların bir anlamı var mıydı? Avrupa'nın bu Afrika serüveni söylendiği, yazıldığı, sanıldığı gibi bir şey miydi? Serbest ticaret ve İncil Öğretisi aracılığıyla buraya uygarlığı, kalkınmayı, modernleşmeyi mi getiriyordu? Asayiş Gücü'nün yerli halkı cezalandırmak için çıktığı seferlerde, ellerine geçen her şeyi talan eden o hayvanların buraya uygarlık getirdiği söylenebilir miydi? O sömürgecilerin -tüccarların, askerlerin, görevlilerin, serüvencilerin- arasında acaba kaç tanesi yerlilere karşı azıcık olsun saygı duyuyor, onları kardeş olarak ya da en azından insan olarak görüyordu? Yüzde beşi mi? Her yüz kişiden biri mi? Doğrusu şuydu ki, burada geçirdiği bütün o yıllar boyunca, zencilere en küçük bir pişmanlık duymadan aldatılabilecek, sömürülebilecek, kırbaçlanabilecek, hatta öldürülebilecek ruhsuz hayvanlar gibi davranmayan Avrupalıların sayısının iki elin parmaklarını geçmediğini görmüştü.

Theodore Korte, genç Casement'ın böyle acıyla içini dökmesini hiç sesini çıkarmadan dinledi. Konuştuğundaysa onun ağzından duyduklarına şaşırmışa benzemiyordu. Tam tersine, kendisinin de yıllardan beri korkunç kuşkular içinde olduğunu kabullendi. Yine de, şu "uygarlık" denilen şey, en azından kuramsal olarak doğruydu. Yerlilerin hayat koşullan korkunç değil miydi? Hijyen düzeyleri, boş inançları, en temel sağlık kavramları konusundaki bilgisizlikleri onların sapır sapır dökülmelerine neden olmuyor muydu? Yalnızca hayatta kalma çabaları bile trajik değil miydi? İlkellikten çıkmaları için, bazı barbarca alışkanlıkların, sözgelimi pek çok toplulukta çocukların ve hastaların kurban edilmesi âdetinin, birbirlerini öldürdükleri savaşların, köleliğin ve bazı yerlerde hâlâ uygulanan yamyamlığın yok edilmesi yolunda Avrupa'nın onlara verebileceği çok şey vardı. Dahası, gerçek Tanrı'yı tanımaları, tapındıkları ilahların yerine Hıristiyanların Tanrısını, merhamet, sevgi ve adalet getiren Tanrı'yı koymaları onlar için iyi olmaz mıydı? Buraya pek çok kötü insanın, belki de Avrupa'nın en kötülerinin aktığı doğruydu. Bunun bir çaresi yok muydu? Yaşlı Kıta'dan iyi şeylerin de gelmesi zorunluydu. Ruhları kirlenmiş tacirlerin açgözlülüğü değil, bilim, hukuk, eğitim, insanoğlunun içinde doğuştan var olan haklar, Hıristiyan ahlakı gelmeliydi. Geri adım atmak için artık çok geç değil miydi? Sömürgeleştirmenin iyi mi kötü mü olduğunu sormakta ya da kendi kaderlerine terk edilmiş olsalardı, yanlarında Avrupalılar olmadan Kongolular daha mı iyi olurlardı diye merak etmekte yarar yoktu. Geriye dönüşün olmadığı durumlarda, acaba hiç yapılmasaydı daha mı iyi olurdu diye sorarak vakit kaybetmeye değmezdi. İşleri yoluna sokmaya çalışmak daha iyiydi. Yolunda gitmeyen şeyi düzeltmek her zaman mümkündü. Zaten İsa'nın öğrettiği en güzel şey de bu değil miydi?

**

Çok sonraları, o yolculuk sona erip de raporunu yazarak Kongo'dan ayrıldığında ve Afrika'da geçirdiği o yirmi yıl yalnızca bir anıya dönüştüğünde, Roger Casement, kaç kez, burada gerçekleşmekte olan bütün o korkunç şeylerin kaynağında yalnızca bir tek sözcüğün bulunduğunu söyleyecekti kendi kendine: Açgözlülüktü o sözcük. O ülke insanlarının talihsizliğine bakın ki, Kongo ormanlarında bol bol bulunan o kara altına karşı duyulan açgözlülüktü bu. Oradaki zenginlik, bu bahtsız insanların üzerine yağmış bir lanet gibiydi, işler böyle sürüp gidecek olursa, onları yeryüzünden silip yok edecekti. Üç ay on günlük o süre içinde şu sonuca varmıştı Roger: Kauçuk daha önce tükenmeyecek olursa, yüzlercesini ve binlercesini yok etmekte olan o sistemin içinde Kongolular kendileri tükenip gideceklerdi.

**

Öyleyse bu suçlara son vermek için bir şey yapabilirsiniz," diye mırıldandı Roger Casement. "Biz Avrupalılar Afrika'ya bunun için gelmedik."

"Ya, öyle mi?" diyerek dönüp ona baktı Yüzbaşı Junieux. Konsolos, subayın benzinin solduğunu fark etmişti. "Niye geldik öyleyse? Ha biliyorum: Uygarlığı, Hıristiyanlığı ve serbest ticareti getirmeye geldik. Siz buna hâlâ inanıyor musunuz, Mr. Casement?"

"Artık hayır," diye anında karşılık verdi Roger Casement. 

"Eskiden evet, inanıyordum. Hem de bütün kalbimle. Bir zamanlar olduğum o idealist gencin bütün saflığıyla uzun yıllar inandım. Avrupa'nın Afrika'ya insanların hayatlarını ve ruhlarını kurtarmaya, o vahşileri uygarlaştırmaya geldiğini sanıyordum. Şimdi artık yanıldığımı anlıyorum."

Yüzbaşı Junieux'nun yüzündeki ifade değişmiş, suratındaki o duygusuz maskenin yerini birdenbire daha insanca bir ifade almış gibi gelmişti Roger'a. Hatta o kadar ki, ahmakların layık oldukları, merhamet dolu bir sevecenlikle bakıyordu kendisine.

"Kendimi o gençlik günahımdan kurtarmaya çalışıyorum, Yüzbaşım. Coquilhatville'e kadar bunun için geldim. Sözde uygarlık adına burada işlenen suçlan en küçük ayrıntılarına kadar bunun için belgeliyorum."

"Size başarılar dilerim, Sayın Konsolos," diye gülümseyerek onu alaya aldı Yüzbaşı Junieux. "Ama size içtenlikle söylememe izin verirseniz, korkarım başarıya ulaşamayacaksınız. Bu sistemi değiştirmeye kimsenin gücü yetmez. Bunun için artık çok geç."

How to Write about Africa

Binyavanga Wainaina, Granta Magazine

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering. Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and who is concerned for your well-being. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them, bathe them, feed them; he carries lots of babies and has seen Death. Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic international celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction).

Bad Western characters may include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners, employees of the World Bank. When talking about exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders. Blame the West for Africa’s situation. But do not be too specific.

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.

Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people’s property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil).

After celebrity activists and aid workers, conservationists are Africa’s most important people. Do not offend them. You need them to invite you to their 30,000-acre game ranch or ‘conservation area’, and this is the only way you will get to interview the celebrity activist. Often a book cover with a heroic-looking conservationist on it works magic for sales. Anybody white, tanned and wearing khaki who once had a pet antelope or a farm is a conservationist, one who is preserving Africa’s rich heritage. When interviewing him or her, do not ask how much funding they have; do not ask how much money they make off their game. Never ask how much they pay their employees.

Readers will be put off if you don’t mention the light in Africa. And sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical—Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces. When writing about the plight of flora and fauna, make sure you mention that Africa is overpopulated. When your main character is in a desert or jungle living with indigenous peoples (anybody short) it is okay to mention that Africa has been severely depopulated by Aids and War (use caps).

You’ll also need a nightclub called Tropicana, where mercenaries, evil nouveau riche Africans and prostitutes and guerrillas and expats hang out.

Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.

Non-Western Philosophies

One of the major Western philosophers who read with fascination Jesuit accounts of Chinese philosophy was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). He was stunned by the apparent correspondence between binary arithmetic (which he invented, and which became the mathematical basis for all computers) and the I Ching, or Book of Changes, the Chinese classic that symbolically represents the structure of the Universe via sets of broken and unbroken lines, essentially 0s and 1s. (In the 20th century, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung was so impressed with the I Ching that he wrote a philosophical foreword to a translation of it.) Leibniz also said that, while the West has the advantage of having received Christian revelation, and is superior to China in the natural sciences, ‘certainly they surpass us (though it is almost shameful to confess this) in practical philosophy, that is, in the precepts of ethics and politics adapted to the present life and the use of mortals’.

via Aeon

China and Science

Chinese schoolchildren are still taught to think of this general period as the “century of humiliation,” the nadir of China’s long fall from its Ming-dynasty peak. Back when the ancient observatory was built, China could rightly regard itself as the lone survivor of the great Bronze Age civilizations, a class that included the Babylonians, the Mycenaeans, and even the ancient Egyptians. Western poets came to regard the latter’s ruins as Ozymandian proof that nothing lasted. But China had lasted. Its emperors presided over the planet’s largest complex social organization. They commanded tribute payments from China’s neighbors, whose rulers sent envoys to Beijing to perform a baroque face-to-the-ground bowing ceremony for the emperors’ pleasure.

In the first volume of his landmark series, Science and Civilisation in China, published in 1954, the British Sinologist Joseph Needham asked why the scientific revolution hadn’t happened in China, given its sophisticated intellectual meritocracy, based on exams that measured citizens’ mastery of classical texts. This inquiry has since become known as the “Needham Question,” though Voltaire too had wondered why Chinese mathematics stalled out at geometry, and why it was the Jesuits who brought the gospel of Copernicus into China, and not the other way around. He blamed the Confucian emphasis on tradition. Other historians blamed China’s remarkably stable politics. A large landmass ruled by long dynasties may have encouraged less technical dynamism than did Europe, where more than 10 polities were crammed into a small area, triggering constant conflict. As we know from the Manhattan Project, the stakes of war have a way of sharpening the scientific mind.

Still others have accused premodern China of insufficient curiosity about life beyond its borders. (Notably, there seems to have been very little speculation in China about extraterrestrial life before the modern era.) This lack of curiosity is said to explain why China pressed pause on naval innovation during the late Middle Ages, right at the dawn of Europe’s age of exploration, when the Western imperial powers were looking fondly back through the medieval fog to seafaring Athens.

Whatever the reason, China paid a dear price for slipping behind the West in science and technology. In 1793, King George III stocked a ship with the British empire’s most dazzling inventions and sent it to China, only to be rebuffed by its emperor, who said he had “no use” for England’s trinkets. Nearly half a century later, Britain returned to China, seeking buyers for India’s opium harvest. China’s emperor again declined, and instead cracked down on the local sale of the drug, culminating in the seizure and flamboyant seaside destruction of 2 million pounds of British-owned opium. Her Majesty’s Navy responded with the full force of its futuristic technology, running ironclad steamships straight up the Yangtze, sinking Chinese junk boats, until the emperor had no choice but to sign the first of the “unequal treaties” that ceded Hong Kong, along with five other ports, to British jurisdiction. After the French made a colony of Vietnam, they joined in this “slicing of the Chinese melon,” as it came to be called, along with the Germans, who occupied a significant portion of Shandong province.

Meanwhile Japan, a “little brother” as far as China was concerned, responded to Western aggression by quickly modernizing its navy, such that in 1894, it was able to sink most of China’s fleet in a single battle, taking Taiwan as the spoils. And this was just a prelude to Japan’s brutal mid-20th-century invasion of China, part of a larger campaign of civilizational expansion that aimed to spread Japanese power to the entire Pacific, a campaign that was largely successful, until it encountered the United States and its city-leveling nukes.

China’s humiliations multiplied with America’s rise. After sending 200,000 laborers to the Western Front in support of the Allied war effort during World War I, Chinese diplomats arrived at Versailles expecting something of a restoration, or at least relief from the unequal treaties. Instead, China was seated at the kids’ table with Greece and Siam, while the Western powers carved up the globe.

Only recently has China regained its geopolitical might, after opening to the world during Deng Xiaoping’s 1980s reign. Deng evinced a near-religious reverence for science and technology, a sentiment that is undimmed in Chinese culture today. The country is on pace to outspend the United States on R&D this decade, but the quality of its research varies a great deal. According to one study, even at China’s most prestigious academic institutions, a third of scientific papers are faked or plagiarized. Knowing how poorly the country’s journals are regarded, Chinese universities are reportedly offering bonuses of up to six figures to researchers who publish in Western journals.

It remains an open question whether Chinese science will ever catch up with that of the West without a bedrock political commitment to the free exchange of ideas. China’s persecution of dissident scientists began under Mao, whose ideologues branded Einstein’s theories “counterrevolutionary.” But it did not end with him. Even in the absence of overt persecution, the country’s “great firewall” handicaps Chinese scientists, who have difficulty accessing data published abroad.

China has learned the hard way that spectacular scientific achievements confer prestige upon nations. The “Celestial Kingdom” looked on from the sidelines as Russia flung the first satellite and human being into space, and then again when American astronauts spiked the Stars and Stripes into the lunar crust.

China has largely focused on the applied sciences. It built the world’s fastest supercomputer, spent heavily on medical research, and planted a “great green wall” of forests in its northwest as a last-ditch effort to halt the Gobi Desert’s spread. Now China is bringing its immense resources to bear on the fundamental sciences. The country plans to build an atom smasher that will conjure thousands of “god particles” out of the ether, in the same time it took cern’s Large Hadron Collider to strain out a handful. It is also eyeing Mars. In the technopoetic idiom of the 21st century, nothing would symbolize China’s rise like a high-definition shot of a Chinese astronaut setting foot on the red planet.

Ross Andersen, The Atlantic
 

Why are some parts of the world rich, and other parts poor?

This “great divergence” is even more intriguing given how relatively recent it is: 500 years ago the west was no richer than the far east, while 1,000 years ago, the Islamic world was more developed than Christian Europe in everything from mathematics to philosophy, engineering to technology, agriculture to medicine; the medieval German nun and writer Hrotsvitha called Islamic Córdoba “the ornament of the world”.

By 1600, however, the Islamic world had fallen behind western Europe, and for centuries the Middle East has been beset by slow growth, persistent poverty and seemingly intractable social problems. North-western Europe, by contrast, became the richest corner of the world, the hub of industrialisation and globalisation. In this sweeping and provocative book, the economic historian Jared Rubin asks how such a dramatic reversal of fortunes came about.

Rubin has no time for those who see the answer in any supposed “backwardness” of the Muslim faith. The successes of medieval Islam alone show that there is nothing against progress in its religious doctrine: “The superiority of the learned man over the devout is like that of the moon over the rest of the stars,” states one of Muhammad’s hadiths. Instead, Rubin argues that differences in the way religion and government interact caused the economic fortunes of Europe and the Middle East to diverge.

The driving motivation of most rulers is not ideology or to do good, but to maintain and strengthen their hold on power: “to propagate their rule”. This requires “coercion” – the ability to enforce power – and, crucially, some form of “legitimacy”. In the medieval world, both Islamic and Christian rulers claimed part of their legitimacy from religious authorities, but after the Reformation, Rubin thinks that European governments had to turn away from religion as a source of political legitimacy.

By getting “religion out of politics”, Europe made space at the political “bargaining table” for economic interests, creating a virtuous cycle of “pro-growth” policy-making. Islamic rulers, by contrast, continued to rely on religious legitimation and economic interests were mostly excluded from politics, leading to governance that focused on the narrow interests of sultans, and the conservative religious and military elites who backed them.

The source of Europe’s success, then, lies in the Reformation, a revolution in ideas and authority spread by what Martin Luther called “God’s highest and ultimate gift of grace”: the printing press. Yet even though printers quickly discovered how to adapt movable type to Arabic lettering, there were almost no presses in the Middle East for nearly 300 years after Gutenberg’s invention. Conservative Islamic clerics did not want the press to undermine their power, and the state – still tied to religion not commerce – had no incentive to overrule them. Not until 1727 did the Ottoman state permit printing in Arabic script, with a decree that the device would finally be “unveiled like a bride and will not again be hidden”. The prohibition was “one of the great missed opportunities of economic and technological history”, a vivid example of the dead hand of religious conservatism.

By contrast, Europe was revolutionised. Rubin argues that the Dutch revolt against Catholic Spain and the English crown’s “search for alternative sources of legitimacy” after breaking with Rome empowered the Dutch and English parliaments: by the 1600s both countries were ruled by parliamentary governments that included economic elites. Their policies – such as promoting trade and protecting property rights – were conducive to broader economic progress. Decoupling religion from politics had created space for “pro-commerce” interests.

Answering long-term questions requires both Rubin’s big picture macro-history and his awareness that even small events can set history’s direction and create “path dependencies”. But zoom out too far and the big picture can blur. Many developments affected who got a seat at the table, from changes in wealth generation to the impact of imperialism, and there was a lot more to English and Dutch success than institutional change, not least innovation in science and technology. Most important, Europe’s long reformations were more a maze than a path. As Rubin notes, “getting religion (mostly) out of politics took centuries” – centuries of radical social upheaval and destructive warfare. He argues persuasively for the importance of both religion and secularisation in economic history, but religious change affected not just politics but culture and ideas.

Early in the 20th century, Max Weber noted that many regions that had done well economically were Protestant, while some Catholic regions lagged behind. Rubin thinks Weber’s explanation – a Protestant “spirit of capitalism” – was unquestionably wrong, but that the pattern he spotted was correct. Not all recent economic analyses agree that Protestant cities did better than Catholic ones, but one Catholic region that certainly did lag behind was Spain. Early modern Europe’s first superpower grew persistently slowly after the 16th century, and Rubin shows that poor governance from a Spanish crown that ignored the country’s pro-commercial interests was often to blame. Imperial overreach, overreliance on colonial treasure, and myopic policymaking all inhibited development.

But were Spain’s struggles really due to the continued power of religion? The Spanish inquisition was not purely, as Rubin characterises it, a “costly” concession to the church in return for legitimation, but a state institution of social control; and Spanish kings did not involve themselves in endless European warfare purely to “protect the church’s interests”. State and religious interests were not so easily separable, and Spain had other problems too, including a regional fragmentation that lingers today.

In the Middle East the powers of state and religion were fused by Ottoman sultans intent on legitimising their rule and expansion through Islam. Unity that had been a medieval advantage became an early modern hindrance: with no political need to negotiate with economic interests, the Ottomans failed to pursue modernising reforms in finance, currency and law. It was not until the 19th century, with the region far behind the west, that liberal reform came, and its advance was swiftly checked by authoritarianism, religious conservatism and colonialism.

Via Guardian

Tanrılar Tarafından İktidara Getirilen Yöneticiler(!)

Ankhises oğlunu, diğer medeniyetlerin (isim vermek gerekirse Romalıların açgözlülükle yağmaladığı Yunanlıların) sanat ve kültürü ne kadar ihtişamlı olsa da, Romalıların dünyanın hakiki efendileri olduklarını ve öyle kalacaklarını asla unutmaması yönünde uyarır.

"Bırak, diğerleri daha canlı görünen, adeta nefes alan bronzdan tasvirler yapsınlar,Zaten öyle yapacaklar, mermerden yapılma yaşayan yüzleri uyandırsınlar;Diğerleri hatiplikte kusursuzlaşsın, diğerleri aletleriyle izini sürsünCennette dönen gezegenlerin ve yıldızların ne zaman görüneceğini tahmin etsin,Ancak Romalılar, sizin aracınızın hükümet olduğunu asla unutmayın,Sizin sanatınız bu olsun: İnsanlara barış alışkanlığını, Fethedilene karşı cömertliği ve saldırganlara karşı metaneti öğretin."

Vergilius ve Cervantes'in de kuşkusuz farkında olduğu gibi, bir ozan için ilginç bir iddia bu: Siyasi iktidarın, sanat ve kültürden önce gelmesi.

Birçok emperyalist öğreti, benzer savlar üzerine inşa edilmiştir ve Ankhises'in kelimeleri günümüz okurlarının içini acıtarak kulaklarına tanıdık gelir. Vergilius, bu mısralarla, kasten ya da değil, Roma'nın sömürgecilik ihtiraslarıyla geleceğin sayısız Romalarının ihtirasları için bir yol haritası çıkarır. Ankhises oğlu ve torunlarına, biz diğerlerinden daha güçlüyüz der ve ekler: Güç, herhangi bir sanat ya da bilimden daha iyi olduğundan, iktidarın imtiyazlarını hak ederiz ve ikincil soyları fethederek insanlarımızı onlara karşı seferlere sürükleme hakkına sahibiz. Bizler, Augustus'un ya da İsa'nın barışını getirmek için buradayız. Tanrılar tarafından göreve getirilen (cömert, adil ve kararlı) yöneticileriz ve diğer herkes bize biat etmelidir. Biat etmeyenler, sonuçlarına katlanacaktır.

Hıristiyan Roma son Haçlı seferini 1270 yılında Araplara karşı düzenledi. İki yüzyılı aşkın bir süre sonra, Katolik İspanya, Yahudileri ve Arapları topraklarından atarak kendini resmi olarak Arap ve Yahudi kültürlerinden ayırdı. Kendine "araç" olarak "hükümeti" uygun gören Batı, bu tahliye eylemleriyle muzaffer hami rolünü üstleniyor, Doğu'ya ise sanat ve zanaatta bir hayli usta olan itaatkâr düşman rolünü biçiyor, böylece Arap ve Yahudiler, resmi görüşte egzotik öteki'ye dönüşüyordu. Ancak Arap ve Yahudi düşüncesi, ihraçlara karşın, İspanya'nın "temizlenmiş" toplumunun her noktasma nüfuz etmeye devam etti. Alınan bir kararın ardından gerçekleştirilen çoğu nüfus tahliyelerinde olduğu gibi, İspanya da söz dağarcığının, yer isimlerinin, mimarisinin, felsefesinin, lirik şiirlerinin, müziğinin ve tıp bilgisinin büyük kısmını, hatta satranç oyununu borçlu olduğu bu kültürlerden kendisini ayıramadı (ve ayırmadı). Arap ve Yahudi mevcudiyeti yasaklanmış olsa da, İspanya toplumu koparılmış kimliklerinin hayaletlerini muhafaza etmenin gizli yollarını buldu.

2 Ocak 1492'de, Katolik kral Aragonlu Fernando ve kraliçe Kastilyalı İsabel, törensel Mağrip kıyafetleri içinde Gırnata'ya girdiler ve Nasrilerin son emiri Ebu Abdullah'la kapitülasyon koşulları üzerinde anlaşmaya vararak, iki buçuk yüzyılı aşkın bir süredir Mağribi İspanya'nın merkezindeki Müslüman bir şehir olan Endülüs'ün Mağribi saraylarına yerleştiler. Şehrin tesliminden önce Ebu Abdullah'a Gırnata Müslümanlarının korunacağına ve geleneklerini muhafaza etmelerine izin verileceğine dair güvence vermelerine karşın, camiler süratle kilise olarak takdis edildi ve Arapça yasaklandı: Arapça kitap okurken yakalanan kimse İspanyol olarak değerlendirilmeyecek ve ağır cezalara çarptırılacaktı.
Yahudiler ilk sürülenler oldu. Kral, Gırnata'nın teslim alınışının üzerinden henüz birkaç ay geçmişken, Yahudilerin nihai sürgününü emreden bir kararnameyi imzaladı.

Araplar için alınan tedbirler kısmen de olsa farklıydı. Yahudiler söz konusu olduğunda, Katolik krallar onları din değiştirmeye razı etmek için bir sürgün buyruğu vermenin yeterli olacağını düşünmüşlerdi. Gerçekten de, az sayıda Yahudi, Sefarad'da kalabilmek için "Yeni Hıristiyan" oldu ve "domuzlar" anlamına gelen aşağılayıcı "Marronolar" adıyla anılır oldular. Ancak sıra Araplara geldiğinde, Katolik krallar din değiştirme seçeneğini açıkça ortaya koymaya karar verdiler. Bu nedenle, ilk sürgünden dört yıl sonra, 1502'de Araplar için hazırlanan sürgün buyruğunda, Kilise Ana'nın içtenlikle açılmış kollarına girmeyi kabul eden Arapların sürgünden muaf tutulacağına dair bir madde bulunuyordu. Din değiştiren Araplar, "Moriskolar" olarak anıldılar.