>>Photos hit core beliefs of Muslims, scholars say
By Mark O'Keefe
RELIGION NEWS SERVICE
Saturday, May 8, 2004
As soon as Ingrid Mattson saw the photo of the smiling American woman soldier pointing at the genitals of a hooded, naked Iraqi prisoner, she knew that it would touch a deep, inner chord in Muslims, no matter where they live.
That image and others like it assault at a visceral level such core Islamic values as modesty and dignity while evoking feelings of humiliation that non-Muslims may not fully understand, Mattson and other scholars of Islam say.
"This is definitely symbolic," said Mattson, a professor of Islamic studies at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. "This soldier is symbolic of American force, and the prisoner is symbolic of Muslim peoples. For the broader Muslim public, this will be a symbol of the subjugation and rape of Muslim lands."
"That picture will become the recruiting poster of radicals trying to attack the West," said Akbar Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American University in Washington and a columnist for Religion News Service. "If Osama bin Laden had come to Madison Avenue and asked for an advertising image to help him recruit, this would be it."
In the United States, the full power of the images is only beginning to be realized, said Ahmed, an anthropologist trained in semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, and the author of Islam Under Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World.
So far, he said, the picture that seems to resonate most in the West is one showing a hooded and wired prisoner with his arms outstretched, like Christ suffering on the cross.
But the image that Muslims will have seared on their psyche is the photo of the female American soldier, because it depicts an interaction brazenly crossing spiritual, societal and cultural boundaries.
"Here, you're getting one person representing one civilization pointing to the most vulnerable part of another person representing another civilization," Ahmed said. "It's gloating. It's triumphant, with an element of sadism and stupidity."
The image, readily available on the Internet, has already been published in Muslim newspapers and broadcast on television not only in the Middle East but also worldwide.
The display of skin is shocking enough in cultures where women's faces and sometimes entire bodies are customarily covered, and where men don't wear shorts or T-shirts, but modest, loose-fitting clothing, even when it's hot.
When Muslims learned that the prisoners were put in compromising sexual positions and forced to masturbate, to the amusement of American soldiers, it was nearly incomprehensible, Ahmed said. If the prisoners had been killed instead of sexually abused, it would have been less inflammatory to many Muslims, he said.
The claim that the abuse was "un-American," as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday, and "does not represent the America that I know," as President Bush put it Wednesday, does little to mitigate the damage, Islamic scholars say. That's because the images play perfectly to stereotypes of morally decadent Americans.
"This is only going to reinforce the notion in Muslim countries that Americans have this kind of obsession with sexuality and sex," Mattson said.
But more than just sexual mores were violated, said Ebrahim Moosa, a co-director of the Center for the Study of Muslim Networks at Duke University in Durham, N.C. The abuse, which occurred in the Abu Ghraib prison made
notorious by Saddam Hussein, "highlights a widespread impression held by Muslims the world over that there is very
little difference in the morality of the U.S.-led forces and the Baathists they claim to have unseated."
Moosa said that blame must go to the top, to the people who created a climate that would allow for such abuse.
"When the commander in chief uses self-serving and overheated rhetoric proclaiming that every means must be
used to defeat terrorism and that all means are legitimate, why would the foot soldiers not understand it to be legitimate to torture 'terrorists' in Iraq?" he asked.
In the 2000 presidential election, Agha Saeed, a lecturer at California State University at Hayward, urged Muslims
to vote for Bush, and many did, said Saeed, the chairman of the American Muslim Task Force on Civil Rights and Elections.
But the images of prison abuse are so powerful that they will not only turn many American Muslims against Bush,
Saeed said, but might also discourage some from articipating at all in American democracy.<<
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