Polished off Another One, and I'm Amazed

[le_bebna_kamni]

Book #4: In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, by Amin Maalouf

When I started looking into white supremacist sites, I had an extreme desire to understand what it is that makes people racist ‒ at least in the blatant sense. This book was exactly the answer I was looking for. The book is a short read, and the author himself admits that he had no intention of going into detail about the subjects he is discussing. Instead, his book is meant to put forth general ideas about why it is that we divide ourselves into groups and why we hate others who are not like us.

Amin Maalouf was natively born in Lebanon, but lived half of his life in France. He speaks Arabic and identifies with many people from the Middle East, yet he's a Christian Frenchman and not a Muslim. Because he is uniquely situated between several different cultures, Maalouf is a good person to discuss the issue of identity and how it shapes the way we perceive ourselves.

Maalouf points out that our identities are composed of many different things: our country of origin, our current nationality if we have moved during our lifetimes, our ethnic heritage, our religion, the language we speak, our chosen line of work, and so on. As we go through life, our identities are fluid, some parts of our identities becoming stronger than others at different times, depending on our circumstances. He gives several examples of this, such as a man in Yugoslavia who proudly proclaimed his nationality in 1980. Twelve years later during the war, he would have proclaimed that he was first and foremost a Muslim, and after the war he once more identifies with his country, now Bosnia. As the European Union begins to form, he also begins to think of himself as a European, although this still takes a lower place to his nationality and religion.

And one of the greatest factors in determining which part of our identity is the strongest, he hypothesizes, is the threat or the perceived threat against one portion of our identity. This fits in well with the things that I have observed as I'm looking at the websites for both white and black nationalists. They perceive themselves as being threatened in some way ‒ for black nationalists, it's the continuation of history, that what has gone on in the past hasn't gotten better; for white nationalists it's the perception that somehow they the will lose what they have historically had. I find this speaks to me on a personal level as well: I've never had a particularly "white" identity, most likely because I've never been threatened or felt threatened by people who have different cultures. But when someone insults my intelligence (a key factor in my identity), my hackles go up immediately.

While his main hypothesis may be a bit over-simplified (as he admits himself), it has a lot of merit, and he presents several glosses of history to show his point. His main argument is in regards to Islam, which many Westerners have claimed is and always has been a violent religion. Yet when the religion's entire history has been taken into account, Islam has been one of the most tolerant religions for most of its existence, and certainly in comparison to Christianity. One reason for this, Maalouf demonstrates, is that when Islamic nations have been at their height of power, they have been amazingly tolerant of Christians and Jews in times when Christianity was murdering even their own people for suspected heresy. Yet as predominantly Christian Western nations have come to power, we have seen more and more tolerance for diversity, whereas Islamic nations have become the persecutors.

Maalouf says that he has no intention of presenting a solution to racial, religious, nationalistic, and other types of hatred, but his last few chapters make a rambling attempt to propose that "we can all get along if..." These last few ideas seem poorly formed, and could have been left out of the book. He would have been much better off if he had expounded more on his earlier passages. Yet he seems to be good at boiling down complex ideas into a few good sentences; there are a few quotable gems scattered throughout his book (it even prompted me to buy some highlighter markers to mark up the book ‒ something I rarely do). I don't particularly recommend reading the book ‒ while it isn't necessarily bad, a well-written synopsis online should be enough to get the meat of his arguments without wading through all his chapters.