West and Others

“I have come to restore your rights, to punish the usurpers, and that I respect God, his prophet, and the Qur’an.”

Napoleon after the invasion of Egypt, 1798

“We are in Egypt not merely for the sake of the Egyptians, though we are there for their sake, we are there also for the sake of Europe at large.”

 Arthur James Balfour, 13 june 1910, House of Common

You know, the saddest thing about these western leaders is that they have taken us for the nomads who don’t know a bit about their welfare in that without them we can’t survive. They started colonizing us, remapping our countries, and supporting fundamentalist groups for their own benefits. Take for example a terrorist group like Taliban which was shaped to prevent the spread of communism in the region, and when Soviet Union collapsed it turned against those who were fighting for freedom once and it became a strong enemy of the great West; hence a false image of ‘Muslims’. Yes, it might be right that without its colonialism the Middle East couldn’t taste modernity, but do you think we’re modern now? We went through two required stages of modernity but are stuck in the third one, which is the grant of human rights. To justify its colonialism, western missionaries, according to Hamid Dabashi, made the notion of the West versus the East, or according to Edward Said its Others. Then, they easily managed to spread the Islamophobia across the world. The Western missionaries depicted us as ‘the Others’, like the Others of the Lost Series, always threatening and never seen. We know what democracy is, what our rights are, and how to fight for it. If the West cared for it, it could support us instead of depicting a frightening image of us. It saw us fighting for our rights last year in the streets of Iran, but stayed aside watching us. If you’re really going to change something, just try to fathom what we are and not what the idiotic Islamist groups are trying to depict.