MORONITORIAL
The Prince of Cliches

Dec. 12 - Speaking to a Muslim gathering on Wednesday, Prince Charles declared that the existence of stereotypes often makes it difficult to understand different religious faiths. (Just as, presumably, it often makes it difficult to understand the platitudes of aristocratic billionaires.)

Efforts at understanding, the Prince told a crowd of about 500 at the Muslim News Awards for Excellence, "can sadly be undermined by the fact that all too often we learn about communities different from our own through the distorting prism of cliche and stereotype."

The prince neglected to mention that efforts by westerners to understand Islam have also been "sadly undermined" by the distorting prism of Muslims trying to kill us.

They're not trying to kill us because they misunderstand us. They understand us perfectly. They understand political pluralism, economic liberty, and social tolerance, and, having judged us guilty of these crimes, have rendered their sentence of death.

It has always struck me as peculiar that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, American booksellers couldn't keep up with demand for the Koran or histories of Middle Eastern and Central Asian culture. whereas the Arab world scrambled for copies of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I'd like to think that the Prince of Wales wasn't apologizing for western "stereotypes" of wild-eyed, suicide-bombing, 9/11-applauding, journalist-killing, rape-victim-stoning, homosexual-hanging Muslim misogynists. I'd like to think instead that he was condemning Islamofascist stereotypes of westerners as latter-day crusaders hellbent on converting Mecca into a land of strip malls and casinos.

But I'd also like to think that McDonald's fries are a low-calorie treat.

Centuries ago, the mostly-Christian west made a collective decision to separate their faith from their politics and the mostly-Muslim Arab world locked their calendars on the fifth century. Two paths diverged in a wood. . .

For good or ill, the popular stereotype of the forward-looking secular westerner and the backward-looking Muslim had been born. Those stereotypes eventually led to such cliches as political empowerment, equality before the law, nuclear power, space travel, and the Internet for the former, and poverty, servitude, and ritual stonings for the latter.

Today's western secular cliches include an increasingly level playing field, insatiable intellectual curiosity, receptivity to new ideas, and ceaseless innovation. Muslim cliches include schools that refuse to teach math or science, women that can't show their faces in public, and death sentences passed on anyone who finds fault with the preceding.

Not every Muslim is a genocidal maniac, any more than every German was a bloodthirsty Nazi. But the "stereotype" of the goose-stepping, conquest-hungry, murderous Nazi bastard of the late 1930s was more useful than inaccurate when the time came to confront that menace.

Which stereotypes in particular does bonnie Prince Charlie think stand in the way of our understanding Islam? The stereotype of the airline-hijacking maniac? The stereotype of the cave-dwelling cretin vowing to kill us? The stereotype of the rape victim being sentenced to death by stoning? The stereotype of the 12-year-old girl being encouraged to strap herself with explosives to kill as many civilians as she can? The stereotype of medieval "royals" lecturing us on the virtues of tolerance and inclusion even as they execute their own citizens for such crimes as heresy, adultery, and witchcraft?

Couldn't be... after all, those aren't stereotypes, they're realities.

I can think of one cliche blocking our understanding of Islam: "A religion of peace."

Until we learn to see through that cliche, we'll never really understand Islam as it's practiced in too much of the world today.

© 2002, The Moron's Almanac™