(This is a translation from the original Arabic, offered so that my grandchildren, and others of their generation, may understand something of their history— a history they were denied when they were uprooted without choice.)
We Did Not Choose Our Enemies
In the two previous parts, I presented a concise framework for defining who we are and who the European is. I argued that, within this understanding, the Arabs are a composite of the peoples who have inhabited our region—stretching from the borders of Persia to the Mediterranean coast, and southward to the Arabian Sea—upon whom Arab identity came to prevail not by accident, nor through domination, but because it was the last of the region’s authentic identities, one that neither invasion, conquest, nor colonialism, under any guise, succeeded in erasing.
I then defined the European as a political concept rather than a racial or geographical one. The European, in this sense, may live in California, Tel Aviv, or Sydney, yet remains bound to other Europeans by shared goals, concepts, and patterns of behaviour.
I concluded Part Two by stressing that understanding history is an essential prerequisite for understanding the present and anticipating the future.
Today, I turn to the question of who our enemies are—because diagnosing our adversaries, no less than understanding history, is fundamental to grasping where this nation is headed.
The first and most fundamental truth is this: we did not choose our enemies; our enemies chose us. There is not a single historical record showing that Arabs harboured hostility toward Europeans. If we examine the past century alone, we find that despite the devastating European aggression against our region— whose scars remain plainly visible—the Arab continues to cling to Europe, to regard it with deference, and to seek its approval.
Indeed, several of my own friends, members of the Iraqi Communist Party, did not seek refuge in Moscow when they were persecuted and exiled. Instead, they came to London—the capital of global Zionism—which for seventy years worked, directly or indirectly, to fragment their party, imprison its members, kill them, and drive them into exile. This is a truth that demands reflection: what explains the Arab’s attachment to European friendship, a friendship that Europe itself rejects and actively undermines?
If we set aside the Arab settlement of al-Andalus—a subject that warrants independent study—we find that over the past thousand years Arabs have posed no political, economic, or social threat to Europe that might explain Europe’s hostility toward them.
Nor is Europe’s hostility toward us comparable to its hostility toward other peoples. The European who occupied Japan during the Second World War, disarmed it, and defeated it did not thereafter treat Japan as an enemy; on the contrary, he drew it close and participated in rebuilding it. This stands in stark contrast to what Europe did in Iraq. After expelling its army from its Kuwait, Europe imposed upon Iraq a genocidal siege that can only be described as hatred surpassing the bounds of ordinary enmity. Likewise, the European who withdrew from Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century does not harbour the same hostility toward Africa. He may deal with Africans with condescension, but he does not treat them as enemies in the way he treats us.
Some may argue that Europe’s hostility toward us is rooted in Islam. This explanation, however, is insufficient. While it is true that Europe rejects any belief system that contradicts the rules of its overarching project, this alone cannot account for its enmity toward us. Since the Second World War, Europe has maintained its closest alliances with two of the largest Muslim-majority states: Pakistan and Turkey. The peoples of these two countries possess no overriding ethnic identity; their primary identity is Islam itself. If one claims that this is merely a deceptive policy designed to preserve European alliances with these states, then one must ask: why did Europe not attempt this same deceptive policy with us before deciding upon enmity?
Others may claim that oil is the cause. Oil undeniably plays a role in political calculations, but it is not decisive. China, which possesses little oil and requires it no less than Europe does, does not harbour this deeply rooted historical hostility toward us. More importantly, Europe attacked and invaded us— as I shall show later—long before there was any indication of oil reserves in our region. And Europe will remain hostile toward us in the twenty-first century even as oil declines in importance and is replaced by alternative energy sources such as hydrogen, solar power, and wind.
At this point, the inevitable question arises: what, then, is the true reason for Europe’s hostility toward us?
The answer brings us back to the conclusion of Part Two: the necessity of understanding history. I choose my starting point—for reasons that will become clear as this argument unfolds—in the emergence of Jesus Christ, peace be upon him and upon our Prophet. At that time, the Roman Empire controlled the Mediterranean coast and extended its dominance across the region, before it officially adopted Christianity as its religion.
Since the primary historical testimony available to us from that period consists of the four Gospels, we must ask: in what language were they written?
Greek—whose alphabet, as I have previously noted, was derived from that of our Canaanite ancestors—had spread throughout northern Egypt following Alexander’s arrival. Its use later extended into Greater Syria after Roman occupation. Yet the language of the people of the Levant, and the language spoken by Jesus himself, was Aramaic. Hebrew, by contrast, was confined to synagogue worship and religious ritual.
Since the Jews of the Levant did not accept Jesus as the awaited Messiah, it would not be reasonable to expect the Gospels to have been written in Hebrew. They must therefore have been written either in Aramaic or in Greek. Two schools of thought exist: one holds that the Gospels were originally written in Greek and later translated into Aramaic and other languages; the other holds that they were written in Aramaic and subsequently rendered into Greek. I am inclined toward the latter view. Reason suggests that the followers of Jesus in Palestine wrote in the language they spoke daily, and in the language in which Jesus addressed them.
What further supports this view is the phrase attributed to Jesus on the cross— “Eli, Eli, lama shabaktani”—which appears in Aramaic, indicating that this was the living language of Jesus and the people of the Levant. The debate over the original language of the Gospels is not central to this article, yet it bears relevance to the later role of Greek as a conduit between the intellectual development of our region and the transmission of Greek thought to Europe after the European Renaissance.
What matters here is the significance of the interconnection between Greek and Aramaic revealed through the Gospels. Although I do not know why Judaism failed to spread widely among the Greeks—despite the presence of a small Jewish community in Greece, and despite the possibility that scholars have addressed this question—the arrival of Christianity in Greece carries profound historical importance. It reveals a deep continuity between the intellectual heritage of our region and that of Greece, a continuity that is essential to understanding Europe’s antagonistic stance toward us.
It was no coincidence that Greeks, or Greek-speaking peoples of the Mediterranean basin, so readily embraced the new faith, studied it, and disseminated it. This was a confirmation of the shared intellectual roots between Greek thought and the thought of our region. It was this continuity that allowed the message of Christ to be absorbed naturally into the evolving intellectual framework of the region—of which Greece formed the western edge overlooking the European continent. Had there been no such intellectual affinity, the Greeks would have rejected the new faith as alien and clung instead to their inherited traditions.
What, then, occurred after Rome converted to Christianity? And how did Europe come to adopt its first posture of hostility toward us?
This is what I shall attempt to examine in what follows.
To be continued…