There is blood and sweat on the brow of the past
Iron fetters on its feet,      
A bitter smile on its lips.
What a red spirit it clashed with…


There is still occasional darkness on the horizon;
However, day follows the night…
Autumn fell in and all the orchards decayed.
Leaves turned yellow and flowers faded.

The hero died, and his steed was tired;
He had fought with a huge malicious demon.

Now even if it seems impossible for him to return, 

We’re waiting for him at rosy dawns…
The crowns that once shone,
The slopes that opened their bosoms to the crowned.

Emerald trees on golden slopes,
Reached the caravan of separation and left.


There’s a spark from that frightful extinction

There are messages in the spark from the return.

Not long after, I saw a minuscule thing coming to me from that direction; I thought it was a bird of some kind. Strange enough, the bird came to me so abruptly that I heard its sound only after it passed me… Guess what? It was not a bird; it was a fighter jet. This time, I knew where to look, and I followed it for the short while it played pick-a-boo with me.

The following day, mom took me to the celebration arena for a national day. I couldn’t believe my eyes, everywhere was full of fighter jets; but my eyes looked for the one that mesmerized me the day before. And, it was standing right there, waiting for me to come. I approached it with respectful steps, and carefully touched it. It was so cold and tough, yet so beautiful. That day, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. The smell of the jet fuel coming from the engines was so powerful that even I could fly with that kind of a drink.

“Hey; come here” I heard someone calling me. There was really nobody around. “Follow the sharp smell, come on here,” insisted the voice. Was I daydreaming, or had I been poisoned by the jet fuel and lost my conscience? Yeah, yeah, the voice was coming from the rear-end of the engine. It was the nozzle that was talking to me.

The moment I realized who was talking to me, I found myself in the circular, hollow structure of the nozzle. I was too nervous and surprised at first, but after a moment of looking around admiringly, I spoke with the words: “I know the inferno fire that you are exhausting. Isn’t it beautiful? You are so powerful. You are the one that is powering this beauty in the sky.”

The nozzle was not happy to hear my words of flattery. “Hey little boy, you know something, but you don’t know everything. Yes, it is true that I am exhausting that violent river of gas. You are right that this stormy exhaust is in the heart of this beauty in the sky. But you have got to learn more. I am only a solid duct that is accelerating what comes into me. I have no power to compress that humongous amount of air into a volume as small as a bird’s nest. I am completely unable to heat up the air to inferno level. And, the beauty in the sky is not taken up there by me either.”

I was totally disappointed and frustrated by the nozzle. I had thought for an instant that it was my hero; but now, my dreams were destroyed. I felt all alone in a desert. The nozzle must have realized my situation, so it picked up again: “Come on. I am going to introduce you to the unseen heroes behind our mysterious beauty. I am going to show you the inside.”

I was truly perplexed. What else could be more mysterious than a speaking nozzle? The voice of the nozzle slowly diffused into the deep and dark hallway into the engine, and I followed it. Soon, I came by long towers that had a nicely curved shape. As soon as I stepped near them, the floor that the towers were built on started moving. In the midst of this earthquake and a blinding darkness, I could faintly see another row of towers that were stagnant. I threw myself towards them. As I was dealing with my horrified and troubled soul, I heard a thunderous voice that reverberated everywhere:

“How nice to see you here, Adam!” I was doubly shocked. Not only was this unseen thing talking to me, but it also knew my name. “Do you know me?” I replied. “How could I miss your glittering eyes fixed at us whenever we pass over you? I am the turbine, one of the unseen heroes. I am the one that powers the compressors that squeeze the air. I am the one that faces the hot air before it goes into the nozzle.”

Wow, this was the man; this was the legendary hero behind the beauty in the sky. I looked at its towers that displayed nobility and their curved surfaces that embodied beauty. As I was losing myself in admiration, I heard the voice again:

“These are the eyes that I have been seeing every time we passed over you. But I have to tell you something. What you are looking for is not me either, because I cannot create the hot air that energizes everything, including me. Despite the beauties and power embodied in me, I am not the essence that bears the real beauty you are looking for.”

What was that supposed to mean? First the nozzle, now the turbine; every time, I am being attracted, and then I am left alone with a sense of deception. Are these heroes making fun of my admiration of their beauty? If so, they don’t deserve my admiration anymore; if not, then why am I having this feeling of deception? Is it wrong to attribute hero status to something?

Lost in feelings and thoughts like these, I left the turbine, and proceeded further into the darkness. Not only didn’t I know where I was, but also I had no means to determine my whereabouts. In total silence and darkness, I sat at a place that felt like a smooth and large room. Suddenly, a wind started blowing with growing speed, and a constant noise occupied everywhere. I was alarmed and sought somewhere to cling to. With the help of lightning that seemed to come out of nowhere, I saw a cavity that looked safe. After a challenging crawl, I was there. Then, a second lightning came and everywhere burst into fires. As if winds from the hell were gushing out. My jaw dropped down, I stared at this miraculous display of fire.

“Welcome, finally you are here,” told a voice that was distinctly heard despite the violent storm. I felt like I am being driven through a scenario so that where ever I enter, I experience things that I was meant to. “Am I the hero of this scenario?”, I asked myself inside, and laughed at the idea. Upon seeing so many extraordinary things, my awe of the strange things was veiled with habituation. So, I couldn’t pay the respect that was due the voice I heard. Maybe because of this, I received a kick from behind, and I had to struggle against the winds of fire to get back to my seat where I was safe and comfortable.

“Hello, are you still there?” I asked. “Can you tell me where I am?” That distinct voice appeared again in my ears: “Indeed, I am here, but you weren’t!” I bowed my head with shame. Having hurt the only one that could help me in this situation was as foolish as it could be. “And I was with you all along from the start.” What was this? I didn’t know whether to feel ashamed because of my selfish and pragmatic sense of respect, or to burst into a thousand pieces for not having recognized the one who has been with me all along?

“This is as far as you can go in this story. You are in the place where the energy that empowers everything is revealed. It is the heart of the beauty that you have been admiring.” After a second of silence, “Did you find what you were looking for?” asked the voice. I had seen strange things, but none of them had satisfied my heart nor quenched my curiosity. A sad face was my response to the question, but I didn’t know if the voice could see my face. Apparently it did, so that it directed me to another place. “You see this violent fire going on, would you like to fly away with it?” Was this guy crazy? How in the world could I survive in fire? “Well then, there are two ways to get out of here. Either you go along the fire back to where you came from. Or, if you are not able to do so, you go forward.”

With that directive, I started crawling towards the front, into the strong wind. I came across a thing similar to the turbine, and then another hallway similar to the nozzle. At first I was puzzled, because I had seen the same things that I had seen on my way previously. Had I made a mistake and proceeded backwards? That mustn’t be the case, since I had moved away from the fire.

After this stupefying similarity, I was at the mouth of the cave where everything starts. I was able to see the wings too. But now, the aircraft was moving. All of the storm that was going on inside was for accelerating. The force of the acceleration was so strong that I slipped from where I was clinging, and found myself stuck at the beautiful front curve of the wing. Strange enough, the same voice welcomed me again: “Finally you are here.” I didn’t know whether to reply to it or to lose myself while watching the beauty of the aircraft as it soared into the air with an ever increasing speed. It definitely felt like the divers who hear that beautiful voice when they go deeper than they should. I could not resist melting my body in the excitement of the maneuvers. After a while, we were hundreds of meters above where we had started. Now, the aircraft was cruising, and despite the rareness of the experience, it felt like sitting in the living room. With the steadiness of my state, I found myself emerging from the depths of excitement.

“Have you found the beauty you are looking for?” asked the voice again, to which I said yes. “Where do you think that beauty is coming from? From the engines or from the wings?” That question was most unexpected. The engine itself was not able to fly, it was only able to create a strong push. The wings were only beautiful. They did not actively do anything. They only stood there in the wind, and then, lift was there. Without the air, the wings would not create anything. As for the air, we are completely sunken in it, let alone flying. “I don’t know where the beauty is coming from. There seems to be something missing in the ingredients that created the beauty of flight. None of the ingredients seems to originate it. It looks like you put the engine, the wings and the air in the pot, and suddenly something that you did not put comes into being.”

“But you did not realize this point until you made this journey, despite that you have been witnessing the same beauty all along. “

Why was that the case? Why did I have to make this incredible journey in order to become aware of this uncertainty in the source of beauty?

“When you are not actually in a journey like this, you take all the mysteries for granted, because you consider them natural, ordinary. But once you are in the journey, you realize something different that exists neither in you nor in the things you come across. It is as if somebody is tracking what is going on, and whenever the necessary ingredients are there, he secretly adds the missing spice into it at the right amount. And, then? Behold the beauty!”

Roaming in our shining civilization.

They breathed life into lost souls,

We called them heroes of compassion.

How we have missed you, waiting,

O heroes of compassion, alight.

Our darkened souls been longing.

In your return we will delight.

Heroes of compassion speak

Without words. They convey

An eternal message of love.

Their destiny became this way.

They did not come to hate,

Nor did they come to fight.

Their work was only for love

To erect the statue of the heart.

They absorb the fragrance of love

As the rain of grace descends.

Heroes of compassion radiate

Without a haze of pretence.

Deep in a fight of spiritual struggle

Until their mind and heart merge,

Their trademark is their anguish

Felt for those lost in cerebral surge.

A hero embellished our dreams

Since the days he roamed our shores.

On the coastline of our spirit

We still hear echoes of his chores.

Accentuate my heart O Lord!

Helping needy souls is my passion.

Elevate my soul up high

Like a hero of compassion.

Haven’t we waited long enough

In infinite yearned expression?

When will you roam our shores?

We need you now, O heroes of compassion!

Together with massive campaigns to promote Western products, such story-lines and images, perpetuate the inferiorized stereotypes that used to be taught openly in the nineteenth century. Films especially can be seen as an arm of economic domination: ‘Because every film is a part of the economic system, it is also part of the ideological system… cinema and art are branches of ideology. None can escape; somewhere, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, all have their allotted place’ (Nicholls, 1976, vol.1, p.24).

Because the US got the edge over the Europeans in the mass-market film industry, Hollywood and what it stands for have often been accused, even by Europeans, of cultural imperialism. The English as well as the French often complain that the norms of popular culture in their countries have been ‘taken over’ by the Americans. But the fact is that the success of American styles has been largely due to their commercial skill and power relative to English and French products. In no sense can it be claimed that the American popular culture industry portrays the French or the English negatively. By contrast, it is true to say that Western cinema, particularly American cinema, portrays Orientals, especially Muslims, negatively as a matter of course. All easy, popular stories have goodies and baddies, but must the baddies so often be foreigners and need the foreigners be culturally foreign? In order to be popular, popular films reinforce popular stereotypes-it is a vicious circle, at least for its victims. For those who manage such images, popular cinema is a powerful instrument of cultural suppression and domination. As one writer maintains, the virtual monopoly Hollywood has enjoyed for the last quarter century has made it the single most powerful advocate and purveyor of a simplified, homogenized American culture (Collins, 1989).

Within this Hollywood style in particular, there has been a consistent Middle Eastern stereotype-Arab or Arab-Palestinian, or Turk or Iranian-with negative physical and moral characteristics- lustful, fanatical, irrational, cruel, scheming, unreliable, often cowardly, and always outwitted and defeated. The adventurer-hero, once in the Flash Gordon style of noble warrior on the side of the good (in simple contrast to arch-enemy Ming the Merciless, an Oriental tyrant), is now, typically, a morally imperfect figure, nevertheless worthy of the audience’s full sympathy. The ‘James Bond’ character of the sixties and seventies remains by far the most successful hero-formula. He was designed for British and American audiences to identify with: ‘he is worldly, has diverse but specialized expertise, and has a passion for excitement. He is self-reliant, proud, wedded to privacy, honest, candid, loyal, a man of honour…’ (Simon, 1989). This figure exemplifies, in a form appropriate to the genre of comic caricature, the virtues and ethos which are supposed to give the British and the Americans their directness and sense of humour, their get-up-and-go, their problem-solving success. The villain-figures altogether lack positive characteristics, even any energy or wit they have is of a mad, evil-genius type; their characters lack any exposition; they have no past, their only present is to pose the challenge to the hero. It follows that no audience, not even the non- British/American audience can possibly do otherwise than identify, through the momentum of the story, with the hero and the ethos he represents.

Among recent historical films which have to do with Muslim lands and people, the most popular have been Lawrence of Arabia, Death on the Nile, Midnight Express, and Robin Hood. Of these, only the first has any substantial claim to be a serious, well-made film. In it, Lawrence, a British army officer, stationed in Cairo during World War I, works to ally the Sharif of Makka with the British against the Turks. The Arabs are presented as bumbling, loud, unruly primitives with some barbarian dignity but, in the end, easily bribed, easily tricked. The Turks are utterly vile and disgusting with no saving qualities of any kind. Indeed, the Turkish Pasha in Egypt is, in addition to being, ugly, foul and aggressive, a sodomite- characteristics flatly contradicted by historical evidence (Kirkbride, 1956). The fact that Lawrence was a British spy with very British images about the desert, about Arabs, Turks and Muslims in general, never enters into the film or the consciousness of its audience-there is not the slightest hint that the events might be presented from another point of view and so tell quite a different story. For all the undeniable beauty of some scenes, this film well illustrates the general point made by Raymond Williams that, in spite of their being artistic, works of art still serve an ideological function, that is, serve as propaganda (Williams, 1982). Embedded in Lawrence of Arabia there are all the usual distortions, political and cultural, which less artistic films present also, but crudely.

Midnight Express has been widely and continuously shown since its production in 1978. Though shot mostly in a nineteenth-century British barracks in Malta, the film is set in Istanbul which comes over as a most depressing place – a shock surely for anyone who has actually visited it. David Putnam, the director, freely admits that the film is based on a ‘dishonest book’ (Shipman, 1984, vol.2, p.1103). It wholly misrepresents what really happened to Billy Hase who was sentenced in Turkey for drug smuggling: the story implies that he was innocent; it makes much of his escape, though he was released under an amnesty agreement’ (ibid.). The quality of the director’s attention to the Islamic setting can be judged from the scene in which hairy- eared Hamidou (the actor is in fact an American) is whipping Jimmy with a leather belt while some other Turks are praying to Allah – Jimmy’s yells of pain provide the ‘music’ to the praying chorus (Kael, 1980, p.498).

Much the same kind of attention (and the same intention) is evident in the opening scene of Robin Hood: in a gloomy atmosphere the call to prayer rises from a minaret in Jerusalem, then an abrupt ‘cut’ to a filthy prison where an executioner is chopping off the hand of a prisoner – an illustration for the audience of Islamic justice. The point of these and similar devices of narrative and plot of setting, colour, tone and music – many examples could be given – is not only to present an image of Islam and Muslims that is as negative and humiliating as possible. It is also intended to contrast that negative with the positive virtues of the Western characters portrayed within the same story: the audience are required (and expected) to conclude that ‘the Americans, and the Englishmen and the Swedes, are civilized and sensitive…’ (Kael, 1980, p.498).

References

• COLLINS, J. (1959) Uncommon cultures: Popular Culture and Post Modernism, Routledge, London.
• KAEL, P. (1980) When the lights Go Down, Holt, Rinehart & Wilson, New York.
• KIRKBRIDE, Sir As. (1956) A Crackle of Thorns: Experiences in the Middle East, John Murray, London.
• NICHOLLS, B. (1976) (ed.) Movies and Methods, University of California Press.
• SHIPMAN, D. (1984) The Story of Cinema, Hodder & Stoughton, London..
• SIMON, S.R. (1989) The Middle East in Crime Fiction, Lilian Barber Press, New York.
• WILLIAMS, R. (1982) The Sociology of Culture, Fontana, London.