Abd-Al-Rahmān Nur-Al-Din, or Jami for short, a 15th-century Persian mystic, Sufi poet and scholar whose works include the Alexandrian Book of Wisdom, is sitting in Izmir, gazing across the Aegean Sea from the Turkish coast. This is where the homeland of Alexander the Great, now called Europe, spreads. Jami wonders what drove the unstoppable invader to tirelessly drive his armies to the borders of the known world and beyond, subdue Egypt and Persia by brutal force, and start the first, Hellenistic globalisation. Although the primary will to power is more than obvious, a curiosity, a genuine interest in the Other is clearly outlined. When embarking on his bloody conquests of the East, Aristotle's disciple, who crushed the mighty Persepolis, took scholars with him – to open the doors to the mysterious symbolism of the worlds that he ruthlessly subjugated in the physical sense.
The ancient dialectic between raw power and subtle thought goes back to the very beginnings of our (hi)story. Not only to Zeus’ abduction of Europe, but even further back to the Phoenicians, and further east to the Indus and Hindukush, where the ancient Indian and the later Islamic civilisations meet. To this day, it shows and defines us in the intertwining games of competition and cooperation, freedom and brotherhood, individualism and solidarity. If we are all brothers (and sisters, as should be immodestly added), as emphatically declared in Schiller's Ode to Joy, which modern Europe chose for its anthem in the form of a prelude to Beethoven's 9th Symphony, then what do the victorious heroes do in this story? For where there are victories, there are also defeats, and invariably losers.
Did Alexander the Great sense the deep ties between the Orient and the Occident? As Ludwig Witgenstein lucidly gleaned them in the slender silhouette of the minaret well over two millennia later, when he moved with the Austro-Hungarian army from the Eastern Front through Hungary to Italy during World War I? It was probably easier for the latter; his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in which he studied the relationship between reality and language, was devised at the end of an era that produced the romantic saying ex oriente lux. Logic is a reflection of the world, outside logic all is an accident – but there are inexpressible things that show themselves as mystical. Reason and mysticism. Physics and metaphysics. Body and spirit. Dancing body.
But history is not a straight line, and humanity is clearly a poor learner despite all the libraries of wisdom available. 2300 years after Alexander and almost exactly a century after Wittgenstein's realisation we no longer see the light from the East in the reflection of the minaret. We have covered it, buried it under thick layers of egoistic exploits, narcissistic mistakes, patronising arrogance and blind humiliations. Ever since we white people “discovered” the “New World” – in the same year, 1492, when Jami concluded his extremely fruitful life, and Catholic Spain expelled the last Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula with the Reconquista, driving the last nail into the coffin of almost eight centuries of the flourishing Al Andalus civilisation, which was unparalleled in the territories of the European continent at the time – we have finally established ourselves in practice as the “crown of creation”. The creation that we, including all its creatures, arbitrarily use and rampantly abuse.
Today, on this same Turkish coast, we are maintaining the bulwarks of the fortress of Europe by paying billions of bribes to the local absolutist in power. We are also expanding razor wires and walls in other parts of its borders – just over three decades after the “historic” fall of the Berlin Wall. Human beings who are drowning en masse in its defensive trenches – even quite close to us, in the Mediterranean and in our border rivers – and freezing in our forests are simply not recognised as humans. To be able to sleep in our fortified and enclosed bubble, we have made them radically different, symbolically dehumanised them: centuries after the violent Christianisation, we still perceive them as savages without a soul, almost as inanimate things.
Alexander could not understand how the Greek mercenary Memnon of Rhodes, in the service of the Persian king, could defy his campaign to the East and thus betray his “Greekness.” Because Alexander could only sense the links between the Orient and the Occident. In the 21st century, however, we have all the information we need to know more and better understand the vast Eastern influences on the emergence and development of Europe. However, we manifestly refuse to do it, desperately closing our eyes to the known historical facts.
We do not have to fully believe Martin Bernal’s story of the Afro-Asian roots of classical civilisation as presented in his controversial book Black Athena (1987) to understand how the idea of Europe as a pure Christian civilisation is just fiction. No civilisation exists on its own, apart from others, civilisations always touch, communicate (with quite frequent conflicts), and above all, enrich one another – and only thus ensure their vitality and long-term survival. The idea of Europe as a political community is, however, originally largely constituted in a per negationem way, i.e. by determining who and what we are not, with Muslims used as a primary counterpole. At the same time, however, today's European culture would not exist without the so-called Islamic Golden Age between the 8th and 13th centuries, which in many ways laid the foundations for the European Renaissance and the modern scientific revolution.
So who are we Europeans and what is Europe? When modern populists fervently call for the defence of the European identity and “our way of life”, they are referring exclusively to the Christian culture of the white man. But all those who perceive Europe differently, as a unique amalgam of a very long rational and secular tradition, Christianity as well as Islamic and many other previous sources, can also respond to this call. Our way of life is undoubtedly worth resolutely defending – including against Western traditionalists, when their unequivocally conservative attitude towards the world makes them uncannily similar to Islamists who, in the name of one and only true way of life, fundamentally oppose Western pluralism, perhaps the most defining element of modern European and Western culture and identity.
Le Etiopiche tell us about this ancient and still fierce struggle for the idea of Europe – with good reasons in English and German, Yiddish and Arabic, classical and modern Greek, Persian andAmharic . In our time of the decline of the American empire of illusory freedom and fictitious human rights. At the moment when the 20th anniversary of Guantanamo relentlessly confirms the timeless Latin proverb about Jupiter and bulls. In the era of the rise of the darkest ideologies of the last century that we witness during the violent crisis of representative democracy and the painfully obvious (not only organisational, but probably also ideological) impotence of the left before the tsunami of vulgar right-wing populism. They tell and, shamelessly looking directly into our eyes, they also ask: which side have we chosen in this conflict that, in addition to the fight against climate change, probably most fatally characterises our time and determines the future of the world. You – are you standing on the barricades of the exclusive fortress of Europe or defending the colours of Europe as an emancipatory transnational and universal idea of free and equal people and peoples?
