Ich bin ein Mussulman

The start of the war for the conquest, and reconstruction (both terms are to imperialism like milk & sugar to coffee) of the Middle East finds me in Berlin.

By the way, the conquest of the Middle East is only a smart aleck way of referring to what is true. Today’s Wall St Journal(European Edition) carries a headline story saying that the Bush administration is following through on a plan first thought out by a neo conservative (Berlin tempts me to say Neo-Nazi) Washington-based think tank called ‘Project for the New American Century’.

I am in Berlin to attend a festival of literature, film, performance, music, theatre, and visual arts by artists from my generation living in Syria, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine, Egypt.

The festival is called DisORIENTation.

It is disorienting to be in Berlin, what to speak of attending the festival.

My hotel room window is right across the Spree River from a magnificent building. At dawn, at noon, at night I view it, and its dappling reflection in the Spree, and see the glory of German Romanticism and empire.

Empire is good, look, see the high taste.

I walk any old strasse and see monumental buildings with plaques dedicated to a founding father of microbiology, pharmacy, chemistry, or some fundamental modern science. I was unreasonably intimidated and then I found the barbarism kin to this European Civilization.

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I walked one avenue and saw the spires of a mosque. Closer, I found out it was a synagogue. It was not just the dome and the spires that were Islamic, the abstractions on the tile and windows recalled for me geometries (or should I say cosmo-etries) I have seen in Fatehpur Sikri and on Akbar’s Tomb. I remembered how a Dilli ka Yaar, Shuddha, oriented me once about the designs we saw in Humayun’s Tomb: they represent the universe breathing in and out.

This beautiful synagogue was the epicentre of the desecration on Kristalnaacht, the night in 1933 when the Nazis burnt the books. Berlin, like Delhi, Lahore, Kolkata, Dhaka, Ahmedabad has broken many hearts, and worse.

I can see the high romanticism of Berlin in places but most of the city feels like some power has cleaned up the place with acid and built an anaesthesised, functional city.

I wonder if this is what Baghdad is going to look like in ten years: bombed to hell and then germ-free. Not bad, but Gabbar, kitnay banday maray ga?

My disorientation with the festival began when I entered the palatial venue on John Foster Dulles road (the Dulles were brothers, one secretary of state and the other defence secretary in the 50s). The American made structure for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (the House of World Culture) has been built opposite the Reichstag (Hitler’s offices), and symbolically disempowers the Nazi past. Inside I read the dedication, from Benjamin Franklin (one of America’s Founding Fathers) about the future time when all the countries in the world will respect human values and a philosopher will be at home everywhere.

50 years of US billions in Pakistan have made a home for soldiers, not philosophers.

Perhaps Baghdad will fare well, and soon have a Colin Powell dedicated House of Culture on Paul Wolfowitz Boulevard (Paul is Assistant Secretary of Defence and leading light of the Project for the New American Century).

I hope my final disorientation will not occur on the way back to New York. Though in Berlin I am part of an American group, some of us, a Palestinian American member and me, joke that we are the Imperial Delegation, the way back makes me nervous.

A civil liberties lawyer I consulted in New York before I left said you are brown, Muslim, born in Pakistan (three strikes! No, it’s really one strike!), going to Germany (a country that is not an ally and considered a breeding ground for al-Qaeda— America has woken up to more germs!), and attending an Arab festival (now its three strikes...), you may be... er, harassed.

Anyway, my next writing may be from Karachi (remember, they deported a Canadian passport holder like me, but who was born in Syria, to Syria).