Essentially language is a tool of power which is being used very deliberately in the West to erode the identity of people from having any real meaning. It is language that is intended to make Islamists superficial, to make the whole identity of Islamism unattractive and repellent to moderates in the West, to turn people against it. It is essentially trying to crush alternative movements and alternative centres of power, to prevent new power from arising to challenge the West in this region, whether in Iraq, Palestine or Lebanon. This emptying of identity and language of meaning is a reflection of how the West uses and conceives of its power
So in this sense of the unmeaning of language, where the West has been involved in destroying the substance and the content of language, what should be the Islamists? response? Clearly it is simply neither appropriate nor possible to answer in the language of mediation. When language is not being used for communication or to comprehend or to mediate, it is being used here to erode an undermine identity. This is not an appropriate use of language.
In a sense this underlies the reason that we face resistance. Because in one way, resistance can be the way to facilitate dialogue, but only one sort of dialogue. I want to come back to what that is because we?re not talking about a simple misunderstanding in the West; it is not the case, for example, that if you or I were to sit down with Dick Cheney and said this is how we see things, that he would reply: ?well now I really understand?. That is not going to happen because this is essentially about power - the West retaining power.
Fanon describes in powerful terms the impact of language and power on a colonised people: ?Every colonised people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural creativity ultimately finds itself face to face with the language of the civilising nation; that is with the culture of the mother country. The colonised is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country?s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle?.2
In a sense, this is the paradox of the current situation: that you need to refuse dialogue to get dialogue. Only by the refusal of dialogue which the Islamists are doing by saying ?no, we?re not willing to engage on the terms set by the West; we?re only prepared to sit down and talk on different terms?, will real dialogue become possible. In other words, they are saying, ?we want to change the rules of the game, and not simply accept your rules?. Only when the West understands the need to listen to these insights on their own terms will we see a dialogue that has any real meaning. The Islamists do have ideas, they do have an ideology which has a potential to sever stale relationships in societies and stale ideas between people and societies. They have a category of rationality which Muslims find both energising and mobilising as one can see from the excitement and energy if you visit Gaza or south Lebanon - the excitement of young people who work with Hamas who are stimulated by these fresh ideas.
