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Rival Brothers: A Mimetic View of East - West Relationships

  Luca Luchesini

  Copyright 2013 by Luca Luchesini

  “I tell you with certainty, tax collectors and prostitutes will get into God's kingdom ahead of you!” (Matthew, 21, 31)

  “To God Belong the East and the West” (Quran, Surah of the Cow, v. 115)

  Introduction

  When back in 2005 I accepted to become the Sales support director for Turkey, Egypt and the Gulf countries, I had in the first place some second thoughts out of fear for travelling in a region that was widely known to be politically unstable, diverse and irremediably hostile to the average Western visitor. The very same feeling was echoed by friends who were reacting to the news like if I had told them I had some benign cancer and asked invariably if I was taking any special precautions when I was down there “in partibus infidelium”. Five years on, I have it very clear that the biggest risk we are facing in the West is simply not realizing that to the South and East of the Mediterranean there is a large and diversified civilization to which we are actually tied by thousands of years of mutual exchanges, and whose people share our very same goals of fulfilment in life while facing the very same challenges of re-assessing their identity in a world that changes with amazing speed. Sure, political stability is far away, there are objective dangers (I was in the Islamabad Marriott Hotel just three days before the attacks that claimed more than 200 lives) and many issues are entangled beyond imagination. Yet if we have to go anywhere we can only start from removing the “romantic myths” that, albeit comforting, keep ourselves prisoners of our own (mis-)representations and leave us in search for the next scapegoat, be it Osama Bin Laden, the Jewish lobby or the immigrant living next door. The material herein contained has no claim of sociological, political, anthropological or even less theological or philosophical accuracy. Much if not all of it is likely to sound rather obvious to the expert eye. However, the target here is not to provide yet another brilliant idea, but rather a no-nonsense approach to the everyman when coming into contact with the “other side” of the Mediterranean over a beer or a cup of tea or, should one have the possibility, thoughts to be used in a television talk show, trying to popularize as much as possible the potent ideas of Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory. Short, it is a small contribution to what could be a “Cultural Lonely Planet Guide to Our Rivals”, where rivals is used here in its original meaning of “the people living on the other side of the river”. The paper is structured as follows: In the first Chapter, by using some demographic data, literary examples and anecdotes, we will highlight how West and East are actually haunted by the very same set of identity and uncertainty problems each leading to a similar set of taboos and prejudices. In the second Chapter, mainly by recurring to some literary examples, we will show that there is indeed between the two worlds a much deeper level of understanding and interconnection whose dynamics can be explained by the mechanisms of mimetic theory. We will use here mostly the works of Miguel de Cervantes and Orhan Pamuk. Finally, in the third Chapter we will focus more on the approach guidelines, briefly explaining the three concepts that we have found useful when in the everyday dialogue with friends and colleagues the topic came to cultural issues. The novelty here is maybe the appeal to the “merchant spirit” and the “open challenge” concept rather than the usual and in my opinion also somehow hypocritical notion of “tolerance”. Throughout the paper, I will make an almost interchangeable use of the terms “West” and “East”, “Europe” and “Middle East” (meaning the region spanning from North Africa to Iran and including the Arabian Peninsula) and “Christianity” and “Islam”, knowing very well that they include a huge variety of people, civilizations, languages and cultures. However, there is no place like the Mediterranean where a relatively “easy” demarcation can be drawn between the North and South shores and at the same time the mutual influence has been so close that Western and Eastern people living along these coasts are by far the best entitled to act as bridges and ambassadors between these worlds.