CULTURE: ETHNIC CONFLICT

 

CULTURE

ethnic conflict

conflict ètnico A term used in the social sciences to refer to conflicts in which the main protagonists

they organize their ideological positions on the basis of belonging to a specific ethnic group, whose values

cultural and religious are considered preferential and used as identity tools to oppose those of other groups

co-present in the same territorial area. Especially in modern industrialized societies the causes of

ethnic conflicts must be sought in the contradictions of the wider social system in which they take place, within the

 which antagonisms of various kinds are conceptualized and managed in terms of the "ethnicity" of the groups involved.

 

In

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CULTURES RELIGIONS ISLAMISM

Mohsin Hamid's reluctant fundamentalist from the Library of Garlasco di Silvana

 

"One fact is a civilization that has among its founding myths that of the son who kills his father. The civilization in which it is the fathers who exterminate their children. 

'Oedipus against ancient Hindu mythology' is the deliberately simplified way in which Mohsin Hamid sums up the difference between West and East and above all his own 'divided' identity as a born writer

... in Pakistan 36 years ago, but educated in the best Anglo-American universities and now living in London. 'In Oedipus the future triumphs over the past, we are dramatically renewed in the cancellation of the parent. It is the freshness irresponsible of the new always projected forward, of dynamism, of the process at all costs. 
...With the risk constant to fall into utopia, in the illusion that, every time, every generation, it is possible to create a world better, 'he says to summarize his 20 years in the West. As for the legacy of 16 years in Pakistan
... he adds: 'In the second case, however, immobility, conservation, wins. The past kills the new, closes us in nostalgia for the golden age, in the belief of the supremacy of their ancient traditions, without ever having the courage to confront them with the different and with the challenges of change '. Hamid looks on with pained participation

... emotional and refined intellectual detachment from the news coming from his native country. 'I was at my parents' house

... parents in Lahore, when Benazir Bhutto was murdered. We all knew she could be killed. But

when it happened, the shock was very strong, I found myself attached to my country as I never would have thought '. But then it is returned to London, where he is writing a new novel after the success of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and on Monday

...he will not return to Pakistan to vote. Here in London he has found his balance. In its search for an autonomous identity, yes

defines' a very Pakistani writer, but also very American, British citizen and attracted by
modern European tradition of Calvin, Camus and Nabokov '. Eight years ago the critics revealed it as the best promise among Pakistani writers. His Nero Pakistan (Piemme) was at the top of the charts for a long time.

 

Then came September 11th. He was immersed in writing a second novel focusing on what the Russians did they would call the 'polu-intelligentsia', the intellectuals born in the cotton wool of their limited societies of origin and then influenced by very cosmopolitan and open cultural currents. Hamid thought of the difficult processes of integration into

large Western universities of students who, like him, arrived in the Muslim world. He wanted to counter the theories of the 'clash of civilizations'. He felt totally assimilated and wanted to prove it. But it was a revolution: war, hunting for

.... terrorism, security issues, debate on Islam and democracy. 'Since then I can say that the collapse of the Towers.

Gemelle represented for me, and many other immigrants from Muslim countries, what for Primo Levi was the Holocaust:
became a central element of our thinking, our living and our writing '. It took him another six years

... to finish The reluctant fundamentalist. Just a little over a hundred pages, but dripping with emotions, intimate and traumatic autobiographical experiences. [...] Through the metaphor of the contrast between Oedipus and the ancient Hindu myths,

Hamid also summarizes the reasons for the state of paralysis that he says is affecting his country and many intellectuals Muslims. 'Post-Benazir Bhutto Pakistan and in the era of the decadence of President Pervez Musharraf is a state
stuck between the pushes towards modernization and the inability to react due to the conditioning of a system tribal and religious repressive, immobile

.... '. Hamid condenses all this into one word: inadequacy. '

Our government is inadequate to the demands of the country, to the challenges of globalization, as are the rest of the Muslim intellectuals in comparison with the Western world '. The consequences are traumatic: 'That's what fundamentalism is born, from the inability to cope with the complexities of the modern world and from the refusal to assume
 their responsibilities'. Yet even the temptation to blindly exalt Oedipus has consequences
negative. [...] So he can also take away the pleasure of criticizing Western societies for what he calls theirs
'lack of religiosity'. '[...] Islam with its system of rules, with the central role given to the elderly, the deep bonds family and community, somehow still offers answers to these questions. If the United States, before leaving go to anger and revenge after September 11, they tried to share their sense of mourning with the

...rest of the world, perhaps their reactions would appear less inadequate today.

"(from Lorenzo Cremonesi, Oedipus against the Hindu myths, "Corriere della sera", 02/16/08)

"Mohsin Hamid and The Reluctant Fundamentalist" (from Npr.org)