الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

J EWS AND A RABS

Gil Anidjar

Civilization and Its Discontents According to legal scholar Karl-Heinz Ziegler, Abu Hanifa was the first jurist “who first forbade the killing of women, children, the elderly, the sick, monks, and other noncombatants. He also condemned rape and the killing of captives.” Commenting on the effects of his recommendations on the history of law, and more importantly, on the history of war, Sven Lindqvist points out that his attempt “to make war more humane by setting forth rules that were not accepted in Europe until several centuries later” (Lindqvist, History , 9). Indeed, it seems fair to say that, to this day, these rules are “still not accepted, or in any case not practiced, when colored people [are] involved” (ibid.). Until World War II, one of the main tools of such legal and practical differentiation between white Europeans (and Americans) and the rest of the “colored” world, was the bomb, and more specifically, as Lindqvist painstakingly documents, the bomb dropped from airplanes. “Airplanes and bombs were examples of progress in military technology. And technology was civilization... Bombs were a means of civilization” (Lindqvist, History ,34). The first bomb – the first “civilizing” bomb – ever dropped from an airplane exploded on November 1, 1911. It came from an Italian machine flying over North Africa. Its geographical target was an oasis near Tripoli. Its human targets were Arabs. By 1924, by the time of the bombing of the town of Chechaouen, “bombing natives was considered quite natural. The Italians did it in Libya, the French did it in Morocco, and the British did it throughout the Middle East, in Indian, and East Africa, while the South Africans did it in Southwest Africa” (Lindqvist, History , 74). By 1939, Hitler had embraced and enhanced this tradition, deciding that

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