Sikander Amani

It is singularly interesting to take a look at history textbooks in countries that are considered hostile. Palestine and Israel for example, or Pakistan and India. In each case, the versions presented of the very same events are so spectacularly different that an alien would think they took place on altogether different planets

“Nationalism is an infantile
disease. It is the measles of mankind,” Albert Einstein famously said. Somehow, though, it is a disease many nations like to instil in their citizens, unaware of how ugly these little red mental zits look — and how dangerous they are. A key element in the contamination process lies, unsurprisingly, in the creation of an idealised narrative on the homeland, taught in schoolbooks from the earliest age. Then the infantile disease is indeed caught at infancy: armed with the fallacious idea that nationalists will be better citizens (they are not), the state embarks on a widespread effort to mould children’s minds, at the expense of objectivity, critical analysis, justice, tolerance, and historical truth.

In this respect, it is singularly interesting to take a look at history textbooks in countries that are considered hostile. Palestine and Israel for example, or Pakistan and India. In each case, the versions presented of the very same events are so spectacularly different that an alien would think they took place on altogether different planets. And sadly, though yet again not very surprisingly, religion often plays a devastating role in promoting this revised, nationalist, and politicised version of history — so much so that one is once again led to wonder about the amazingly destructive, divisive and vituperative power of (some interpretations of) religion.

The most striking example is perhaps that of Israel and Palestine. Where the Palestinian textbooks talk about “uprisings”, the Israeli schoolbooks merely mention “events”. What is named the “Naqba” (catastrophe) in Palestinian books becomes the “war of independence” in the Israeli texts. Where the former insist on land, and on the homeland specifically, the latter emphasise the right to national security. Researchers have found some (sad) commonalities though: a common neglect for the periods of relative peace and stability, in favour of a war-oriented narrative; a common tendency to dehumanise the ‘other’, to denigrate their religion and present a laughable caricature of their culture and political claims. History is here deeply intertwined with geography, and as a result, the maps of the region presented in the two sets of schoolbooks unsurprisingly leave no space for the people implicitly or explicitly portrayed as the enemy. Palestine does not exist for one set of pupils, Israel barely appears for the other.

Pakistan and India offer a parallel example. In Pakistan, a 2006 study showed that all mention of non-Muslim festivities had been removed in Punjab textbooks, while Hinduism was commonly portrayed as an iniquitous and deceitful religion; disturbing themes such as “Pakistan is for Muslims alone”, “The world is collectively scheming against Pakistan and Islam” and “Muslims are urged to wage jihad against the infidels” were routinely found, and the history of events leading up to partition squarely laid the blame on the perfidious Hindus, while the righteous Muslims are viewed as mere innocent victims. India is often portrayed as responsible for the 1948, 1965 and 1971 wars. Meanwhile, in India, recent textbooks (especially under the BJP government) presented Indian history through stereotypes rooted in religious identity, in order to lend legitimacy to a communalist reading of the past, denigrating the “outsider” and valorising the Hindu. The anti-colonial struggle was spearheaded by Nehru and Gandhi (with, believe it or not, the RSS being credited with a positive role in the fight for independence), while Muhammad Ali Jinnah is presented as the ‘dark knight’ of secession and division, the evil figure who led to massive bloodshed in the subcontinent.

These two examples are far from isolated: French and German textbooks between the two world wars show the exact same pattern, as did the two Germany’s school manuals during the Cold War, or the American and Soviet historiographies in the same era. The recreation of history in the Balkan countries during the 1990s was spectacular. And the same falsities constantly reappear: defeats are turned into victories, an insignificant long-forgotten shootout becomes a nascent war of independence, some minor radical character fallen into oblivion is resurrected into a national hero before his time, we were always victims anyway, and so on. Languages are re-cast into a differentiating element, when, e.g. in the Balkan case, they were a common factor. Music, art and culture are suddenly hailed as the evidence, arrogantly brandished, of the legitimacy of political separatism. Bring in a national flag, sing a national anthem, and pffft, the trick is done: very soon, as Howard Zinn said, the Motherland becomes a burning cause for which one is ready to kill the children of other Motherlands.

No doubt this disturbing trend is rooted in the need for a nation, especially a newly founded one, to cement a collective identity through a carefully selected and organised rewriting of the past. The aim is to create a continuity and lend a political legitimacy to the national endeavour. Textbooks have a destinal finality: to show that the nation was destined to be, and that its necessity is rooted in either a transcendent, or an immemorial legitimacy. What is more disturbing is first, the constant, and exasperating, process of whiny victimisation that goes hand-in-hand with such revisionism (it is never our fault, “they” are the big bad guys), and second, the openly antagonistic presentation of this common memory — as if the self could not be defined except as opposed to the other, as if there are friends only if there are foes. Carl Schmitt is famous for having defined the essence of the political as the friend-enemy distinction: politics is essentially, and not just accidentally, about antagonism, and you cannot have a political community without the designation of an enemy. But this desultory perspective is unsatisfactory morally, intellectually and politically, apart from often having disastrous large-scale consequences and, literally, creating generations of brainwashed and perhaps even brain-dead children.

The good news is that such revisionism is now strongly opposed by many quarters of civil society, and that nationalists no longer monopolise the field. Israeli and Palestinian historians have gathered under the auspices of the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME) to write a bi-national narrative of the Middle East conflict (they have not yet managed to write a common history though); similarly, a joint South Asian history textbook is being prepared by a group of Indian and Pakistani scholars. UNESCO is also active in promoting a less war-prone, less biased perspective on national memory. What is at stake is not just instilling a less conflictual approach to our neighbours, and teaching a more tolerant and respectful view of other ways of life, other cultures, other religions (no, we are neither the best, nor the brightest, nor the chosen ones). It is also a scientific and intellectual issue: how can we teach the value of truth, of scientific reasoning, of objectivity, to children, if we so blatantly distort facts and events to suit our narrow, petty, mental measles?

The writer is a freelance columnist and can be reached at sikander.amani@gmail.com