Getting Along in Ethiopia and the World

May 14, 2007

The Washington Post had an article yesterday about rising tensions between Muslims and Christians in Ethiopia. The article presents Ethiopian Christians and Muslims as having lived in peace "for centuries":

For centuries, Muslims and Christians here have lived in the same neighborhoods, celebrated each other's holidays, intermarried and blended religions with indigenous beliefs. Relationships are cemented through such Ethiopian institutions as the idir -- groups of neighbors, often religiously mixed, that raise money to pay for funerals.

During my time in Ethiopia in the winter of 2003 I saw hints of these problems. My friend and I visited a small rural church outside of the city of Tana and brought a young student along with us to translate the sermon. The congregation was urged not to go over to the side of the Muslims.. even though they had more money. Evidence for the wealth of Muslims was obvious as the minarets of a newly constructed mosque rose in a nearby neighborhood. I was told that this mosques was financed by Saudi money.

It is sad to read about the ongoing changes to the religious culture of Ethiopia:

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the competition has been heightened as a strain of more fundamentalist Islam has woven through Ethiopian society and, in Dese, taken hold in some mosques. One mosque in the city now barricades the area at prayer time. Some young men have begun growing their beards long, and more young women are wearing burqas, sights that were once rare.

How should we understand this phenomenon of surging Islamic identity?

I would categorize it as an example of secondary globalization. When people talk about globalization they often mean something like the spread of English, international corporate commerce, and Western values and popular culture. But while that may be the big wave of globalization, there is an accompanying undertow associated with this wave. It is a counter or shadow globalization that is visible in a range of movements, from anti-globalization protesters to militant versions of Islam.

These examples of shadow globalization exhibit (ironically) the same tendencies of homogenization as the primary wave of globalization. This shadow globalization breaks down traditional social structures and replaces them with something that could not possibly have existed a century ago. People become the same.. and so to my mind this movement fails in its main goal of countering the homogenization of the primary globalization.

The film Children of Men managed to distill the complexities of the two globalizations into two distinct sides.. set a couple of decades into the future. On the one hand there is the militaristic/Christian/white side that holds all the real power.. and on the other everyone who can't fit into that side. The symbolic marker for that second outsider group is Islam. The following are three scenes which illustrate the way the film uses familiar images to delineate these sides.

Entrance to the camp means going through Abu Ghraib type scenes of hooded and chained men, dogs barking at prisoners.. and in the above picture you can glimpse the hooded man standing with his arms outstretched, referencing the well-known image from Abu Ghraib.

Within the refugee camp we get this image of graffiti. In back of "The Uprising" you can see the Arabic word Intifada scrawled. One way to understand The Children of Men is as a version of the future in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has come to characterize the entire world.

In the above scene the characters walk through a protest that consists of men wearing hoods, carrying guns, and chanting "Allah hua al-Akbar". So once again the naysayers to the main power are represented through reference to Islam. This is actually quite perceptive on the part of the director Alfonso Cuaron. There are many facets of the shadow globalization, but its most potent symbols are related to Islam.

So back to Ethiopia. There remain parts of the world that are still dominated by traditional ways of life, but they are getting rare. Ethiopia, despite its political turbulence could be counted as traditional.. and traditional culture tends to find ways to downplay internal differences. One of the hallmarks of the arrival of globalization (primary or shadow versions) is the destruction of older patterns of co-existence. As individuals plug themselves into a new global identity, those old patterns of co-existence cease to make sense. Certainly on a global scale the last century has produced more ethnic separation than ever before..