The setting was the august halls of the University of Chicago. On the upper floors of Pick Hall, the political science building. A nice, polite, well read young woman is going to give a short talk and take questions about her thesis, to whoever wanted to show up (not her defense, mind). She isn't a political scientist but the talk is there because it should be of interest. Her subject is Shakespeare in Egypt - what they read of him, how it is presented or performed, what plays, the politics of it and reactions to it.
She has traveled there, she speaks Arabic, she knows the plays. She is intelligent, speaks carefully after pausing to consider each question, grants points while shifting emphasis to what she is most concern about. She has found the reaction of Egyptians to the plays she loves troubling. They are so political about them. So judgmental. Everything is sides, identities, archetypes. To take them seriously at all is a declaration of political allegiance of a sort.
The young woman is intensely moral in a peculiar, relativistic, "meta" way. She fears making outright moral judgments. Of the plays, of the audiences, of Egypt, of others around her in the room. She is not avoiding them because they are hard, she sees them. She is avoiding them as sins, as conscious moral failings, as standing temptations. Beneath her entire demeanor and presentation, you can practically her here screaming "if I judge, I will become one of them".
The talk is of multi-voiced readings and the hermeneutics of the other, of the sense of awakening when seeing how differently someone else sees the same thing. The woman relates how surprised she once was to hear a Russian friend explain that "Hamlet" is all about justice, not indecision. Her openness to this so alien and original thought is a gleaming moral gem to her, that she rejoices to display for us all.
I suggest that perhaps the reason Egyptians see archetypes in Shakespeare is because he put them there. I suggest that if the entire Egyptian audience considers "the Merchant of Venice" to be a frankly antisemitic play and agree with it on that very basis, that perhaps they saw it that way because Shakespeare meant it that way, being something of an antisemite himself. That if they see the plays as political, perhaps it is because they are shot through with politics. And that the special somewhat twisted way of reading them in which they are not, may perhaps be a peculiarity of certain strange people who think about hermeneutics. That maybe the weirdness is a reflection.
She hopes not. She allows the justice of the "charge", but hopes there is more to multivoiced relativist openness as a morality than that - without breathing the taboo "m" word ("morality"). She quite agrees that there are archetypes in Shakespeare, that he meant them. But she was in Egypt. And she saw how much absolutely everyone thinks in these partisan, identity-allegiance terms. And, as earnestly yet humbly as she can, she testifies that it really was something strange and alien and...
Well, one can see she was "wigged". She as much as screams that they are all judgmental fascists, but to do so would be to cross over to the Dark Side where judgment occurs and fascism is sure to follow. The conversation segues back to the safer terrain of literary criticism, and the room breaths a bit easier. Judgment threatened, but was narrowly avoided by the silent moral discipline and shining non-judgmental excellence of everyone in the room (except of course for that guy who asked that question).
When these types see Bernard Lewis, when they read his books, they see facts on every page. Judgments drawn from them casually and immediately, as easy as breathing. They feel they are in the presence of monsters. To judge is a graver sin than murder. To judge thoroughly, page after page, to spin elaborate theories of what went wrong with an entire culture, why that would be as shocking as that dung-and-porn Mary in that New York museum was, to a different sensibility. They look at their shoes. It would be as though somebody made a mess on the carpet in the middle of their sherry hour. (Maybe two people "got it").
This was only a few months after 9-11.
Now, there are also bastards out there, commies I call them, for whom the innocent stupidity just explained is cover and smoke for hard core pushing of murder. The out and out Hamas apologists, the kind of people who would be running bomb factories in Gaza if they lived there and had the talents for it, instead of a talent (sometimes dubious enough) for rhetoric. But not all that many. Their influence is immensely heightened by the previous relativist attitude, by the echo chamber of earnest useful idiots. Lewis is sneered at not because he crosses the "commies", but because he does not toe the moralizing relativist line.
We've got a home front culture problem, in other words. One that is not simply a political problem, but a deeper intellectual and moral one. (Now I'll make your head spin - that very problem is part of why the Islamic nutjobs can't stand us...)