A Distant Episode

In the Paul Bowles story with the above title, a Western professor travels to a distant, Muslim land and attempts to make a simple purchase of a cultural item.  He is made complacent, perhaps filled with a false sense of entitlement, as he attempts to deal with the Muslims on his little adventure.  Soon, however, his piece of foreign intrigue and commerce has gone horribly awry, as he is led to an ominous place and betrayed by his guide.  He is set upon by dogs and kidnapped, with his abductors taking great pleasure in cutting out his tongue.  What he thought would be a simple transaction becomes a contorted nightmare, as he is caged and made to wear a suit of tin cans, all for the merriment of his hosts.  With time he forgets who he was prior to his transformation; it is better this way, for remembering would be too painful.  He is bought and sold, and one day runs off into the desert, shot at by a watching sentry who is entertained by the site of a fleeing madman.  

The misguided visions of our administration, the unhinged dreams of sponsoring peaceful democracies in the tribal Middle East, have led us down the treacherous path to a confrontation with a culture completely foreign to us.  We cannot understand the Muslims beyond a certain point, and our government’s true intentions, whether naïve or cynically pragmatic, become minuscule next to the void of incomprehension between the two cultures.  Iraq is in a state of civil war and Iran moves swiftly toward its goal of possessing nuclear weapons.  The Palestinians are led in a newly born democracy by the terrorist Hamas group, and other heavily Muslim countries from Pakistan to Nigeria are erupting in deadly rioting over a few cartoons drawn in the West.