What we don't know can hurt us (5/12/04)

Sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was sitting in a tea house along the main street in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, talking with Masrur.

The subjects of the conversation were the Soviet Union and Islam, but the underlying theme was American ignorance about the rest of the world.

Masrur, who works for a group trying to improve broadcast journalism in his country, is a doctoral candidate in the area of Central Asian history and cultures.

Pouring a glass of cognac, he warmed to his subject matter.

The Soviet Union, he told me, was always a much more complicated place than America seemed to recognize. It was 15 different countries and included even more ethnic groups.

Yet American foreign policy tended to treat it as monolithic, a somehow uniform nation stretching from the Baltics to the edge of China.

It was, in short, the enemy; and it was easier to think of it as a single thing, to simplify it, and to oversimplify it.

Masrur, a Tajik by ethnicity and a Muslim by religion, finds the notion laughable.

The differences between his country and a place like, say, Lithuania or Latvia are so numerous that it’s hard to know where to start.

One is European, the other is Asian. One looks West, the other tends to look East.

Linguistically, culturally, and historically, the two couldn’t be more different. Yet in the oversimplification of the Cold War — and in the rocky years since the collapse of the Soviet Union — they were viewed as being interchangeable parts of some larger whole.

Now, said Masrur, the U.S. is at risk of making the same sort of mistake with Islam, lumping entirely different cultures under the same label.

There are five different countries in Central Asia that were once part of the Soviet Union, and each of them is unique, he said.

In Tajikistan, for example, there are strong ties historically and linguistically to ancient Persia. The language is a variant of Farsi, which is spoken in Iran.

Yet the Tajiks tend to be Sunni Muslims, while Iran is Shiite, and the two have fought since the earliest days of Islam.

And in the high Pamir mountains of Tajikistan, the dominant Islamic group is the Suffis, who represent an entirely different strain of the religion.

Lump them together, oversimplify them, and ignore their subtle differences if you will, said Masrur. But you do so at your peril.

What we don’t know can indeed hurt us.[[In-content Ad]]