Civilisation and its malcontents

We are surrounded by Iagos in this digital age. If we stop thinking for ourselves, we risk becoming Othello killing the Desdemona of our public lives — our collective freedoms

March 25, 2018 12:15 am | Updated 12:15 am IST

CHENNAI: A scene from the play 'Othello' adapted in Kathakali by Sadanam Balakrishnan and International Centre for Kathakali, New Delhi being performed at Bharata Kalakshetra Auditorium in Chennai on September 16, 2006.
Photo: N. Sridharan

CHENNAI: A scene from the play 'Othello' adapted in Kathakali by Sadanam Balakrishnan and International Centre for Kathakali, New Delhi being performed at Bharata Kalakshetra Auditorium in Chennai on September 16, 2006. Photo: N. Sridharan

In August, 1600, a 16-member delegation from Morocco landed at Dover, England. It was led by a 42-year-old man named Abd al-Wahid bin Masoud bin Muhammad al-Annuri whose portrait, drawn during his time in England, survives to this day. In it, al-Annuri is draped in a black robe with a scimitar tied to his waist. His right hand is pressed across his chest in an act of supplication and suspicion. He projects an unease and comes across as a man wary of others. Al-Annuri had been entrusted by the ruler of Morocco, Ahmad al-Mansur, to solicit and enlist Queen Elizabeth I for a military campaign against Catholic Spain, which was ruled by the great Habsburg monarch Philip II. To get a sense of Philip II’s importance, it is useful to note that the great historian Fernand Braudel’s influential work on the Mediterranean was titled La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'Epoque de Philippe II ( The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II ).

Navigating a world of men

Meanwhile, Elizabeth I, who had spent a lifetime deflecting Philip II’s aggressive moves, and being herself in the 42nd year of her reign, was shrewder than the Maghrebis had imagined. Since the 1560s, England had progressively become addicted to Moroccan sugar — nearly 250 tonnes was imported every year — and by 1600, nowhere was the evidence of this trading partnership seen more vividly than on Elizabeth’s face. Her teeth had begun to rot from the sugared fruits that she was hooked on. Presumably, they imagined a pliant old woman who could be seduced with visions of geopolitical freedom from Spain. But like many a woman who have had to navigate a world of men who foolishly underestimate them, her response was a masterclass in blunt refusal masquerading as reluctance. Elizabeth agreed that the Moroccans had an excellent idea but unfortunately, logistical difficulties and her curmudgeonly advisers prevented her from waging war together.

The inspiration for Othello?

What al-Annuri made of this refusal we will never know. But his complicated identity — he was a Muslim from Spain who had been forcibly converted to Christianity, and who then reconverted to Islam — was a source of great fascination and dread to not just Elizabeth but to many others who had heard and seen the Arabs wander about London (“They are very strangely attired and behaviored,” wrote an observer). And in all of Elizabethan England, no one observed more keenly than a playwright called William Shakespeare. As per Professor Jerry Brotton, who writes in his fascinating book The Sultan and the Queen , al-Annuri was most likely the inspiration for Shakespeare’s famous hero Othello — a protagonist of divided loyalties, physiologically (a dark skinned “moor” in white Europe) and psychologically (Othello is most likely of North African Muslim origin and fights for Christian Europe against his coreligionists, the Ottoman Turks). Predictably, Shakespeare’s Othello arouses admiration and envy among the Venetian elite and his own contemporaries, especially when the “fair skinned” Desdemona chooses him over all others. None of this absolves Othello of his own failings — overconfidence about his own talents, willingness to countenance hearsay, and, most fatally, an inability to identify the serpent in his marital garden: his standard-bearer Iago who poisons Othello’s mind against Desdemona.

For his part, when Iago conjures up visions of Desdemona in bed with Othello to her father — “even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe!” — the anxiety is not mere jealousy of an inferior man towards his better. Nor is it sexual rivalry between two men. It is a deeper animus that we find, to this day, burbling in the rhetoric of far-rightists across the U.S., Europe, West Asia, and India: the fear of outsiders and “their” women. Iago’s words to Desdemona’s father, Brabantio — “Awake the snorting citizens with the bell. Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you” — is echoed on social media with the solemnity of theologians: demographic change is imminent. These messages are couched as a public safety announcement: civilisation is in danger, culture is in peril, act now!

‘Concern trolling’

In our age of social media, Iago’s malodorous whispers come across as a strategy of deception called ‘concern trolling’ in which, under the guise of righteousness and compassion, one preys on the natural insecurities of humans. As we learn more about how expertly democratic institutions can be subverted via social media and fake news, we realise that our polities are no different than Othello: easily suspicious, overzealous, and quickly aroused to overreaction. When capable — even if cynical — ideologues, intelligence agencies, and politicians act no different than Iago, pouring sweet authoritarian poison into our minds that lulls us away from thinking for ourselves, we risk becoming all too eager, like Othello, to strangle the Desdemona of our public lives: these hard-won collective freedoms.

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