Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 10, 1991 TAG: 9102100328
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY COLIN MCENROE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It was a clock, the machine that chops up time.
Time makes a lovely gift in times of peace, and a powerful weapon in times of war, especially if your enemy does not experience time the same way you do.
American culture has tuned itself to the nanosecond heartbeat of computers and the rapid rim shots of news reports bouncing off satellites. We play computer games in which the outcome of a battle is decided in an eye blink. Is it any wonder that Americans are impatient for a victory after little more than two weeks of fighting?
Iraq is no stranger to new technologies, but there are some who think that the ancient ways of perceiving time are more solidly entrenched in the Middle East.
"I think we are not aware of the embedded nature of time in this Islamic culture and how much time is on their side," said Anthony Aveni, professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y.
Aveni, who has studied the perception of time in ancient civilizations, says it may be a mistake to assume that Iraqis think of time the way Americans do: as moving in a straight line, always in the direction of progress and betterment.
"We expect things to click; we expect an outcome; we're a dynamic culture," said Aveni, author of the book "Empires of Time" (Basic Books, $24.95).
The ancient way of looking at time is more cyclical, he said. Events recur. Fortunes rise, fall and rise again.
In the Muslim world, said the Rev. Wadi' Z. Haddad, professor of Islamic Studies at the Hartford Seminary Foundation, history is "not a straight line but sort of a spiral, with ups and downs."
Haddad says the people of the Middle East are acutely aware of history and see events stretching back many hundreds of years as touching their lives directly.
"They think of the Crusades, which started in, what, 1099, and in their memory it's like yesterday," Haddad said.
Still, Haddad said he was not convinced that the issue of time perception is relevant to the current war. Hussein's ability to drag things out and refuse to surrender will be more a product, he said, of the Iraqi willingness to make sacrifices and endure hardships for a cause.
Even so, Haddad concedes that those sacrifices may be possible at least partly because the Islamic attitude toward time allows a person to look forward to a triumph that will not happen in his lifetime.
"The way the various announcements of the holy war are being put out, they all appeal to the long term: final victory of good over evil," said J.T. Fraser of Westport, Conn., founder of the International Society for the Study of Time.
Iraq has 6,000 years of civilized history behind it. Asking people to wait, say, 175 years for a final victory of good over evil may not be such a stretch. Fraser doubts that an American leader could ask for that kind of patience.
"The American idea is closer to the Walt Disney cartoon idea of putting together a house in three seconds," he said.
Jeremy Rifkin, another time scholar and author of the book "Time Wars" (Simon & Schuster, $9.95 paperback), said that Americans now live in such an accelerated-time orientation that they have lost the ability to reflect on their history or to plan for their future.
"The attention span of this civilization is narrowed to the moment," he said.
Americans are unable to learn from their own history because they don't even know it, Rifkin said.
"Kids have an expression: `Hey, man, you're history,"' he said. "That means you don't exist."
Rifkin calls Hussein's Iraq "a strange mixture of high-tech 20th century reality layered on top of an ageless culture, going back to the first great irrigation culture. They've got 6,000 years of civilized history."
But Hussein, as opposed to the people he leads, functions in very short units of time, Rifkin said.
"He's moving day by day, maintaining whatever advantage he can on the shortest time span possible," Rifkin said. "Yesterday is irrelevant. He rearranges his world each day. His temporal window is very small."
by CNB