Why Selective Blindness and what it is about (Por que Cegueira Seletiva e de que se trata)

A critical, alternative, look at events and facts, mainly on International Affairs and the Middle East, to fight off the naturalized narratives.

Photo by Osarugue Igbinoba on Unsplash

How do we see the world?

I meant to start by telling you who I am, but people are hard to define or describe using just a few words. So let me start by saying something about how I look at the world, how I see it and how I see the ways in which we are told things about the world. These are, after all, the central pieces of what brings about this Selective Blindness Substack page and newsletter.

Since my childhood days, while I was living in Paraguay, attending school in Brasil and interacting mainly with my Lebanese, Muslim, immigrant community, I have learned that wars, revolutions, historical and religious facts of all kinds could, and were in fact, be represented and told in different manners by different people. If I listened with enough attention, I noticed that the same reality (the Iranian Revolution, for instance, or the Iran-Iraq war, just to stay with those early days) was described in completely opposite manners, by family members on one side, and by the mainstream press on the other.

Confusing this was, at least, even if you just wanted to know what was in fact going on. But it was more than confusing. Different narratives tell divergent things about right and wrong, about justice and injustice and they invite us to take different courses of action. Different narratives are themselves weapons used in all power plays; they compete fiercely among them to convince us on how the world is and on how we should perceive reality.

This is what I started to understand as a child. Since then and still today, many years later, it is probably the single theme that most constantly has agitated my soul, as a teenager, a Shia Muslim (never a practicing one, but always identified and self-identified as such) teenager who lived through the Iran-Iraq war and the demonization of Shia Islam, as a Law School student in Brasil just before the first Gulf War, a post-grad student in Paris during the times in which Saddam Hussein had ceased being a hero at war with the Ayatollahs and had been “discovered” to be a war criminal and finally as a law professor who deals with international affairs every single day.

This continuous apprenticeship and this permanent central concern have been founded upon a vocation towards thinking (it is not a self-compliment but rather a statement related to a pscychological type) and a history of tensions between feelings of belonging and of not belonging. Trying to see beyond what is naturalized as truth and what is too easily and uncritically accepted has become my way of looking, at every thing.

As I write this first post, and as I invite you to accompany me in this adventure of seeing differently, an object of choice for discussions on blindness and naturalized narratives has been agitating the news and political analyses for more than one year: the Ukraine war. If one needed a prime example of how powerful narratives can construe imagined realities and have as believe in them, the prevalent representation of this war in the West has provided that example.

I have my own critical reading of what is going on in Ukraine, in Russia, in China or with the changes in world power…. But, as it is probably clear by now, my mains field of investigation, of questioning and of thinking is this ensamble that includes the Middle East, Islam, the Arab World and the Muslim World.

So, if you accept my invitation to follow the writings I will produce within this Selective Blindness by SALEM NASSER newsletter and to entertain a discussion with me, know that the themes will very often relate to critical readings of this universe, very often on political issues.

Not exclusively, though. I will also explore other themes, such as literature and cultural products, related or not to the Arab and Islamic universes.

Finally, the name “Selective Blindness” came after much reflection; I finally decided it was the most suitable even though many times we will no be talking about that naturalized and parcial, if not false, representation of reality. So the name is not all-encompassing, but it should be inviting enough.

I also know that not always the blindness is selective in the sense of “voluntarily selective”. It is because I believe that it can be broken that I write.

If you accept my invitation and decide com come along, I will always make sure this is a space of open debate, of searching, of questioning, of critical thinking, of ouverture for discovery and change, of instigating search and writing, of imagination, of love of truth and justice, against all dogma, inequality and exclusion.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

In exchange for your vote of confidence I will offer:

1- A number of free posts and notes, to try to show that this newsletter is worth it;

2- For free as well, new readings of many texts that have appeared elsewhere and in previous times and circumstances;

3- For paying subscribers, new material concerning what I believe (helped by your inputs) is more relevant or pressing, One Every Week;

4- For paying subscribers, after the 100 paying subscribers mark is reached (as a challenge to me and an incentive to some of you): exclusive access, every two weeks, to a new chapter of an in progress book (a very personal but very complete course) on the Middle East, Arabs, Islam, history, religion, ethnicities, political issues etc., One Chapter every two weeks.

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