Table Of ContentA GUILTED AGE
A GUILT ED AGE
APOLOGIES FOR THE PAST
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Philadelphia • Rome • Tokyo
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
www.temple.edu/tempress
Copyright © 2015 by Temple University—Of The Commonwealth System
of Higher Education
All rights reserved
Published 2015
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., 1961–
A guilted age : apologies for the past / Ashraf Rushdy.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4399-1321-5 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4399-1322-2 (paper :
alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4399-1323-9 (e-book) 1. Apology—Political aspects.
2. Restorative justice. 3. Reparations for historical injustices. I. Title.
BF575.A75R87 2015
302'.17—dc23
2015007949
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1992
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Amgad
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
1 The Guilted Age 17
2 Political Apologies I 38
3 Political Apologies II 61
4 Historical Apologies I 79
5 Historical Apologies II 98
6 The Metaphysics of Undoing 117
7 The Concrete Past: Memorials 145
Conclusion 169
Notes 181
Index 207
PREFACE
C
onsider these four scenes from four continents.
We begin with Africa. The Acholi people in Northern Uganda
have a ritual called nyono tong gweno. Literally translated as “stepping
on the egg,” the rite was originally understood as a purification ritual for
travelers returning home, as a way of cleansing the impurities from beyond,
that was essential for the health of the individual and the community. The
Acholi have other rituals for purification that are also meant to provide vari-
ous forms of reconciliation, including moyo kum (cleansing the body), moyo
piny (cleansing an area), and gomo tong (bending the spear). The core belief
about these rites of conflict resolution, writes James Latigo, is that they pro-
vide a forum for the wrongdoer to acknowledge and accept responsibility for
the harm and then remake “relations of trust and the restoration of social
cohesion” through “the act and process of forgiveness.” Recently, the Acholi
have implemented the full range of these rites in a more concerted and wide-
spread way to welcome back to the community those child soldiers who were
abducted to serve in Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. After brushing
against the branch of a pobo tree and then stepping over a pole, Charles
Otim, for instance, who had been abducted eighteen years earlier when he
was sixteen, addressed the village chiefs: “I ask for your forgiveness. We have
wronged you.” In other cases, those seeking forgiveness and permission to
return to the community step on an egg as a symbol of cleansing. What used
to be a rite for creating reconciliation between individuals and within fami-
lies has now become a ritual for the thousands of former members of Kony’s
x | PREFACE
Army who have accepted the government’s offer of amnesty and must be
forgiven to return to their communities and their lives.1
Let us now turn to Europe. In an address in 2001, Pope John Paul II
made a statement to the bishops of the Greek Orthodox Church in which
he begged God to forgive the sins that the Catholic Church had commit-
ted against the Greek Orthodox Church. These events, he noted, “have left
deep wounds in the minds and hearts of people to this day.” He then speci-
fied one event in particular—“the disastrous sack of the imperial city of
Constantinople” by the Catholic warriors who were seeking a secure path
to Jerusalem for the Fourth Crusade. This event of 1204, the pope believed,
still resonated in a powerfully destructive way: “To God alone belongs judg-
ment, and therefore we entrust the heavy burden of the past to his endless
mercy, imploring him to heal the wounds which still cause suffering to the
spirit of the Greek people.” This “healing” is necessary, the pope perorated,
“if the Europe now emerging is to be true to its identity, which is inseparable
from the Christian humanism shared by East and West.” Two years before
the pope’s address, an informal group of four hundred Christians completed
what they called the Reconciliation Walk, in which, from 1996 to 1999, they
traced the exact path and chronology of those who had set off nine hundred
years earlier on the First Crusade (1096–1099). Arriving in Jerusalem on
the nine hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Crusaders, they offered
religious leaders in the Old City framed statements of their apology for the
Crusaders’ slaughter of Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the Holy Land.2
Let us next consider America. On January 14, 1993, at Sand Creek,
Colorado, a group of congregants gathered to commemorate the slaughter of
the Native Americans that occurred on that site in 1864, when a large regi-
ment of the Colorado Territory militia killed a peaceful village of Cheyenne
and Arapaho people. The leader of the congregation led the group in con-
fession and prayer and then directed them as they sought “forgiveness in
the presence of the Lord” and from the Native Americans gathered for the
occasion. He described how “one woman stretched herself out in the sand,
touching the feet of an Indian pastor; deeply ashamed she wept for the lost
generation that was cut off in this place.” At the end of the day, the congrega-
tion took communion together and then walked in pairs to where the dead
had been placed by the creek. The leader poured out the remainder of the
communion wine to commemorate the spot where blood had been shed.3
Finally, let us go down under to Australia. In memory of the white settler
nation’s history of oppression of the Aboriginal peoples, and especially in the
wake of the government-sponsored removal of Aboriginal children from their
birth families (the so-called “stolen generations”), Australian citizens formed
