Democracy, Not Terror, is the Engine of Political Islam
September 21, 2007
William Dalrymple sets some facts straight about the factors contributing to the rise of political Islam.
Six years after 9/11, throughout the Muslim world political Islam is on the march; the surprise is that its rise is happening democratically – not through the bomb, but the ballot box. Democracy is not the antidote to the Islamists the neocons once fondly believed it would be. Since the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been a consistent response from voters wherever Muslims have had the right to vote. In Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey and Algeria they have voted en masse for religious parties in a way they have never done before. Where governments have been most closely linked to the US, political Islam’s rise has been most marked.
Much western journalism in the six years since 9/11 has concentrated on terrorist groups, jihadis and suicide bombers. But while the threat of violence remains very real, those commentators who have compared what they ignorantly call “Islamofascism” to the Nazis are guilty of hysteria: the differences in relative power and military capability are too great for the comparison to be valid, and the analogies that the neocons draw with the second world war are demonstrably false. As long as the west interferes in the Muslim world, bombs will go off; and as long as Britain lines up behind George Bush’s illegal wars, British innocents will die in jihadi atrocities. But that does not mean we are about to be invaded, nor is Europe about to be demographically swamped, as North American commentators such as Mark Steyn claim: Muslims will make up no more than 10% of the European population by 2020.
Yet in concentrating on the violent jihadi fringe, we may have missed the main story. For if the imminent Islamist takeover of western Europe is a myth, the same cannot be said for the Islamic world. Clumsy and brutal US policies in the Middle East have generated revolutionary changes, radicalising even the most moderate opinion, with the result that the status quo in place since the 1950s has been broken.
Egypt is typical: at the last election in 2005 members of the nominally banned Muslim Brotherhood, standing as independents, saw their representation rise from 17 seats to 88 in the 444-seat people’s assembly – a five-fold increase, despite reports of vote-rigging by President Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Alliance. The Brothers, who have long abjured violence, are now the main opposition.
The figures in Pakistan are strikingly similar. Traditionally, the religious parties there have won only a fraction of the vote. That began to change after the US invasion of Afghanistan. In October 2002 a rightwing alliance of religious parties – the Muttahida Majlis Amal or MMA – won 11.6% of the vote, more than doubling its share, and sweeping the polls in the two provinces bordering Afghanistan – Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province – where it formed ultra-conservative and pro-Islamist provincial governments. If the last election turned the MMA into a serious electoral force, there are now fears that it could yet be the principle beneficiary of the current standoff in Pakistan.
The Bush administration proclaimed in 2004 that the promotion of democracy in the Middle East would be a major foreign policy theme in its second term. It has been widely perceived, not least in Washington, that this policy has failed. Yet in many ways US foreign policy has succeeded in turning Muslim opinion against the corrupt monarchies and decaying nationalist parties who have ruled the region for 50 years. The irony is that rather than turning to liberal secular parties, as the neocons assumed, Muslims have lined up behind parties most clearly seen to stand up against aggressive US intervention.
Religious parties, in other words, have come to power for reasons largely unconnected to religion. As clear and unambiguous opponents of US policy in the Middle East – in a way that, say, Musharraf, Mubarak and Mahmoud Abbas are not – religious parties have benefited from legitimate Muslim anger: anger at the thousands of lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq; at the blind eye the US turns to Israel’s nuclear arsenal and colonisation of the West Bank; at the horrors of Abu Ghraib and the incarceration of thousands of Muslims without trial in the licensed network of torture centres that the US operates across the globe; and at the Islamophobic rhetoric that still flows from Bush and his circle in Washington.
Moreover, the religious parties tend to be seen by the poor, rightly or wrongly, as representing justice, integrity and equitable distribution of resources. Hence the strong showing, for example, of Hamas against the blatantly corrupt Fatah in the 2006 elections in Palestine. Equally, the dramatic rise of Hizbullah in Lebanon has not been because of a sudden fondness for sharia law, but because of the status of Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s leader, as the man who gave the Israelis a bloody nose, and who provides medical and social services for the people of South Lebanon, just as Hamas does in Gaza.
The usual US response has been to retreat from its push for democracy when the “wrong” parties win. This was the case not just with the electoral victory of Hamas, but also in Egypt: since the Brothers’ strong showing in the elections, the US has stopped pressing Mubarak to make democratic reforms, and many of the Brothers’ leading activists and business backers, as well as Mubarak’s opponent in the presidential election, are in prison, all without a word of censure from Washington.
Yet on a recent visit to Egypt I found everywhere a strong feeling that political Islam was there to stay, and that this was something everyone was going to have to learn to live with; the US response had become almost irrelevant. Even the Copts were making overtures to the Brothers. As Youssef Sidhom, who edits the leading Coptic newspaper, put it: “They are not going away. We need to enter into dialogue, to clarify their policies, and end mutual mistrust.”
The reality is that, like the Copts, we are going to have to find some modus vivendi with political Islam. Pretending that the Islamists do not exist, and that we will not talk to them, is no answer. Only by opening dialogue are we likely to find those with whom we can work, and to begin to repair the damage that self-defeating Anglo-American policies have done to the region, and to western influence there, since 9/11.
· William Dalrymple is the author of The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857.
Islam Now, China Then
July 21, 2007
Today’s guest editorial comes from respected friend and inspiration, M. Shahid Alam, who is the author of the superb collection of essays, Challenging the New Orientalism.
Islam Now, China Then: Any Parallels?
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.” — Henry Ford, 1916
On some days, a glance at the leading stories in the Western media strongly suggests that Muslims everywhere, of all stripes, have gone berserk. It appears that Muslims have lost their minds.
In any week, we are confronted with reports of Islamic suicide attacks against Western targets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Western countries themselves; terrorists foiled before they could act; terrorist attacks gone awry; terrorists indicted; terrorists convicted; terrorists tortured; terrorist suspects kidnapped by CIA; or warnings of new terrorist attacks against Western targets.
Unprovoked, without cause – we are repeatedly told – Muslims everywhere, even those living in the West, are lashing out against the civilized West. Many in the Western world – especially in the US – are beginning to believe that the entire Islamic world is on the warpath against Civilization itself.
Expert commentators in Western media want us to believe that the Muslims have lost their minds. They tell us that Muslims are inherently, innately, perverse; that never before has violence been used in this way, against innocent civilians. It is always ‘innocent’ civilians.
Other peoples too have endured colonization, slavery, expulsions, extermination at the hands of Western powers: but none have responded with violence on this scale against the West. Certainly not with violence against civilians. Never have Aborigines, Africans, indigenous Americans, Hindus, Jews, or the Chinese targeted civilians. They never attacked Westerners indiscriminately. They never targeted ‘innocent Western civilians.’
Is this ‘insanity’ slowly raising its head across the Islamic world really unique? Is this ‘insanity’ a uniquely Islamic phenomenon? Is this a uniquely contemporary phenomenon? Is this ‘insanity’ unprovoked?
We cannot of course expect any history from the corporate US media on this Islamic ‘insanity.’ In order to take the moral high ground, to claim innocence, the rich and powerful – the oppressor classes – prefer not to talk about history, or invent the history that serves their interest.
What is surprising, however, is that few writers even on the left bring much history to their analysis of unfolding events. Not being a historian – of Islam, China or Britain – I can only thank serendipity for the little bit of history that I will invoke to provide some background to the ‘malaise’ unfolding in the Islamic world. A little history to connect Islam today to China in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Implausibly – perhaps for some – the history I invoke comes from Friedrich Engels – yes, he of the Communist Manifesto, friend of Karl Marx, revolutionary – writing in May 1857 when the British were waging war against China, known to history as the Second Opium War.
More implausibly, this history comes from an article published in a leading US newspaper: The New York Daily Tribune (available in Marx and Engels Internet Archiv). Yes, in some remote past, a leading US newspaper routinely published commentaries by the likes of Marx and Engels. Today, the publishers of NYT, the Washington Post or LA Times would become apoplectic just thinking about it.
During the First Opium War of 1840-42, when the British waged war to defend their ‘right’ to smuggle opium into China – Friedrich Engels writes — “the people were quiet; they left the Emperor’s soldiers to fight the invaders, and submitted after defeat with Eastern fatalism to the power of the enemy.” Yes, in those times, even enlightened Westerners spoke habitually of Oriental fatalism, fanaticism, sloth, backwardness, and – not to forget their favorite – despotism.
However, something strange had overtaken the Chinese some fifteen years later. For, during the Second Opium War, writes Friedrich Engels, “the mass of people take an active, nay fanatical part in the struggle against the foreigners. They poison the bread of the European community at Hongkong by wholesale, and with the coolest premeditation…They go with hidden arms on board trading steamers, and, when on the journey, massacre the crew and European passengers and seize the boat. They kill and kidnap every foreigner within their reach.”
Had the Chinese decided to trade one Oriental disease for another: fatalism for fanaticism? Ah, these Orientals! Why can’t they just stick to their fatalism? If only the Orientals could stick to their fatalism, all our conquests would have been such cakewalks!
It was no ordinary fanaticism either. Outside the borders of their country, the Chinese were mounting suicide attacks against Westerners. “The very coolies,” writes Friedrich Engels, “emigrating to foreign countries rise in mutiny, and as if by concert, on board every emigrant ship, and fight for its possession, and, rather than surrender, go down to the bottom with it, or perish in its flames. Even out of China, the Chinese colonists…conspire and suddenly rise in nightly insurrection…”
Why do the Chinese hate us?
No doubt the Europeans then were asking this question. And, like the democracy-mongers in the United States today, unwilling to examine the root causes, the history of their own atrocities, unwilling to acknowledge how they “throw hot shell on a defenseless city and add rape to murder,” the Europeans then too were outraged. European statesmen and newspapers fulminated endlessly about Chinese barbarity, calling their attacks “cowardly, barbarous, atrocious…” The Europeans too called for more wars, endless wars, till China could be subdued, totally.
Friedrich Engels was not deceived by the moralizing of the British press. Yes, the Chinese are still ‘barbarians,’ but the source of this “universal outbreak of all Chinese against all foreigners” was “the piratical policy of the British government.” Piratical policy? No, never! We are on a civilizing mission; la mission civilizatrice Européenne. It was not a message that the West has been ready to heed: then or now.
Why had the Chinese chosen this form of warfare? What had gone wrong? Was this rage born of envy; was it integral to the Chinese ethos; was this rage aimed only at destroying the West? Westerners claim “their kidnappings, surprises, midnight massacres” are cowardly; but, Friedrich Engels answers, the “civilization-mongers should not forget that according to their own showing they [the Chinese] could not stand against European means of destruction with their ordinary means of warfare.” In other words, this was asymmetric warfare. If the weaker party in a combat possesses cunning, it will probe and fight the enemy’s weaknesses: not its strengths.
Then as now, this asymmetric warfare caused consternation in the West. How can the Europeans win when the enemy neutralizes the West’s enormous advantage in technology, when the enemy refuses to offer itself as a fixed target, when it deploys merely its human assets, its daring, cunning, its readiness to sacrifice bodies?
“What is an army to do,” asks Engels, “against a people resorting to such means of warfare? Where, how far, is it to penetrate into the enemy’s country, how to maintain itself there?” The West again confronts that question in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. The West has ‘penetrated into the enemy’s country,’ but is having considerable trouble maintaining itself there. Increasingly, Western statesmen are asking: Can they maintain this presence without inviting more attacks?
Friedrich Engels asked the British to give up “moralizing on the horrible atrocities of the Chinese.” Instead, he advises them to recognize that “this is a war pro aris et focis [“for altars and hearth”], a popular war for the maintenance of Chinese nationality, with all its overbearing prejudice, stupidity, learned ignorance and pedantic barbarism if you like, but yet a popular war.” If we can ignore the stench of Western prejudice in this instance, there is a message here that the West might heed. Is it possible that the Muslims too are waging a “popular war,” a war for the dignity, sovereignty of Islamic peoples?
In 1857, the Chinese war against Westerners too was confined to Southern China. However, “it would be a very dangerous war for the English if the fanaticism extends to the people of the interior.” The British might destroy Canton, attack the coastal areas, but could they carry their attacks into the interior? Even if the British threw their entire might into the war, it “would not suffice to conquer and hold the two provinces of Kwangtung and Kwang-si. What, then, can they do further?”
The United States and Israel now hold Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. How strong, how firm is their hold? On the one hand, they appear to be in a much stronger position than the British in China. They have the ‘rulers’ – the Mubaraks, Musharrafs and Malikis – in their back pockets. But how long can these ‘rulers’ stand against their people?
What if the insurgency that now appears like a distant cloud on the horizon – no larger than a man’s fist – is really the precursor of a popular war? What if the “extremists,” “militants,” “terrorists,” are the advance guard of a popular war to restore sovereignty to Islamic peoples? Can the US and Israel win this war against close to a quarter of the world’s population? Will this be a war worth fighting: worth winning?
Shouldn’t these great powers heed the words of Friedrich Engels? Shouldn’t they heed history itself. After nearly a century of hard struggle, the Chinese gained their sovereignty in 1948, driving out every imperialist power from its shores? Today, China is the world’s most powerful engine of capitalist development. It threatens no neighbor. Its secret service is not busy destabilizing any country in the world. At least not yet.
Imagine a world today – and over the past sixty years – if the West and Japan had succeeded in fragmenting China, splintering the unity of this great and ancient civilization, and persisted in rubbing China’s face in the dirt? How many millions of troops would the West have to deploy to defends its client states in what is now China – the Chinese equivalents of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan and Iraq? If Vietnam bled the United States, imagine the consequences of a quagmire in China?
Would the United States prefer this turbulent but splintered China – held down at massive costs in blood and treasure, with bases, client states, wars, and unending terrorist attacks on American interests everywhere in the world – to the China that it has today, united, prosperous, at peace; a competitor but also one of its largest trading partners?
At what cost, and for how long, will the United States, Europe and Israel continue to support the splintering, occupation and exploitation of the Islamic heartland they had imposed during World War I? At what cost – to themselves and the peoples of the Islamic world? There are times when it is smarter to retrench than to hold on to past gains.
That time is now: and that time may be running out.
Another turn of the screw – another attack by the United States or Israel – and this window may close irrevocably. If wars, civil conflicts or revolutions sweep across the Islamic world – unlike the Chinese revolution, most likely this turbulence will not be confined to one segment of Asia. In one way or another, this violence will draw the whole world into its vortex. One cannot even begin to imagine all the ramifications, all the human costs of such a conflagration.
The most vital question before the world today is: Can the United States, Israel or both be prevented from starting this conflagration?
M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of Challenging the New Orientalism (2007). He may be contacted at alqalam02760@yahoo.com. Visit his website at: http://aslama.org. © M. Shahid Alam.
Red Mosque, Yellow Journalism
July 12, 2007
I am no fan of Ahmad Rashid’s journalism — it is superficial and is always calibrated for its intended Western audience. His book on the Taliban is a work of mundane reportage, with little understanding of the social and historical forces that shape the region’s politics. (He is also sensitive enough to Western sensibilities to describe the 1857 War of Independence as the ‘Indian Mutiny’.) Little wonder then that the book should garner praise from the likes of Tony Blair. So it was with some dismay that I listened to Democracy Now yesterday interview Rashid on the events that transpired in Islamabad. The analysis was predictably shallow, and would probably be no different had DN interviewed a hack from a neocon think-tank in Washington instead. Even though Amy Goodman mentioned the fact that NATO troops have killed a high number of civilians this year, he downplayed the fact to continue harping on the essentials for ‘victory’ in the war.
I used to live in Islamabad back in 2000. The place I worked at was very near the Red Mosque. You can surmise how much prominence it had from the fact that when it started making news, I actually had to dig up a map and some photos to recall which one it was. Islamabad is not a city you associate with religiosity. Modelled after Brasilia the city has historically been just as distant from the rest of Pakistan culturally, as perhaps London was during the days of the Raj. There are actually people in Islamabad who celebrate the Fourth of July. It is a city of conspicuous consumption, juxtaposed with its twin, Rawalpindi, which, besides serving as the headquarter for the various services of the military, is remarkable only for the degree of privation. The contrast is hard to miss.
That was 7 years back. A lot has apparently changed since. A former City Bank official sits in the seat of the prime minister. He has done what bankers usually do — helped the ones with access accumulate wealth in a manner not heard of since the time of colonial plunder. The cities, where people frequently conflate being with having, the ones who don’t have feel their being questioned. In their avarice, they have contributed to the dehumanization of the underclasses by leaving them little they could possess. In The violence that is inherent to the system that preserves this inequality, a violent denouement is inevitable. So we come to the Red Mosque.
In a characteristically perceptive dispatch from Pakistan, Robert Jensen writes:
In addition to calls for shariah law under a fundamentalist Islamic state, Lal Masjid imams Abdur Rashid Ghazi and Mohammed Abdul Aziz critiqued the corruption of Pakistani political, military and economic elites, highlighting the living conditions of the millions of Pakistanis living in poverty. As in most Third-World societies, the inequality gap here has widened in recent years, as those who find their place in the U.S.-dominated neoliberal economic project prosper while most ordinary people suffer, especially the poor.
“We can reject the jihadist and patriarchal aspects and still recognize that there is in this fundamentalist philosophy a call for social justice, a challenge to the power-seeking and greed of elites,” said Esack, the author of Qur’an: Liberation and Pluralism. “When I spoke with Ghazi, it was clear that was an important part of his thinking, and it’s equally clear that the appeal of this theology is magnified by the lack of meaningful calls for justice from other sectors of society.”
But clearly there is more at play here than mere economic disparity. Religious extremism is a factor no doubt. But Islamabad never had any religious extremists. Where did these come from? Has there anything that has happened in the region in the years that I have been away that might have stoked the flames of religious extremism?
My own experience with religious intolerance has never been pleasant and I have little time for any kind of morality police. I have had my share of harassment from some religious student groups back in my days at the Peshawar University — over the most trivial of issues. So the last thing I wanted to see was for religious parties to dominate the elections in the Nort and South-Western provinces of Pakistan — but I was not surprised.
As a backlash against Musharraf’s supine support in the destruction of Afghanistan, the people of NWFP and Baluchistan elected the MMA — a coalition of religious parties. It was less an endorsement of MMA than a rejection of the mainstream parties which didn’t raise a peep against US aggression. But when MMA came to power in NWFP in 2002, their approach was humble: no ostentation, their MPs were approachable and amenable to dialogue. Constrained by the central government however, soon their attentions turned to the familiar moral issues, and people’s lifestyles. Their interference into people’s personal lives were unwelcome, and painting over the women’s face on billboards did little to increase their popularity.
In the meanwhile the central government embarked on a campaign to subdue the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Israeli style collective punishment was employed by the military including mass demolition of homes. Torture and disappearances became common. Very soon, the government had an active insurgency on its hands, which soon started creeping from the tribal areas towards the cities. Excluding the cities, the North is for the most part sympathetic towards the so-called Taliban. Except, the term doesn’t capture the scope of the identity, which is as much ethnic, as it is ideological and historical. The support is not restricted to ethnic Pakhtuns — they sympathies also have a religious element, as well as a historical element rooted in the history of the struggle against foreign aggression.
Contrary to the popular understanding, Musharraf has never ‘supported’ the Mullahs. He has indeed tried to instrumentalize them, but their power ultimately derives from a reservoir of support which is related to Musharraf only insofar as it is a response to his proximity to the West. Madrassah were not invented by Musharraf. These are not just religious seminaries, they are also for the most part orphanages where the government spends little on social welfare. They also provide shelter to the homeless. So when the likes of Benazir claim that they will do a better job of suppressing the Mullahs, it only reflects their disconnect with the realities on ground. They merely see the symptoms. They have no appreciation of the causes which have led the people who until even 10 years ago had never sent more than three MPs from a religious party to the parliament to seek alternatives in the MMA. It is precisely a blowback from Benazir’s failed geopolitics, Nawaz Sharif’s predatory neoliberalism, and Musharraf’s ‘war on terror’.
The raid on the mosque was avoidable. Negotiations would have ended it. But Musharraf was perhaps keen to establish his strongman credentials. It was only two years back that he had paid Ariel Sharon a tribute, calling the butcher of Sabra and Chatilla “a bold man, a great soldier, a courageous leader”. It is no surprise then that the admirer of Sharon should employ the tactics — and rhetoric — perfected in the killing fields of the West Bank and Gaza. There were all the familiar props — ‘terrorists’, ‘human shields’, ‘weapons caches’ and ‘foreign fighters’. Globalized semantics of the ‘war on terror’. ‘Civilian casulaties were lower than expected’ said the Banker PM. But the BBC and other Western media, which usually suspends disbelief when the victims are other Muslims did not ask why there were any casualties at all. The militants were willing to surrender after all. All the dead were conveniently declared ‘Taliban sympathisers’, hence eminently killable. Except that if the same criteria were to be applied to the NWFP and Balochistan, Musharraf will perhaps have to hire the services of an Eichmann. The language also won’t do Musharraf any favor in the said regions. If they were killed for being ‘Taliban’ or ‘Taliban sympathisers’, then that is a direct assault on the identity (ethnic, religious or historical) of the majority in the North and South-West.
Finally, there is the question of the reaction. I notice that many Pakistani liberals are cheering the massacre. This is hardly a surprise, given the general attitudes of the moneyed classes towards the indigent in a highly stratified society. For most liberals, they were a nuisance. Hardly anyone has taken the time to ponder on the circumstances that created them. Mostly because they are seen as lesser human beings, not worth the time reflecting on their concerns. Except that these concerns have a much larger constituency. These may have been only the first shots in a conflict that could very well end in the disintegration of the country.
*A notable exception here is Fawzia Afzal Khan who provides a glimpse into what lies beneath in her Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Burqa Brigade
I Don’t Believe in Atheists
May 23, 2007
From TruthDig: On Tuesday night, Chris Hedges and Sam Harris debated “Religion, Politics and the End of the World.” The following is Hedges’ opening statement, in which he argues that Harris and other critics of faith have mistakenly blamed religion for the ills of the world, when the true danger lies in the human heart and its capacity for evil. Click here for full debate coverage.
Sam Harris has conflated faith with tribalism. His book is an attack not on faith but on a system of being and believing that is dangerous and incompatible with the open society. He attacks superstition, a belief in magic and the childish notion of an anthropomorphic God that is characteristic of the tribe, of the closed society. He calls this religion. I do not.
What he fails to grasp is not simply the meaning of faith—something I will address later—but the supreme importance of the monotheistic traditions in creating the concept of the individual. This individualism—the belief that we can exist as distinct beings from the tribe, or the crowd, and that we are called on as individuals to make moral decisions that at times defy the clamor of the tribe or the nation—is a gift of the Abrahamic faiths. This sense of individual responsibility is coupled with the constant injunctions in Islam, Judaism and Christianity for a deep altruism. And this laid the foundations for the open society. This individualism is the central doctrine and most important contribution of monotheism. We are enjoined, after all, to love our neighbor, not our tribe. This empowerment of individual conscience is the starting point of the great ethical systems of our civilization. The prophets—and here I would include Jesus—helped institutionalize dissent and criticism. They initiated the separation of powers. They reminded us that culture and society were not the sole prerogative of the powerful, that freedom and indeed the religious life required us to often oppose and defy those in authority. This is a distinctly anti-tribal outlook. Immanuel Kant built his ethics upon this radical individualism. And Kant’s injunction to “always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as mere means” runs in a direct line from the Christian Gospels. Karl Popper rightly pointed out in the first volume of “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” when he writes about this creation of the individual as set against the crowd, that “There is no other thought which has been so powerful in the moral development of man” (P. 102, Vol. 1). These religions set free the critical powers of humankind. They broke with the older Greek and Roman traditions that gods and destiny ruled human fate—a belief that when challenged by Socrates saw him condemned to death. They offered up the possibility that human beings, although limited by circumstances and simple human weaknesses, could shape and give direction to society. And most important, individuals could give direction to their own lives.
By M. Shahid Alam,
Islamic Publications International, 272 pp., 2007, 978-1889999458
Early in the 12th century, the Crusaders rampaged through Islamic lands with little initial resistance; the emirs and sultans were more concerned with their own internecine feuds. At this point, Ibn al-Khashab, an Imam from Aleppo, took it upon himself to jolt the Islamic world out of its suicidal stupor. His passionate, eloquent and incessant exhortations eventually shamed the would-be defenders of Islamic lands into confronting the aggressors, and laid the ground for an effective resistance that culminated in the crusader’s eventual ejection from the Levant.
Since the foundation of Israel in 1948, and later after 1967, the Islamic world has been under renewed assault – this time from United States and Israel (at times joined by lesser European powers). This aggression also incorporates an ideological assault – an ideological Crusade, as it were. The twin objectives of the Zionists – to demonise those it sought to dispossess and the need to bring the imperial powers on board its colonial enterprise – led them to revive an ideologically driven discourse, Orientalism, which by end of the Second World War had become increasingly irrelevant. In its Zionist incarnation, however, Orientalism is far more virulent.
A sad legacy of prolonged Western domination has been that few people read in Muslim world; fewer still do so critically. This has left the field wide open for Orientalists to extend their pernicious influence. They have taken liberties with the history, culture, traditions and beliefs of the Islamic world and with the notable exception of Edward Said, they have encountered little resistance. In the tradition of Said, and in the spirit of al-Khashab, then, Challenging the New Orientalism: Dissenting Essays on the “War Against Islam” is M. Shahid Alam’s bracing riposte to the New Orientalists.
Alam covers expansive intellectual territory in this collection of essays: from Islamic history to global economics; Orientalist dogma to anti-Imperialist activism; wars to Human Rights. His message is universal: whether one is a historian, political scientist, sociologist, economist, activist, member of an ethnic minority, or a Muslim, the book has plenty to offer. Its passionate, at times lyrical, rendering makes this a highly readable book.
The New Orientalism, the first of the book’s three sections, deals with the proliferation of literature on the Muslim world by Orientalists – mostly of Zionist provenance – whose scholarly pretences barely conceal their deep-seated prejudice towards their subject. While the earlier Orientalists had produced tracts that aided the colonization of the Orient by furnishing ideological pretexts; the new version of Orientalism has taken on unabashedly political overtones. Their Manichean view posits an unchanging, retrograde, totalitarian Islam in perpetual conflict with an enlightened, democratic, egalitarian and free West. Alam’s broadside against the most influential protagonists of this project – Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington – is trenchant as it is lucid; he shows up a theoretical edifice that has weak empirical foundations, one that is barely held together by specious arguments and defective logic.
With advances in gunnery and shipping providing a decisive military advantage and the Industrial Revolution helping replace the feudal order, Europe’s colonial venture soon established and consolidated the global capitalist system. This was dominated by Core capital, comprising of Europe and America (and Japan to a lesser degree), that lorded over a Periphery whose markets and resources it relied on for profits. Like the rest of the countries that comprise the Periphery, the Islamic world was caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of neoliberal economics and neocolonial politics. Far from being a proof of Islam’s resistance to modernity, aversion to science and hostility to the West, the relative decline of Islamic societies vis-à-vis the West is attributable to the same economic, political, social and technological factors that have contributed to the lag in the rest of the Periphery. In fact, Egyptian, Ottoman and Persian attempts at modernization and democratic reform were crushed right at their inception by European colonial powers.
Palestine and Israel, the second section of the book, addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time. The essays in the section range from the history of the conflict, contemporary political realities, to the misconceptions and fallacies sown through a systematically skewed media representation. Alam argues that the advent of a colonial-settler state, Israel, and the discovery of oil have fuelled the resurgence of interest in the region which has culminated in myriad interventions, contributing to its continued instability. By aligning with the hegemonic ambitions of the reigning powers (first Britain, then France and now America), Israel has appropriated their military and financial strength to further its own regional goals. In this, it has been assisted by a powerful lobby in Washington, which not only exercises inordinate influence over American foreign policy, but also confronts dissent in order to suppress critical voices. Alam ‘s personal experience in this regard is instructive: signing a petition in support of an Academic Boycott of Israel – a legitimate, popular and non-violent mode of protest – made him the target of a smear campaign headed by Zionist extremists at Campus Watch (a McCarthyite project which aims to discredit and intimidate critical dissenters) with accusations of “encouraging terrorist murderers”. From there, the story was relayed on to right-wing media and Alam found himself the centre of much unwelcome attention.
While Alam has weathered this storm with courage, not everyone has his fortitude; if the fraudulent Zionist narrative still prevails in the American mainstream discourse, it is because most choose silence over jeopardizing their careers.
The War Against Global Terrorism, the last section of the book, addresses the historical provenance of September 11, which Alam situates in the dynamics of political-economic interactions between the West and the Periphery in general, and the Islamic societies in particular, rather than any claimed cultural-ideological proclivities of the latter for murder. Alam proceeds to dispel the ideological fog that envelops the events and causes of the tragedy. The roots of this conflict lie not in profound hostility of Islam to modernity, freedom and democracy, as the ideological cheerleaders of the so called “war on terror” suggest; but in mundane realities of imperial excess and a deeply iniquitous economic system that sustains the neocolonial grip of Core capital over the Periphery. Alam exposes how the events of September 11 have been instrumentalized in the pursuit of global hegemonic ambitions. Afghanistan was merely a first step. With a pretext established, unchecked imperial ambitions soon opened the way for American conquest of Iraq, urged on all the way by the neocon vanguard of the Zionist lobby. The fall of Baghdad, an event with painful historical connotations for most Muslims, is the spark for one of the book’s most searing essays. The concise, charged rhetoric of “Iraq is Free” has an almost poetic quality to it.
Alam next dissects the semantics of Empire; the corrupted discourse that presages – and rationalizes – wars of aggression; the language that reduces adversaries to mere labels and statistics. The purveyors of violence have their propaganda agents in the media and academia, who substitute the sensory reality of war and occupation with a mythical reality imbued with benevolence and high minded ideals. Alam tackles the question of identity in imperial USA; what it is like being a Muslim in the age of war and terror – of being prejudged and demonized by the likes of Thomas Friedman; of being the centre of every bigot’s leery attention; of paying the price for departing from doctrinal orthodoxy.
September 11 complicated things for many Muslims. The majority chose to weather the storm quietly; some accepted the role of native informers. Only a rare few refused to accept the dominant narrative and challenge the doctrinal assumptions. Prominent in this latter group, Alam has had to bear a heavy toll.
Alam ends the book with a topical essay on the escalations in the Gulf that threaten a new war, this time against Iran. He traces the roots of this planned aggression to 1979 when the Islamic Revolution brought down one of the pillars of American power in the region: the regime of the Shah of Iran. The revolution was a serious setback for US-Israeli hegemonic ambitions; therefore Iraq was tasked with neutralizing this potential threat. The Zionists, on the other hand, had more ambitious plans; as articulated by Oded Yinon in Kivunim, the World Zionist Organization’s main publication, they aimed to break Iraq into ethnic-sectarian statelets and neutralize regional challengers to Israel’s dominance one at a time. In the wake of the US conquest of Iraq in 2003, Zionists immediately started recycling the same falsehoods used to justify the war against Iraq to sell the new war – against Iran this time.
The endgame in the case of US-Israeli aggression against Iran is uncertain, but Alam’s essay does an admirable job of exposing the source and trajectory of this policy.
As with any collection of essays dealing with broadly similar topics, repetition is inevitable and in that respect this book is no exception. However, that also means that each essay is self-contained and offers complete context and analysis. My only objection is with the use of the term “Islamicate” [1], which is obscure and lacks linguistic resonance; for instance, there is no comparable word for other similar societal configurations.
In his later years, Aldous Huxley had complained about the trend towards excessive specialization in academia, which produces knowledge that does little to improve the human situation. He emphasized a need for bridges to rescue knowledge from the sterile confines of academic exclusion back into the service of human endeavour. In Alam ‘s writings one finds that rare amalgamation of depth and breadth, of scholarly rigor and activist zeal. An accomplished economist, he is also an erudite political scientist, engages complex sociological debates, has a keen eye for textual analysis, and writes with the passion of a poet.
At a time when authentic narratives of the Islamic world are being submerged under a vast proliferation of Orientalist dogma, Challenging the New Orientalism offers an invaluable antidote. Alam’s insights are indispensable; this book deserves to be widely read.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a member of Spinwatch. His regular commentaries appear on The Fanonite
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Notes
[1] A terms coined by Marshall Hodgson which refers “not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims”
Lifting the Veil on Ayaan Hirsi Ali
February 20, 2007
Every once in a while, a native informer comes along who is willing to affirm his or her own inferiority in order to help the West rationalize its neocolonial grip on the South. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the latest, and one of the more ambitious among them. This 38-year-old Dutch citizen of Somali origin has built a career on her criticisms of Islam, the religion she renounced after the 9/11, for its “brutality”. Through her unrestrained attacks on Islam, her close friendship with far-right Dutch politican Pim Fortuyn and rabid xenophobia, she rode a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment all the way into the Parliament [on a ticket from the right-wing People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD)] only to leave for the United States after an uproar over lies she had told to obtain asylum. Presently, she works for the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. In 2005, Time magazine named Hirsi Ali as one of its 100 Most Influential People of the World.
As her new book, Infidel, scales the charts to reach the New York Times Bestseller list, let us look at who this intrepid feminist really is.
Muslims Taking Over Europe
January 29, 2007
The Muslims “seem to be about to take over Europe,” says Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Euro-American Orientalists. Earlier, this sage had used his phenomenal numerological powers to issue a warning – duly publicized by the Wall Street Journal – that Iran would attack Israel and the Western world on September 22, 2006. Fortunately for us we survived, unlike, so it seems, Lewis’s sanity.
Lewis clearly knows his case is weak, which makes one wonder why he would not speak on the topic he is more intimately familiar with: the Jewish influence on US politics and media. With a son working for America’s most powerful lobby, AIPAC, and his fellow neoconservatives pushing US towards a new war against Israel’s regional adversaries, having already mired it in Iraq, Lewis clearly isn’t oblivious to this fact. Imagine the epithets that would be hurled, however, if someone were to suggest ”the Jews are taking over United States”? Legitimately so, I believe. The majority of American Jews do not share the pro-war, rejectionist stance of the neoconservatives or the organizations like AIPAC, AJC, ADL, CPMJAO etc. Blaming all Jews for the actions of this minority would be just as anti-Semitic as the fearmongering indulged in by Lewis and the Jerusalem Post is Islamophobic.
Alas, as Edward Said pointed out, anti-Arab and Muslim bigotry is the last form of acceptable racism in the West.
Jerusalem Post‘s Islamophobic Crusade
I have a feeling that the Lewis article is not merely an isolated example of the demented views of a sclerotic mind gone off the deep end. Just a short while back, Jerusalem Post had published another article with the appropriately alarmist title Right on!: Say Goodbye to Europe. The article was sent to me for comments by a friend in California who in turn had received it from a lobbyist in DC. Here is from the reply I sent her.
Thank you for this very interesting article. There are many things about it that are noteworthy, and give a clue as to its credibility.
1) The source itself: Jerusalem Post is a right-wing Israeli publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, and in an Israeli society, which, on most issues, stands even to the right of Ariel Sharon, it is the equivalent of Fox News on steriods.
Rand Corporation, the other source cited, is a rightwing think tank which was being ridiculed as far back as the ’60s when in Dr. Strangelove it was referred to as the “Bland Corporation”. In the ’70s it was taken over by the Zionists and the two recent heads of AIPAC, the main Israeli lobby, served as directors at Rand (Condolezza Rice’s first job was at Rand under Steve Rosen).
Mark Steyn, the only commentator cited is a far-right Zionist extremist, who is given columnspace in right-wing publications in Britain and Canada because of his friendship with Conrad Black (Canadian version of Rupert Murdoch, and husband of the Canadian Ann-Coulter, Barbara Amiel) to stir up the type of controversies that boost sales. Here’s his online garbage dump.
2) The various sources cited are sequenced in an way that gives the impression that each supports the premise. No where does it offer a projection of exactly when this calamitous takeover will take place. The figures, such as the population of European muslims, are exaggerated first and then extrapolated to reach the fantastic conclusion that it will double by 2025. First of all, most european countries have highly restrictive immigration laws for individuals coming from Muslim countries. Secondly, most second generation muslims mostly have birthrates only marginally higher than their european counterparts. Thirdly, most muslims don’t come to stay; they come either for higher education, or to make their metaphorical fortunes.
3)The article relies on an assumption that a muslim society is essentially inimical to Judaism or Christianity, and a europe with a muslim majority will become “even less welcoming place for Americans, Israelis and for Jews”. The fantastic nature of the claim (of muslims become a majority) notwithstanding, it ignores european and islamic history, and present day political realities. First of all, Muslims are quite capable of making the distinction between American people and their governments. Americans have always been welcome in Muslim countries and there are few places which have escaped the diffusion of american cultural icons. Even at the height of the bombing of Afghanistan, I personally witnessed ameican journalists welcomed, and walking about freely in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar — a place with strong ethnic and emotional affinities to the Taliban. As for Jews, if they are not as welcome today as people of other ethnicities, it has to do with the fact that Israel and Zionists — by consciously obfuscating the distinction between Judaism and Zionism, and by declaring Israel a state of “all jews” — have distributed the culpability for their crimes over a whole people. As for history, everyone knows that only in Islamic lands did Jews escape the kind of persecution and demonization that they faced everywhere else. Recall, that Jews were welcomed in Islamic lands when they fled Spain to escape the inquisition. As with Americans in Iraq, Israeli actions in Palestine are fast eroding the goodwill that has hitherto survived the vagaries of history.
Let us also not forget that anti-Zionist Jews and Muslims frequently cooperate in Europe and United States, and those Jews — like Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Harold Pinter, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Jennifer Loewenstein — who are openly critical of US-Israeli crimes, are just as popular amongst Muslims as they are here in the West. It is not the ethnicity, it is the active complicity, or failure to make a distinction with the crimes of Israel that accounts for the suspicions otherwise.
4). Lastly, and most importantly, the article tries to identify Israeli interests with American interests. Palestinian Statehood is an Israeli problem. The whole world, save Israel and US, are unanimous in its support, and solution has been on the cards since atleast 1976, blocked by Israeli intransigence and the US veto (at Israels behest). Regarding terror, as the eminent American political scientists, John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago) and Stephen Walt (Dean of Harvard School of Government) have pointed out, “ saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around”. Of course, both professors, like Jimmy Carter – for that matter all muslims – were vilified by the Israel lobby for having the temerity to question Israel’s brutal policies, or its disproportionate influence over US policy. (The Iraq Study Group, and James Baker in particular received the same treatment for reaching similar conclusions).
The New Canard
A friend adds:
There is another curious element to the “new canard”: trying to project the Israeli/zio “fears of a demographic threat” onto Europe. We reject this in toto in Israel-Palestine: it is simply one of the many racist arguments meant to justify ethnic cleansing etc. One of the issues they have is how to justify this to a European public, and what they try to do together with rightists groups is to crank up the fears of “muslims”… If they can sell this in Europe, then their hope is that Europeans will (1) understand what Israel is doing and (2) suppress forces inimical to Israel in Europe. This is a constant theme, and one only has to read the ruminations of the leading zionists (e.g., Emanuele Ottolenghi) in Europe to realize this.
There is also a huge element of hypocrisy — what else is new. Europe allowed massive immigration to do its dirty work. It is a fact that Europe now has a two-layered second class citizenship, i.e., one that has a legal status (primarily from the ex-colonies) and another that operates in the black economy (these are not really citizens, but people expected to be invisible — ghosts). While the immigrants do their menial work and keep quiet some Europeans are happy with the outcome. However, when suddenly this second tier in society raises its head or its voice, then all sorts of phony fears are conjured by the likes of the Daily Mail, Evening Standard, or the Murdoch rags. It is a fact that the dual society suggests that we don’t live in a democracy — people who live and work here for generations also should have rights. At this stage of the game it is not valid to put forth the Le Pen type of recommendations: ethnic cleansing in Europe. Just like we reject apartheid/ethnic cleansing in Palestine, then same thing holds for Europe. Europe has to become a democracy for all its citizens, and the right-wing posturing about new canards, ethnic threats, etc. must be rejected in toto. Mark Steyn, Freund, Lewis — are the purveyors and justifiers of apartheid/ethnic cleansing in Israel, and while they think they are doing something for their cause in Europe, in reality they are poisoning and undermining a serious discussion about the nature of our societies. It is best to leave these smooth bigots out of this equation.
Iconic Burgalry: Lolita and Beyond
December 19, 2006
“The cover of RLT is an iconic burglary. It photographically kidnaps two young Iranian women, while they are busy reading a newspaper, following the parliamentary election in their homeland, and thus participating in the democratic aspirations of their people, and incarcerates them inside a colonial harem” — Hamid Dabashi, in Lolita and Beyond
The following excerpt from Hamid Dabashi’s essay traces the Orientalist genealogy of the representation of Irani girls on the cover of Azar Nafisi’s novel.
By far the most immediate and intriguing aspect of Reading Lolita in Tehran is its cover, which shows two female teenagers bending their heads forward in an obvious gesture of reading something. What exactly is it they are reading, we do not see or know. Over their heads we read “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” The immediate suggestion is very simple. The subject of the book purports to be reading Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” in Tehran, and here are two Iranian-looking teenagers in their headscarves reading (one thing or another). The two young women appear happily engaged with what they are reading, and they do so in such an endearing way that solicits sympathy, and even evokes complicity. What better picture to represent the idea–leaving it to the imagination of the observer that they are indeed reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita ? Right? Wrong.
A moment of pause on this cover begins to reveal something entirely different. Under the banner of Reading Lolita in Tehran, the image and the caption put together–in a classical case best read and analysed by Roland Barthes in his magnificent essay on “The Photographic Message”–suggest the tantalising addition of an Oriental twist to the most notorious case of pedophilia in modern literary imagination. Both as social sign and as literary signifier, the term “Lolita” invokes illicit sex with teenagers. The covered heads of these two Iranian teenagers thus suggestively borrows and insidiously unleashes a phantasmagoric Oriental fantasy and lends it to the most lurid case of pedophilia in modern literary imagination. Under the rubric that he called a photographic paradox, Barthes gave a brilliant diagnosis of how such imitative arts as photography “comprises two messages: a denoted message, which is the analogon itself, and a connoted message, which is the matter in which the society to a certain extent communicates what it thinks of it.” (Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in A Barthes Reader. Hills and Wang, 1982: 195-198).
The denoted message here seems quite obvious: these two young women are reading “Lolita” in Tehran–they are reading (“Lolita”), and they are in Tehran (they look Iranian and they have scarves on their head). The connoted message is equally self-evident: Imagine that–illicit sex with teenagers in an Islamic Republic! How about that, the cover suggestively proposes and asks, can you imagine reading Lolita in Tehran ? Look at these two Oriental Lolitas! The racist implication of the suggestion–as with astonishment asking, “can you even imagine reading that novel in that country?”–competes with its overtly Orientalised pedophilia and confounds the transparency of a marketing strategy that appeals to the most deranged Oriental fantasies of a nation already petrified out of its wits by a ferocious war waged against a phantasmagoric Arab/Muslim male potency that has just castrated the two totem poles of the US empire in New York.
One of the most common clichés of the desirable Orient is the under-aged men and women, staged in numerous Orientalist paintings . Sir Frank Dicksee’s “Leila” (1892) and William Clarke Wontner, “Safie, One of the Three Ladies of Baghdad” (undated) are among the most immediate archeological traces of the cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran, itself a photographic updating of a long tradition in Orientalist painting.
Equally evident in this cover is the whole genre of colonial picture postcards of young Algerian women–staged, produced and bought by the French colonial officers. Malek Alloula has studied these pictures in The Colonial Harem (1995). In his study of these colonially manufactured photographs, Malek Alloula has demonstrated how the pathological colonial phantasm generated and sustained what Barthes has called “the degree zero” of photographic evidence to represent and own the colonised body. I find it prophetic, were it not so obscene, that in the space of the front and back covers of Reading Lolita in Tehran we have an updated pedophiliac Orientalism documented so succinctly: on the front cover the picture of two veiled Iranian teenage “girls” and on the back the endorsement of Professor Humbert Lewis of Orientalism himself.
The evident act of provoking this colonial trait on the cover of Azar Nafisi’s book is not the end of what this cover does. There is more, much more, to it. In fact the case of this cover provides an intriguing twist on Roland Barthes’ binary opposition between the denoted and connoted messages of a photograph and its caption. The twist rests on the fact that the picture of these two teenagers on the cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is in fact lifted from an entirely different context. The original picture from which this cover is excised is lifted off a news report during the parliamentary election of February 2000 in Iran. In the original picture, the two young women are in fact reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat. Azar Nafisi and her publisher may have thought that the world is not looking, and that they can distort the history of a people any way they wish. But the original picture from which this cover steals its idea speaks to the fact of this falsehood.
The cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is an iconic burglary from the press, distorted and staged in a frame for an entirely different purpose than when it was taken. In its distorted form and framing, the picture is cropped so we no longer see the newspaper that the two young female students are holding in their hands, thus creating the illusion that they are “Reading Lolita”–with the scarves of the two teenagers doing the task of “in Tehran.” In the original picture the two young students are obviously on a college campus, reading a newspaper that is reporting the latest results of a major parliamentary election in their country. Cropping the newspaper, their classmates behind them, and a perfectly visible photograph of President Khatami–the iconic representation of the reformist movement–out of the picture and suggesting that the two young women are reading “Lolita” strips them of their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their homeland, ushering them into a colonial harem.
