I’m a Muslim in that I feel allegiance to the Muslims as a people. It’s not a blind patriotism. I don’t feel allegiance to any particular sect, doctrine or government. As a member of this cultural group (or groups), somebody who lives with and sympathises with and loves many believing Muslims and their overwhelmingly warm and humane culture, I recognise that the Qur’an is the source text that is crucial to us. We do with it what we can. The range of what we’ve done throughout history is astounding.
There is the Islam of the Sultan and the Islam of the Sufi. The Sultan’s rulebook religion, the god-idol that fits into the human mind. And the Sufi’s tradition of peaceful wandering, of poverty, of shrines and poetry, of Qawwali songs and intoxication. It is the latter that attracts me, the Sufi’s but not the Sultan’s Islam. The Islam of Hallaj, not of the authorities who mutilated and murdered him.
If you ask which Islam is inspired by the Qur’an, I must reply that both are.
I am Marxist enough to believe that religions are for the most part products of the material conditions from which they arise. Islam arose from a culture of Beduin raiding and enforced tribal consensus, and yet managed to move beyond this to something new, still pointing further to possibilities for future development. I believe it is possible, but by no means inevitable, for Muslims of the present and future to make an Islamic society better than the society made by the Prophet’s companions.
I love the implications of ‘la illaha illa allah’ – there is no god but God – an-noor, al-haqq, the Light, the Real. Nothing worthy of worship except the Real – not money nor nation, not race nor Sultan, not idol nor ideology.
I love the centrality to Islam of tawheed – the unity from which multiplicity arises – and I see evolution and Big Bang theory as expressions of the same principle.
I love ‘alhumdulillah’ – the praise of the Real and gratefulness to it for this mystery and our experience of it.
Sometimes I sense God and the divine patterning emanating from Him. And sometimes I don’t.
I hope without certainty for the afterlife.
The certainty of the static believer and the certainty of the atheist are equally distant from me.
My fundamental position is one of radical agnosis, not a wishy-washy refusal to make my mind up but a recognition that my mind matters little. This state of unknowing is the basis of mysticism and humility and is paradoxically described by some as knowledge. Dhu’ n-Noon said, “To ponder the essence of God is ignorance, and to point to Him is shirk (idolatrous association), and real gnosis is bewilderment.”
What I believe today is not necessarily what I’ll believe tomorrow. If I am unknowable to myself, how can I know God?
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Amis Again
Amis is at it again. In an essay in the London Times he’s had another rabid go at Islamism. (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article2424020.ece) Previously he has told us that the battle of ideas in the Muslim world is over, and that extremism and literalism have won, everywhere. He’s also told us that a doorkeeper at the Aqsa mosque wanted to kill his mother. His evidence? He just knew it to be so.
We should be thankful, perhaps, that there has been a slight development in his position. This time Amis is able to distinguish, just, between Islamists with a comprehensible agenda like Nasrallah and Ismail Hanniyeh on the one hand and nihilists like Bin Laden on the other. He even begins to recognise that, in Wahhabi-nihilist violence, “what we are witnessing is not spiritual certainty so much as spiritual insecurity and spiritual doubt.” Perhaps there’s hope for him. He may be a rancid Islamophobe and a fiction writer crippled by the contempt in which he holds his characters, but to his credit he has opposed the idiocy of the Iraq war, and he is clearly a clever man. It may be that continually spewing venom about Muslims onto paper will lead eventually to a nuanced perspective on the Muslim world.
But it’s more likely that his commitment to Zionism will stop this happening. His latest essay mocks the third world Arabs for being defeated by little Israel. (But last summer’s war with Hizbullah suggests that the age of defeat is coming to an end.) Amis scorns the Arab world for calling the 1948 catastrophe a catastrophe (nakba), and implies that the ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine doesn’t matter, because little Israel covers only 0.6% of Arab land. I’m not sure what he means by Israel here, if the 0.6% of Arab land refers to the borders determined by an imperial United Nations in 1947, or the land captured in 1948, or all of the land now controlled by Israel. The point is that 100% of Palestine has gone. If Amis wants to ignore Palestine and see this in terms of the Arab world, we could ask what percentage of the Anglo-Saxon world is covered by Greater London. The Anglo-Saxon world covers the deserts of Australia and the prairies of Canada, and I’m sure that Greater London makes up less than 0.6% of it. So I presume that if invaders drove out the population of London and made it their exclusive ethnic property, supposedly for all eternity, Amis would not consider this to be a catastrophe. He would sneer at Londoners and their sympathisers for calling it a catastrophe. Of course, London is important not for the amount of space it takes up but for its cultural and economic power. Palestine is holy land for Muslims and Christians too, and is central to Arab history. It is one of the few fertile areas in the Arab world, and it bridges Syria and Egypt.
Amis can’t distinguish between Arab and Muslim, and says the key psychological problem posed to Arabs by the establishment of the Jewish state is that Muslims have been promised victory by God, and through Israel God has humiliated them. This is shoddy thinking, not only because Christian Arabs have been engaged in the struggle against Zionism. It is only in the last ten years that the struggle has been cast, unfortunately, in religious terms. Before that the language employed by most Arabs to describe their problems with Israel was nationalist and anti-imperialist.
Amis describes Islamism as a fanatical death cult. Already he has forgotten his recognition that there are different types of Islamism, but if he means Wahhabi nihilism, I agree with him. The problem is that he wants us to magnify the cult to a status equal to Nazism and Bolshevism. He wants us to ignore the Palestinian tragedy – the refugees, the tens of thousands dead in the West Bank and Gaza and Lebanon, the brutal occupation – and simultaneously to exaggerate al-Qa’ida violence against Westerners to earth-shaking proportions.
We don’t need to call it 9/11, he says, September 11th will do. In fact, just September. The murderousness of it is big enough to be iconic, to wipe everything else out of consciousness. But on another September 11th the democratic government of Chile was toppled by a US-backed military coup, and thousands were tortured and killed. In another September the puppet king of Jordan attacked the Palestinian camps in his country, killing thousands.
For Amis, some killing isn’t worth remembering. Only the killing which afflicts Western cities deserves the force of his literary pyrotechnics.
I previously had a go at Amis here: http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2006/09/save-us-from-amis.html
Terry Eagleton on Amis: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article3024729.ece
We should be thankful, perhaps, that there has been a slight development in his position. This time Amis is able to distinguish, just, between Islamists with a comprehensible agenda like Nasrallah and Ismail Hanniyeh on the one hand and nihilists like Bin Laden on the other. He even begins to recognise that, in Wahhabi-nihilist violence, “what we are witnessing is not spiritual certainty so much as spiritual insecurity and spiritual doubt.” Perhaps there’s hope for him. He may be a rancid Islamophobe and a fiction writer crippled by the contempt in which he holds his characters, but to his credit he has opposed the idiocy of the Iraq war, and he is clearly a clever man. It may be that continually spewing venom about Muslims onto paper will lead eventually to a nuanced perspective on the Muslim world.
But it’s more likely that his commitment to Zionism will stop this happening. His latest essay mocks the third world Arabs for being defeated by little Israel. (But last summer’s war with Hizbullah suggests that the age of defeat is coming to an end.) Amis scorns the Arab world for calling the 1948 catastrophe a catastrophe (nakba), and implies that the ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine doesn’t matter, because little Israel covers only 0.6% of Arab land. I’m not sure what he means by Israel here, if the 0.6% of Arab land refers to the borders determined by an imperial United Nations in 1947, or the land captured in 1948, or all of the land now controlled by Israel. The point is that 100% of Palestine has gone. If Amis wants to ignore Palestine and see this in terms of the Arab world, we could ask what percentage of the Anglo-Saxon world is covered by Greater London. The Anglo-Saxon world covers the deserts of Australia and the prairies of Canada, and I’m sure that Greater London makes up less than 0.6% of it. So I presume that if invaders drove out the population of London and made it their exclusive ethnic property, supposedly for all eternity, Amis would not consider this to be a catastrophe. He would sneer at Londoners and their sympathisers for calling it a catastrophe. Of course, London is important not for the amount of space it takes up but for its cultural and economic power. Palestine is holy land for Muslims and Christians too, and is central to Arab history. It is one of the few fertile areas in the Arab world, and it bridges Syria and Egypt.
Amis can’t distinguish between Arab and Muslim, and says the key psychological problem posed to Arabs by the establishment of the Jewish state is that Muslims have been promised victory by God, and through Israel God has humiliated them. This is shoddy thinking, not only because Christian Arabs have been engaged in the struggle against Zionism. It is only in the last ten years that the struggle has been cast, unfortunately, in religious terms. Before that the language employed by most Arabs to describe their problems with Israel was nationalist and anti-imperialist.
Amis describes Islamism as a fanatical death cult. Already he has forgotten his recognition that there are different types of Islamism, but if he means Wahhabi nihilism, I agree with him. The problem is that he wants us to magnify the cult to a status equal to Nazism and Bolshevism. He wants us to ignore the Palestinian tragedy – the refugees, the tens of thousands dead in the West Bank and Gaza and Lebanon, the brutal occupation – and simultaneously to exaggerate al-Qa’ida violence against Westerners to earth-shaking proportions.
We don’t need to call it 9/11, he says, September 11th will do. In fact, just September. The murderousness of it is big enough to be iconic, to wipe everything else out of consciousness. But on another September 11th the democratic government of Chile was toppled by a US-backed military coup, and thousands were tortured and killed. In another September the puppet king of Jordan attacked the Palestinian camps in his country, killing thousands.
For Amis, some killing isn’t worth remembering. Only the killing which afflicts Western cities deserves the force of his literary pyrotechnics.
I previously had a go at Amis here: http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2006/09/save-us-from-amis.html
Terry Eagleton on Amis: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article3024729.ece
Sunday, September 02, 2007
The End of the Arabs? Part Two
Peter W. Galbraith writes that Iraq is an artificial creation made up of different ethnic groups. This is true, but Iraq is not alone in its artificiality. All states are artificial in that they have been created by historical process and human machination, not by God or nature, and all contain different ethnic groups. More specifically, the centralised nation state in the Middle East (and Africa and much of Asia) is always artificial because the very concept of the nation state is an import from 19th Century Europe. The borders of every Arab state were determined, suddenly, by imperialism, and not by the long processes of war, negotiation and ideological mythmaking that drew borders in Europe. It is this imperialist division of the Arabs which has led to various forms of pan-Arab nationalism.
The definition of ‘Arab’ has expanded over the last hundred and fifty years from describing tribal nomads as opposed to townsmen, to describing the people of the Arabian peninsula, and then to describe all from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf who share the heritage of the Arabic language.
The Ba’ath Party went so far as to find religious significance in ‘Arab,’ as is evident from the slogan ‘One Arab Nation bearing an Eternal Message.’ The ‘risala’ or message is what Arabs would previously have assumed to be the revelation of the Prophet (more often called Messenger in Arabic) Muhammad. In fact, Ba’athism should be seen as one of the twentieth century’s many attempts to compensate for the collapse of traditional religion (Nazism, Zionism, Stalinism, contemporary Wahhabism and hedonist consumerism are others).
In its effort to spiritualise and mythologise Arabism Ba’athism surely takes nationalism to absurd extremes, but it is significant that the Ba’ath Party was founded by a Damascene Christian, and that it appealed in the main to minority communities. Arab nationalism’s potential strength was its inclusive nature, the possibility that Sunni and Shia, Christians and Muslims, urban and rural populations would all identify together as members of the Arab nation. Sadly, it is precisely this inclusiveness that has failed.
If nationalism’s definition of ‘Arab’ had been the widest possible – to engage all those who share the common heritage of the Arabic language in a cooperative enterprise – the Arabs could perhaps have overcome their underdevelopment and imposed borders more easily. They would have had increased political weight for a start, and would not have wasted so much blood and treasure on intra-Arab fighting (or rather, fighting on behalf of the little ruling classes of each state). Given that some Arab countries are blessed with fertile land but not with oil, others with educated people but not with sea ports, an intelligent sharing of resources would have been mutually beneficial.
This cooperation has failed, and there is no Arab state, but the Arab nation exists. The nation, not the state. The nation exists despite the tens of states, and now the attempt to splinter the Arabs further, into yet more mini-states squabbling over sect and ethnic variation, all of them dependent on a corporate-imperial sponsor for survival. It exists in shared language and cultural reference points. Any Arab who travels the great distances of the Arab world will find each corner foreign and also familiar. He will recognise the classic and contemporary music on the radio. He’ll see the same Egyptian films in the cinemas, the same Syrian comedies and historical dramas on the television. He’ll understand the newspaper. He’ll feel welcomed and understood, more than he would, for instance, in a non-Arab Muslim country. Wherever you go in the Arab world the ordinary people want closer economic cooperation between Arab countries, an end to foreign military bases, and justice for the Palestinians. In these times of rising sectarian conflict, it’s important to realise and remember that the Arab nation exists
So why then is Galbraith’s thesis – that even a single unit of Arabism like Iraq needs to disintegrate – to some extent persuasive? Because the same homogenising impulse that animates both contemporary Islamism and late capitalism has perverted Arabism. I’ll repeat it: Arabism only had a chance if it recognised the diversity of the Arab world’s peoples. The inheritors of Arab history, culture and language include blue-eyed Syrians and black Africans in the Sudan. Many of the heroes of the Arabist narrative were not ethnically Arab at all. Salahuddeen al-Ayubbi (Saladin) was a Kurd, Ibn Rushd a Spaniard, Ibn Batuta a Berber. In Iraq, where Arabism has failed most spectacularly, ‘Arab’ even began to morph into ‘ethnically-Arab Sunni Muslim,’ but many of the great Arabic-language writers and scientists have been Christians and Jews, Berbers and Persians.
The moral degeneration of Arabism is painfully evident on Layla Anwar’s blog http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/. We must make allowances for the fact that Mrs. Anwar lives, it seems, in Baghdad, in the midst of a savage occupation and civil war. Most of the Iraqis I meet who have recently left Iraq are traumatised in some way or other, and Mrs. Anwar probably is too. But then, she doesn’t make any allowances for the Kurds or Shia who suffered so much under the previous regime. She calls the Kurds turds (ha ha), and denies that any were massacred by Saddam Hussain. I must say here that by now, although I don’t believe that new states can set anybody free, I support the Kurdish desire for an independent state, at least in Iraqi Kurdistan. Perhaps Iraqi Arabs could have persuaded the Kurds to be part of an Arab state if, from the start, they had treated them as full citizens with full rights to cultural expression. What happened was that they were seen as a non-Arab security problem, and that thousands of their villages were razed, hundreds of thousands of their people subjected to poison gas attacks. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 seems smallscale by comparison. True, it was a dictatorship, backed at the time by the West, that committed these crimes, and relations between ordinary Kurds and Arabs often remained good. But if people like Layla Anwar can’t accept that the oppression even happened, we have an insurmountable obstacle to coexistence. Mrs. Anwar declares in one of her postings that the Kurds are guests in Arab Iraq. How shameful that this supposed nationalist is unaware of her own country’s history. Kurds have been present in Mesopotamia for as long as Semites, and for far longer than Sunni Muslims.
Mrs. Anwar regards ALL Shia forces in her country as Persian, and therefore inauthentic. Again, exclusive nationalist extremism has blinded her to her country’s reality. The Shia are of course a majority of Iraq's people. It is both true and unsurprising that many Shia escaped Saddam’s persecution by crossing the border to Iran, where some founded organisations with Iranian help. Some of these organisations, like al-Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, returned to Iraq after the regime’s fall and are now in powerful positions. But other organisations, like Moqtada Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi, are Arab nationalist as well as Shia, and resent the Iranian-supported organisations. Mrs. Anwar rightly complains about the persecution of Sunnis by Shia militias, but is silent on both the sectarian repression practised by the Ba’ath regime which provoked the Shia revival, and the horrific Wahhabi terrorism to which Shia militia crimes have been retaliation.
As for more general Iranian influence in Iraq, which many Sunni Arabs are unable to accept, this is natural. The word itself, Iraq, comes from the Persian ‘Eraagh’, meaning ‘lowlands.’ The Arabs of southern Iraq have been as influenced by the cooking and religious and philosophical ideas of Persia as much as the Arabs of Syria have been influenced by the Turks and Mediterranean cultures. This doesn’t stop them being Arabs.
Nations (as opposed to states) are imaginary structures. Their borders are porous and membership in them is not exclusive. You can feel allegiance to the Arabs and also to Islam, or Africa, or Christianity, or Shi’ism. Variety and diversity should be the strength and richness of the Arabs, but many Arabs are ill with the centralised state disease, the rage for conformity which made Saddam Hussain brutalise the majority of Iraq’s people. When we replace humane, inclusive nationalism with exclusive totaltarian police states, we have lost nationalism as a positive force.
There are still glimmers of light. Important sections of Sunni Iraqi opinion have turned decisively against Wahhabism and Ba’athism. The vast majority of Shia feel Iraqi and Arab. But the Iraqis and other Arabs will be unable to work cooperatively until they honestly confront sectarianism and the class oppression which it usually masks, until they are able to sympathise with the history of the other, until they can think beyond the nation state.
The definition of ‘Arab’ has expanded over the last hundred and fifty years from describing tribal nomads as opposed to townsmen, to describing the people of the Arabian peninsula, and then to describe all from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf who share the heritage of the Arabic language.
The Ba’ath Party went so far as to find religious significance in ‘Arab,’ as is evident from the slogan ‘One Arab Nation bearing an Eternal Message.’ The ‘risala’ or message is what Arabs would previously have assumed to be the revelation of the Prophet (more often called Messenger in Arabic) Muhammad. In fact, Ba’athism should be seen as one of the twentieth century’s many attempts to compensate for the collapse of traditional religion (Nazism, Zionism, Stalinism, contemporary Wahhabism and hedonist consumerism are others).
In its effort to spiritualise and mythologise Arabism Ba’athism surely takes nationalism to absurd extremes, but it is significant that the Ba’ath Party was founded by a Damascene Christian, and that it appealed in the main to minority communities. Arab nationalism’s potential strength was its inclusive nature, the possibility that Sunni and Shia, Christians and Muslims, urban and rural populations would all identify together as members of the Arab nation. Sadly, it is precisely this inclusiveness that has failed.
If nationalism’s definition of ‘Arab’ had been the widest possible – to engage all those who share the common heritage of the Arabic language in a cooperative enterprise – the Arabs could perhaps have overcome their underdevelopment and imposed borders more easily. They would have had increased political weight for a start, and would not have wasted so much blood and treasure on intra-Arab fighting (or rather, fighting on behalf of the little ruling classes of each state). Given that some Arab countries are blessed with fertile land but not with oil, others with educated people but not with sea ports, an intelligent sharing of resources would have been mutually beneficial.
This cooperation has failed, and there is no Arab state, but the Arab nation exists. The nation, not the state. The nation exists despite the tens of states, and now the attempt to splinter the Arabs further, into yet more mini-states squabbling over sect and ethnic variation, all of them dependent on a corporate-imperial sponsor for survival. It exists in shared language and cultural reference points. Any Arab who travels the great distances of the Arab world will find each corner foreign and also familiar. He will recognise the classic and contemporary music on the radio. He’ll see the same Egyptian films in the cinemas, the same Syrian comedies and historical dramas on the television. He’ll understand the newspaper. He’ll feel welcomed and understood, more than he would, for instance, in a non-Arab Muslim country. Wherever you go in the Arab world the ordinary people want closer economic cooperation between Arab countries, an end to foreign military bases, and justice for the Palestinians. In these times of rising sectarian conflict, it’s important to realise and remember that the Arab nation exists
So why then is Galbraith’s thesis – that even a single unit of Arabism like Iraq needs to disintegrate – to some extent persuasive? Because the same homogenising impulse that animates both contemporary Islamism and late capitalism has perverted Arabism. I’ll repeat it: Arabism only had a chance if it recognised the diversity of the Arab world’s peoples. The inheritors of Arab history, culture and language include blue-eyed Syrians and black Africans in the Sudan. Many of the heroes of the Arabist narrative were not ethnically Arab at all. Salahuddeen al-Ayubbi (Saladin) was a Kurd, Ibn Rushd a Spaniard, Ibn Batuta a Berber. In Iraq, where Arabism has failed most spectacularly, ‘Arab’ even began to morph into ‘ethnically-Arab Sunni Muslim,’ but many of the great Arabic-language writers and scientists have been Christians and Jews, Berbers and Persians.
The moral degeneration of Arabism is painfully evident on Layla Anwar’s blog http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/. We must make allowances for the fact that Mrs. Anwar lives, it seems, in Baghdad, in the midst of a savage occupation and civil war. Most of the Iraqis I meet who have recently left Iraq are traumatised in some way or other, and Mrs. Anwar probably is too. But then, she doesn’t make any allowances for the Kurds or Shia who suffered so much under the previous regime. She calls the Kurds turds (ha ha), and denies that any were massacred by Saddam Hussain. I must say here that by now, although I don’t believe that new states can set anybody free, I support the Kurdish desire for an independent state, at least in Iraqi Kurdistan. Perhaps Iraqi Arabs could have persuaded the Kurds to be part of an Arab state if, from the start, they had treated them as full citizens with full rights to cultural expression. What happened was that they were seen as a non-Arab security problem, and that thousands of their villages were razed, hundreds of thousands of their people subjected to poison gas attacks. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 seems smallscale by comparison. True, it was a dictatorship, backed at the time by the West, that committed these crimes, and relations between ordinary Kurds and Arabs often remained good. But if people like Layla Anwar can’t accept that the oppression even happened, we have an insurmountable obstacle to coexistence. Mrs. Anwar declares in one of her postings that the Kurds are guests in Arab Iraq. How shameful that this supposed nationalist is unaware of her own country’s history. Kurds have been present in Mesopotamia for as long as Semites, and for far longer than Sunni Muslims.
Mrs. Anwar regards ALL Shia forces in her country as Persian, and therefore inauthentic. Again, exclusive nationalist extremism has blinded her to her country’s reality. The Shia are of course a majority of Iraq's people. It is both true and unsurprising that many Shia escaped Saddam’s persecution by crossing the border to Iran, where some founded organisations with Iranian help. Some of these organisations, like al-Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, returned to Iraq after the regime’s fall and are now in powerful positions. But other organisations, like Moqtada Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi, are Arab nationalist as well as Shia, and resent the Iranian-supported organisations. Mrs. Anwar rightly complains about the persecution of Sunnis by Shia militias, but is silent on both the sectarian repression practised by the Ba’ath regime which provoked the Shia revival, and the horrific Wahhabi terrorism to which Shia militia crimes have been retaliation.
As for more general Iranian influence in Iraq, which many Sunni Arabs are unable to accept, this is natural. The word itself, Iraq, comes from the Persian ‘Eraagh’, meaning ‘lowlands.’ The Arabs of southern Iraq have been as influenced by the cooking and religious and philosophical ideas of Persia as much as the Arabs of Syria have been influenced by the Turks and Mediterranean cultures. This doesn’t stop them being Arabs.
Nations (as opposed to states) are imaginary structures. Their borders are porous and membership in them is not exclusive. You can feel allegiance to the Arabs and also to Islam, or Africa, or Christianity, or Shi’ism. Variety and diversity should be the strength and richness of the Arabs, but many Arabs are ill with the centralised state disease, the rage for conformity which made Saddam Hussain brutalise the majority of Iraq’s people. When we replace humane, inclusive nationalism with exclusive totaltarian police states, we have lost nationalism as a positive force.
There are still glimmers of light. Important sections of Sunni Iraqi opinion have turned decisively against Wahhabism and Ba’athism. The vast majority of Shia feel Iraqi and Arab. But the Iraqis and other Arabs will be unable to work cooperatively until they honestly confront sectarianism and the class oppression which it usually masks, until they are able to sympathise with the history of the other, until they can think beyond the nation state.
Monday, August 27, 2007
The End of the Arabs? Part One
Peter W. Galbraith’s book ‘The End of Iraq’ argues the initially persuasive thesis that Iraqis have already divided themselves into three separate countries roughly corresponding to the Ottoman provinces of Basra (the Shii Arab south), Baghdad (the Sunni Arab centre) and Mosul (the Kurdish north), and that American attempts to keep the country unified are bound to fail. I agree wholeheartedly with Galbraith’s call for America to withdraw from Iraq – America is incapable of stopping the civil war, and is in fact exacerbating it. The rest of his argument is much more debatable.
For a start, he minimises the extent to which the US occupation has contributed to the disintegration of Iraq. I do not wish to deny the sectarian and ethnic fractures which exist in Iraq and other Arab countries, but it is reasonable to expect that any country, having suffered dictatorship, war, sanctions, and then the overnight collapse of all its institutions, would enter a period of chaos and division. Galbraith accurately records Western support for Saddam Hussain throughout the Iran-Iraq war, when he was gassing Kurds, and the American refusal to intervene when Republican Guards were slaughtering southern Shia in 1991 (the massacres happened under the eyes of American forces occupying the south at the end of the Kuwait war). He describes the criminal failure in 2003 of the occupying forces to stop the looting and burning of every ministry except the oil ministry, of military arsenals and even yellowcake uranium stocks the Americans claimed to be so concerned about in the run-up to the invasion, and of the national museum and national library. (He doesn’t examine claims made at the time by Robert Fisk and others that masked men with Kuwaiti accents were bussed in to certain ministries to set fires professionally.) The attack on Iraq’s – and the world’s – heritage is of course a cultural crime far greater than the despicable Taliban destruction of the Bamyan Buddha statues. Bombing and looting ravaged what was left of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure. The Iraqi state was destroyed within the first week of occupation, long before the sectarian killing began.
Galbraith charitably calls incompetence what may more realistically be seen as deliberate divide and rule policies. Certainly arrogance, stupidity and corruption have played a large role – the arrogance and stupidity which allowed Americans to park their tanks on the ruins of Sumerian cities; the corruption which allowed Halliburton to profit by the billion from reconstruction which never happened, and which put Americans in their early twenties, and with no knowledge or experience of Iraq, in charge of entire sectors of the Iraqi economy simply because they were members of the right ‘think tank’ or prayer group. At a certain point, however, it seems naïve to put all the mistakes down to incompetence. From the very beginning it was obvious to me and the people I talk to that a violent assault on an Iraq already crippled by war and sanctions would not result in a prosperous, unified democracy. It was obvious that every ‘mistake’ made would further damage national unity. I and my friends are not geniuses, and unlike the neo-conservative and Zionist architects of the invasion, we aren’t paid to study the Middle East.
The immediate and sweeping dissolution of the Ba’ath Party, the army and security forces made it inevitable that people would look to the nearest militia or criminal gang to provide security and material supplies. Before long each area had its dominant gang, and the country was a free competition zone for Shia, Sunni, takfiri, and Kurdish militias, American and British troops, South African and Latin American mercenaries, imported Wahabi nihilists, kidnappers and drug traffickers, and so on. John Negroponte, who had made a career setting up fascist death squads to destabilise leftist democracies in Latin America, was brought in to organise Kurdish and Shia militia into ‘police’ to pacify militantly Sunni towns. Meanwhile, Bremer at one stroke abolished Iraqi economic independence, opening every sector of Iraq to privatisation and foreign control.
These supposed 'mistakes' give us a much clearer picture of the real purposes of the invasion than all the journalistic psychoanalysis of a traumatised post-September 11th America or of its ignorant president. The war was designed as corporate rape of a resource-rich country. Having the Iraqis split into tiny units, each fighting the other and looking for an external sponsor, guarantees that there will be no unified Iraqi force to pose a serious threat to the corporations or their imperial and Zionist facilitators.
Despite the hatreds unleashed by the sectarian war, the number of Arab Iraqis I’ve met who want the disintegration of their country to be formalised is precisely zero. The neat picture ‘The End of Iraq’ presents of three clearcut post-Iraq zones is not realistic. Iraq has splintered into smaller pieces than the three zones Galbraith describes. In the south, the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army battle for supremacy. In al-Anbar, the battle is between the tribes, the Ba’ath, and al-Qa’ida. Baghdad, supposedly part of the Sunni zone, has a Shii majority. Mosul is a largely Sunni Arab city with a largely Kurdish hinterland. For these cities and other mixed areas such as Diyala and Babil a formalised partition would lead to greatly intensified ethnic cleansing. The horrific bomb attacks which recently killed 500 Yezidi Kurds happened within the context of a forthcoming referendum on which northern areas will join the Kurdish zone.
And if Iraq is allowed to formally splinter, where does the break-up stop? The Arabs of the Jezira in eastern Syria have more in common ethnically, culturally and tribally with the Arabs of al-Anbar than they do with the urban Levantine Arabs of western Syria. There are almost two million Iraqi refugees in Syria, most in Damascus, very many of them Sunnis who have nowhere to return to if Iraq is not put back together. An ethnic-sectarian Sunni state would also pull at the fabric of Jordan, as artificial a state as they come with its three populations of urban Iraqi Sunnis, Jordanian Beduin, and Palestinian refugees. And in Syria, if the Sunnis were to give their allegiance to a sectarian identity, what would stop the Alawis demanding a state in the north west, or the Druze in the Hauran? Which would bring us back to an early French imperial plan for Syria. I could go on, ad infinitum, to prospects for the division of Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and further afield.
Division is a disaster for all but imperialists. If the map must be changed, we should aim for fewer state units, not more. Yet Arabism as manifested so far has clearly failed. I’ll examine why in part two.
For a start, he minimises the extent to which the US occupation has contributed to the disintegration of Iraq. I do not wish to deny the sectarian and ethnic fractures which exist in Iraq and other Arab countries, but it is reasonable to expect that any country, having suffered dictatorship, war, sanctions, and then the overnight collapse of all its institutions, would enter a period of chaos and division. Galbraith accurately records Western support for Saddam Hussain throughout the Iran-Iraq war, when he was gassing Kurds, and the American refusal to intervene when Republican Guards were slaughtering southern Shia in 1991 (the massacres happened under the eyes of American forces occupying the south at the end of the Kuwait war). He describes the criminal failure in 2003 of the occupying forces to stop the looting and burning of every ministry except the oil ministry, of military arsenals and even yellowcake uranium stocks the Americans claimed to be so concerned about in the run-up to the invasion, and of the national museum and national library. (He doesn’t examine claims made at the time by Robert Fisk and others that masked men with Kuwaiti accents were bussed in to certain ministries to set fires professionally.) The attack on Iraq’s – and the world’s – heritage is of course a cultural crime far greater than the despicable Taliban destruction of the Bamyan Buddha statues. Bombing and looting ravaged what was left of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure. The Iraqi state was destroyed within the first week of occupation, long before the sectarian killing began.
Galbraith charitably calls incompetence what may more realistically be seen as deliberate divide and rule policies. Certainly arrogance, stupidity and corruption have played a large role – the arrogance and stupidity which allowed Americans to park their tanks on the ruins of Sumerian cities; the corruption which allowed Halliburton to profit by the billion from reconstruction which never happened, and which put Americans in their early twenties, and with no knowledge or experience of Iraq, in charge of entire sectors of the Iraqi economy simply because they were members of the right ‘think tank’ or prayer group. At a certain point, however, it seems naïve to put all the mistakes down to incompetence. From the very beginning it was obvious to me and the people I talk to that a violent assault on an Iraq already crippled by war and sanctions would not result in a prosperous, unified democracy. It was obvious that every ‘mistake’ made would further damage national unity. I and my friends are not geniuses, and unlike the neo-conservative and Zionist architects of the invasion, we aren’t paid to study the Middle East.
The immediate and sweeping dissolution of the Ba’ath Party, the army and security forces made it inevitable that people would look to the nearest militia or criminal gang to provide security and material supplies. Before long each area had its dominant gang, and the country was a free competition zone for Shia, Sunni, takfiri, and Kurdish militias, American and British troops, South African and Latin American mercenaries, imported Wahabi nihilists, kidnappers and drug traffickers, and so on. John Negroponte, who had made a career setting up fascist death squads to destabilise leftist democracies in Latin America, was brought in to organise Kurdish and Shia militia into ‘police’ to pacify militantly Sunni towns. Meanwhile, Bremer at one stroke abolished Iraqi economic independence, opening every sector of Iraq to privatisation and foreign control.
These supposed 'mistakes' give us a much clearer picture of the real purposes of the invasion than all the journalistic psychoanalysis of a traumatised post-September 11th America or of its ignorant president. The war was designed as corporate rape of a resource-rich country. Having the Iraqis split into tiny units, each fighting the other and looking for an external sponsor, guarantees that there will be no unified Iraqi force to pose a serious threat to the corporations or their imperial and Zionist facilitators.
Despite the hatreds unleashed by the sectarian war, the number of Arab Iraqis I’ve met who want the disintegration of their country to be formalised is precisely zero. The neat picture ‘The End of Iraq’ presents of three clearcut post-Iraq zones is not realistic. Iraq has splintered into smaller pieces than the three zones Galbraith describes. In the south, the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army battle for supremacy. In al-Anbar, the battle is between the tribes, the Ba’ath, and al-Qa’ida. Baghdad, supposedly part of the Sunni zone, has a Shii majority. Mosul is a largely Sunni Arab city with a largely Kurdish hinterland. For these cities and other mixed areas such as Diyala and Babil a formalised partition would lead to greatly intensified ethnic cleansing. The horrific bomb attacks which recently killed 500 Yezidi Kurds happened within the context of a forthcoming referendum on which northern areas will join the Kurdish zone.
And if Iraq is allowed to formally splinter, where does the break-up stop? The Arabs of the Jezira in eastern Syria have more in common ethnically, culturally and tribally with the Arabs of al-Anbar than they do with the urban Levantine Arabs of western Syria. There are almost two million Iraqi refugees in Syria, most in Damascus, very many of them Sunnis who have nowhere to return to if Iraq is not put back together. An ethnic-sectarian Sunni state would also pull at the fabric of Jordan, as artificial a state as they come with its three populations of urban Iraqi Sunnis, Jordanian Beduin, and Palestinian refugees. And in Syria, if the Sunnis were to give their allegiance to a sectarian identity, what would stop the Alawis demanding a state in the north west, or the Druze in the Hauran? Which would bring us back to an early French imperial plan for Syria. I could go on, ad infinitum, to prospects for the division of Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and further afield.
Division is a disaster for all but imperialists. If the map must be changed, we should aim for fewer state units, not more. Yet Arabism as manifested so far has clearly failed. I’ll examine why in part two.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
"You Muslims!"
This summer my son and I spent a few days in the house of a friend of mine from university days, a friend from a very different background, but a very good friend, very intelligent and very funny, who has always treated me with respect and a great deal of generosity. It was wonderful to see him. The problem was his girlfriend. (Now ex-girlfriend, so I dare write this without jeopardising the friendship).
The first thing she said to my eight-year-old son, after “hello,” was, “Do you feel uncomfortable because I’m not all covered up?” Some minutes later at the dinner table she squeezed her eyes at him and then me, and asked, “What nationality are you?” I should stress here that I’m a native speaker of English, and that my son, although he’s never lived in Britain, has inherited my proper British accent. By now it was apparent that there was an obsessional block in this woman’s head.
A little later my friend (as he does) said something silly about gay people. The girlfriend cast worried glances at me, then my son, and said in the childish tone some people adopt when instructing children, “I think gay people are great!” These educative comments continued, quite irrelevantly. The most absurd, aimed meaningfully at my little boy, was “I really enjoy getting drunk sometimes!” Normally I would argue back, but I was in the very uncomfortable position of being a guest in my friend’s house. Anyway, my son was grown-up enough to understand that this strange woman had a strange agenda.
By the end of the meal she told me, “I think you should bring your daughter next time. It would be fairer.” I had actually offered to bring my daughter to London, but she preferred to go straight to our destination in Scotland with her mother. And she’s only five, so long walks around London would not have been practical.
Later still the girlfriend asked, out of the blue, “Do you have to pray eight times a day?”
This is a woman who achieved a first class degree at Oxford.
Next morning at breakfast the talk was of the alleged car bombs discovered in central London (apparently containing explosives and nails but no detonators). I said the way terrorism works is by causing disproportionate fear, so I was more scared that my son would be hurt by a bomb as we walked through London that day than by a car, although logically I knew he was more likely to be hit by a car. “What?” she exploded (her detonator was well attached). “How can you possibly say it’s disproportionate?” A few moments later she was shouting at me. At this point I felt I had to defend myself, so I said my Arab-Islamic background appeared to be provoking her to false assumptions. “Well,” she said. “You haven’t cleared away your dishes. It’s obvious your wife does all the work.”
And there we have it. From her comments we can piece together quite easily what was going through her mind: this Arab Muslim, or more specifically his still malleable son, needs to be educated on the following points: covered women, homosexuality, alcohol, favouritism of sons over daughters, terrorism, the domestic drudgery enforced on women. At no point did she bother asking me what I thought about any of these issues, or what the people thought in the various Muslim countries I’ve lived in. She believed she already knew.
I don’t have a problem with someone initiating a discussion on any contentious Arab or Muslim issue, so long as they genuinely want to listen to what I say. Curiosity is a good thing. I often stop people in the street, especially in London, and ask them what language they’re speaking, where they’re from. I’ve never offended anyone because it’s clear that I’m really interested, and because if I discover differences of perspective or tradition I consider these differences to be enriching (a very traditional Muslim position this, not trendy multiculturalism. The Prophet said, “al-ikhtilaf rahmeh,” meaning “Difference of opinion is a blessing.”)
Problems arise when your interlocutor is motivated not by curiosity but by the certainty of prejudice. My friend’s ex-girlfriend didn’t need to ask my position on women’s rights because she already knows what people like me think of women’s rights. Whatever I said about bombs in London was irrelevant; she knew what murderousness was in my mind.
And when people immediately jump to, and return to, the same Daily Mail – Fox News – Ayaan Hirsi Ali Islamophobic buttons, you begin to wonder what the point is in having a conversation. On the last day of our meditation retreat (see previous posting), when we were allowed to talk, a man opened a conversation with my wife with the words: “The Qur’an says Muslim men are allowed to hit their wives.” I don’t think the man meant to hurt, but there we are, there’s the climate. Muslims in contact with Westerners now face this all the time, whatever their level of education or commitment to their religion. I don’t think that people of Hindu background are immediately asked to justify widow-burning or the caste system. Most Westerners aren’t even aware of a connection between Hinduism and the caste system, and if they’re educated enough to know about it, they also know that religious Hindus like Ghandi campaigned against it. If someone is wearing a cross you don’t immediately express outrage at Saint Paul’s order to burn witches, or the Biblical prohibition of men lying with men.
I recognise this Islamophobic racism because I’ve met it so often. Recently an Australian resident in Oman had a rant at me. “What you Muslims have to realise,” he screamed, “is that killing Muslims who convert to other religions just isn’t on!” I tried to explain that I have no desire to kill anyone for converting to anything, but he literally couldn’t hear me. He knew, much better than I did, that I hated ex-Muslims, women, gays, Jews, Christians, the West. “But I’m from the West!” I spluttered. To no avail. He didn’t listen, and he felt he didn’t need to.
A few days ago a white man arrived at Regent’s Park Mosque, the most important mosque in Britain, and asked to speak to an imam. An attendant took him to the imam and hurried off to bring tea and biscuits, at which point the white man started beating the imam about the head, and then stuck his fingers deep into the imam’s eyes. The imam is now in a critical state in hospital.
When a Muslim writer condemned the attack on the Guardian’s ‘comment is free’ site, tens of readers posted words to the effect of ‘what do you expect, terrorist? If you’d contributed anything but bombs to the world you wouldn’t be attacked!’
Bombs detonated by Wahabi nihilists have killed far more people in Muslim countries than in the West – in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria and elsewhere. When their bombs explode in London or Madrid Muslims are double victims, because they are killed and maimed by the bombs like any other passer-by, and because the hatred of the natives towards them intensifies and becomes more widespread with each attack or alleged plot.
Two of the four bombs which exploded in London on the 7th July 2005 were placed in heavily Muslim areas of the city – Edgware Road, the centre of the Arab community, and Aldgate, the centre of the Bengali community.
This summer’s bomb scares in London and Glasgow led to an immediate upsurge in violence against British Muslims, including firebombings of mosques and a car-ramming of a Muslim-owned shop in Glasgow.
Immediately after September 11th a taboo was imposed in the United States on asking why the attacks happened. At school in Britain I was encouraged to ask why Naziism took over Germany. No-one accused the history teacher of being a Nazi. But in the US after 9/11, linking the attacks to American foreign policy was tantamount to justifying terrorism. For a while there was more space for debate in Britain, but the climate is changing. For many, the question is no longer ‘why are we violently involved in the Muslim world?’, but ‘what is wrong with Islam?’
There is a connection between the Islamophobia of my friend’s ex-girlfriend and violent attacks on British Muslims, in that both arise from essentialising assumptions of Muslims being ‘all the same,’ and of all Muslim violence arising outside of any context, simply because Muslims are violent. Politicians (like Jack Straw, see my posting Hijab/Niqab/Blab at http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html ) and the media bear a lot of responsibility for this. The media talks about ‘Islamic terror,’ but doesn’t describe Zionist attacks motivated by belief in the apartheid Jewish state as ‘Jewish terror.’ It doesn’t talk about the ‘Christian Crusade in Iraq,’ although many supporters of the invasion in America think of it in these terms. More fundamentally, in the absence of coherent oppositional politics (in both the West and the Muslim world) it has been easy for our rulers to shift the debate in essentialist directions. Forget about power and money, bombs are exploding in Baghdad, Jenin, and London because the Muslims are evil, or the Shia, or the Crusaders, or the Jews. So we all hurtle, blaming each other, to the abyss. The rulers hunker down in their gated communities while the proles fight outside.
In a later posting I will ignore taboos and ask why a tiny minority of British Muslims are attracted to al-Qa’ida ideology, and why they might even seek to kill their fellow citizens.
The first thing she said to my eight-year-old son, after “hello,” was, “Do you feel uncomfortable because I’m not all covered up?” Some minutes later at the dinner table she squeezed her eyes at him and then me, and asked, “What nationality are you?” I should stress here that I’m a native speaker of English, and that my son, although he’s never lived in Britain, has inherited my proper British accent. By now it was apparent that there was an obsessional block in this woman’s head.
A little later my friend (as he does) said something silly about gay people. The girlfriend cast worried glances at me, then my son, and said in the childish tone some people adopt when instructing children, “I think gay people are great!” These educative comments continued, quite irrelevantly. The most absurd, aimed meaningfully at my little boy, was “I really enjoy getting drunk sometimes!” Normally I would argue back, but I was in the very uncomfortable position of being a guest in my friend’s house. Anyway, my son was grown-up enough to understand that this strange woman had a strange agenda.
By the end of the meal she told me, “I think you should bring your daughter next time. It would be fairer.” I had actually offered to bring my daughter to London, but she preferred to go straight to our destination in Scotland with her mother. And she’s only five, so long walks around London would not have been practical.
Later still the girlfriend asked, out of the blue, “Do you have to pray eight times a day?”
This is a woman who achieved a first class degree at Oxford.
Next morning at breakfast the talk was of the alleged car bombs discovered in central London (apparently containing explosives and nails but no detonators). I said the way terrorism works is by causing disproportionate fear, so I was more scared that my son would be hurt by a bomb as we walked through London that day than by a car, although logically I knew he was more likely to be hit by a car. “What?” she exploded (her detonator was well attached). “How can you possibly say it’s disproportionate?” A few moments later she was shouting at me. At this point I felt I had to defend myself, so I said my Arab-Islamic background appeared to be provoking her to false assumptions. “Well,” she said. “You haven’t cleared away your dishes. It’s obvious your wife does all the work.”
And there we have it. From her comments we can piece together quite easily what was going through her mind: this Arab Muslim, or more specifically his still malleable son, needs to be educated on the following points: covered women, homosexuality, alcohol, favouritism of sons over daughters, terrorism, the domestic drudgery enforced on women. At no point did she bother asking me what I thought about any of these issues, or what the people thought in the various Muslim countries I’ve lived in. She believed she already knew.
I don’t have a problem with someone initiating a discussion on any contentious Arab or Muslim issue, so long as they genuinely want to listen to what I say. Curiosity is a good thing. I often stop people in the street, especially in London, and ask them what language they’re speaking, where they’re from. I’ve never offended anyone because it’s clear that I’m really interested, and because if I discover differences of perspective or tradition I consider these differences to be enriching (a very traditional Muslim position this, not trendy multiculturalism. The Prophet said, “al-ikhtilaf rahmeh,” meaning “Difference of opinion is a blessing.”)
Problems arise when your interlocutor is motivated not by curiosity but by the certainty of prejudice. My friend’s ex-girlfriend didn’t need to ask my position on women’s rights because she already knows what people like me think of women’s rights. Whatever I said about bombs in London was irrelevant; she knew what murderousness was in my mind.
And when people immediately jump to, and return to, the same Daily Mail – Fox News – Ayaan Hirsi Ali Islamophobic buttons, you begin to wonder what the point is in having a conversation. On the last day of our meditation retreat (see previous posting), when we were allowed to talk, a man opened a conversation with my wife with the words: “The Qur’an says Muslim men are allowed to hit their wives.” I don’t think the man meant to hurt, but there we are, there’s the climate. Muslims in contact with Westerners now face this all the time, whatever their level of education or commitment to their religion. I don’t think that people of Hindu background are immediately asked to justify widow-burning or the caste system. Most Westerners aren’t even aware of a connection between Hinduism and the caste system, and if they’re educated enough to know about it, they also know that religious Hindus like Ghandi campaigned against it. If someone is wearing a cross you don’t immediately express outrage at Saint Paul’s order to burn witches, or the Biblical prohibition of men lying with men.
I recognise this Islamophobic racism because I’ve met it so often. Recently an Australian resident in Oman had a rant at me. “What you Muslims have to realise,” he screamed, “is that killing Muslims who convert to other religions just isn’t on!” I tried to explain that I have no desire to kill anyone for converting to anything, but he literally couldn’t hear me. He knew, much better than I did, that I hated ex-Muslims, women, gays, Jews, Christians, the West. “But I’m from the West!” I spluttered. To no avail. He didn’t listen, and he felt he didn’t need to.
A few days ago a white man arrived at Regent’s Park Mosque, the most important mosque in Britain, and asked to speak to an imam. An attendant took him to the imam and hurried off to bring tea and biscuits, at which point the white man started beating the imam about the head, and then stuck his fingers deep into the imam’s eyes. The imam is now in a critical state in hospital.
When a Muslim writer condemned the attack on the Guardian’s ‘comment is free’ site, tens of readers posted words to the effect of ‘what do you expect, terrorist? If you’d contributed anything but bombs to the world you wouldn’t be attacked!’
Bombs detonated by Wahabi nihilists have killed far more people in Muslim countries than in the West – in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria and elsewhere. When their bombs explode in London or Madrid Muslims are double victims, because they are killed and maimed by the bombs like any other passer-by, and because the hatred of the natives towards them intensifies and becomes more widespread with each attack or alleged plot.
Two of the four bombs which exploded in London on the 7th July 2005 were placed in heavily Muslim areas of the city – Edgware Road, the centre of the Arab community, and Aldgate, the centre of the Bengali community.
This summer’s bomb scares in London and Glasgow led to an immediate upsurge in violence against British Muslims, including firebombings of mosques and a car-ramming of a Muslim-owned shop in Glasgow.
Immediately after September 11th a taboo was imposed in the United States on asking why the attacks happened. At school in Britain I was encouraged to ask why Naziism took over Germany. No-one accused the history teacher of being a Nazi. But in the US after 9/11, linking the attacks to American foreign policy was tantamount to justifying terrorism. For a while there was more space for debate in Britain, but the climate is changing. For many, the question is no longer ‘why are we violently involved in the Muslim world?’, but ‘what is wrong with Islam?’
There is a connection between the Islamophobia of my friend’s ex-girlfriend and violent attacks on British Muslims, in that both arise from essentialising assumptions of Muslims being ‘all the same,’ and of all Muslim violence arising outside of any context, simply because Muslims are violent. Politicians (like Jack Straw, see my posting Hijab/Niqab/Blab at http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html ) and the media bear a lot of responsibility for this. The media talks about ‘Islamic terror,’ but doesn’t describe Zionist attacks motivated by belief in the apartheid Jewish state as ‘Jewish terror.’ It doesn’t talk about the ‘Christian Crusade in Iraq,’ although many supporters of the invasion in America think of it in these terms. More fundamentally, in the absence of coherent oppositional politics (in both the West and the Muslim world) it has been easy for our rulers to shift the debate in essentialist directions. Forget about power and money, bombs are exploding in Baghdad, Jenin, and London because the Muslims are evil, or the Shia, or the Crusaders, or the Jews. So we all hurtle, blaming each other, to the abyss. The rulers hunker down in their gated communities while the proles fight outside.
In a later posting I will ignore taboos and ask why a tiny minority of British Muslims are attracted to al-Qa’ida ideology, and why they might even seek to kill their fellow citizens.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
A Step Forward
Last summer I spent seven days on a ten-day meditation retreat in England. With the background of the attack on Lebanon, it formed the matter of my first posting on this blog, called ‘Taking a Step Back from Taking a Step Back.’ (see http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html) Although I found the meditation itself fascinating and beneficial, the atmosphere at the retreat was poor, and the ‘teaching’ of the guru, Indian industrialist Goenka, was dogmatic, undemocratic and unintelligent. Even slightly cultlike: silence was demanded, but still we heard Goenka chanting on cassette as we tried to meditate; linguistic thought was bad, we weren’t allowed to make notes, read, or ask questions considered impractical, yet listening to Goenka talk for an hour and a half on video every evening was compulsory. Goenkaism makes a big deal of not being a religion, of Buddhism not being a religion, but in actuality it has the full set of taboos and set explanations demanding belief, from reincarnation to the leader figure, to qualify it as a religion in the worst possible sense. I wasn’t looking for a new religion, but for an opportunity to learn more about meditation in a supportive environment. So I left on the seventh day, and I’m very happy I did. I’m also glad I spent the seven days there, but Goenkaism left a bad taste in my mouth.
This summer my wife and I spent a week on a meditation retreat at Gaia House in Devon. It has left me questioning all tastes. I mean it was good.
In her opening talk, Martine Batchelor advised retreatants to “be your own teacher.” That sentence alone is heresy for Goenkaism. It set the tone for the week.
Stephen Batchelor, author of “Buddhism Without Beliefs” and former Tibetan and Korean monk, presented a totally demystified and secularised approach to Buddhism. He described reincarnation and karma as part of the Buddha’s historical context in ancient Indian culture rather than as ideas intrinsic to the Buddha’s thought, and enlightenment as an attainable – or to use a metaphor he’d prefer, arrivable-at – goal, a way of experiencing that it is entirely possible to glimpse or inhabit, however temporarily. Batchelor’s Buddhism isn’t a series of propositions to be believed, but a practice, underwritten by a profound agnosticism which is both non-theistic and non-atheistic. Unlike Goenka, Batchelor doesn’t ‘explain’ for you what you’re supposed to be experiencing. Rather, he encourages you to heighten and intensify your state of questioning. Any open-minded Muslim, Christian or atheist could feel at home in this environment. I was fully engaged, intellectually and viscerally. Furthermore, the retreat offered a real ‘mystical’ experience – that of defamiliarisation, or just noticing. That of reversing, however briefly, your domestication.
Gaia House used to be a convent. Beside it is a preserved 16th century church, and a churchyard with graveslabs from the 1800s – providing relevant commentary on the conditioned, contingent, death-bound nature of the present moment. Footpaths run through Devon’s deciduous jungleland and fields. I missed the early afternoon meditation session each day and went for long walks which were themselves meditations. I saw rabbits and squirrels, kestrels and voles. Once I startled a large red deer, only a few metres away from me in a field. Being my own boss like this, making my own timetable, would not be allowed in Goenka’s scheme.
Inside, in the official meditation hall, I sat down to meditate in 45 minute bursts, and was quickly reacquainted with the fictional make-up of much of my thought. All the time my mind pictured people and voices I’d never heard, and which I usually never notice. One of the strangest was a blue eyed face turning suddenly and looking into mine. All the songs, all the staged discussions, all the banal fantasies which my consciousness consists of, or which obscure my consciousness. The songs in particular followed me around as I walked outside, or brushed my teeth, or swept the floor (there was a work hour each day).
Perhaps the songs were resistance to the listening meditation (introduced after breathing and body-awareness meditations), resistance to hearing what is actually here. I found listening meditation particularly effective. I heard the wind swelling and declining in the trees, and rain, birdsong, animals, cars, a plane, the coughs and groans of my and neighbouring bodies, the rhythmic thrum of blood in my ears. It all formed one polyphony, constantly and subtly shifting. At times I became aware of my calculations of distance as an effect that I was staging – every sound was sound waves breaking on my inner ear, however near or far, and although I could feel my ears the sound wasn’t physically present there – the sound was passing unobstructed from without to within, and there was no within, just emptiness. The part of me which categorised sounds as near or far also named sounds as sheep or tractor, and as good or bad – this commentator fishing objects from the stream. And as I practised, as I became a little bored of the commentator, his commentary became quieter and quieter until I was able, for moments at least, to forget about it.
After a listening meditation, although it had been very mundane sitting listening to normal sounds, I would stand up and notice that the veil of familiarity with which the world is usually cloaked, my domesticated perception, had lapsed. In nature there was transfiguration, or more correctly, in me. I wasn’t high; I was on the earth. I wasn’t absorbed in another world; I was properly aware of this one. The detail of trees. A veritably breathing bush. Cold air in contact with my skin. Me, the animal, shivering awareness of my own presence. This is vipassanna, seeing intensely. The meditation practice is the cultivation of vipassanna. Simply experiencing things in themselves rather than through the mediation of my commentary – those voices explaining, contextualising, reducing the real – allowed me a glimpse of wonder.
And Goenka, and so much organised religion, is about ‘explaining’ and therefore reducing and distancing. About commentary instead of reality.
After the listening meditation came a taste of Zen discipline. Stephen Batchelor told the story of a Chinese monk who walked to the monastery of a famous teacher. The teacher asked where the monk had come from, and the monk replied from Mount Song. Then the teacher asked, “But what is this? Where has it come from?” And the monk remained in that monastery for eight years meditating on the question.
It’s a funny-serious story. The meditation technique is simply to ask, once your attention is still, what is this? The aim is not to try to construct answers, but to experience and heighten the sensation of asking. It encourages awe and wonder, what a Muslim might call taqwa or God-consciousness. It’s what I do anyway in my most intensely alive moments, but I found this wonderful questioning resounding more loudly within in the days following the retreat.
Silence was imposed at most times, but free and wide-ranging discussion was permitted in group meetings and in private meetings with the teachers. In any case, the silence was a smiling silence. By the end of the week I felt I’d got to know the other retreatants, without language, without knowing where they came from or what they believed. And I enjoyed talking to them on the last day. There was a refreshing lack of new age people or ideas on this retreat.
My wife said that at the start she categorised these silent people into the ones she liked and the ones she didn’t, but by the end she felt she loved everybody. And another word on my wife’s experience there. She spent a lot of time lying in bed, and she broke the rules to read books – but the place was flexible enough to leave her alone. She’s a more conventional Muslim than I am, but felt very comfortable in the environment, and benefitted from it greatly, so much so that she wishes to return every year.
So I recommend Buddhist meditation to the extent that it isn’t a religion, but a signpost to living more fully in the world, to asking our questions fully. If Islamists can add a dose of Marxist organisation to their Islam without becoming Marxists in a religious sense, I’ll add some Buddha, and Marx (in a different way), some Shakespeare too, and so on, to mine. “Much silence and a good disposition,” said the Prophet Muhammad, “there are no two works better than those.”
This summer my wife and I spent a week on a meditation retreat at Gaia House in Devon. It has left me questioning all tastes. I mean it was good.
In her opening talk, Martine Batchelor advised retreatants to “be your own teacher.” That sentence alone is heresy for Goenkaism. It set the tone for the week.
Stephen Batchelor, author of “Buddhism Without Beliefs” and former Tibetan and Korean monk, presented a totally demystified and secularised approach to Buddhism. He described reincarnation and karma as part of the Buddha’s historical context in ancient Indian culture rather than as ideas intrinsic to the Buddha’s thought, and enlightenment as an attainable – or to use a metaphor he’d prefer, arrivable-at – goal, a way of experiencing that it is entirely possible to glimpse or inhabit, however temporarily. Batchelor’s Buddhism isn’t a series of propositions to be believed, but a practice, underwritten by a profound agnosticism which is both non-theistic and non-atheistic. Unlike Goenka, Batchelor doesn’t ‘explain’ for you what you’re supposed to be experiencing. Rather, he encourages you to heighten and intensify your state of questioning. Any open-minded Muslim, Christian or atheist could feel at home in this environment. I was fully engaged, intellectually and viscerally. Furthermore, the retreat offered a real ‘mystical’ experience – that of defamiliarisation, or just noticing. That of reversing, however briefly, your domestication.
Gaia House used to be a convent. Beside it is a preserved 16th century church, and a churchyard with graveslabs from the 1800s – providing relevant commentary on the conditioned, contingent, death-bound nature of the present moment. Footpaths run through Devon’s deciduous jungleland and fields. I missed the early afternoon meditation session each day and went for long walks which were themselves meditations. I saw rabbits and squirrels, kestrels and voles. Once I startled a large red deer, only a few metres away from me in a field. Being my own boss like this, making my own timetable, would not be allowed in Goenka’s scheme.
Inside, in the official meditation hall, I sat down to meditate in 45 minute bursts, and was quickly reacquainted with the fictional make-up of much of my thought. All the time my mind pictured people and voices I’d never heard, and which I usually never notice. One of the strangest was a blue eyed face turning suddenly and looking into mine. All the songs, all the staged discussions, all the banal fantasies which my consciousness consists of, or which obscure my consciousness. The songs in particular followed me around as I walked outside, or brushed my teeth, or swept the floor (there was a work hour each day).
Perhaps the songs were resistance to the listening meditation (introduced after breathing and body-awareness meditations), resistance to hearing what is actually here. I found listening meditation particularly effective. I heard the wind swelling and declining in the trees, and rain, birdsong, animals, cars, a plane, the coughs and groans of my and neighbouring bodies, the rhythmic thrum of blood in my ears. It all formed one polyphony, constantly and subtly shifting. At times I became aware of my calculations of distance as an effect that I was staging – every sound was sound waves breaking on my inner ear, however near or far, and although I could feel my ears the sound wasn’t physically present there – the sound was passing unobstructed from without to within, and there was no within, just emptiness. The part of me which categorised sounds as near or far also named sounds as sheep or tractor, and as good or bad – this commentator fishing objects from the stream. And as I practised, as I became a little bored of the commentator, his commentary became quieter and quieter until I was able, for moments at least, to forget about it.
After a listening meditation, although it had been very mundane sitting listening to normal sounds, I would stand up and notice that the veil of familiarity with which the world is usually cloaked, my domesticated perception, had lapsed. In nature there was transfiguration, or more correctly, in me. I wasn’t high; I was on the earth. I wasn’t absorbed in another world; I was properly aware of this one. The detail of trees. A veritably breathing bush. Cold air in contact with my skin. Me, the animal, shivering awareness of my own presence. This is vipassanna, seeing intensely. The meditation practice is the cultivation of vipassanna. Simply experiencing things in themselves rather than through the mediation of my commentary – those voices explaining, contextualising, reducing the real – allowed me a glimpse of wonder.
And Goenka, and so much organised religion, is about ‘explaining’ and therefore reducing and distancing. About commentary instead of reality.
After the listening meditation came a taste of Zen discipline. Stephen Batchelor told the story of a Chinese monk who walked to the monastery of a famous teacher. The teacher asked where the monk had come from, and the monk replied from Mount Song. Then the teacher asked, “But what is this? Where has it come from?” And the monk remained in that monastery for eight years meditating on the question.
It’s a funny-serious story. The meditation technique is simply to ask, once your attention is still, what is this? The aim is not to try to construct answers, but to experience and heighten the sensation of asking. It encourages awe and wonder, what a Muslim might call taqwa or God-consciousness. It’s what I do anyway in my most intensely alive moments, but I found this wonderful questioning resounding more loudly within in the days following the retreat.
Silence was imposed at most times, but free and wide-ranging discussion was permitted in group meetings and in private meetings with the teachers. In any case, the silence was a smiling silence. By the end of the week I felt I’d got to know the other retreatants, without language, without knowing where they came from or what they believed. And I enjoyed talking to them on the last day. There was a refreshing lack of new age people or ideas on this retreat.
My wife said that at the start she categorised these silent people into the ones she liked and the ones she didn’t, but by the end she felt she loved everybody. And another word on my wife’s experience there. She spent a lot of time lying in bed, and she broke the rules to read books – but the place was flexible enough to leave her alone. She’s a more conventional Muslim than I am, but felt very comfortable in the environment, and benefitted from it greatly, so much so that she wishes to return every year.
So I recommend Buddhist meditation to the extent that it isn’t a religion, but a signpost to living more fully in the world, to asking our questions fully. If Islamists can add a dose of Marxist organisation to their Islam without becoming Marxists in a religious sense, I’ll add some Buddha, and Marx (in a different way), some Shakespeare too, and so on, to mine. “Much silence and a good disposition,” said the Prophet Muhammad, “there are no two works better than those.”
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Ed Husain: The Islamist
“The Islamist”, in which Muham(Ed) Husain describes his journey from one form of over-simplification to another, is a story worth both telling and publishing. It works as a local story, of one Bengali-Indian-Briton growing up in Muslim Tower Hamlets in the 1990s and becoming obsessively involved in Wahabi-tinted London Muslim politics. Other east end Muslims might have become involved in business of some form or other, or rap music, or gangs, but Husain’s story provides a detailed look at one of Britain’s tiny subcultures, amateurish and naïve Islamism, and this is interesting. I can even vaguely identify with the earnest silliness of the whole thing, having spent cold mornings as a teenager selling the Socialist Worker newspaper to uninterested nurses and marketmen. And I wholeheartedly admire Husain’s rejection, by the end of the book, as he visits Syria and Saudi Arabia, of Islamism’s scriptural literalism and state-obsession in favour of more traditional and Sufistic forms of Islam.
A great local story, which fails when it makes grandiose claims to universalism. At such moments (perhaps it was the Penguin editors imposing sexiness) the style descends to tabloid: “Lurking in the background were forces preparing to seize the minds of Britain’s Muslim children,” Husain screams, and it may have looked like that to a young man who kept his company and came from his sheltered background of limited cultural interaction. But there were hundreds of thousands of ‘Britain’s Muslim children’ whose minds were occupied by other things. I would suggest that there were plenty who grew up with a lot more knowledge about the politics of various Muslim countries than Ed Husain, and who were therefore not so gullible when (and if) they met a Hizb ut-Tahrir loon.
In penance for his previous Islamism, Husain overcompensates. And, just as he’d done as an Islamist, he oversimplifies. All Islamic organisations other than Sufi groups (not only in London but abroad) are described as Islamist, and all are therefore Wahabi-oriented, intolerant, potentially violent. All of them are what Husain thinks he used to be when he was an Islamist. But understanding Ed Husain and his psychic projections does not help us to understand organisations ranging from the Taliban to Turkey’s ruling party, via Hizbullah and Rashid Ghanoushi’s Tunisian opposition, all of which have different definitions of ‘Islam’, different motivations and goals. Ed Husain is really not that important.
Once Husain’s absurd Islamist reasons for hating America, Israel, and the rest of it, have been exploded, he is unable to see any other reason why people might be angry with America or Israel. The only cause of anti-Zionist anger, as he sees it, is anti-Semitic Islamism. This will be news to the Jews, Christians and atheists, and the non-Islamist, non-Jew-hating Muslims, who oppose the Zionist state and its crimes. But Husain is unable to hear these voices, despite his stay in Syria, because he’s reading the Middle East from his bitter Tower Hamlets perspective. The Middle East here is important only as part of the psycho-drama.
Almost all of his criticisms of the Saudis, in particular, are entirely accurate. And he manages to write, “Neither is there an excuse for state terrorism: the governments of Britain, the US and Israel are as guilty as any 9/11 hijacker.” Yet he doesn’t write about US-corporate control of governments and markets in the Middle East, or about the US role in projecting Wahabism worldwide, first as a weapon against the Soviet Union, and then (and now) against Iran. He doesn’t at any point explain genuine Muslim grievances such as American military bases and control of economies, the long destruction and now occupation of Iraq, the Palestinian tragedy caused by the establishment of a Jewish state. (Why is Husain not as outraged by the Jewish state as he rightly is by the inexistent ‘Islamic state’? Zionism and Islamism are, after all, two very similar examples of religions, under great and traumatic change, coming unhinged from spiritual tradition and attaching to statist politics instead).
Discounting the historical experience of various Muslim populations, discounting political context entirely, results in a failure to understand these people’s ideas. Husain is amazed when educated Syrians express support for attacks on Israeli civilians, even though “these were not Hamas or Hizbullah supporters, just ordinary Syrians expressing a commonly held viewpoint.” He concludes that this is a result of the ever-expanding phenomenon of ‘Islamism,’ against all the evidence. Arabs of Christian and Muslim background have been engaged in war with Zionism for many decades, since long before Islamism emerged. Their opinions are not directly tied to Ed Husain’s Tower Hamlets experience.
The combination of wide-eyed naivety and racist over-simplification is unpleasantly apparent in the following passage, describing the London bus and tube bombs on the morning of the G8 summit:
“The summit, thanks largely to the combined efforts of Tony Blair and Sir Bob Geldof, had been set to tackle poverty in Africa. Now it was forced to address Islamist terrorism; Arab grievances had hijacked the agenda again. The fact that hundreds of children die in Africa every day would be of no relevance to a committed Islamist....Who in the Arab world cares that some 6000 people die each day in Africa from AIDS. Let them die, they’re not Muslims, would be the unspoken line of argument.”
Here is analysis as biting as a BBC royal correspondent’s. Husain now inhabits a nice world ruled wisely by nice people. Tony and Sir Bob were about to abolish African poverty, when baddies ruined the plan. And then he talks rubbish. In reporting of the London bombs and at the summit, Arab grievances weren’t even raised, let alone allowed to hijack the agenda. Surely it would have been a good thing if Palestine and American imperialism had been forced onto the summit agenda, but in reality there was familiar shoulder-to-shoulder and civilisation-versus-barbarism grandstanding, and silence on the tragedy in Iraq. Finally Husain slips unconcernedly between ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamist,’ ending with the slander that no Arab cares about AIDS in Africa.
It’s a great shame that the quote from The Times on the front cover says “A complete eye-opener.”
At another point Husain jumps from a discussion of Wahabi intolerance to the “racist Arab psyche,” even the “racist reality of the Arab psyche.” Although it’s undoubtedly true that Saudis and other Arabs can be guilty of savage racial, sectarian and class prejudices, I dislike this generalising and essentialising language to describe hundreds of millions of people. I too have been appalled by Arab behaviour, particularly in Saudi Arabia, but the Arabs I live with and mix with socially oppose racism and sectarianism. There are plenty of Saudis, too, who are appalled with their own government and religious authorities. Discriminating Arabs (a lot of Arabs) will talk about ‘neo-con racism’ or ‘Zionist racism,’ but avoid expressions like ‘crusaders’ and ‘Jewish racism.’ Ed Husain, remember, is now too civilised and grown-up to use expressions like “racist Jewish psyche.”
But it looks like I didn’t like the book. I did, except for the slanderous and overly silly bits. I wish Ed Husain success not only in learning more about the big world out there, but also in the continuation of his authentic path towards God and the Prophet.
A great local story, which fails when it makes grandiose claims to universalism. At such moments (perhaps it was the Penguin editors imposing sexiness) the style descends to tabloid: “Lurking in the background were forces preparing to seize the minds of Britain’s Muslim children,” Husain screams, and it may have looked like that to a young man who kept his company and came from his sheltered background of limited cultural interaction. But there were hundreds of thousands of ‘Britain’s Muslim children’ whose minds were occupied by other things. I would suggest that there were plenty who grew up with a lot more knowledge about the politics of various Muslim countries than Ed Husain, and who were therefore not so gullible when (and if) they met a Hizb ut-Tahrir loon.
In penance for his previous Islamism, Husain overcompensates. And, just as he’d done as an Islamist, he oversimplifies. All Islamic organisations other than Sufi groups (not only in London but abroad) are described as Islamist, and all are therefore Wahabi-oriented, intolerant, potentially violent. All of them are what Husain thinks he used to be when he was an Islamist. But understanding Ed Husain and his psychic projections does not help us to understand organisations ranging from the Taliban to Turkey’s ruling party, via Hizbullah and Rashid Ghanoushi’s Tunisian opposition, all of which have different definitions of ‘Islam’, different motivations and goals. Ed Husain is really not that important.
Once Husain’s absurd Islamist reasons for hating America, Israel, and the rest of it, have been exploded, he is unable to see any other reason why people might be angry with America or Israel. The only cause of anti-Zionist anger, as he sees it, is anti-Semitic Islamism. This will be news to the Jews, Christians and atheists, and the non-Islamist, non-Jew-hating Muslims, who oppose the Zionist state and its crimes. But Husain is unable to hear these voices, despite his stay in Syria, because he’s reading the Middle East from his bitter Tower Hamlets perspective. The Middle East here is important only as part of the psycho-drama.
Almost all of his criticisms of the Saudis, in particular, are entirely accurate. And he manages to write, “Neither is there an excuse for state terrorism: the governments of Britain, the US and Israel are as guilty as any 9/11 hijacker.” Yet he doesn’t write about US-corporate control of governments and markets in the Middle East, or about the US role in projecting Wahabism worldwide, first as a weapon against the Soviet Union, and then (and now) against Iran. He doesn’t at any point explain genuine Muslim grievances such as American military bases and control of economies, the long destruction and now occupation of Iraq, the Palestinian tragedy caused by the establishment of a Jewish state. (Why is Husain not as outraged by the Jewish state as he rightly is by the inexistent ‘Islamic state’? Zionism and Islamism are, after all, two very similar examples of religions, under great and traumatic change, coming unhinged from spiritual tradition and attaching to statist politics instead).
Discounting the historical experience of various Muslim populations, discounting political context entirely, results in a failure to understand these people’s ideas. Husain is amazed when educated Syrians express support for attacks on Israeli civilians, even though “these were not Hamas or Hizbullah supporters, just ordinary Syrians expressing a commonly held viewpoint.” He concludes that this is a result of the ever-expanding phenomenon of ‘Islamism,’ against all the evidence. Arabs of Christian and Muslim background have been engaged in war with Zionism for many decades, since long before Islamism emerged. Their opinions are not directly tied to Ed Husain’s Tower Hamlets experience.
The combination of wide-eyed naivety and racist over-simplification is unpleasantly apparent in the following passage, describing the London bus and tube bombs on the morning of the G8 summit:
“The summit, thanks largely to the combined efforts of Tony Blair and Sir Bob Geldof, had been set to tackle poverty in Africa. Now it was forced to address Islamist terrorism; Arab grievances had hijacked the agenda again. The fact that hundreds of children die in Africa every day would be of no relevance to a committed Islamist....Who in the Arab world cares that some 6000 people die each day in Africa from AIDS. Let them die, they’re not Muslims, would be the unspoken line of argument.”
Here is analysis as biting as a BBC royal correspondent’s. Husain now inhabits a nice world ruled wisely by nice people. Tony and Sir Bob were about to abolish African poverty, when baddies ruined the plan. And then he talks rubbish. In reporting of the London bombs and at the summit, Arab grievances weren’t even raised, let alone allowed to hijack the agenda. Surely it would have been a good thing if Palestine and American imperialism had been forced onto the summit agenda, but in reality there was familiar shoulder-to-shoulder and civilisation-versus-barbarism grandstanding, and silence on the tragedy in Iraq. Finally Husain slips unconcernedly between ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamist,’ ending with the slander that no Arab cares about AIDS in Africa.
It’s a great shame that the quote from The Times on the front cover says “A complete eye-opener.”
At another point Husain jumps from a discussion of Wahabi intolerance to the “racist Arab psyche,” even the “racist reality of the Arab psyche.” Although it’s undoubtedly true that Saudis and other Arabs can be guilty of savage racial, sectarian and class prejudices, I dislike this generalising and essentialising language to describe hundreds of millions of people. I too have been appalled by Arab behaviour, particularly in Saudi Arabia, but the Arabs I live with and mix with socially oppose racism and sectarianism. There are plenty of Saudis, too, who are appalled with their own government and religious authorities. Discriminating Arabs (a lot of Arabs) will talk about ‘neo-con racism’ or ‘Zionist racism,’ but avoid expressions like ‘crusaders’ and ‘Jewish racism.’ Ed Husain, remember, is now too civilised and grown-up to use expressions like “racist Jewish psyche.”
But it looks like I didn’t like the book. I did, except for the slanderous and overly silly bits. I wish Ed Husain success not only in learning more about the big world out there, but also in the continuation of his authentic path towards God and the Prophet.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Palestines
Here is my response to recent events in occupied Palestine. It’s quite long .. but not nearly as long as the Palestinian tragedy.
Fatah was established as a revolutionary liberation movement, the party of the Palestinian masses wherever they were, the movement which energised the Palestine Liberation Organisation and took it out of the hands of the Arab regimes. Arafat, Abu Jihad and other leaders resisted and negotiated, and withstood even the 1982 seige of Beirut, until the rulers of the world were obliged to recognise the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The PLO included various small Marxist factions, but its centre was Fatah. The word means ‘opening’ or ‘victory’, and is a back-to-front acronym of harakeh at-tahrir al-watani al-filastini, or the Palestinian National Liberation Movement.
The PLO and Fatah were nearly synonymous, and were everywhere under attack. In 1970 organised Palestinian resistance was driven out of Jordan. In 1982 it was driven out of Lebanon, and out of the eastern Arab world entirely, to exile in Tunisia. The leadership was separated from those living under occupation and from the refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and of course from the Palestinian minority inside Israel, but still the PLO, and Fatah, remained the hope and the rallying point of all Palestinians. The first Intifada came from the occupied grassroots, but Palestinians looked to the PLO, and Arafat’s Fatah, to translate the Intifada’s victories into political and diplomatic gains.
Then came the disastrous Oslo agreements and the farce of the ‘peace process,’ all process and no product, and clearly never aimed at peace but at Palestinian surrender (in Arabic, not ‘salaam’ but ‘istislaam’). The supposed basis of the process was a two-state solution, and ‘land for peace’ based on UN Resolution 242. That is, Israel deigns to give 22% of Palestine back to its people, in return for which these people would stop threatening the nuclear-armed Jewish state with their catapults. In reality, the Oslo deal meant that the now-threatening PLO would be superceded by a Palestinian Authority, a bureaucracy for bits of the West Bank and Gaza which would police the restive natives on Israel’s behalf but which would have no real sovereignty. Arafat was not nearly as good at politics as he was at symbolism. The best PLO leaders had been assassinated, and the fat class around Arafat was hungry. Mistaking the machinery of a semi-state for their national rights, and desperate, many Palestinians on the inside reluctantly supported Oslo. The Palestinians on the outside, half of the Palestinian nation, were no longer represented.
Settlement building on land belonging to the virtual Palestinian state didn’t stop for one day during the Oslo ‘peace process’ years. Nor did assassinations or mass arrests. Intensified closures and checkpoints meant that from the start of Oslo to the outbreak of the second Intifada the Palestinian economy halved its size. Meanwhile, international ‘aid’ money was channelled to the Fatah-staffed Palestinian Authority, and corruption blossomed. Fatah had become like any other Arab regime (or just, any other regime). It perceived its function to be crowd control and the protection of the rulers’ property. Hamas, which had originally been encouraged by Israel as a counterweight to Fatah, now began to take on the role of a genuine liberation movement, free of corruption and of any illusions concerning the bantustan state.
At Camp David Clinton and Barak failed to intimidate Arafat into signing an agreement which would describe a series of beseiged cantons on less than 22% of Palestine as a state. Sharon’s stroll through the Aqsa compound was only the catalyst for the second Intifada. For the first weeks the rebellion involved stone-throwing and slogan-chanting youths. Scores were murdered every day by occupation forces while the American media wondered why Palestinian mothers didn’t care to stop their children dying. Then, unsurprisingly, the Intifada was militarised. In fighting and in providing food, healthcare and education to the beseiged Palestinians Hamas proved itself to be far more organised and committed than Fatah.
The Intifada was effectively defeated by overwhelming military force, destruction of remaining infrastructure, including farmland, Western political support for the occupation, the timorous silence of Arab puppet regimes, and international indifference as the media focus shifted first to New York, then to Afghanistan and Iraq. Arafat retrieved some of his earlier charisma by his final refusal to capitulate and the subsequent Israeli refusal to allow him out of his compound in Ramallah. After his suspicious death elections were held for a new president. The most popular and capable Fatah leader was Marwan Barghouti, who intended to stand from his Israeli prison cell. But Israel and the US made it clear that they would only talk to Mahmoud Abbas, so Fatah fell in line and pressured Barghouti not to stand. There was no Hamas candidate. The Palestinians duly voted for Abbas, who dropped all pretensions to resistance. He waited in vain for Israel to enter into serious negotiations. Israel did withdraw its few settlers from the heart of Gaza, and presented this to the world as a liberation of the strip. In fact the siege of Gaza, from land, sea, and air, only tightened, and military attacks on the civilian population increased in frequency and ferocity.
Unlike Kuwait, or for that matter Israel, Palestine had to continually prove to the ‘international community’ that it was grown up enough to deserve the basic rights guaranteed by international law. It had to prove this by holding more elections (though not, of course, elections which all Palestinians could participate in). So parliamentary elctions were held in January 2006. Hamas surprised everybody, including itself, by taking 74 out of 132 seats.
Having demanded democracy, America and Israel, with the European Union limping behind, now set about punishing the Palestinians for voting the wrong way. It’s worth very briefly examining the claimed reasons for isolating the democratic choice of the occupied Palestinians, and their hypocrisy.
Firstly, Hamas doesn’t recognise Israel. True, Hamas believes that Arafat made a strategic blunder by officially recognising Israel before Israel allowed the Palestinians minimal rights. In this Hamas is only being logical. Hamas certainly knows that Israel exists, and even if Hamas drank enough whisky to forget Israel’s existence (which isn’t likely) Israel would still be there, with its Merkava tanks, its checkpoints and its nuclear bombs. In any case, Israel doesn’t recognise Palestine. Its failure to recognise Palestine has immediate and practical ramifications, like the occupation and the ethnic cleansing.
Secondly, Hamas doesn’t recognise the two-state solution. But again, neither does Israel. And Israel is the occupier. By obeying UN resolutions, without the need for any negotiation, Israel could vacate the land for the Palestinian state. And Hamas has repeatedly stated that an Israeli withdrawal from the lands occupied in 1967 would result in a long-term ‘hudna’ or ceasefire, and that the conflict would then become cultural. This position is very similar to the IRA position when it was welcomed into the Northern Irish peace process: the IRA kept its dream of a future unified Ireland, but agreed to renounce violence and to work politically with its former enemies on the ground.
Thirdly, Hamas has attacked civilians. This is surely the most hypocritical of ‘reasons’ for isolating the movement. Since September 2000, Palestinians have killed 1023 Israelis, about 700 of whom have been civilians (many of these were armed settlers). In the same period, Israelis have killed 4160 Palestinians (not including those who died as an indirect result of the occupation, for instance critically ill people who died in ambulances held up for hours at checkpoints). The Palestinians do not have an army, but counting armed men as legitimate military targets, at least 2819 of the dead have been unarmed civilians. 118 Israeli children have been killed. 943 Palestinian children have been killed. The numbers alone show that Israel is far more guilty of killing civilians. And I would say that the violence of the occupied struggling to liberate themselves is more justifiable than the oppressive violence of the occupier, but the empire disagrees. It gives Israel financial, military and political support, and demonises Hamas. Clearly, the ‘killing civilians’ argument is just propaganda. Either that, or Palestinians are not considered to be real human beings, so culling them is not like killing real people. Or both.
Even if we could establish that the Palestinian side has been more violent than the Israeli side – which we can’t – Hamas, unlike Israel, has shown itself capable of sustaining ceasefires. And anyway, many of the Israeli victims have been killed by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is linked to Fatah.
Fourthly, Hamas aims to establish an Islamic state. True, in theory. But it hasn’t tried to impose ‘Islamic’ codes of behaviour on those who don’t want to practise them. It knows that it was elected for its resistance agenda and its freedom from corruption, not for Islamic reasons. It is in fact a bulwark against the more offensive Salafi nihilist groups which are now appearing among Palestinians in their desperation, the groups who have firebombed liquor shops and who hold the BBC journalist hostage. And Saudi Arabia is America’s greatest Arab ally despite being a ferocious fundamentalist state. And of course Israel is not a state for its citizens, still less for the people under its control, but a Jewish state.
So after the elections, the seige. Or rather, the international seige added to the Israeli seige. Palestine’s economy has been deliberately and systematically destroyed, so it is completely dependent on money from outside. This stopped coming in. Even money granted by Iran and others couldn’t come in because no bank would dare to transfer it to the Palestinians and thus be put on America’s list of terror-funding organisations. Israel withheld tax monies which it had collected from the Palestinians themselves. Salaries were not paid. For the first time in all the years of horror, malnutrition became widespread.
When Hamas was first elected it offered Fatah a place in a unity government but Fatah, on American and Israeli orders, refused. In fact, the dominant Abbas-Dahlan faction actively lobbied for the seige of Palestine. America’s ‘Abrams plan’ channelled arms from America and Israel via Jordan and Egypt to Fatah militias, and encouraged chaos by blocking every move towards Palestinian reconciliation. For good measure Israel arrested 40 Hamas MPs, including ministers, with not a squeak from the democracy-loving West. Following early bursts of civil war in Gaza, the Mecca agreement set up a unity government. Once again Abbas and Dahlan followed orders, and undermined the agreement. The independent Interior Minister resigned when Fatah refused to accept his formation of a security force. Gaza descended into chaos.
In the end Hamas responded to the endless provocations by taking over Gaza. It may have won despite itself. It certainly wasn’t difficult for the much better organised and motivated cadres to rout a divided and corrupt Fatah, however much international backing it had. Capturing the Preventative Security building, where the Authority had tortured Hamas men on Israel’s behalf, must have been a sweet victory. But it’s clear that the present situation is no victory for anyone except, in the very short term, Israel.
I’ve laid the blame for the fighting at Fatah’s door, but more generally all Palestinian forces are guilty, and the gangland culture that has grown in the territories. This last isn’t the Palestinians’ ‘fault.’ If national struggles are indefinitely extended, the struggling population is brutalised. Look at Iraq. Or Algeria. Or Chechnya. Many young militiamen in Palestine were children when the second Intifada began. They grew up seeing their fathers, brothers and schoolmates being shot or beaten or dragged away to imprisonment. They heard sonic booms and the whine of missiles instead of the icecream van. Many Arabs are describing the fighting as ‘madness,’ and I think it is, literally. The battles are being fought by pople suffering psychological trauma. A further aspect is the closed, overcrowded nature of the Gaza Strip, the largest prison on earth, the refugee camp of longest duration. If you crowd too many mice into a cage, they start to eat each other.
The probable future can be read from the Abbas and world response: political Palestine split between Fatahland on the West Bank and Hamastan in Gaza. Now that Abbas has appointed an unelected government under a prime minister whose list won a staggering two per cent of votes in the elections, America, Israel, Europe and the Arabs have reestablished contacts and financial aid. The West Bank will be rewarded, but not of course with a realistic political solution. And Gaza, once again, will be educated. Another lesson, or the same lesson, will be drummed out.
But the Palestinians will not be educated out of resistance. If Hamas falls, it will be replaced in Gaza by al-Qa’ida types who will be disastrous for Israel as well as for the Palestinians. Abbas can buy people off for a while, but he has no real credibility, and the West Bank will not accept separation from Gaza.
Fatah is no longer one organisation but a collection of factions, warlords and interests. If Abbas continues to slander Hamas while they seek negotiation, they should appeal to Barghouti and to the honest grassroots under the Fatah umbrella. There is no other option for the two movements than reconciliation.
Meanwhile, commentators cry that the two-state solution is off the agenda. But it already was. The West Bank Palestinians are irreversibly divided into enclaves, bounded by Jews-only roads, with limited access to water and agricultural land. The Jordan valley is off limits to them. The wall cuts deep into their territory. The real choice is between apartheid – the current reality – and the one state solution. All the rest is theatre.
But to get to the one state, the Palestinians need an articulate voice. It’s time for a new PLO to unify and represent all Palestinians, secular and Islamist, from the 48 lands and the 67 lands, and from the diaspora. The Arab client regimes, Europe and America are against them. It is a huge task, but it is more necessary than ever before.
And all of us should support them. Palestine is at the epicentre of world conflict. A just solution to the Palestine problem is necessary for all of us, including Israeli Jews.
Fatah was established as a revolutionary liberation movement, the party of the Palestinian masses wherever they were, the movement which energised the Palestine Liberation Organisation and took it out of the hands of the Arab regimes. Arafat, Abu Jihad and other leaders resisted and negotiated, and withstood even the 1982 seige of Beirut, until the rulers of the world were obliged to recognise the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The PLO included various small Marxist factions, but its centre was Fatah. The word means ‘opening’ or ‘victory’, and is a back-to-front acronym of harakeh at-tahrir al-watani al-filastini, or the Palestinian National Liberation Movement.
The PLO and Fatah were nearly synonymous, and were everywhere under attack. In 1970 organised Palestinian resistance was driven out of Jordan. In 1982 it was driven out of Lebanon, and out of the eastern Arab world entirely, to exile in Tunisia. The leadership was separated from those living under occupation and from the refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and of course from the Palestinian minority inside Israel, but still the PLO, and Fatah, remained the hope and the rallying point of all Palestinians. The first Intifada came from the occupied grassroots, but Palestinians looked to the PLO, and Arafat’s Fatah, to translate the Intifada’s victories into political and diplomatic gains.
Then came the disastrous Oslo agreements and the farce of the ‘peace process,’ all process and no product, and clearly never aimed at peace but at Palestinian surrender (in Arabic, not ‘salaam’ but ‘istislaam’). The supposed basis of the process was a two-state solution, and ‘land for peace’ based on UN Resolution 242. That is, Israel deigns to give 22% of Palestine back to its people, in return for which these people would stop threatening the nuclear-armed Jewish state with their catapults. In reality, the Oslo deal meant that the now-threatening PLO would be superceded by a Palestinian Authority, a bureaucracy for bits of the West Bank and Gaza which would police the restive natives on Israel’s behalf but which would have no real sovereignty. Arafat was not nearly as good at politics as he was at symbolism. The best PLO leaders had been assassinated, and the fat class around Arafat was hungry. Mistaking the machinery of a semi-state for their national rights, and desperate, many Palestinians on the inside reluctantly supported Oslo. The Palestinians on the outside, half of the Palestinian nation, were no longer represented.
Settlement building on land belonging to the virtual Palestinian state didn’t stop for one day during the Oslo ‘peace process’ years. Nor did assassinations or mass arrests. Intensified closures and checkpoints meant that from the start of Oslo to the outbreak of the second Intifada the Palestinian economy halved its size. Meanwhile, international ‘aid’ money was channelled to the Fatah-staffed Palestinian Authority, and corruption blossomed. Fatah had become like any other Arab regime (or just, any other regime). It perceived its function to be crowd control and the protection of the rulers’ property. Hamas, which had originally been encouraged by Israel as a counterweight to Fatah, now began to take on the role of a genuine liberation movement, free of corruption and of any illusions concerning the bantustan state.
At Camp David Clinton and Barak failed to intimidate Arafat into signing an agreement which would describe a series of beseiged cantons on less than 22% of Palestine as a state. Sharon’s stroll through the Aqsa compound was only the catalyst for the second Intifada. For the first weeks the rebellion involved stone-throwing and slogan-chanting youths. Scores were murdered every day by occupation forces while the American media wondered why Palestinian mothers didn’t care to stop their children dying. Then, unsurprisingly, the Intifada was militarised. In fighting and in providing food, healthcare and education to the beseiged Palestinians Hamas proved itself to be far more organised and committed than Fatah.
The Intifada was effectively defeated by overwhelming military force, destruction of remaining infrastructure, including farmland, Western political support for the occupation, the timorous silence of Arab puppet regimes, and international indifference as the media focus shifted first to New York, then to Afghanistan and Iraq. Arafat retrieved some of his earlier charisma by his final refusal to capitulate and the subsequent Israeli refusal to allow him out of his compound in Ramallah. After his suspicious death elections were held for a new president. The most popular and capable Fatah leader was Marwan Barghouti, who intended to stand from his Israeli prison cell. But Israel and the US made it clear that they would only talk to Mahmoud Abbas, so Fatah fell in line and pressured Barghouti not to stand. There was no Hamas candidate. The Palestinians duly voted for Abbas, who dropped all pretensions to resistance. He waited in vain for Israel to enter into serious negotiations. Israel did withdraw its few settlers from the heart of Gaza, and presented this to the world as a liberation of the strip. In fact the siege of Gaza, from land, sea, and air, only tightened, and military attacks on the civilian population increased in frequency and ferocity.
Unlike Kuwait, or for that matter Israel, Palestine had to continually prove to the ‘international community’ that it was grown up enough to deserve the basic rights guaranteed by international law. It had to prove this by holding more elections (though not, of course, elections which all Palestinians could participate in). So parliamentary elctions were held in January 2006. Hamas surprised everybody, including itself, by taking 74 out of 132 seats.
Having demanded democracy, America and Israel, with the European Union limping behind, now set about punishing the Palestinians for voting the wrong way. It’s worth very briefly examining the claimed reasons for isolating the democratic choice of the occupied Palestinians, and their hypocrisy.
Firstly, Hamas doesn’t recognise Israel. True, Hamas believes that Arafat made a strategic blunder by officially recognising Israel before Israel allowed the Palestinians minimal rights. In this Hamas is only being logical. Hamas certainly knows that Israel exists, and even if Hamas drank enough whisky to forget Israel’s existence (which isn’t likely) Israel would still be there, with its Merkava tanks, its checkpoints and its nuclear bombs. In any case, Israel doesn’t recognise Palestine. Its failure to recognise Palestine has immediate and practical ramifications, like the occupation and the ethnic cleansing.
Secondly, Hamas doesn’t recognise the two-state solution. But again, neither does Israel. And Israel is the occupier. By obeying UN resolutions, without the need for any negotiation, Israel could vacate the land for the Palestinian state. And Hamas has repeatedly stated that an Israeli withdrawal from the lands occupied in 1967 would result in a long-term ‘hudna’ or ceasefire, and that the conflict would then become cultural. This position is very similar to the IRA position when it was welcomed into the Northern Irish peace process: the IRA kept its dream of a future unified Ireland, but agreed to renounce violence and to work politically with its former enemies on the ground.
Thirdly, Hamas has attacked civilians. This is surely the most hypocritical of ‘reasons’ for isolating the movement. Since September 2000, Palestinians have killed 1023 Israelis, about 700 of whom have been civilians (many of these were armed settlers). In the same period, Israelis have killed 4160 Palestinians (not including those who died as an indirect result of the occupation, for instance critically ill people who died in ambulances held up for hours at checkpoints). The Palestinians do not have an army, but counting armed men as legitimate military targets, at least 2819 of the dead have been unarmed civilians. 118 Israeli children have been killed. 943 Palestinian children have been killed. The numbers alone show that Israel is far more guilty of killing civilians. And I would say that the violence of the occupied struggling to liberate themselves is more justifiable than the oppressive violence of the occupier, but the empire disagrees. It gives Israel financial, military and political support, and demonises Hamas. Clearly, the ‘killing civilians’ argument is just propaganda. Either that, or Palestinians are not considered to be real human beings, so culling them is not like killing real people. Or both.
Even if we could establish that the Palestinian side has been more violent than the Israeli side – which we can’t – Hamas, unlike Israel, has shown itself capable of sustaining ceasefires. And anyway, many of the Israeli victims have been killed by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is linked to Fatah.
Fourthly, Hamas aims to establish an Islamic state. True, in theory. But it hasn’t tried to impose ‘Islamic’ codes of behaviour on those who don’t want to practise them. It knows that it was elected for its resistance agenda and its freedom from corruption, not for Islamic reasons. It is in fact a bulwark against the more offensive Salafi nihilist groups which are now appearing among Palestinians in their desperation, the groups who have firebombed liquor shops and who hold the BBC journalist hostage. And Saudi Arabia is America’s greatest Arab ally despite being a ferocious fundamentalist state. And of course Israel is not a state for its citizens, still less for the people under its control, but a Jewish state.
So after the elections, the seige. Or rather, the international seige added to the Israeli seige. Palestine’s economy has been deliberately and systematically destroyed, so it is completely dependent on money from outside. This stopped coming in. Even money granted by Iran and others couldn’t come in because no bank would dare to transfer it to the Palestinians and thus be put on America’s list of terror-funding organisations. Israel withheld tax monies which it had collected from the Palestinians themselves. Salaries were not paid. For the first time in all the years of horror, malnutrition became widespread.
When Hamas was first elected it offered Fatah a place in a unity government but Fatah, on American and Israeli orders, refused. In fact, the dominant Abbas-Dahlan faction actively lobbied for the seige of Palestine. America’s ‘Abrams plan’ channelled arms from America and Israel via Jordan and Egypt to Fatah militias, and encouraged chaos by blocking every move towards Palestinian reconciliation. For good measure Israel arrested 40 Hamas MPs, including ministers, with not a squeak from the democracy-loving West. Following early bursts of civil war in Gaza, the Mecca agreement set up a unity government. Once again Abbas and Dahlan followed orders, and undermined the agreement. The independent Interior Minister resigned when Fatah refused to accept his formation of a security force. Gaza descended into chaos.
In the end Hamas responded to the endless provocations by taking over Gaza. It may have won despite itself. It certainly wasn’t difficult for the much better organised and motivated cadres to rout a divided and corrupt Fatah, however much international backing it had. Capturing the Preventative Security building, where the Authority had tortured Hamas men on Israel’s behalf, must have been a sweet victory. But it’s clear that the present situation is no victory for anyone except, in the very short term, Israel.
I’ve laid the blame for the fighting at Fatah’s door, but more generally all Palestinian forces are guilty, and the gangland culture that has grown in the territories. This last isn’t the Palestinians’ ‘fault.’ If national struggles are indefinitely extended, the struggling population is brutalised. Look at Iraq. Or Algeria. Or Chechnya. Many young militiamen in Palestine were children when the second Intifada began. They grew up seeing their fathers, brothers and schoolmates being shot or beaten or dragged away to imprisonment. They heard sonic booms and the whine of missiles instead of the icecream van. Many Arabs are describing the fighting as ‘madness,’ and I think it is, literally. The battles are being fought by pople suffering psychological trauma. A further aspect is the closed, overcrowded nature of the Gaza Strip, the largest prison on earth, the refugee camp of longest duration. If you crowd too many mice into a cage, they start to eat each other.
The probable future can be read from the Abbas and world response: political Palestine split between Fatahland on the West Bank and Hamastan in Gaza. Now that Abbas has appointed an unelected government under a prime minister whose list won a staggering two per cent of votes in the elections, America, Israel, Europe and the Arabs have reestablished contacts and financial aid. The West Bank will be rewarded, but not of course with a realistic political solution. And Gaza, once again, will be educated. Another lesson, or the same lesson, will be drummed out.
But the Palestinians will not be educated out of resistance. If Hamas falls, it will be replaced in Gaza by al-Qa’ida types who will be disastrous for Israel as well as for the Palestinians. Abbas can buy people off for a while, but he has no real credibility, and the West Bank will not accept separation from Gaza.
Fatah is no longer one organisation but a collection of factions, warlords and interests. If Abbas continues to slander Hamas while they seek negotiation, they should appeal to Barghouti and to the honest grassroots under the Fatah umbrella. There is no other option for the two movements than reconciliation.
Meanwhile, commentators cry that the two-state solution is off the agenda. But it already was. The West Bank Palestinians are irreversibly divided into enclaves, bounded by Jews-only roads, with limited access to water and agricultural land. The Jordan valley is off limits to them. The wall cuts deep into their territory. The real choice is between apartheid – the current reality – and the one state solution. All the rest is theatre.
But to get to the one state, the Palestinians need an articulate voice. It’s time for a new PLO to unify and represent all Palestinians, secular and Islamist, from the 48 lands and the 67 lands, and from the diaspora. The Arab client regimes, Europe and America are against them. It is a huge task, but it is more necessary than ever before.
And all of us should support them. Palestine is at the epicentre of world conflict. A just solution to the Palestine problem is necessary for all of us, including Israeli Jews.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Gonu
The first I heard of it was the Monday evening when a friend called to say that his son’s birthday party had been postponed due to the hurricane warning. Hurricane warning? Five minutes later my brother-in-law called about it too. You’ll forgive me for not taking it too seriously. For a start, we’re not in a hurricane zone. There has never before been a cyclone (as Indian Ocean hurricanes are called) in the Arabian Sea. There have been a few tropical storms, but they fail to make headway into the dry and dusty Gulf. Secondly, Oman had cried wolf a month previously when an Indian holy man predicted a storm and a tidal wave which would destroy the Qurm area. He said disaster would strike on a Wednesday, and a hysteria - which made the expatriate population chuckle - rapidly spread, so that children were kept home from school and more than a few workers failed to go to work. Nothing happened, of course. Except that the Indian holy man was imprisoned for starting the panic.
But there it was on the Omani TV station. Warnings to stock up on drinking water and then to stay indoors. Anyone within two kilometres of the sea should find a safe place further inland. On Tuesday morning I saw satellite images of Cyclone Gonu on the internet. It was huge, a swirl spreading its arms between the Iranian and Omani coastlines, with a defined eye. It had been upgraded to a category five cyclone. That’s as strong as a cyclone can get. Hurricane Katrina was a category five. A category five makes trees, rocks and cars dance in the heavens. A category five knocks down buildings. I bought a lot of candles and water, and taped up the windows. When I’d taped the windows, I shielded them with wardrobes and upended beds.
Cloud built up over Tuesday, with spits of rain and gusts of wind. On Tuesday evening the weather forecast said the storm was moving towards southern Iran, away from us, and weakening. Now it didn’t seem such a terrifying prospect it became exciting, a break from the high-forties, sun-blasted routine of an Omani summer. Shortly after midnight I went walking. Remarkably for June I didn’t sweat. Lightning flashed to the south and east, over the sea. A steady rain started.
Torrential rain woke me at four. Now the internet said Gonu had changed course again, and was coming directly at Muscat. Sur was being badly battered. When red light dawned we let the children run about outside in the rain, before it got worse and we’d have to keep them in the house. The storm intensified throughout the day. Before noon the wadi must have overbrimmed because the floods came. It always floods when it rains here, the earth being baked and unabsorbent, the city on an edge between rock mountains and the sea, but this time the floods stretched as far as we could see. Water poured through the windows in two rooms, soaking carpets and furniture, making us work with mop and mesaaha. Water started dripping though the ceiling, and here I went up to our Lebanese neighbour whose balcony was flooded. He couldn’t open the door to it so we unscrewed a window frame and got out that way to break the blocked drain pipe with a hammer and bail out with buckets. From up there I saw the building was an island, and many of our neighbours were submerged to the second storey.
In the end Gonu was a category one cyclone, and its centre had veered out to sea, sparing us a direct hit. It just brushed us with its fingertips, a whirling dervish of a storm absorbed in the centre around which it turned. I’ve seen worse rain in Britain, or Pakistan. The wind was never more than strong.
On Thursday morning we went for a drive to inspect the damage, which was astounding. The roundabout near our house had been partly carried away, partly drowned in mud. Roads were missing chunks. Trees and telephone poles were down. Cars were smashed and turned on their backs. A river rushed down the carriageway towards the coast. The closer to the sea, the more savage the effects, and particularly on the poor. Labourers’ houses had collapsed. Hundreds sat in the streets trying to dry out.
Our electricity came back the morning after the storm but at our friends’ house in north al-Hail it remained off. We were sweating without air conditioning so went to sit on the roof, and military helicopters circled loud overhead. It all felt a little like Baghdad. Just one day of it. Without the explosions or the fear of your neighbour.
The water was off. Supply pipes had been broken by the storm, plus sewage had been mixed up with it. The army and others came round to hand out drinking water and water to fill the bath with, for washing and flushing the toilet.
On Sunday I drove my brother-in-law, who’d wisely come to stay with us, back to his flat in al-Ghubra. It was much worse than anything we’d seen. Cars piled on top of each other three or four deep, mud and felled trees and wires, rubble and gaping holes in the roads, not in locations we’d have to point out to each other, but everywhere. The death toll for Oman then stood at 50, a modest day’s bodycount for Baghdad. The final toll must be far higher.
The crisis reinforced basic characteristics of the country. The poor – the Indians – suffered most. The rich least of all. That’s normal: remember New Orleans after Katrina. What isn’t normal is that there was a genuine sense of brotherhood in extremis. Neighbours looked after each other. Everyone kept calm. Everyone smiled. That’s the abnormality of Oman, this gentle, safe country, one of the last refuges of a traditional community-based Islam.
Any lessons? I don’t know much about the climate, but it seems very likely that this first-ever Arabian Sea cyclone, like the droughts in Australia and the United States, like the more severe hurricanes in the Caribbean, was caused by global warming. It seems likely, therefore, that it will happen again. The ramifications for Oman will be dramatic. A good step would be an Omani reacquaintance with the natural environment. Wadis will reclaim their paths. Building roads and houses in the wadis regardless won’t work. And unsustainable beachfront projects like The Wave (see my posting called Unsustainable Development) must be suddenly looking .. unsustainable. Which could be a good thing.
Much of Sur and Quryat are still underwater, a week on. The water by now, especially in these temperatures, is filthy. And Qurm, I almost forgot. There was a mini tidal wave, and the business district was trashed. On a Wednesday, as predicted. Has the Indian holy man been released from prison? He just got his timing a bit skewed, after all.
But there it was on the Omani TV station. Warnings to stock up on drinking water and then to stay indoors. Anyone within two kilometres of the sea should find a safe place further inland. On Tuesday morning I saw satellite images of Cyclone Gonu on the internet. It was huge, a swirl spreading its arms between the Iranian and Omani coastlines, with a defined eye. It had been upgraded to a category five cyclone. That’s as strong as a cyclone can get. Hurricane Katrina was a category five. A category five makes trees, rocks and cars dance in the heavens. A category five knocks down buildings. I bought a lot of candles and water, and taped up the windows. When I’d taped the windows, I shielded them with wardrobes and upended beds.
Cloud built up over Tuesday, with spits of rain and gusts of wind. On Tuesday evening the weather forecast said the storm was moving towards southern Iran, away from us, and weakening. Now it didn’t seem such a terrifying prospect it became exciting, a break from the high-forties, sun-blasted routine of an Omani summer. Shortly after midnight I went walking. Remarkably for June I didn’t sweat. Lightning flashed to the south and east, over the sea. A steady rain started.
Torrential rain woke me at four. Now the internet said Gonu had changed course again, and was coming directly at Muscat. Sur was being badly battered. When red light dawned we let the children run about outside in the rain, before it got worse and we’d have to keep them in the house. The storm intensified throughout the day. Before noon the wadi must have overbrimmed because the floods came. It always floods when it rains here, the earth being baked and unabsorbent, the city on an edge between rock mountains and the sea, but this time the floods stretched as far as we could see. Water poured through the windows in two rooms, soaking carpets and furniture, making us work with mop and mesaaha. Water started dripping though the ceiling, and here I went up to our Lebanese neighbour whose balcony was flooded. He couldn’t open the door to it so we unscrewed a window frame and got out that way to break the blocked drain pipe with a hammer and bail out with buckets. From up there I saw the building was an island, and many of our neighbours were submerged to the second storey.
In the end Gonu was a category one cyclone, and its centre had veered out to sea, sparing us a direct hit. It just brushed us with its fingertips, a whirling dervish of a storm absorbed in the centre around which it turned. I’ve seen worse rain in Britain, or Pakistan. The wind was never more than strong.
On Thursday morning we went for a drive to inspect the damage, which was astounding. The roundabout near our house had been partly carried away, partly drowned in mud. Roads were missing chunks. Trees and telephone poles were down. Cars were smashed and turned on their backs. A river rushed down the carriageway towards the coast. The closer to the sea, the more savage the effects, and particularly on the poor. Labourers’ houses had collapsed. Hundreds sat in the streets trying to dry out.
Our electricity came back the morning after the storm but at our friends’ house in north al-Hail it remained off. We were sweating without air conditioning so went to sit on the roof, and military helicopters circled loud overhead. It all felt a little like Baghdad. Just one day of it. Without the explosions or the fear of your neighbour.
The water was off. Supply pipes had been broken by the storm, plus sewage had been mixed up with it. The army and others came round to hand out drinking water and water to fill the bath with, for washing and flushing the toilet.
On Sunday I drove my brother-in-law, who’d wisely come to stay with us, back to his flat in al-Ghubra. It was much worse than anything we’d seen. Cars piled on top of each other three or four deep, mud and felled trees and wires, rubble and gaping holes in the roads, not in locations we’d have to point out to each other, but everywhere. The death toll for Oman then stood at 50, a modest day’s bodycount for Baghdad. The final toll must be far higher.
The crisis reinforced basic characteristics of the country. The poor – the Indians – suffered most. The rich least of all. That’s normal: remember New Orleans after Katrina. What isn’t normal is that there was a genuine sense of brotherhood in extremis. Neighbours looked after each other. Everyone kept calm. Everyone smiled. That’s the abnormality of Oman, this gentle, safe country, one of the last refuges of a traditional community-based Islam.
Any lessons? I don’t know much about the climate, but it seems very likely that this first-ever Arabian Sea cyclone, like the droughts in Australia and the United States, like the more severe hurricanes in the Caribbean, was caused by global warming. It seems likely, therefore, that it will happen again. The ramifications for Oman will be dramatic. A good step would be an Omani reacquaintance with the natural environment. Wadis will reclaim their paths. Building roads and houses in the wadis regardless won’t work. And unsustainable beachfront projects like The Wave (see my posting called Unsustainable Development) must be suddenly looking .. unsustainable. Which could be a good thing.
Much of Sur and Quryat are still underwater, a week on. The water by now, especially in these temperatures, is filthy. And Qurm, I almost forgot. There was a mini tidal wave, and the business district was trashed. On a Wednesday, as predicted. Has the Indian holy man been released from prison? He just got his timing a bit skewed, after all.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Blaming Syria .. Fisk and Others
Up to seventy people have been killed so far in Lebanon’s most violent internal battle since the end of the civil war. On one side are the Wahhabi militants of Fateh al-Islam, Palestinians, Lebanese, Saudis and others, based in Tripoli’s Palestinian camp of Nahr el-Bared. On the other is the Lebanese army, with the support of most Lebanese and Palestinians.
Very sadly, very ominously, Wahhabi nihilists are expanding their reach. In recent weeks there have been al-Qa’ida linked bomb attacks in Morocco and Algeria, and hundreds of arrests in Saudi Arabia when a plot to attack infrastructure was allegedly uncovered. In Iraq, Wahhabi car bombings and beheadings continue, with Sunnis now as likely to be the victims as Shia. In Afghanistan and Pakistan al-Qa’ida increases its power. The nihilists are sometimes confused with genuine resistance against occupation (in Afghanistan and Iraq) or against dictatorship (in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia), but in fact their presence confuses and weakens resistance.
There are many reasons for the growing al-Qa’ida phenomenon, some of which I have discussed previously. They include past and present American, Saudi and Pakistani promotion of Wahhabi groups to trouble the Soviet Union, revolutionary Iran and Arab nationalism, and the collapse of traditional patterns of social belonging and religious observance in large parts of the Muslim world, and the poverty of education in many Muslim countries, and the brutalisation caused by both dictatorship and occupation. Then ample funding from private donors in the Gulf as well as Wahhabism’s long term supporters (see above) married to nihilistic ruthlessness can make a small group of fighters extremely effective. In Nahr el-Bared there are an estimated couple of hundred fighters, but it will be almost impossible for the Lebanese army to arrest or kill them without a politically impossible and bloody invasion of the camp.
What is not in doubt is that the nihilist phenomenon is widespread, complex and dangerous. As usual, however, some people are resorting to simplistic, propagandist explanations. In the case of the Nahr el-Bared battle, Lebanese government officials and large sections of the media are blaming the Syrian regime, without providing any proof. It’s true that Fatah al-Islam’s parent organisation was Syrian sponsored, a creation of the divisions among the Lebanese-based Palestinians following the expulsion of PLO forces by Israel in 1982, but Fateh al-Islam broke away from the parent organisation a long time ago. There is far more evidence that Fateh al-Islam is being helped by Syria’s enemies. Seymour Hersh’s recent investigation, published in the New Yorker, suggested that Saad al-Hariri, among others in the wealthy Lebanese Sunni establishment, is helping to channel American funds to Wahhabi groups to counter the influence of Shia Hizbullah.
Robert Fisk in the Independent writes “it is difficult not to feel Syria’s hand these days.” His evidence for Syrian involvement in Nahr el-Bared? The Syrian border is “scarcely ten miles away.” Which brings me to my problems with Fisk. There is no question that he has been the best-connected, best-informed and bravest of British Middle East correspondents, and that he has often been fearless in calling a spade a spade when it comes to Israeli crimes. Most Western journalists in the region can’t even speak Arabic, so we should be grateful for Fisk. He’s been better than the rest, but latterly, still not good enough. During last summer’s onslaught on Lebanon he kept reminding his readers that Hizbullah’s border incursion and hostage-taking had ‘provoked’ the Israeli attack, without mentioning the more than 10, 000 border violations by Israel in the previous six years, or the Lebanese hostages. He didn’t change his tune even when Olmert announced that Israel had prepared the attack months in advance, months before the supposed provocation.
Fisk once wrote very convincingly of how Western journalists may become biased in the Middle East, before politics and money come into play, for simple cultural reasons. Anglo-Saxons, he said, will naturally feel more at home with Israeli friends who eat the same kind of food, watch the same kind of TV shows, and so on, than with Palestinians in their mosques and camps. French journalists will naturally sympathise with Lebanese Maronites, who speak French, listen to French music, and worship in Catholic churches. And now it seems that something similar has happened to Fisk, who was so personally moved when his friend Rafiq al-Hariri was assassinated. (There is a good case to be made for Syrian guilt in the Hariri assassination, but there are other arguments too, and Fisk has not aired them.) Fisk has become uncritically supportive of the Lebanese Sunni and Druze establishment and its perspectives. In the stand-off between the government and opposition, it is clear where he stands. Stooping low, he tells us again and again how “intelligent” war-criminal Waleed Junblatt is, and, worse, how “glorious” Junblatt’s wife.
I put it down to exhaustion, and perhaps to fame. The poor man has seen more than his share of blood, from the Iran-Iraq war to Sabra and Shatila. He’s been shot at on numerous occasions and beaten up by Afghan refugees from Anglo-American bombing. He’s written at least one excellent book (“Pity the Nation” on the Lebanese war – I haven’t read his latest) and it is time for him to have a dignified rest. But not to rest on his laurels. Too much of his newspaper journalism now looks like a blog: his moral and emotional responses to events are as important as the events themselves. He uses the phrase “of course” in nearly every paragraph. He goes on about his old dad and his mother Peggy. He consistently refers to Blair as “Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara” – which is vaguely funny, but suited to satire rather than reportage. I have become tired of reading articles which I know will give me Fisk’s opinion rather than fresh information, which will degenerate into ‘why, o why?’ and ‘if they’d only asked me.’
Back to Syria. There are plenty of good reasons to condemn the Syrian dictatorship, such as its staggering capacity for corruption and its abuses of human rights. The recent imprisonment of intellectuals like Anwar Bunni and Michel Kilo simply for expressing their opinions will have horrified all true friends of the country. For all I know (because I’m no expert on intelligence matters) Syrian officials may be playing a stupid and dirty game in Nahr el-Bared. But there is no evidence for it, not yet, and there are better explanations. People who illogically blame Syria for absolutely everything that goes wrong in the region, providing no proof whatsoever, lose their credibility. In Iraq’s al-Anbar, the Sunni resistance has now realised that its first enemy is al-Qa’ida style Wahhabism. It would be nice if the so-called Sunni leadership in Lebanon could do the same, in this case at least, and stop playing anti-Syrian politics.
Very sadly, very ominously, Wahhabi nihilists are expanding their reach. In recent weeks there have been al-Qa’ida linked bomb attacks in Morocco and Algeria, and hundreds of arrests in Saudi Arabia when a plot to attack infrastructure was allegedly uncovered. In Iraq, Wahhabi car bombings and beheadings continue, with Sunnis now as likely to be the victims as Shia. In Afghanistan and Pakistan al-Qa’ida increases its power. The nihilists are sometimes confused with genuine resistance against occupation (in Afghanistan and Iraq) or against dictatorship (in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia), but in fact their presence confuses and weakens resistance.
There are many reasons for the growing al-Qa’ida phenomenon, some of which I have discussed previously. They include past and present American, Saudi and Pakistani promotion of Wahhabi groups to trouble the Soviet Union, revolutionary Iran and Arab nationalism, and the collapse of traditional patterns of social belonging and religious observance in large parts of the Muslim world, and the poverty of education in many Muslim countries, and the brutalisation caused by both dictatorship and occupation. Then ample funding from private donors in the Gulf as well as Wahhabism’s long term supporters (see above) married to nihilistic ruthlessness can make a small group of fighters extremely effective. In Nahr el-Bared there are an estimated couple of hundred fighters, but it will be almost impossible for the Lebanese army to arrest or kill them without a politically impossible and bloody invasion of the camp.
What is not in doubt is that the nihilist phenomenon is widespread, complex and dangerous. As usual, however, some people are resorting to simplistic, propagandist explanations. In the case of the Nahr el-Bared battle, Lebanese government officials and large sections of the media are blaming the Syrian regime, without providing any proof. It’s true that Fatah al-Islam’s parent organisation was Syrian sponsored, a creation of the divisions among the Lebanese-based Palestinians following the expulsion of PLO forces by Israel in 1982, but Fateh al-Islam broke away from the parent organisation a long time ago. There is far more evidence that Fateh al-Islam is being helped by Syria’s enemies. Seymour Hersh’s recent investigation, published in the New Yorker, suggested that Saad al-Hariri, among others in the wealthy Lebanese Sunni establishment, is helping to channel American funds to Wahhabi groups to counter the influence of Shia Hizbullah.
Robert Fisk in the Independent writes “it is difficult not to feel Syria’s hand these days.” His evidence for Syrian involvement in Nahr el-Bared? The Syrian border is “scarcely ten miles away.” Which brings me to my problems with Fisk. There is no question that he has been the best-connected, best-informed and bravest of British Middle East correspondents, and that he has often been fearless in calling a spade a spade when it comes to Israeli crimes. Most Western journalists in the region can’t even speak Arabic, so we should be grateful for Fisk. He’s been better than the rest, but latterly, still not good enough. During last summer’s onslaught on Lebanon he kept reminding his readers that Hizbullah’s border incursion and hostage-taking had ‘provoked’ the Israeli attack, without mentioning the more than 10, 000 border violations by Israel in the previous six years, or the Lebanese hostages. He didn’t change his tune even when Olmert announced that Israel had prepared the attack months in advance, months before the supposed provocation.
Fisk once wrote very convincingly of how Western journalists may become biased in the Middle East, before politics and money come into play, for simple cultural reasons. Anglo-Saxons, he said, will naturally feel more at home with Israeli friends who eat the same kind of food, watch the same kind of TV shows, and so on, than with Palestinians in their mosques and camps. French journalists will naturally sympathise with Lebanese Maronites, who speak French, listen to French music, and worship in Catholic churches. And now it seems that something similar has happened to Fisk, who was so personally moved when his friend Rafiq al-Hariri was assassinated. (There is a good case to be made for Syrian guilt in the Hariri assassination, but there are other arguments too, and Fisk has not aired them.) Fisk has become uncritically supportive of the Lebanese Sunni and Druze establishment and its perspectives. In the stand-off between the government and opposition, it is clear where he stands. Stooping low, he tells us again and again how “intelligent” war-criminal Waleed Junblatt is, and, worse, how “glorious” Junblatt’s wife.
I put it down to exhaustion, and perhaps to fame. The poor man has seen more than his share of blood, from the Iran-Iraq war to Sabra and Shatila. He’s been shot at on numerous occasions and beaten up by Afghan refugees from Anglo-American bombing. He’s written at least one excellent book (“Pity the Nation” on the Lebanese war – I haven’t read his latest) and it is time for him to have a dignified rest. But not to rest on his laurels. Too much of his newspaper journalism now looks like a blog: his moral and emotional responses to events are as important as the events themselves. He uses the phrase “of course” in nearly every paragraph. He goes on about his old dad and his mother Peggy. He consistently refers to Blair as “Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara” – which is vaguely funny, but suited to satire rather than reportage. I have become tired of reading articles which I know will give me Fisk’s opinion rather than fresh information, which will degenerate into ‘why, o why?’ and ‘if they’d only asked me.’
Back to Syria. There are plenty of good reasons to condemn the Syrian dictatorship, such as its staggering capacity for corruption and its abuses of human rights. The recent imprisonment of intellectuals like Anwar Bunni and Michel Kilo simply for expressing their opinions will have horrified all true friends of the country. For all I know (because I’m no expert on intelligence matters) Syrian officials may be playing a stupid and dirty game in Nahr el-Bared. But there is no evidence for it, not yet, and there are better explanations. People who illogically blame Syria for absolutely everything that goes wrong in the region, providing no proof whatsoever, lose their credibility. In Iraq’s al-Anbar, the Sunni resistance has now realised that its first enemy is al-Qa’ida style Wahhabism. It would be nice if the so-called Sunni leadership in Lebanon could do the same, in this case at least, and stop playing anti-Syrian politics.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Racaille
Segolene Royal has been much criticised for warning that the French ‘banlieu’ will riot if Sarkozy, the interior minister who called banlieu inhabitants ‘racaille’ (‘scum’), is elected president. The banlieu is prone to riot anyway. Why?
Well, here are a few personal anecdotes. The stories are 15 years old, so are not directly relevant to Sarkozy, but explain something of the racist background to France’s social problems.
One: I was walking one evening in Paris with an upper-middle class English friend, whose mother is Malaysian. I’m an English Arab, but white-skinned and blue-eyed. Out of nowhere arrived two policemen. With no warning they grabbed my friend, threw him against a wall, pushed a truncheon against his throat until he was choking and weeping. They took me round the corner and asked why I was walking with him.
Two: I had a French girlfriend of Algerian origin, also white and not noticeably Arab, who was being harassed by an insane neighbour. She was scared, so we went to the police station to inform them of the situation. The police were polite and concerned. They wrote everything down. But when they asked my girlfriend’s name, their tone changed radically. They scrumpled up the report sheet, told us no offence had been committed, and advised us to get out immediately.
That girlfriend remembered her old maths teacher ordering her to the back of the classroom with the rest of the Arabs and Africans because, as the teacher explained, “I’m employed by the French state to teach French children.”
Her father had escaped from the extreme poverty of his (French-occupied) Algerian childhood to France, where he spent a lifetime as a migrant labourer, suffering casual and brutal violence from foremen and police – and then inflicting some himself, in his impotence, on his own family. When they finally settled in an industrial town, he found work in a factory where he would train white teenagers to do his dangerous, lowest-of-the-low job, and then watch them promoted after a couple of months to brighter and better things.
In Paris I had an African friend who for a time lived in a slum building with other African families. One day a skinhead threw a teargas canister into the corridor where children were playing. The police weren’t interested. They clearly had more important things to do with their time. The same friend was stopped almost every day by police on his way to work, insulted, and ordered to show his papers.
These scorned and abused French citizens, the blacks and beurs who work in the worst jobs for the lowest pay, who live in the ‘rabbit cages’ of the urban wasteland, who have the least representation, whose voices are not heard, are supposedly the omnipotent Islamic fiends who threaten to destroy French secularism, the whole French way of life, and whose clothing choices must therefore, for the sake of freedom, be sanctioned by the state. (To his credit, Sarkozy did not support the ban on hijab in schools.)
The fact that the French were still using torture and prison camps for civilians in Algeria in the 60s in an attempt to hold on to their empire, and that an ex-Vichy police chief (Maurice Papon) at the same time dealt with demonstrating pro-independence Algerians in Paris by tieing their feet and throwing them into the Seine, suggests that France has got savage racial prejudice to blame, primarily, for its social problems. The bodies-in-the-Seine incident happened in October 1961. At least 200 civilians were murdered, a crime in which the French media collaborated by its silence and concealment.
It’s certainly the case that many young French Arabs and Africans are somewhat raggamuffin, but extreme alienation and marginalisation tends to have that result. Besides, if white men in France have a couple of years off the rails they are not in danger of being shot by the police. When I was there, beurs and blacks were shot in the back every couple of months. This was considered normal. It certainly didn’t result in soul-searching by the white population.
It is the complex of racism and class oppression which has made the French innercities unbearable. The real 'racaille' are those who blame the victims.
See this link for information on the 1961 massacre:
http://w02-0209.web.dircon.net/Flame/algerians.htm
Saturday, April 21, 2007
My absence .. and Sectarianism
Just to remind my readers that I’m here, I’m posting my response to Henry Porter’s Guardian article ‘When Will Islam Damn the Chlorine Bombers?’ The article is at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story
/0,,2062876,00.html
I’m tremendously busy at the moment. I should be able to post properly in a couple of weeks' time. In the meantime, here’s my Commentisfree response:
I agree with Porter's general point that there has not been enough official Muslim condemnation of the Salafi nihilist sectarian killers at work in Iraq. This is because the pro-American order in the Arab world (the Sauds and Hashemites and Mubaraks) has been busy rabble-rousing against Iran and the Shia - hoping to defuse anger against imperialism and its puppets by provoking sectarian and ethnic hatreds. And also because, yes, thre is a serious problem in the Muslim (especially Arab) world of Wahhabi intolerance and literalism, and many people do not realise the extent of the danger. Wahhabism appeals in terms of its anti-Westernism, but of course it has previously been America's greatest Arab ally (against Communism, then against revolutionary Iran) in the region. It causes 'fitna' (dissension) among Muslims, and seeks to erase the riches of Islamic history, philosophy, diversity, and mysticism. Its foot soldiers are deracinated and confused - the products of a brutal Middle Eastern modernism.
However, I must say that there are many unofficial Muslim voices condemning the terrorism. I live in a non-Wahhabi Gulf state, and my family are Syrian. (I have plenty of Lebanese and Iraqi friends). People cheer for the anti-American resistance, but bitterly condemn the 'dogs' and 'agents' responsible for violence against civilians. Syrians in particular fear the wild sectarianism that has established itself in Iraq, and worry that the same could happen in their own diverse and divided society.
Not everybody of course. I've heard Syrian villagers and taxi drivers spout the most obscene sectarian hatred. Ethnic and sectarian divisions are rife in the Middle East, and the chaos unleashed by the destruction of Iraq has been fuel for them.
I also disagree with Porter's comment that Western forces would leave Iraq quicker if there was less bloodshed. This is what they tell the Iraqi and Western publics, but it's obviously not true. Why spend so much money building huge permanent bases inside Iraq? Why provoke the sectarian war in the first place, by many steps, not least Negroponte's Central American style death squads made up of Shia and Kurdish militiamen operating in Sunni areas.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story
/0,,2062876,00.html
I’m tremendously busy at the moment. I should be able to post properly in a couple of weeks' time. In the meantime, here’s my Commentisfree response:
I agree with Porter's general point that there has not been enough official Muslim condemnation of the Salafi nihilist sectarian killers at work in Iraq. This is because the pro-American order in the Arab world (the Sauds and Hashemites and Mubaraks) has been busy rabble-rousing against Iran and the Shia - hoping to defuse anger against imperialism and its puppets by provoking sectarian and ethnic hatreds. And also because, yes, thre is a serious problem in the Muslim (especially Arab) world of Wahhabi intolerance and literalism, and many people do not realise the extent of the danger. Wahhabism appeals in terms of its anti-Westernism, but of course it has previously been America's greatest Arab ally (against Communism, then against revolutionary Iran) in the region. It causes 'fitna' (dissension) among Muslims, and seeks to erase the riches of Islamic history, philosophy, diversity, and mysticism. Its foot soldiers are deracinated and confused - the products of a brutal Middle Eastern modernism.
However, I must say that there are many unofficial Muslim voices condemning the terrorism. I live in a non-Wahhabi Gulf state, and my family are Syrian. (I have plenty of Lebanese and Iraqi friends). People cheer for the anti-American resistance, but bitterly condemn the 'dogs' and 'agents' responsible for violence against civilians. Syrians in particular fear the wild sectarianism that has established itself in Iraq, and worry that the same could happen in their own diverse and divided society.
Not everybody of course. I've heard Syrian villagers and taxi drivers spout the most obscene sectarian hatred. Ethnic and sectarian divisions are rife in the Middle East, and the chaos unleashed by the destruction of Iraq has been fuel for them.
I also disagree with Porter's comment that Western forces would leave Iraq quicker if there was less bloodshed. This is what they tell the Iraqi and Western publics, but it's obviously not true. Why spend so much money building huge permanent bases inside Iraq? Why provoke the sectarian war in the first place, by many steps, not least Negroponte's Central American style death squads made up of Shia and Kurdish militiamen operating in Sunni areas.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Unsustainable Development
Unsustainable Development
I recently spent a weekend in Oman's ash-Sharqiyya region – the easternmost part of the Arab world – collecting wind-polished rocks in the desert, sleeping on an isolated beach (a turtle crawled up the sand to bury its eggs before dawn), and passing through small coastal villages.
This area remains – for a short time still – unspoilt. Although the inhabitants of the Sharqiyya enjoy the basic amenities which modernisation can and should provide – sanitation, electricity, health services – the state's footprint is soft in the sand. I saw no sign of police. Institutional buildings are few and far between. The corporations have not yet arrived. None of the fast food outlets and coffee factories that homogenise the globe from the tropics to the tundra. So the settlements are handsome. The doors of the simplest houses are carved and patterned wood. Recent building may have been done with breeze blocks, but it's been finished with mud.
The region wobbles on the edge of misnamed 'development.' It would be unwise in this water-scarce area to install flush toilets, but there will be worse. Emirati money is buying up the shoreline. Painted rocks mark the outlines of future residential complexes and hotels. I prayed as I passed that these were markers of dreams that would remain unfulfilled.
We stopped to drink tea in a low-slung village inhabited by shoeless people 'undeveloped' enough to sit in the road, in the shade of the mosque, talking and laughing. Goats nibbled at occasional rubbish. Children squealed. And in the tea house we met … a worker from Kerala state, south India. Even here in this unmonied corner of the Gulf, a member of the imported working class. Down the street a black man crouched, racially African, by culture and language an Arab.
When Oman was new to me I thought that Zanzibari Omanis could be recognised by the colour of their skin. I soon learnt things were more complicated. Many Omanis went to work or trade in east Africa, and many of them intermarried with the people there. At one point Zanzibar was the political capital of Oman, and well before the current bout of globalisation the trade in perfumes, spices, gold and slaves moved capital and people around the Indian Ocean and deep into Oman's mountainous interior. Zanzibari 'Arabs' – usually Swahili-speakers, black, brown and white – claimed Omani nationality in the post-1970 passport age, and helped to build the modern state. Distinct from the Zanzibari community are Arabs of African descent, from every part of Oman, but particularly from the old slave ports of Sur and Salalah.
The Prophet Muhammad did not explicitly ban slavery, but he worked against it by example, freeing slaves and encouraging his followers to seek God's pleasure by doing the same. Notably, the first muezzin in Islam (the man who calls the faithful to prayer), Bilal, was a freed slave. Given this example, it's somewhat shameful that slavery lasted as long as it did in the southern Arabian peninsula (and still exists today in Muslim as well as Christian and animist areas of Sahelian Africa).
Unlike its Euro-American variant, slavery in the Arab world was not associated with rigid racial ideology, and slaves were not so totally dehumanised. Omani slaves were African, but slaves in Syria or Egypt were often brought from the Caucasus or the Balkans. Slaves quickly became assimilated into Arab society. In the peninsula they were adopted by the tribes they worked for. Slaves could marry, do business, buy their own freedom, own property. They were sometimes – like the pre-Islamic Antar – the heroes of epic and romance, and ex-slaves – like the Egyptian Mamluks – even formed their own ruling dynasties. None of that justifies slavery, of course, nor alters the fact that there are some very un-Islamic attitudes to blacks in the Arab world, attitudes which have their roots in the institution of slavery.
In the old days, Gulf Arabs herded animals, dived for pearls, traded frankincense, and often relied on slaves to do menial work. In the oil age, menial work is done by the imported working class, mainly Indians. While the Africans became Arabs, and changed the Arabs, the Indians are sent home at the end of their contracts. One result of oil wealth has been that Oman, by importing workers, has preserved its tribal social system in which all are strong – whatever their skin colour or personal wealth – because all are backed by the solidarity of their tribe. Omanisation, which aims to replace foreign workers with locals, is necessary, and has a better chance of succeeding in Oman than its counterpart programmes in other Gulf states. One result, however, will be to replace tribal equality with a savage internal class system.
Welcome to capitalism, Oman. Eight kilometres of beach front in the capital area which were previously used by locals and foreign workers for picnics, swimming, walks and football have become eight kilometres of private land. A gated community is being built there, the unbuilt houses already sold to rich foreigners – Indians, Arabs, Westerners – and a private road being built from the nearby airport. The mineral spring in the town of Rustaq also seems to have become private property overnight. Public access to the spring is under threat, as are the old houses built over the channeled spring water. There are rumours that a luxury hotel is to be built in their place. A five-star 'Shangri-La' hotel has been built on the previously free-access beach at Jussa. Yitti beach, Muscat's favourite day trip, is slated for further developments – luxury housing and yet another five-star hotel.
The social and environmental disaster that is Dubai crawls closer.
In a region short of water and increasingly long on population, in an economy built on that most dangerous and outdated product, oil, in an Arab world groaning under the weight of American military bases, with Iran staring back at the bases, with depleted uranium wafting down from Iraq-Kuwait, with hatred of foreigners rising, none of this development is in any way sustainable. Part of me wants the collapse to come soon, for the sake of the Sharqiyya and all those regions of the world happily still undeveloped.
I recently spent a weekend in Oman's ash-Sharqiyya region – the easternmost part of the Arab world – collecting wind-polished rocks in the desert, sleeping on an isolated beach (a turtle crawled up the sand to bury its eggs before dawn), and passing through small coastal villages.
This area remains – for a short time still – unspoilt. Although the inhabitants of the Sharqiyya enjoy the basic amenities which modernisation can and should provide – sanitation, electricity, health services – the state's footprint is soft in the sand. I saw no sign of police. Institutional buildings are few and far between. The corporations have not yet arrived. None of the fast food outlets and coffee factories that homogenise the globe from the tropics to the tundra. So the settlements are handsome. The doors of the simplest houses are carved and patterned wood. Recent building may have been done with breeze blocks, but it's been finished with mud.
The region wobbles on the edge of misnamed 'development.' It would be unwise in this water-scarce area to install flush toilets, but there will be worse. Emirati money is buying up the shoreline. Painted rocks mark the outlines of future residential complexes and hotels. I prayed as I passed that these were markers of dreams that would remain unfulfilled.
We stopped to drink tea in a low-slung village inhabited by shoeless people 'undeveloped' enough to sit in the road, in the shade of the mosque, talking and laughing. Goats nibbled at occasional rubbish. Children squealed. And in the tea house we met … a worker from Kerala state, south India. Even here in this unmonied corner of the Gulf, a member of the imported working class. Down the street a black man crouched, racially African, by culture and language an Arab.
When Oman was new to me I thought that Zanzibari Omanis could be recognised by the colour of their skin. I soon learnt things were more complicated. Many Omanis went to work or trade in east Africa, and many of them intermarried with the people there. At one point Zanzibar was the political capital of Oman, and well before the current bout of globalisation the trade in perfumes, spices, gold and slaves moved capital and people around the Indian Ocean and deep into Oman's mountainous interior. Zanzibari 'Arabs' – usually Swahili-speakers, black, brown and white – claimed Omani nationality in the post-1970 passport age, and helped to build the modern state. Distinct from the Zanzibari community are Arabs of African descent, from every part of Oman, but particularly from the old slave ports of Sur and Salalah.
The Prophet Muhammad did not explicitly ban slavery, but he worked against it by example, freeing slaves and encouraging his followers to seek God's pleasure by doing the same. Notably, the first muezzin in Islam (the man who calls the faithful to prayer), Bilal, was a freed slave. Given this example, it's somewhat shameful that slavery lasted as long as it did in the southern Arabian peninsula (and still exists today in Muslim as well as Christian and animist areas of Sahelian Africa).
Unlike its Euro-American variant, slavery in the Arab world was not associated with rigid racial ideology, and slaves were not so totally dehumanised. Omani slaves were African, but slaves in Syria or Egypt were often brought from the Caucasus or the Balkans. Slaves quickly became assimilated into Arab society. In the peninsula they were adopted by the tribes they worked for. Slaves could marry, do business, buy their own freedom, own property. They were sometimes – like the pre-Islamic Antar – the heroes of epic and romance, and ex-slaves – like the Egyptian Mamluks – even formed their own ruling dynasties. None of that justifies slavery, of course, nor alters the fact that there are some very un-Islamic attitudes to blacks in the Arab world, attitudes which have their roots in the institution of slavery.
In the old days, Gulf Arabs herded animals, dived for pearls, traded frankincense, and often relied on slaves to do menial work. In the oil age, menial work is done by the imported working class, mainly Indians. While the Africans became Arabs, and changed the Arabs, the Indians are sent home at the end of their contracts. One result of oil wealth has been that Oman, by importing workers, has preserved its tribal social system in which all are strong – whatever their skin colour or personal wealth – because all are backed by the solidarity of their tribe. Omanisation, which aims to replace foreign workers with locals, is necessary, and has a better chance of succeeding in Oman than its counterpart programmes in other Gulf states. One result, however, will be to replace tribal equality with a savage internal class system.
Welcome to capitalism, Oman. Eight kilometres of beach front in the capital area which were previously used by locals and foreign workers for picnics, swimming, walks and football have become eight kilometres of private land. A gated community is being built there, the unbuilt houses already sold to rich foreigners – Indians, Arabs, Westerners – and a private road being built from the nearby airport. The mineral spring in the town of Rustaq also seems to have become private property overnight. Public access to the spring is under threat, as are the old houses built over the channeled spring water. There are rumours that a luxury hotel is to be built in their place. A five-star 'Shangri-La' hotel has been built on the previously free-access beach at Jussa. Yitti beach, Muscat's favourite day trip, is slated for further developments – luxury housing and yet another five-star hotel.
The social and environmental disaster that is Dubai crawls closer.
In a region short of water and increasingly long on population, in an economy built on that most dangerous and outdated product, oil, in an Arab world groaning under the weight of American military bases, with Iran staring back at the bases, with depleted uranium wafting down from Iraq-Kuwait, with hatred of foreigners rising, none of this development is in any way sustainable. Part of me wants the collapse to come soon, for the sake of the Sharqiyya and all those regions of the world happily still undeveloped.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Gunboat Diplomacy
On January 11th, US occupation forces took five Iranian officials hostage from a diplomatic office in Arbil, Northern Iraq, prompting protests from the Kurdish regional authorities who had invited the Iranians. On February 4th, an Iraqi army unit under direct American command kidnapped an Iranian diplomat in Baghdad. These are incidents we can be sure of.
On February 14th, the anniversary of the bomb which killed Rafiq Hariri and many passersby in Beirut, eleven Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen died when their bus was bombed by Jundallah, a Sunni fundamentalist and Baluchi separatist group active in southeastern Iran. Iranian authorities accused the US of involvement in the attack, a claim which is backed up by Seymour Hersh and several other analysts who have described American promotion of ethnic and sectarian conflict in Iran, and specifically American cooperation with al-Qa'ida linked anti-Shia groups throughout the region.
Murkier still are rumours that the US administration's Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group is running a campaign to kidnap Revolutionary Guard commanders. Veteran Guardsman Alireza Askari either defected or was kidnapped during a visit to Istanbul in early February, and the fates of several other officers are unknown.
One of Iran's top nuclear scientists, Ardeshir Hussainpur, died on January 18th. His death wasn't announced until a week later, and the cause given then was 'gas poisoning.' The US security company Stratfor has said that the Israeli Mossad assassinated Hussainpur.
Meanwhile, there are now two US aircraft carrier batle groups in the Gulf, and Britain's naval presence has recently been boosted.
This is the context in which 15 British sailors have been arrested by Iranian forces while patrolling the Shatt al-'arab waterway between Iraq and Iran. Immediately much of the Western media fits the event into the narrative of the American embassy hostage crisis. We are told, without a hint of irony, that the British navy is on the Shatt al-'arab to ensure that 'intruders' will be chased off. The British mission, writes Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian, is to 'protect Iraq's oil supply' against 'pirates, smugglers and terrorists.' If the Anglo-American invasion and destruction of Iraq is seen against the background of the new oil law hurried through Iraq's absentee parliament, the words 'pirates, smugglers and terrorists' seem apt descriptors of US and British forces. In any case, Western packaging of the story has made very little reference to the recent history of US kidnapping operations against Iranian targets, or to the fact that the Shatt al-'arab was one front in the disastrous Iran-Iraq war during which Saddam Hussain used Western arms and money to cover Iranian cities in poison gas.
Nobody has wondered what the British reaction would be if Iranian forces were found half a mile outside of British territorial waters (this is the British claim; the Iranians say the sailors had crossed the border). The press, 'liberal' and conservative, have remained largely loyal in framing the victim as the aggressor, the aggressor as the victim, once again. Watch this story carefully. It has the potential to escalate into a deliberately-plotted, nation-smashing tragedy. Once again.
On February 14th, the anniversary of the bomb which killed Rafiq Hariri and many passersby in Beirut, eleven Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen died when their bus was bombed by Jundallah, a Sunni fundamentalist and Baluchi separatist group active in southeastern Iran. Iranian authorities accused the US of involvement in the attack, a claim which is backed up by Seymour Hersh and several other analysts who have described American promotion of ethnic and sectarian conflict in Iran, and specifically American cooperation with al-Qa'ida linked anti-Shia groups throughout the region.
Murkier still are rumours that the US administration's Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group is running a campaign to kidnap Revolutionary Guard commanders. Veteran Guardsman Alireza Askari either defected or was kidnapped during a visit to Istanbul in early February, and the fates of several other officers are unknown.
One of Iran's top nuclear scientists, Ardeshir Hussainpur, died on January 18th. His death wasn't announced until a week later, and the cause given then was 'gas poisoning.' The US security company Stratfor has said that the Israeli Mossad assassinated Hussainpur.
Meanwhile, there are now two US aircraft carrier batle groups in the Gulf, and Britain's naval presence has recently been boosted.
This is the context in which 15 British sailors have been arrested by Iranian forces while patrolling the Shatt al-'arab waterway between Iraq and Iran. Immediately much of the Western media fits the event into the narrative of the American embassy hostage crisis. We are told, without a hint of irony, that the British navy is on the Shatt al-'arab to ensure that 'intruders' will be chased off. The British mission, writes Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian, is to 'protect Iraq's oil supply' against 'pirates, smugglers and terrorists.' If the Anglo-American invasion and destruction of Iraq is seen against the background of the new oil law hurried through Iraq's absentee parliament, the words 'pirates, smugglers and terrorists' seem apt descriptors of US and British forces. In any case, Western packaging of the story has made very little reference to the recent history of US kidnapping operations against Iranian targets, or to the fact that the Shatt al-'arab was one front in the disastrous Iran-Iraq war during which Saddam Hussain used Western arms and money to cover Iranian cities in poison gas.
Nobody has wondered what the British reaction would be if Iranian forces were found half a mile outside of British territorial waters (this is the British claim; the Iranians say the sailors had crossed the border). The press, 'liberal' and conservative, have remained largely loyal in framing the victim as the aggressor, the aggressor as the victim, once again. Watch this story carefully. It has the potential to escalate into a deliberately-plotted, nation-smashing tragedy. Once again.
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