More Double Standards

Here’s my third post in a row on Israel-Palestine, and there may be another to come. I don’t intend to narrow the focus of the blog to one area, however important; but bear with me a little as I comment on the hypocrisy (briefly – several volumes could be filled on the subject) of Western responses to recent events.

Following the killing of 130 Palestinians in a week, more than half of them non-combatants, a Palestinian has shot dead eight young Israelis in the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in West Jerusalem, the part of the city which was occupied in 1948. Not only has most of the Western media given this attack more coverage than the deaths of the 130 Gazans (there are many days on which the death toll in Gaza reaches seven or eight and the Western media doesn’t even notice), it has also described the attack as an ‘escalation.’ I won’t discuss whether or not the attack was justified or wise, but I will say that it was an entirely predictable and understandable response to the suffering of Gaza, and that to call it an ‘escalation’ – when the occupying Zionist army perpetrates such crimes against the occupied on an average day – is simply grotesque.

The yeshiva was founded in 1924 by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the founders of religious Zionism. Traditional Orthodox Jews understood the term ‘religious Zionism’ to be an oxymoron; they believed that the ‘return’ to Israel would be effected when the Messiah arrived, that in any case ‘Israel’ signified a spiritual condition and not an armed state, and that until the coming of the Messiah Jews were commanded to live peacefully among the nations, to oppress no-one. The principled religious Jews of Neturei Karta, sadly reviled by Zionists, still hold to this position. You can see them on demonstrations for Palestine, hatted and ringletted, holding signs which say “Zionism is a Blasphemy against Judaism” and “Demolish the State of Israel.”

European Fascism destroyed the majority voice of traditional religious Jews and made the minority blood-and-soil movement of Zionism mainstream. People like Rabbi Kook were able to twist Judaism into a call for racial supremacy and the violent settlement of all of ‘Eretz Israel.’ Biblical texts referring to ancient tribal warfare were understood as literal contemporary commands. For example, Numbers 33:50-55: “When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan;/Then shall ye drive out all the inhabitants of the land…/And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land.” This is the ideology that drives the ugliest of armed West Bank settlers.

It is easy to see analogies with the worst forms of Islamism, which insist on literal approaches to sacred texts, which justify hatred of other religious communities by decontextualised readings of ancient battles, which have transformed Islam under the force of trauma and disconcertingly rapid social change from a spiritual and mystical tradition to a political programme obsessed with state power. But I digress. My point here is that while the British media refer to Mercaz Harav as a ‘seminary’, and the Americans call it a ‘school’, the term ‘militant madrasa’ would be as appropriate. The problem with this description is that when, for example, General Musharraf bombs a ‘militant madrasa’ in the Pakistani Tribal Areas, this is offered as a sign of his responsibility, political backbone and moral courage.

It is interesting too to notice the media’s ready use of the word ‘massacre’ to describe the attack on the militant colonist madrasa. Contrast this and the Jenin refugee camp, where a minimum of 52 Palestinians were killed in April 2002. A minimum of 22 were unarmed. We must assume that the rest were fighting back with small arms against the US-armed IDF to defend their homes and families. After blasting residential areas with heavy artillery, Israeli forces bulldozed houses which in many cases still had people inside, leading to claims that tens more corspes were buried for ever under the rubble. A disabled man was buried alive before his neighbours could help him out of his house. The Palestinians immediately referred to what had happened as a massacre, but the term was fiercely contested by Israel and its many supporters in the Western media – to the extent that many considered the word ‘massacre’ as applied to Jenin to be ‘anti-semitism’ or ‘blood libel.’

According to this logic, ‘massacre’ is what the Arabs, or the Muslims, or the brown-skinned, or the poor, do. Not ‘us’. When ‘they’ kill people, it’s called terrorism. When ‘we’ kill people, it’s necessary, unintentional, and legitimate, all at once.

People who don’t benefit from the power structure are never going to accept the definition of terrorism written by powerful states, that it is the political violence perpetrated by non-state actors. They are never going to agree that their oppressor’s monopoly of violence is morally correct. A better definition of terrorism is ‘violence aimed at terrorising civilians for political purposes’, in which case the US and Israeli armies do it better than anyone else. They blow up civilian targets, including buses and other civilian vehicles, and mosques and markets and private homes. They use missiles, tank shells, warplanes, cluster bombs, white phosphorus and depleted uranium. Despite their propaganda, they do it all quite deliberately. Of course they do: modern war involves murdering and terrorising civilians, full stop. You can’t destroy an economy and a nation’s political viability, or bend a population to your will, without murdering civilians. It’s immoral and unIslamic, but it’s modern war.

Calling your opponent a terrorist is, firstly, an attempt to make him submit to your violence and, secondly, a psychological attempt to deny your own criminality and barbarism.

Meanwhile, members of the ‘international community’ line up to dribble their bit into the spitoon. Brown and Milliband (who has family in Israel – I don’t think that should disqualify him from a position in the British government, but I’m sure a Briton with family in a refugee camp in South Lebanon or Gaza would be effectively disqualified) describe the militant madrasa attack as an “arrow at the heart of the peace process.” And what peace process do they mean? The one which takes as its definition of normality and calm the forty-year-old occupation of the West Bank and Gaza? The one which doesn’t mention the occupied Golan Heights? The one which has presided over years of continued land confiscation and slow ethnic cleansing? The one to which the war criminal Zionist Tony Blair has been appointed ‘special envoy’? The one in which the democratically-elected representatives of the Palestinians must not be negotiated with but imprisoned or beseiged? The one which was alive and kicking while Israel was murdering the poor and malnourished of Gaza? That one?

In reality, of course, there is no peace process.

And in Lebanon, because all of this has a wider dimension: on Thursday three Israeli planes flew over the south. On Friday two IAF planes flew over Beirut. Had Iran or Syria flown over Israel, we would be deep into regional war, with the American warships presently menacing the Lebanese coast supporting Israel’s glorious self-defence against Islamist terror.


Everyone should read this: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804
It is now mainstream news that the so-called Hamas 'coup' that took control of Gaza was in fact a pre-emptive strike against a US-Dahlan planned coup against the democratically-elected Palestinian government.

More on the fascist nature of Mercaz Harav here: http://www.scottishpsc.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2249&Itemid=404

Cartoons and Delusions

At least 76 Palestinians have been killed by the Zionist occupation in the last three days, 17 of them children. Three Israelis have been killed. Before I go any further I’d like to explain something which shouldn’t need explaining. A scorecard like 76 to three will not make the Palestinians surrender. On the contrary, it will make them fight with more commitment and devotion. For decades Israeli Jews have been working on the assumption that the more disproportionate the casualties, the more massacres they perpetrate, the more terror they strike into the hearts of the defeated, the closer their ultimate victory comes. The murder-them-into-submission theory has of course been proved wrong again and again. Their invasion of South Lebanon in 1978 and their blitzkrieg of 1982 created Hizbullah, the most effective and intelligent fighting force in the Arab world’s modern history. As for the Palestinians, through the long decades of their dispossession they have grown in resilience, toughening until by the outbreak of the Second Intifada they had lost their fear. Occupied Palestine is certainly exhausted. Unsurprisingly, given the murderous international campaign directed against it, the political leadership is splintered. But this fact remains: Palestinian fearlessness and will to resist is now an unchangeable reality.

Because of the traumatic history of Jews in Europe, Jewish Israeli insanity is in some way understandable. But not so the racist sickness of Zionism’s Western supporters. During the relentless siege of Gaza, Hollywood stars including Sylvester Stallone have held fund-raising concerts for the Israelis of Sderot. Western governments have condemned the killing of the one Israeli in Sderot and remained silent (like the Arab clients) over the death and starvation in Gaza. Tony Blair, the liar and war criminal so unwisely and provocatively appointed ‘envoy to the peace process’, regrets the loss of Palestinian life, but blames it on the Palestinians. (more on Blair here: http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2007/10/tony-blair.html ) For this ugly collection of imperialists, evangelical Christians and ethnic supremacists, and for the ignorant millions lulled by their ‘free media,’ one set of people are clearly worth more than another set of people. Nothing new here. This has always been the key assumption underlying the Zionist project.

To reiterate: the Israelis, though criminally misguided, have some kind of psychological excuse. The Europeans and Americans who provide political, economic and military support, and who don’t have to live in the region, do not.

This escalation comes in the context of the international strangulation of Gaza to punish it for democratically choosing a resistance movement. On Wednesday Israel assassinated a group of Hamas men. In response, the Palestinians unleashed a barrage of homemade Qassam missiles on the nearby Israeli town of Sderot. Unusually, the missiles claimed a victim. Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai then threatened the Palestinians with “a greater holocaust.” On the 10th of February Cabinet Minister Meir Sheetrit had announced: “We must take a neighborhood in Gaza and wipe it off the map.” Most of the Western media is keeping quiet about these genocidal threats. When Iranian President Ahmedinejad was misquoted as calling for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’ (he actually quoted Khomeini’s opinion that the Zionist regime – not the Israeli Jewish people – would be wiped from the page of time, that is, that an unjust power structure would fall) this was taken almost as casus belli in Washington and Tel Aviv. Israel’s threats are now being put into action. The death toll, including two Israeli soldiers, rises as I type.

Why then does the resistance continue the Qassam fire, which the tame Egyptian foreign minister recently called “cartoonish”? Critics say that it only provides an excuse for heavier Israeli repression. The resistance would argue that Israel doesn’t need an excuse, and that it is necessary to create a balance of terror as a deterrent to Israeli violence. (Notice how the Palestinians are called ‘terrorists’ when they use their bodies as weapons delivery systems; when they stop that tactic and use missiles, like the Israeli army, they are still called terrorists.) Zionists and their supporters also claim that Israel no longer occupies Gaza. The resistance would correctly respond that despite the pullout of ‘civilian’ settlers, Gaza is surrounded by Israeli forces by land and sea, and is under the tightest of economic sieges. Besides, Gaza is only one part of occupied Palestine. The resistance has made a political decision to resist as best it can until Palestine is liberated, or until there is a real peace process rather than the theatre we’ve watched since 1973.

It should also be remembered that Hamas has called consistently for a cessation of attacks on civilians on both sides. Activists need to repeat constantly the realities of the conflict, that Hamas is much closer to a recognition of Israeli Jewish rights than Israel is to a recognition of Palestinian rights. Activists need to constantly repeat themselves because they are drowned out by the Zionist propaganda machine. I’m not an activist, and I won’t endlessly repeat myself. But I wrote about Hamas here: http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2007/06/palestines.html

Since yesterday three American warships have been patrolling the coast of Lebanon. Hassan Nasrallah described the recent assassination of Imad Mughniyeh as an Israeli pre-emptive strike, to remove this Hizbullah asset from the battlefield before a wider conflagration. The Saudis have just called on their citizens to leave Lebanon. This could be just another day in the Empire’s Middle East, or this could be the start of a major war. It may include Syria this time, even Iran. It is certain that Israel and the US want to restore the deterrent power they lost when Hizbullah defeated them in 2006.

There is a depth to Palestine of 300 million Arabs and a billion and a half Muslims. Arab leaders may be puppets, or corrupt dictators, or a combination of both, but the depth remains, and will remain. Unlike American power, it is not a passing phenomenon in the region. Hamas is tremendously outgunned, but its missiles are being steadily improved, with a steadily increasing range. Its developing fighting techniques mean that Israel must take some casualties whenever they enter Gaza. Hizbullah cannot be moved from the north. And the world is turning. We’re waiting for the rush to give up the fallen dollar. New alliances are rising, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which brings together China, Russia and the central Asian states. Iran is an observing member. When the US asked to join, it was turned down.

What seems really cartoonish are Zionist delusions of final victory.

Mughniyeh Martyred

In this post I will jettison my chances of ever being granted an American visa, by committing imperially-defined thought crime and supporting the strategy, if not all the tactics, of the martyred resistance leader Imad Mughniyeh. In today’s sad world you can be demonised, even prosecuted, for refusing to sing the ideological chorus with Israel (specifically Danny Yatom) that assassinations of resistance fighters represent “a great achievement for the free world in its fight against terror.” But I believe it is important not to be cowed by such hypocrisy and intimidation.

First, the strategy. Mughniyeh was a key member of Jihad, an earlier, rougher incarnation of Hizbullah which pushed Western forces out of civil-war Lebanon in the 80s. He then became a founding member of Hizbullah and took part in its campaign to drive out the Israeli occupation from most of the south by 2000. This was the first real victory that any Arab force had won against the Zionist state. The strategy was one of well-organised, intelligent, committed resistance, and the strategy paid off. In the summer of 1996, when Israel and America tried to destroy Hizbullah and the affront to their hegemony that it represents, they were again defeated. The first-world hi-tech army that had defeated Egypt and Syria in six days in 1967, that had taken only a week to reach and demolish Beirut in 1982, spent five weeks floundering in its own blood in the villages on the Lebanese border.

And then the tactics, which are more questionable. The 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, perhaps a Hizbullah response to the Israeli assassination of its leader Abbas Moossawi, can be justified. South Lebanon was under occupation, and the embassy was sovereign Israeli territory. The 1994 bomb attack on an Argentinian Jewish cultural centre, in which 85 civilians were killed, cannot be justified. (Hizbullah has denied responsibility for both attacks, and no firm proof has been presented for its involvement.)

In a particularly messy period of the Lebanese civil war, Mughniyeh was responsible for taking foreign hostages. Again, this tactic was undoubtedly morally wrong and politically counterproductive. However, we should be aware of the hypocrisy of official Israeli and American ranting about such despicable terrorism. Israel took hundreds of Lebanese men and women hostage and tortured them in Khiyam prison (this was the context for Mughniyeh’s hostage taking). America has taken thousands of Iraqis hostage and subjected them to grotesque physical, psychological and sexual torture in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. One of Mughniyeh’s hostages was killed: a CIA man. A CIA operative is not an innocent bystander. In fact, I will use the language used by a White House rat describing the Mughniyeh assassination and say that the CIA man was “brought to justice.”

When Mughniyeh hijacked a TWA airliner in 1985, one passenger was killed: a member of the US Navy. (Apparently the Greek singer Demis Roussos was on the hijacked plane. The hijackers helped him to celebrate his birthday, and once released Roussos expressed sympathy for his Arab brothers’ plight).

Mughniyeh’s most effective operations were in 1983, against the US embassy and then the US and French military barracks in Beirut. These attacks killed hundreds and were successful in ridding Lebanon of Western military interference. These attacks are what elevated Mughniyeh to the status of ‘terror mastermind’, and provoked much handwringing over the abstract evil that drives barbarians to murder innocent peacekeepers. But Western ‘peacekeeping’ in Lebanon involved implementing Israel’s plan of expelling Palestinian forces and appointing a traitor as president who would sign a peace agreement with Israel while it was still occupying Lebanon’s capital city. American ships bombarded villagers in the Shuf mountains. American forces guaranteed the safety of Palestinian civilians once the PLO fighters left the country, and then watched the Israeli-organised and Phalange-perpetrated Sabra and Shatila camp massacres. Up to 3000 old men, women, children and babies were raped and hacked to death by coked-up militia under a night sky lit by Israeli flares. But that’s not terrorism, viewers.

On the theme of what isn’t terrorism, let me pick a few more examples… On July 17th 1981, Israel murdered 300 civilians by bombing residential tower blocks which may or may not have housed PLO offices. On March 8th 1985, the CIA failed to kill Ayatullah Fadlallah with a car bomb in Beirut, but succeeded in killing 80 of his neighbours. On April 18th 1996, Israel bombed a UN compound where the civilians of Qana, South Lebanon, were sheltering, killing 106. In July 2006, Israel killed another 28 civilians, half of them children, in Qana. Remember, sons and daughters of the free world, none of this is terrorism. It is legitimate military action on behalf of civilisation and democracy.

Mughniyeh was assassinated in Damascus. In his speech at the Beirut funeral yesterday, Hassan Nasrallah said that Israel has now acted beyond the usual battlefield of Israel-Lebanon and has thereby invited the resistance to “open war,” suggesting that the Hizbullah response could come anywhere in the world. It will be fascinating to see what happens next. Nasrallah is the most intelligent Arab politician there is, and he knows that a high-profile act of ‘terrorism’ beyond the Middle East would lead to an unpredictable chain of events, even to the long-threatened US-Iran confrontation. And Hizbullah’s freedom of action is severely limited by internal Lebanese politics. Although the resistance defeated Israel’s war aims in 2006, adroit US and Saudi manipulation of Lebanese sectarian and class divisions has tied Hizbullah’s hands.

The funeral, which I watched on al-Manar, was very moving. It demonstrated once again the power of the crowd, the great unity, loyalty, discipline and commitment of Hizbullah’s core supporters, these people who have offered so many martyrs, who have suffered so much and fought so hard. The success of Hizbullah derives ultimately from the fact that it is a popular movement, the only organisation or ruling force in the Arab world that is not scared of its people. When you watch these people you wonder how America and Israel can even dream of defeating them. But switch channels, and you understand. Jumblatt, with his usual absurdity, blamed Syria for the assassination, and said the wild animals are eating each other. Future TV didn’t show the funeral or Nasrallah’s speech. The clients in Riyadh and Cairo kept quiet, no doubt secretly exulting. There’s a Middle Eastern saying: Al-Arab Jarab. The Arabs are scabies.

The Western media says what it’s supposed to, all it is capable of doing. The increasingly boring and predictable Robert Fisk writes about Mughniyeh’s staring eyes and steely grip (of course, the main character in Fisk’s article is, as usual, Robert Fisk). Journalists from London to Los Angeles put the word ‘martyr’ inside smirking inverted commas, denying the victims even psychological consolation.

Meanwhile the villagers of the Lebanese Shabaa Farms and the Syrian Golan continue to live under occupation. In Palestine on Thursday a woman died after suffering a stroke when Israeli occupation troops refused to allow her to enter a waiting ambulance. On Wednesday a mentally disabled Palestinian died of Israeli gunshot wounds. Gaza continues to starve.

The struggle against terrorism continues.

Egyptian Novels

In the contemporary Arab world, Bilad ash-Sham, or the Levant, surely comes first for poetry. Whether you’re looking for Muhammad Maghout’s bitter satire, anti-romanticism, and defence of the poor and the peasants, or for Mahmoud Darwish’s lyrical nationalism -- whether you appreciate the modernist obscurity of Adonis or the powerful simplicity of Nizar Qabbani; you will turn to Syria and Palestine for your verse fix. The Arabs certainly do. For poetry in the Middle East isn’t the elite preoccupation it has become in the West. Taxi drivers and market men will quote you snippets of Qabbani’s love poetry or angry anti-occupation verse according to their temperament and the twist of the conversation. Even the illiterate may know some Qabbani from hearing it quoted in the café or crooned by the Iraqi singer Kazem as-Saher, with orchestral accompaniment. When Arab rappers want to express hardcore identity, they proclaim: “I’m an Arab like Mahmoud Darwish!” (the ‘Dam’ crew from Palestine.) That’s how uncissy Arab poetry is.

But for the Arabic novel, a genre which is only a century old (although there are much earlier precursors), the action is centred in Egypt, unsurprisingly – Egypt with its huge population and its indefinable, unmeasurable metropolis.

The most famous of Egyptian novelists is Naguib Mahfouz. Amongst the Arabs his books are bestsellers in garish covers, and many have been made into classic films. His international reputation was sealed when he became the first Arab to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. Reflecting changes in 20th century Arab reality, his style developed from heroic through realist to magical realist or romantic symbolist.

His career began in the 1930s with historical novels such as ‘Thebes at War’ which used ancient Egyptian history to bolster patriotic pride, racial identity, and resistance to the British.

In the 1950s Mahfouz focussed on the archetypal novelistic theme: social change. This and his extensive reading of European novels resulted in the brilliant psychological realism and richly-peopled urban setting of ‘The Cairo Trilogy’, which follows three generations of a family’s life from the First World War to the Free Officers’ Revolution. The Trilogy did everything the 19th Century European realist novel had done, but perhaps did it better.

In the 60s and 70s Mahfouz’s work became more experimental. My own favourite comes from this period: ‘The Harafish,’ which means ‘the rabble’. It is a more universal study of human lust for power and immortality, and is also sexy and drama-packed. By now Mahfouz’s alleyway, that key social unit of traditional Arab cities, has become not just necessary realist background but a freefloating metaphor. It could represent Egypt, or the Arab world, or humanity. Its daily action reflects psychological and sexual tensions as well as social and political conflict.

The vaguely allegorical ‘Children of Gebelawi’ (its Arabic title is ‘Children of our Alley’) traces human history from the Fall through Judaism, Christianity and Islam to modern secular scientism. In its troubled Egyptian context, the book was controversial enough to get the old man stabbed in the neck by an Islamist in 1994. Mahfouz found it difficult to write after that, but continued producing small works until his death in 2006.

His books are classics of world literature and should be read by anyone who likes reading, whether or not they are interested in Egypt.

One star of the ‘Sixties Generation’ is Gamal al-Ghitani, whose historical novel ‘Zayni Barakat’ is particularly good. This is set in 1516 when Egypt’s Mamluk dynasty was crumbling before rising Ottoman power, but like all historical novels it has as much to say about the moment of its authorship. Many Western journalists are frustrated novelists; the oft-censored and once imprisoned Ghitani is a frustrated journalist. His fiction refers to the rise of a new Egyptian ruling class, to Israeli conquest and American hegemony, and the experience of living in a police state.

The Marxist writer Sonallah Ibrahim, in a reaction against social realism and linear narrative, produces kafkaesque and often hilarious criticism of contemporary Egypt. Another frustrated social commentator, Ibrahim blurs borders between literature and reportage. In ‘Zaat’, for instance, chapters describing the sexual, workplace and bureaucratic battles of the eponymous heroine are intercut with headlines culled from the Egyptian press which tell their own story of galloping corruption, loss of national independence, social dislocation and hypocritical Islamism.

A contemporary Egyptian bestseller, in Europe as well as in the Arab world, is Alaa al-Aswany’s ‘The Yacoubian Building.’ Mahfouz’s microcosmic alleyway has been replaced by a residential building inhabited by, amongst others, a gay character, a pious businessman-politician who makes his real money by trafficking drugs, a young woman who has to smile through sexual harrassment in order to keep her job and feed her family, and the doorkeeper’s son who is turned to political violence by frustrated ambition and police torture. Aswany doesn’t quite have the stature of Mahfouz, not yet at least, but he has the same humanist focus on social change and the same democratic comprehensiveness.

Most contemporary of all in its tone is Ahmad al-Aidy’s ‘Being Abbas el Abd’, which is an Egyptian ‘Fight Club’, amongst other things. It contains graphic weirdness and all manner of iconoclasm. Its humour and quickness of thought, and its up-to-the-minute Cairene cynicism, produce devastating lines such as a list of the ‘three options of the Arabs’: “Security in exchange for peace. Oil in exchange for food. And silence in exchange for aid.”

This slim novel has a high frequency of lines you want to underline and repeat for their own sake. Like: “She swivels her gaze with the neutrality of a security camera.” Or: “Another of the ladies is embracing me at an angle that allows her reticent breast to remain that way.” Or: “The usual Oriental machismo – that machismo that blazes up in a house as the light of a female fades.”

‘Being Abbas el Abd’ has a post-modern playfulness in its relationship with genre and literary tradition. When a prostitute relates her first sexual encounters, “She doesn’t say anything about ‘plucking roses’ or ‘and so Shahrazad reached the morning’s shore.’” The book tells us what is happening to contemporary (Egyptian) Arabic as well as to the Arabs. This is a language refigured by the computer and mobile phone, by the closepacked discourses and jargons of the metropolis, by advertising and Hollywood, by psychobabble, by the English language. “Close your eyes, drag and drop the Defilement icon into the folders of your brain,” writes our narrator. In the Arabic, there are expressions which are uncomfortably direct translations from English idiom (‘give a damn’ for instance). In translation, we read, “‘I forgive U,’ she says, dubbing herself into English.”

I have some problems with the Humphrey Davies translation. When I read “Cut to the chase,” or “Don’t act dumb with me! I mean like what’s with the women?” I have to struggle to place myself back in Cairo. But that’s because this American slang sounds foreign to me. al-Aidy is trying to make his Arabic conform to what he hears in the buses and cafés, to make it as local as possible. How do you translate that?

‘Being Abbas el Abd’ is fast-moving, globalised, irreverent, erotic, and alienated. As such it would surprise Martin Amis, who tells us that a monolithic Islamism has won everywhere in the Muslim world. It would confuse any of the commentators who complacently wrap up the ‘Arab mind’ in a trite image or two.

The West is hearing a lot about the Arabs, but only within the straitened confines of its corporate media, which inevitably simplifies. “Making Sense Of It All,” sloganises BBC World. Non-fiction written by outsiders can be good (on Egypt, ‘In an Antique Land’ by Amitav Ghosh is to be recommended), but the stuff in the best-seller lists (Bernard Lewis, VS Naipaul) usually has a narrow agenda. Novels provide context and complexity. They offer a more nuanced understanding and a sense of the human texture of a part of the world which is, naturally, every bit as diverse as any other.

“Maps for Lost Lovers” and writerly responsibility

I’ve recently read Nadeem Aslam’s finely-constructed and richly metaphorical novel “Maps for Lost Lovers”, which portrays a British Pakistani community and its rigid boundaries over a year of daily life and crisis. Save for some occasionally unconvincing dialogue, the writing is beautiful and poetic. Unlike, for example, Martin Amis, Aslam respects his characters, who are well-rounded and complex enough to evoke sympathy even when they behave badly. He shows them busy with gossip, work, poetry – and plenty of murder. For example, a book shop owner is murdered for money by his relatives in Pakistan. At the heart of the book, Chanda and Jugnu are murdered by Chanda’s brothers for ‘living in sin.’ Chanda wants to divorce her husband so she can marry her lover, but her husband has disappeared for years, and she doesn’t know where to. Another girl is murdered by a ‘holy man’ during exorcism-beatings. And so on: a litany of crimes motivated by ‘honour’ and superstition.

One subplot revolves around a woman being forced by sharia law to marry another man before returning to a husband who has divorced her once while drunk. The actual regulation is this: if a man divorces his wife THREE times he cannot remarry her unless she has been married to someone else and that marriage has also collapsed. This is generally understood as a warning to husbands not to divorce their wives without considering the consequences. Furthermore, a divorce announced when the husband is angry or intoxicated is not recognised. As for the stranded Chanda, sharia would automatically grant her a divorce if her husband disappeared for a day longer than a year. Fair enough, Aslam is writing about uneducated people’s partial and skewed understanding of their religion, or of their confusion of tradition and religion, but this point will be lost on non-Muslim readers.

Most offensive to Muslims in Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses” was his rehearsal of Christendom’s old slurs – his depiction of the Prophet’s wives as whores and of the Prophet himself as a power and sex-crazed epileptic. In this, Rushdie was being unnecessarily offensive to hundreds of millions of people. He was showing off. He was dancing for his Western audience. (The front cover of an early edition of “Midnight’s Children” declares: “It sounds like a continent finding its voice.” Despite his English education and residence and his ‘cosmopolitan intellectual’ influences, and despite the enormous and ancient subcontinental literary tradition, Rushdie was cast as the articulate native who, at last, speaks a language ‘we’ can understand. A paper could be written on how the marketing of Rushdie as much as the offensiveness of “The Satanic Verses” fuelled the angry Muslim response to this later novel). But I think most non-Muslim readers recognised that Rushdie’s version of the Prophet’s family was very far from the truth, or at least from more standard narratives. More damage was done, in my opinion, in Rushdie’s mixing of truth with malicious fantasy in his description of the religion itself. On one page, for instance, a character reports that the new religion allows a man four wives (which is true) and that it forbids any sexual position in which the woman is on top of the man (which is not). An informed Muslim reader will understand Rushdie’s self-congratulatory postmodern games, but the book wasn’t written for Muslims.

I don’t mean to put Aslam in the same category as Rushdie. Aslam is undoubtedly a better, more serious writer who confronts real issues rather than making a virtue of insults for their own sake and an ultimately unchallenging iconoclasm. Neither do I want to suggest that a writer should subvert the power and focus of his writing in order to be politically correct or to nanny the reader through his themes. I merely want to bring up the delicate issue of a writer’s responsibility in an Islamophobic climate. When Irvine Welsh (“Trainspotting”, “Marabou Stork Nightmares”, etc) writes about Scottish people in relation to drug abuse, rape and infanticide, his audience understands that he has chosen to focus on only one aspect of Scottish life. But honour killing and the rest are presented on a daily basis in the newspapers and the wider popular culture as emblematic of Muslim communities. For many readers, it’s not one aspect of Muslim reality; it’s comprehensive.

Perhaps Nadeen Aslam should have included a better-educated Muslim character to point out the possibility of more liberal readings of Islam. Perhaps he could have included a preface or an afterword to explain, for example, the reality of divorce and remarriage regulations in Islam. Perhaps these tactics would have diluted the work of art that “Maps for Lost Lovers” undoubtedly is. I don’t know.

I’ve written a novel myself, so I’m aware of the difficulties. Mine is about people in London, but there is backstory in Syria and Iraq. I worry that the aspects of Syrian reality that I shine light on – torture, political violence, sectarianism – could serve neo-con stereotypes, especially given the lack of good news fed to the West about Syria. It’s the traumas of Syria that are important to my British Syrian protagonist’s drama. And it’s a novel, not an essay or a piece of reportage. And .. I didn’t realise it would be published when I started writing. Neither did I anticipate the level of American-Israeli threat that would be directed at Syria in 2008.

Back to “Maps for Lost Lovers”. In Pakistan a woman is sacked from her job as a hotel receptionist for shaking hands with a man. When Chanda visits, a man attempts to molest her. Jugnu’s niece returns to marry a cousin who burns her with his cigarettes. Pakistan is a country, a character tells us, not just of wife-beaters but of wife-killers. This unremittingly dismal picture reminds me of the Bangladesh of Monica Ali’s “Brick Lane”, a country of pure poverty and injustice described in the ungrammatical letters sent by our immigrant heroine’s sister. (And why are these letters – supposedly written in Bengali – so gratingly poor in spelling, grammar and style?)

Of course I’m not suggesting that there is no misogyny in Bangladesh or Pakistan. But that, contrary to what the Daily Express tells you, is not the end of the story. When I lived in Rawalpindi, I shook hands with plenty of women – who didn’t immediately lose their jobs. There were many cases of wife-abuse in the papers, and many illiterate mullahs abusing the confidence of gullible villagers, but also many Pakistanis working to end such abuse, and an unlimited supply of jokes targetting ignorant, lascivious, hypocritical mullahs. I clearly remember people’s appalled attitudes to the Britain-returned Pakistani who kept his women shut in the house. “Where does he think he is?” they complained. “Some village in the 50s?”

And it’s not as if misogyny draws a cultural dividing line between East and West. The primary cause of death for women under 35 in the UK is domestic violence. One third of women killed in the US are killed by boyfriends and husbands.

The key issue is not religion but class, and Aslam’s world recognises this. He shows a rich Pakistani’s horror of her poor compatriots in Britain, and the ‘bad image’ they give of Pakistan in the eyes of the English. In the real world, class is forgotten by those commentators who blame Islam, or multiculturalism, for the poverty, educational underachievment and extremism of some British Pakistanis. Compare the Muslim ‘African Asians’ who arrived in Britain with a great deal of pre-existent cultural capital; they were already the business and professional class in Kenya and Uganda, and now they earn more and do better at school than their white neighbours, and are in general politically content.

It is in his depiction of alienation that Aslam excels. The community’s northern town is called ‘dasht-i-tanhai’, which means ‘wilderness of desolation’ or ‘desert of loneliness’. Britain’s Pakistani immigrants were often illiterate peasants who intended to stay no longer than five or ten years. They were focussed on making money rather than education, and anyway did not have access to good education in the industrial towns they moved to. In those days they considered it shameful to bury their dead in Britain. They had little or no interaction with white people, except for entirely negative experiences of white racism (Aslam is good on this). In many northern towns, once the factories closed even workplace interaction of Pakistanis and whites came to an end, and relations deteriorated further. Old world taboos and stigmas were clung to because they established borders around the community and expressed refusal of what was beyond it. The behaviour and beliefs that made the community overly rigid and illiberal also strengthened it and gave it cohesion. Aslam writes of this with compassion as well as revulsion, showing the tender loves maintained in private, between husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, and the pride in beleaguered identity.

Today this traditional Pakistani community has to a large extent collapsed. The children have rebelled in a thousand ways, and the older generation feels it has lost everything. Meanwhile, the outside remains hostile. In fact, hostility is growing, and globalising. Pakistan itself is in crisis. The British government engages in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, backs Israel’s rampages in Palestine and Lebanon. The police arrest hundreds of dark or bearded men under terrorism legislation, and end up charging almost none. Muslims are taken to court for downloading things from the internet or writing verse no more unpleasant than the gangster rap you can buy on the high street. The media prints anti-Muslim scare stories every single day. The elders despair. Some of the younger generation, unable to believe in the pieties of their parents, unable to bow their heads, no longer enjoying and suffering the structure of taboo and refusal described in Aslam’s novel, turn to crime, and even to suicide bombing.

- Thanks to my friend Tariq Yusuf – a British Pakistani – for the conversation from which these thoughts arose.

Nubians

Crossing the Nile from Aswan to Elephantine Island feels like travelling to a different country. Squashed – for now – between the ruins of Abu and a gated luxury hotel are the Nubian villages of Siwa and Koti and their shared agricultural land. This was where I spent most of my four days in Aswan, returning from museums and cemeteries to the living, to banana and palm groves, rice paddies and cane fields, and the narrow alleys and painted houses of the Nubians.

I smoked with them, played dominoes, laughed and talked at great length. I returned late each night to my toothbrush in the hotel in Aswan, but they invited me to sleep in their house. They fed me a spicy cheese which tastes similar to Syrian shingleesh, but in liquid form, and fool bean paste, tomatoes and carrots full of flavour, spicy fried liver. It was the best food I ate in Egypt, a country without a decent restaurant culture, even in Cairo, so a country where the best food is simple, rural.

In the downstairs room, three three-month-old crocodiles captured from Lake Nasser stretched their necks, destined for early execution and then stuffing, or mummification – it’s the same word in Arabic. A few days later I visited the temple at Kom Ombo where sacred crocodiles once splashed in a riverside pool, and where a mummified-crocodile graveyard was excavated. So the Nubians have been stuffing animals for a very long time. My hosts told me the Nubians were the originators of ancient Egyptian civilisation. This is a simplification, to say the least, and one which reminds me of other nationalist narratives in the Middle East. In Syria you hear how Arab-Semitic culture gave the world language. Iran, so some Iranians say, was the factor that civilised a previously barbaric Arab Islam. Most absurdly, Kemalist nationalism in Turkey, with its ‘sun-language theory’ and other idiocies, claims that the Sumerians were actually ‘Turanian’ Turks, that the Turks colonised India when the Indians lived in trees, and so on. But the Nubians, being a small, divided people – and pushing the rice pudding bowl towards me as they talked – won my sympathy.

They told me many things about the Nubian language, which is Nilo-Saharan rather than Semitic. They speak it fluently, but seem to speak Arabic more often. I wondered if this was a politeness to me, although even quick sub-conversations around the room were conducted in Arabic. The one time I heard them spontaneously speaking Nubian (or Kenzi, for ‘Nubian’ is actually a group of languages) was when an elder stepped in to say hello.

Most of Nubia remained Christian until the fourteenth century. Islam and Arabic came to Nubia with Sufi drums. The chants and songs of the travelling mystics heard in markets and around campfires were Islamic, in the Arabic language. “This is how the people learned,” explained my hosts. “They dominated us in this way.” They use the word ‘domination’ but they don’t resent Islam. On the contrary, they describe Islam as a blessing and all Muslims as their brothers. They wish the Egyptian government would align itself with Islamic powers and causes rather than with capitalism and the West.

They play Sudanese-Arabic music on their mobile phones, sway and smile, and light another.

They feel themselves to be stranded between powers. When they described the inhabitants of their state, they veered between ‘we’ and ‘the Egyptians’. They are proud of the ‘nahda’, of Egypt’s former role as Arab centre of gravity, of Um Kalthoum, Abdelhaleem Hafez and Najuib Mahfouz. They are more emotional about Arab world issues than some uncomplicatedly ‘Arab’ Egyptians I met. Yet they also talked of oppression, of the misrepresentation of their history, of racism. They are conscious of their links to Sudan, where three quarters of Nubians live, and talked wistfully of the time when Egypt and Sudan were one country (recognising that Egyptians dominated Sudanese then, and that the British dominated Egypt). They boasted of the prominent Sudanese, from Nimeiry to Hassan Turabi, who have Nubian blood. At this point one of them chimed in, cautionary, that Sudan is “a land of wars.”

Their contemporary relationship with Mubarak’s state is defined by ‘development’ and the tourism-heritage industry.

The controversial Aswan High Dam is just a few kilometres up the Nile. It was built to control the sometimes destructive annual Nile flood and to generate hydro-electricity, as well as to symbolise modern Egypt’s coming-of-age and independence. One of the triggers for Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez canal (and the imperialist aggression against Egypt which followed) was America’s cancellation of promised funds for the dam. Its construction with Soviet help was thus seen as a victory for the Arabs and the third world as well as for Egypt. But the silt which formerly fertilised the Nile banks, the Delta, and even the Mediterranean Sea is now trapped behind the dam. Without the annual replenishment of silt, the Delta is more prone to flood (as the ice caps melt, this could become an unimaginably huge problem). The lack of silt has even led to the erosion of coastlines around the eastern Mediterranean. The dam also provides an easy target for a sophisticated enemy. One Israeli bomb on the dam would result in Cairo being devastated, so I’ve been told. But as far as the Nubians are concerned, the most profound consequence of the dam was the destruction of their villages and farms and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people when Lake Nasser was formed.

Abdul-Nasser’s government made great progress in redistributing wealth and enfranchising the poor through socialist land reforms – reforms which have since been dismantled. Nasser also won important victories against imperialism. On the other hand, his was the first regime in the Arab world to build a comprehensive police state. The state imposed itself not only on café conversations but even on nature. The history of Egypt, and in some way therefore of the world, is the history of the Nile’s fertile flood. The dam which put an end to it is an example of the folly of ‘development’, the global materialist mania for control. And the dream of Egyptian and Arab independence which was dreamed in the Rapid Eye Movement of the 50s and 60s has become a nightmare of dependence today. The Egyptian state controls a degraded Nile, and the Empire controls the Egyptian state.

Tourism, meanwhile, is the state’s biggest earner. As a result, Elephantine Island has been partitioned into, on one side, the Nubian villages and the ruins of Abu and, on the other, the ugly concrete and very exclusive Oberoi hotel. An impenetrable barrier runs between. An ancient stairway descends beneath the Nubian houses, which makes it likely that there are more temples and statues undiscovered. Elephantine was, after all, the dwelling place of Khnum, the ram-headed god of the cataracts, who guarded and controlled the waters of the Nile from caves beneath the island. The state naturally wishes to uncover what is covered, to do its own guarding and controlling, to make another few guineas from the tourists. The villages of Koti and Siwa may not be there for much longer.

My hosts wondered whose property the artifacts under their homes and hills are. Do they really belong to the British Museum and the Louvre, to the Egyptian museum in Cairo, to the busloads of white people passing through? And what is the most intelligent way to respect and appreciate their ancient heritage, as well as their contemporary reality?

Visiting Syria

I’ve just given up smoking, again, after a relapse in Syria and Egypt. I mean, what can an ex-smoker do, returning to Sham? In Oman very few people smoke. Abu Dhabi airport, where I spent an hour in transit, is of course smoke-free. But in Damascus airport the passport officials were smoking, and the police, and the baggage handlers, and the passengers. So it continued in the taxi, and in the house, and almost everywhere else. I’m not complaining.

I spent a too-brief ten days in Syria, mainly shivering. It was minus seven one night. Coming out of the hot mineral-water baths (men stepping into the pools clutching their cigarettes) at Jbab and waiting ten minutes for a micro to the city, I froze. My hatless brother-in-law said it’s because I haven’t done military service. He started his in the winter time, standing at attention in his underwear on subzero mountainsides, assaulted by insults and buckets of cold water. “Great days!” he mused. “Happy memories!” So it was cold, but the Syrians grumbled that it hasn’t rained enough this year. There was a big snowfall just after I left, and there’s been another one today.

Damascus in the wintertime: men hunched against the weather in leather jackets and wooly hats. Pale eyes under dark brows and tall foreheads. The distinctive mixture of harsh and gentle in the people, and in their environment. It looked to my pampered eye like chaos on the roads, but I didn’t see any accidents. The city is hazed with diesel fumes. Six million people (or is it more now?) burning mazote to keep warm. And it’s ever more urban. Close packed stacks of flat in brown and grey, the colours of poverty. Buildings erupting like warts from the earth’s dry skin, stained orange, exhausted yellow.

The airport road is being worked on in anticipation of the Arab summit and Damascus’s year as the Arab cultural capital. The taxi driver laments the death of Arabism. “Before the invasion of Iraq we had it in name at least. Now it isn’t even mentioned. Now it’s all parties, tribes, sects, ethnic groups, regions..” Outside there is a winter sky of a kind that Oman has never seen. These days I’m not used to the cold. I accept a cigarette. West of Damascus, what I remember as fields seems to have been transformed into mounds of rubble.

I visit the Old City. I hear the heart-jumping exhilaration of the azan called by the four muezzins of the Umawi Mosque, one from each minaret. I have a meal in the courtyard of Bait Jabri, huddled close to a stove. Nearby there are streets full of new cafes and restaurants. The Old City now boasts two five-star hotels in restored Damascene houses. A garden and café have been built beside the citadel walls.

It’s old news to say that everybody now has a mobile phone, and that there are far more cars on the roads since taxes have been eased. People worry about social divisions caused by the liberalising of the economy. More than once I’m told that it costs 600 lira for a cup of coffee in Waleed bin Talal’s Four Seasons hotel. On the ramshackle outskirts of the city I notice a large supermarket, a furniture saleroom, a car showroom.

At Hijaz station the track has been ripped up and a deep hole dug. The plan was to build a new station underground, but the finance didn’t come through so it remains just a hole, an absence. The café in a train carriage where a decade ago my wife and I used to drink coffee has gone.

I saw Larijani, previously Iran’s nuclear negotiator, in the shrine of Sitt Ruqqiyeh. He pulled away his hand when an Iranian pilgrim tried to kiss it, and then sat quietly contemplating, only one bodyguard crouching beside him. He doesn't need more security; Syrians express appreciation of Iran, even those Syrians who don't like Shia.

On my last day I visited Sitt Zainab, the shrine of Ali's daughter. The ten days of Ashura were not yet finished so the shrine and its surroundings were unusually crowded, with Iranians, Lebanese, Pakistanis, and especially Iraqis. Many of the refugees have returned to Iraq (and property prices are falling again), but there are still more than a million and a half Iraqis in Syria, and there are evident signs of their tragedy around Sitt Zainab. This is the only place in Syria where ragged children, shoeless in the crisp cold, beg for coins. There’s a young man missing a leg. There’s another with no legs. The atmosphere in the shrine is thick. People are kissing the door, the step, weeping and shuddering at the grille of the tomb, mourning the oppression of the Prophet’s family, and the failure of the Muslims to realise Islam, and the string of disasters permitted in the world by darkness, persecution and injustice.

In the Iraqi restaurant the cashier wears a green turban. A video of al-azza wal-latm ritual plays on the screen suspended from the ceiling. Bare chested men are red over the heart where they strike themselves in rhythm. The same ritual will start outside the shrine this evening, but I have to go to the airport. Next door there’s a café with a screen showing al-Furat TV, the channel of the Hakeem dynasty, and serving Iraqi men thin-waisted glasses of strong, Turkish-style tea. In the street, too much traffic, and stalls and hand-pushed carts selling the earth of Kerbala, prayer beads, and keyrings and badges and engravings of Ali and Hussain, of Sistani and Nasrallah, and plastic sandals and dolls and toy guns. Scarves illustrated with Ya Hussain! in letters dripping blood, or with the Iraqi flag. Sweets and biscuits. Qur’anic verses. Women push through it clutching their chadors closed at their noses, and others with hair in waves or tied in ponytails.

I heard Muhammad Habash, Member of Parliament, give a Friday sermon in Mezzeh. I liked his fine, quiet language, his comments on the Prophet’s migration, and his criticism of some migrating Muslims today who give Islam a bad name in their adopted countries.

I spent a night in a village on the edges of the Golan. There are still some basalt buildings among the concrete and red soil and rubbish. Electric-white Jebel esh-Shaikh floats above the expanse. The Israelis are up there on the further peak. In 1973 their forces reached as far as this village. Now there are gypsies camped among the olive groves in patched white tents distinct from the more beautiful goat-hair black of the Beduin camps. They’ve come to sell trinkets and pull teeth.

The villagers I spend the night with don’t like Shaikh Habash because of his liberal fatwas – for instance that it is permissible for a woman to travel without a guardian – and because his is, according to them, the Islam of the Sultan. They don’t much like the Shia either. Or the Sufis. They talk religion and politics and tell obscene jokes. Endless glasses of tea and coffee, and cigarettes. At dawn there is ice in the streets. We pray in the village mosque where men wear kuffiyehs and wool-lined cloaks.

A character in Ahmad al-Aidi’s (Egyptian) novel ‘Being Abbas el Abd’ says:
“You want us to progress??
So burn the history books and forget your precious dead civilisation.
Stop trying to squeeze the juice from the past.
Destroy your pharaonic history….
Try to do without the traffic in the dead.
We will only succeed when we turn our museums into public lavatories.”

I have some sympathy with this exaggerated point of view, although the idolised history in Syria is Islamic rather than pharaonic. At another gathering, in Midan, a series of self-validating, optimistic, and absurd statements are made. Like: Arabic is the origin of all languages. Like: Europe will have a Muslim majority within twenty years. Like: nobody has ever converted from Islam to another religion. The uncles speak and everybody nods. It’s not that the uncles are tyrants. In most cases they are the best of men, kind and well-meaning. You confirm their statements for social reasons, and their statements acquire truth status. Comfort and solidarity and identity are evoked and made tangible in this harsh environment. Many of these men have three jobs, and live in boxes. The same discourse that restricts thought makes life bearable, and more than bearable. Where else would you find such hospitality, such manly gentleness, such generosity and dignity?

The problem with turning religion into repeated legends and tales of the ancestors, with unreflective and near-masturbatory veneration of the Prophet’s companions and the rulers of old and the ulama, is that the universe is bigger than the Arab zone, time is longer than 1400 years. Too much religion and too much certainty can domesticate the real and smother the spirit.

Syria reminds you of variations in electric current. The dimming of the lights. Waiting for the water to come.

And simple pleasures. Food, for instance. Not just the recipes but the quality of the raw materials. I swear a Syrian chicken doesn’t taste like the usual dry blandness; nor do Syrian eggs taste like any other eggs. The rich sweetness of a Syrian mandarin is unrivalled. (For all my British childhood it was a burdensome duty to chew fruit. I didn’t understand how fruit should taste until I came to Syria). The traditional Syrian hammam – and I don’t mean the traditional hammam as-souq, wonderful though that is, but a normal bath at home, with mazote dripping into the fizzing stove, and steam rising around you, and hot water splashing in the plastic basin for you to scoop out in cupfulls and pour over your body.

We watch a Yasser al-Azmeh sketch about a blind man in a café complaining about the economy and the citizenry’s hard life. A spy reports him to the mukhabarat, who arrive to make arrests. Such criticism is no longer taboo on Syrian TV. The trend continues, excrutiatingly slowly, towards greater individual rights and freedom of expression.

People say that Syria will survive. Despite the refugees, the Israeli raids, the American threats, the sectarianism, the poverty, despite the smoke, Syria will survive. Did not the Prophet say that God has blessed the lands around al-Aqsa? Did he not pray ‘Allah yubarik shamina,’ God bless our Sham, our Syria?

Dysfunctional State – Dysfuntional World

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto, although it happened across the Gulf of Oman, feels remarkably close, for both personal and public reasons. On a personal level, the event strikes up sparks of memory. As a very young man I worked for The News, an English-language paper, on the Murree Road in Rawalpindi. I loved that office and all the great people in it, the long late chaotic nights through which we typed and laughed and drank tea. I remember Liaquat Bagh just a little down the road, the park named after Pakistan’s first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan, who was assassinated there, and where Benazir was killed last December 27th. I remember People’s Party supporters firing shots into the sky outside the office on the night when Benazir was appointed prime minister, for the second time, in 1993. When I read about bombs and sectarian mayhem in Karachi, Islamabad, Swat or Gilgit I remember the immense beauty and carnivalesque energy of Pakistan, the music I heard there, the Sufi festival I visited, the wealth and poverty I saw, and the intelligent, enthusiastic people I met.

The assassination feels close in a public sense because it contains ingredients which are present globally, and which are particularly apparent in the current Islamic world.

Firstly, the collapse of socialist politics and of any clear analytical approach to problems of wealth concentration and imperialism. The trajectory of the Bhutto-led Pakistan People’s Party illustrates this collapse. Tariq Ali writes: “The People’s party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country’s first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.” That ‘everything’ refers to the way the PPP in government became no more than a gang of thieves. The Bhutto family, landowning aristocrats from Sind, ruled for themselves and their hangers-on. Benazir’s husband Asif Ali Zardari, also known as Mr. 10 per cent, was the most notoriously corrupt pig at the public money trough. People’s Party administration led to precisely zero steps towards social justice, but to a good many extra-judicial executions – including, perhaps, that of Benazir’s brother Murtaza. As in so many countries, an initial surge of popular struggle was co-opted, and then fizzled out in a sea of gangsterism.

The second ingredient, facilitated by the first, is near-absolute military or family control over entire nations. The Bhutto dynasty, or that part of it loyal to Benazir’s will, has proved its arrogance by appointing her nineteen-year-old son Bilawal as leader of the PPP. The real power in Pakistan, however, is the army, which runs hotels, insurance companies and supermarkets as well as state violence. The struggle for social justice having failed, politics is merely a lucrative career for the successful. In Pakistan’s case, the big families send one son into the army, another into the Muslim League, and one into the People’s Party. Most of the rural poor vote for the candidate their feudal lord tells them to vote for. And why not? Voting isn’t going to change anything. If we replace the miltary and big families with corporations, the analogy of single-interest tyranny can be extended not just to Africa and the rest of Asia, but to the West as well.

The third ingredient, as a bitter response to the second and in the void of the first, is the rise of extremist nihilist ideologies. In Pakistan, that means variations on the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, probably the people who pulled the trigger on Benazir. Extreme Islamist-nihilists win only three to ten per cent in Pakistani elections, but provide a home to the desperate. More significantly, some high-up army officers sympathise with the Islamist-nihilist agenda, or at least have important contacts in these movements that they are not shy to use. Again, the nihilist trend is not limited to Pakistan. Everywhere around the world, some form or other of escapism or nihilism can be found as a false substitute for serious liberation politics. In America, right-wing Christian fundamentalism forms a huge vote bank and lobby group. In Europe, right wing anti-immigrant parties are increasingly popular and Islamophobia is going mainstream. In the West in general, there is hedonist consumerism, the cult of manufactured popular ‘culture’, celebrity, and so on.

The fourth ingredient, also common across the continents, is Western interference. The Pakistani army has always been an American client and its larger movements (leaving some small space for manoeuvre and deception) have always followed American orders. Zia ul-Haqq’s military regime helped run the so-called American-Saudi ‘jihad’ against the leftist Afghan government and its Soviet backers, flooding Afghanistan with weaponry and Wahhabi ideology. A lot of the weaponry and Wahhabism flowed back into Pakistani cities, along with rivers of processed heroin. (One of the most distinctive aspects of upper-middle class Pakistan, and of journalism, at the time I worked there was the number of hopeless smack addicts crashing through their lives and begging a few more rupees.) After the Soviet retreat and the failure of ‘mujahideen’ warlords to build a stable Afghan government, Benazir’s administration loyally followed Washington directives and supported the Taliban’s rise. Following the blowback attacks of September 11th, Musharraf led the army 180 degrees into its present role of enforcing imperial law against the Taliban and al-Qa’ida. (The change is total only in relation to the Taliban and al-Qa’ida; the army’s enforcement of imperial law is the same as ever.) But since the ‘War on Terror,’ Pakistan has effectively been at war with itself. The Pushto-speaking North West Frontier Province and the Tribal Areas are ethnically and culturally identical with most of south and east Afghanistan. According to tribal codes of honour, those seeking hospitality must be defended to the death. The process that unfolded was inevitable – refusal by the tribes to surrender Taliban or al-Qa’ida forces, followed by army bombing of civilians, followed by revenge attacks, leading to the present situation in which suicide bombing has become almost as common in Pakistani cities far from the tribal frontier as in Iraq or Afghanistan. Pakistani collaboration with the ‘War on Terror’ has been the crucial destabilising and terror-producing factor.

If elections are held in Pakistan the country will again be representative of global trends, in that it will epitomise false democracy. Democratic procedures will be in place, but they will be void of all democratic substance because they will be controlled by, and designed only to serve, vast inhuman interests.

Tariq Ali on Benazir’s assassination: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2232700,00.html
And William Dalrymple:
http://fanonite.org/2007/12/30/pakistans-flawed-and-feudal-princess/

Very Guarded Optimism

The level of violence in Iraq is still remarkably high, and still nothing works. Compared with the situation a year ago, however, when there were hundreds of killings daily, Iraq today seems like a brave new world. In this very relative oasis of peace it has become possible to glimpse the kind of democracy which could conceivably work in Iraq. A successful democratic system would involve cooperation between local communities (not between sects), with the government a council of councils rather than a powerful centralised state apparatus holding the country together by force

Whenever they have had a chance, local communities have proved their mettle. Remember the role of the early Mahdi Army in stopping the looting triggered by the 2003 invasion, and in establishing basic services for the people. It was mosque committees, Sunni and Shia, which collected money in their neighbourhoods and paid teachers to return to the classrooms, and which organised work teams to repair local infrastructure. This was reminiscent of Hizbullah at its best: people in extremis relying on themselves, and doing what no external authority was willing or capable of doing.

But as we know, it all went horribly wrong. Society fragmented and the logic of violence took over. Local communities were silenced and then splintered by sectarian militias. In my post http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2007/08/end-of-arabs-part-one.html I wrote about how the American destruction of the state was the major factor catalysing the civil war. Specific American actions led directly to the disaster: the initial unwillingness to countenance Iraqi rule followed by a sectarian approach to ‘representation’, the use of central-American style death squads to fight the Sunni resistance (the expert John Negroponte was imported for this), the dissolution of the army and the police so that criminal and sectarian gangs filled the void.

There was also of course an internal Iraqi dynamic motivating the conflict. Sunni-Shia tensions have bubbled for centuries, which is not to say that they are as essential and timeless as some orientalists would have us believe. The ostentatious Shia revival that followed the invasion, bursting forth like steam from a pressure cooker when the lid is suddenly removed, came as a result of the years of Ba’athist persecution. A frightened and dispossessed Sunni community made the fatal mistake of allowing al-Qa’ida and other Wahhabi nihilists to penetrate the resistance. If Shias preferred to wait to see what the new dispensation would bring them in terms of political power, most of them sympathised with the anti-American resistance. Al-Qa’ida’s bomb attacks, however, targetted first the new police, and then Shia civilians, in mosques and marketplaces, in their tens of thousands. After the April 2006 destruction of the dome of the Askari shrine in Samarra’, sacred to Shias as the burial place of the 11th Imam and as the place where the Imam al-Mahdi went into occultation, Shia militias responded with brute force. A mutual orgy of ethnic cleansing wrecked the country’s ancient fabric. Iraq became a kind of Lebanon, not only in the ferocity of its communal hatreds but also in its transformation into a battleground for regional rivals: Saudi Arabia versus Iran, and America in the paradoxical position of fearing Shia power more than the Sunnis, who were attached by their Saudi ties to the illusory ‘arc of moderation’ even if they housed al-Qa’ida.

In the summer of 2007 things started to improve. It would be unfair not to recognise that new American tactics have had a measure of success in calming Iraq. By putting thousands more American soldiers on the streets, the ‘surge’ concedes the idiocy of Donald Rumsfield’s military theories. But much more important than the surge has been the Sahwa or the ‘Awakening’ movement of Sunni tribes and resistance fighters reclaiming their towns from nihilist thugs. Just as the American invasion was the greatest gift to al-Qa’ida, the clear demonstration of al-Qaida’s brutality and sectarianism in areas where it took control demolished the illusion of its revolutionary purity in the eyes of Iraqis and the wider Muslim world. Sunni communities turned on those they’d previously sheltered and, with al-Qa’ida on the defensive, it became possible for the Shia to reach out to the Sunnis. Simultaneously, popular revulsion with the Mahdi Army’s excesses led Moqtada Sadr to declare a six-month suspension of activities, and to purge his organisation of the more criminal, more Sunni-murdering elements. There are signs too, especially since the farcical Annapolis ‘peace’ summit, of the Arab client states realising that America won’t rescue them from their crises of domestic credibility and regional destabilisation. Only a good working relationship with Iran can do that. Regional peacemaking may be reflected in internal Iraqi peacemaking.

It’s still far too early to be optimistic. Many of the Sunni ‘sahwa’ militias may have calculated that a period of peace, and of getting into the Americans’ good books, will provide them with training opportunities and weapons so that they succeed in round two of the civil war. Hating the excesses of al-Qa’ida does not mean loving the new Shia power structure. The government, consisting mainly of politicians sponsored by Shia and Kurdish militias, has so far agreed to employ only 6% of Sunni volunteers in the state security forces. So it may be that the worst is still to come. Beyond the Sunni-Shia conflict, the battle between Muqtada Sadr’s Iraqi-nativist Mahdi Army and the currently pro-American, traditionally Iranian-backed Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council seems to be on temporary hold. And militia forces are only conducive to peace and order to the extent that they represent local people, not the politics of a local strong man.

But I’ve been reading reports not only of cooperation between Sunni and Shia militias in neighbouring areas, but of mixed militias, and even of mixed militias negotiating the reversal of ethnic cleansing. In some areas of Baghdad, families are actually returning to their homes in areas where the other sect dominates.

This is something to thank God for. If against the odds the trend towards peace continues, a large number of the educated professionals that Iraq has lost may return home. Iraqis will then face two huge challenges: to expel the American occupation, which is digging in for the coming decades, and to either remove the corrupt and failed political elite which arrived with the American tanks or to impress upon it the necessity of non-sectarian national politics and real economic and political sovereignty. These challenges can only be met by a unified Iraqi people. A democracy based on community action could lead to unity. Is good news possible in Iraq?

Imperialism Resurgent

Gordon Brown says, “The days of Britain having to apologise for the British Empire are over. We should celebrate!” Sarkozy urges France to be “proud of its history,” meaning its imperial history.

European empires did sometimes construct railways and drainage systems in the conquered lands. They did build law courts and disseminate a certain kind of cuture. But these questionable achievements must be understood against the larger ugly backdrop. Economies under imperial rule stagnated at best. Huge swathes of Africa were transformed from subsistence agricultural land to cashcrop plantations. When the value of the crop plummetted, or when the crop was grown more cheaply elsewhere, local people were left hungry and unskilled on exhausted soil. Africa has still not recovered from this deliberate underdevelopment. During British misrule, preventable famines killed tens of millions of Indians. Elsewhere in the empire, hundreds of thousands were forced into concentration camps, and torture was institutionalised. There were the genocides of indigenous Australians and Americans, by massacre and land theft as well as by disease. There was the little matter of the transatlantic slave trade.

The ethnic-sectarian tensions and political backwardness of much of the third world have roots in imperial power games. For instance, when the 1857 Indian uprising against the British was put down, the British developed a policy of excluding Muslims from education and economic power. A divide and rule strategy to exacerbate pre-existent Hindu-Muslim tensions was implemented precisely because the revolution had shown a remarkable degree of Indian national unity. And, as usual, traitors were rewarded. The twelve families that rule what is now Pakistan (staffing the military high command and both major political parties) are the landowning families that ‘acquired’ their land in return for loyalty to the occupiers in 1857.

Whenever there was a sign of a lesser people organising itself along ‘modern’ European lines, the British crushed the potential challenge. An example is Muhammad Ali’s Egypt, with its state education system, rational miltary organisation, and secularising legal code. A more recent instance is the Anglo-American 1953 coup against Mossadeq’s democratic nationalist government in Iran.

I mention all this not because I want to suggest that Westerners are particularly evil, that they are the only ones to have committed crimes of empire and enslavement, or that indigenous peoples would have managed themselves perfectly if left alone. I mention it because Western imperialism continues and, as competition for resources intensifies, is escalating. Our awareness of the crimes of empire is important because the whitewashing of imperial history proceeds in concert with a ramping-up of imperial intervention.

I’ve been refreshing myself on British and French imperial history in the Levant by reading the excellent 1972 book “Syria: Nation of the Modern World” by Tabitha Petran.

Remember that during the 1917 British-instigated Arab Revolt, the prospect of a unified Arab state was dangled before the Arabs, so long as they were required to make trouble for the collapsing Ottomans. But the British and the French had already signed the Sykes-Picot agreement, which carved up the eastern Arabs into British and French zones of influence, and the Balfour Declaration, by which Englishmen awarded Arab Palestine, as if it were a medal or a school cap, to Zionism.

The British also famously created landlocked, resourceless Transjordan in an afternoon, the straight lines of its borders giving new resonance to the double meaning of the English word ‘ruler’. They kept control of Iraq (which they had cut off from Kuwait, but that’s another story) by applying the glories of modern warfare. “I do not understand this sqeamishness about the use of gas,” said British hero Winston Churchill. “I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.” Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, later famous for the Dresden firestorm, enthused: “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within forty-five minutes a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” This, I suppose, is what we should be celebrating with Gordon Brown. The British tried to install kings from the friendly Hashemite family in both places. In Iraq it took the army, and then Ba’athist army officers, to bring down the client regime. In Jordan the royal line stuck, and has been useful to the West ever since.

The French took the ex-Ottoman region of Greater Syria. Tabitha Petran’s book describes how the Maronite statelet on Mount Lebanon was expanded into a larger Lebanese state of reluctant Orthodox Christians, Shia and Sunni Muslims, and Druze, setting the scene for the later civil wars. As described, Palestine-Israel and Jordan had already been peeled away. Now the Syrian cities of Urfa, Aintab and Antioch, and the country’s largest port at Alexandretta, were ceded to the Western-oriented Turkish Republic. Cities lost their hinterlands, their markets and water supplies.

There were further unsuccessful efforts to dismember Syria. The French envisaged an Alawi state in the mountains around Lattakia and a Druze state around Jebel al-Arab in the south. They encouraged separatism in the Jezira and established ‘autonomous’ puppet governments in Aleppo and Damascus.

First the cutting, then the stunting. The Open Door economic policy flooded the country with cheap imports, while Syrian exports were heavily taxed. The consequences included a diminishment of gold reserves by 70%, a depreciation of the currency, mushrooming unemployment and a collapse in traditional skilled manufacturing. Throughout the French occupation, three percent of the state budget was spent on health care and five percent on education. French collective punishments against the unruly natives led to further trouble. For example, the gold fine imposed after an Alawi rebellion in 1921 made the mountain peasants for the first time hire their daughters out as domestic servants to the urban rich, which led to mutual resentments, which in turn intensified sectarianism when an Alawi-dominated army later took over the country’s political life.

Today the debate at the daring fringes of western political discourse is whether or not an empire would be a good idea, oblivious to the fact that there already is one. The United States underpins its control of markets with a military presence in more than 100 countries. In the larger middle east area, hundreds of thousands have died in American wars in the last half decade. These days, it’s called ‘the war against terror’. This is how far the dominant nations have come in their struggle to move beyond imperialism: they have learnt not to call it imperialism. But they used nice words in the past, too. When the French mangled and traumatised Syria's society and economy, they did so in the name of a League of Nations mandate. Their supposed role was to develop Syria, to prepare its benighted people for independence.

One set of people forcing themselves on another set of people in order to ‘run’ their economy and reorganise their social life is a crime. It leads only to conflict and failure. This is an obvious truth that must not be forgotten.

George Monbiot on imperialist denial:http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1674478,00.html

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

I’ve now read three September 11th novels, by which I mean novelistic responses to the issues raised by the attacks. The first was ‘Saturday’ by Ian McEwan. I usually feel somewhat cheated by McEwan’s novels, and this was no exception. He goes to such trouble to develop characters, setting and plot, raising your expectations to such a pitch that you feel you’re about to learn something unforgettable about life and human beings, and then it all fizzles out. ‘Saturday’ covers a day in the life of a London doctor called Henry Perowne. The day begins with Perowne worrying over a mysterious plane in the sky, wondering if it’s going to fly into a London landmark. Later he avoids the huge demonstration against the approaching invasion of Iraq. Perowne wonders how he feels about it all, comes to no conclusion, goes to play squash. He has an altercation with a thuggish person who scratches the paint from his car, and in the evening the same thug breaks into his house like a symbol of the intrusive messy world. I’ve forgotten how it ends. McEwan has been attacked for being a neo-conservative, or a liberal interventionist, or just as hopelessly complacent and bourgeois as his protagonist, but he has defended himself by pointing out that McEwan is not Perowne – an obvious truth. If we start blaming authors for what their characters say we end up like the fools in Egypt who demonstrated against Haider Haider’s novel ‘A Banquet of Seaweed’ (waleema li-‘ashaab al-bahr) because one of Haider’s characters – who later commits suicide – expresses atheistic beliefs. Nevertheless, it’s a shame that McEwan’s treatment of the post-September 11th world focusses only on Western self-absorption. What the events require is a new engagement with the darknesses and resentments of the world beyond our narrow conception of it, a new sense of the interconnections of the West and elsewhere, for better and for worse.

Then I read John Updike’s ‘Terrorist’, which I’ve previously discussed on this blog (http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2006/11/updikes-terrorist.html ). My great respect for Updike as a writer perhaps made me too charitable in that evaluation. If anybody hasn’t read his series of ‘Rabbit’ novels, I strongly recommend them, for their wonderful style, their tragi-comedy, and for their vast scale which encompasses key moments in American history as well as in Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom’s life. In these books Updike is clearly writing about what he knows and understands. In “Terrorist”, he clearly isn’t. His main protagonist, despite being mixed-race and mixed-up, is a stereotype, and so are all the Arabs and Muslims in the book – either dirty and threatening, or ‘good niggers’ who ardently support the attack on Iraq and report to the CIA. Nothing new is said about the motivations of anti-American terrorism or about the effect of the American empire on the world. Updike’s analysis goes no further than Martin Amis’s. He sees the causes of conflict to be sexual, not political, and believes that America is targetted as a result of its supposed moral degeneracy. But Muslims haven’t attacked the bikini beaches of Brazil, and such ‘analysis’ is as self-congratulatory as Henry Perowne’s bourgeois complacency.

Last night I finished ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ by Mohsin Hamid. This is a simpler novel than the two described above, and is stylistically unremarkable. It is, however, a genuine consideration of real issues raised by September 11th. In its organisation and the cumulative metaphorical power of its subplots it is much more than competent. It is a confessional narrative, told by a Pakistani to an American in a restaurant in Lahore. The anguished first-person self-revelation is reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Notes From Underground’, but Hamid’s Changez is a fundamentally balanced character. It’s the times, and the empire, that are out of joint, and Changez’s story is of righting himself by retreating from America. Educated at Princeton and working for a company which values businesses due to be sold off and stripped, Changez finds himself smiling when he sees TV reportage of the twin towers falling. This prompts a deepening examination of his identity, his allegiances, and his relationship with America. Parallels are implied between Muslim countries and the doomed employees of the companies Changez evaluates. The key here is not religion, but corporate capitalism and traumatic economic change. Changez’s boss Jim says, “We came from places that were wasting away.” He means, on the one hand, Pakistan, and on the other, old industrial America. ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ is a catchy but not very apt title. There is very little theology in the book. By the end of the story Changez is not at all an Islamist, but discovers he has to oppose the corporate American empire in order to remain mentally and morally healthy.

There’s plenty of on-target comment about American reaction to September 11th. Like this: “I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back. Living in New York was suddenly like living in a film about the Second World War; I, a foreigner, found myself staring out at a set that ought to be viewed not in Technicolour but in grainy black and white. What your fellow countrymen longed for was unclear to me – a time of unquestioned dominance? of safety? of moral certainty? I did not know – but that they were scrambling to don the costumes of another era was apparent. I felt treacherous for wondering whether that era was fictitious, and whether – if it could indeed be animated – it contained a part written for someone like me.”

The attack on the empire makes Changez aware of America as an empire. The final straw for him is when he hears someone describing the Janissaries, the Christian slaves taken as boys from their parents by the Ottoman empire and turned into an elite warrior class to defend the sultan. Is Changez a latter-day reversed Janissary?

In an effective subplot, Changez has an almost-girlfriend who is obsessed by the memory of her dead boyfriend. In her depression, “She glowed with something not unlike the fervour of the devout.” Themes of nostalgia and commingled, confused identities seep into other parts of the novel, where they are relevant to Changez, Pakistan, and America. These are the correspondences and suggested patterns that novel writing is all about. ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ deals profoundly with politics without needing to limit itself to political discourse, and so succeeds as a novel. The novel is the most holistic form there is, in that it treats spirituality, identity, sex, politics, and so on, without drawing ideological lines between them. In that respect, the novel is a specimen of life.

Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani who studied and worked in America and now lives in London. He has the cross-cultural experience to write a novel like this. But is it ridiculous to expect a more monocultural Anglo-Saxon writer to approach similar themes – of empire and resistance, of defensive nostalgia and confident self-reinvention – without resorting to stereotype and media cliché? Is a broader perspective really so difficult?

Democracy

Response to Creative Syria’s discussion of Syrian regional alliances (see previous post) was dominated by arguments about democracy between an Israeli poster and others. The Israeli accused anybody who supported any aspect of Syrian government policy of being an apologist for dictatorship, and there, unfortunately, the debate stuck. If you agree with an undemocratic regime, he implied, you are not worth listening to. Here I will write a little against the propagandist uses and religious idealisation of the word ‘democracy,’ a word considered as little and used as injudiciously as the word ‘terrorism.’

First there is the irony of a Zionist lecturing us about democracy. We often hear the preposterous claim that Israel should be defended because it is ‘the only democracy in the Middle East,’ when in fact it is an ethno-democracy or an apartheid democracy. Israeli state apparatus rules over a population equally split between Jews and Arabs. The ‘Arab Israelis’ are at best second class citizens, disadvantaged and under threat of transfer. (There are 20 laws which discriminate against the Arab Israeli minority. For more information visit http://www.adalah.org/eng/index.php) The oppressed Arabs of the occupied West Bank and Gaza only have voting rights in a non-existent state. And this vaunted state of human freedom is possible because most of the indigenous inhabitants of Israel-Palestine have been driven into exile. Establishing a state for the Jews in an Arab country and then calling it a democracy has been one of the blackest jokes of modern history.

Beyond that there are the pervasive Western assumptions that the current system of government in the United States is the model and endpoint of human freedom, that it must be universally applied, and that it is the only form of human organisation of any value. Democracy is good and civilised; anything else is evil and barbaric. These are some of the assumptions responsible for the tragedy in Iraq, and they underly a great deal of nonsense in the global (still West-dominated) media.

The notion that only democracies can offer people the freedom to excel is simply absurd. Elizabethan England, Islamic Spain, the Roman Empire, and the Sumerian city states were not democracies. The Old Testament prophets, the Buddha, Shakespeare and Tolstoy were not produced by democracies.

The original democracy of Athens was not particularly democratic because slaves and women played no role in decision-making. However, given that ‘people’ was defined as ‘free men’, there was ‘rule by the people’ in that decisions were made collectively following a debate contributed to by everybody. Athens and similar Greek cities were small enough that every free male, or at least every head of household, could meet in the theatre to argue and make suggestions.

Tribal shura (consultation) in premodern Beduin societies approached this pure democracy, as did some workers’ councils, for a month or two, in revolutionary Russia, Italy and elsewhere. But such direct popular contribution to decision-making is obviously an impossibility in complex modern states made up of millions of diverse individuals. ‘Democracy’ is reduced to ‘representation’, and this in practice means putting a mark on a piece of paper every four, five or seven years. It is a testament to the power of ruling ideology that some people leave the voting booth feeling that their pencil mark has altered their nation’s destiny.

Now let us briefly examine what is called democracy by the nation that wants to export it as the final, finished product of human history. In the United States the most important positions except for the presidency are held by unelected officials. National security advisers, military strategists, financial planners and supreme court judges are all appointees. Condoleeza Rice, Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger never had to stand for election.

Those who do stand are selected more for their physical characteristics and acting skills than for their ideas and experience. Fundraising is more important than winning debates. Hysterical rallies, with rock music soundtracks and plenty of balloons, and the ability of a campaign team to associate their candidate with a fairytale grand narrative like ‘manifest destiny’ or ‘defeating evil’ count for more than detailed discussion of the real world. Elections are a spectacle to dazzle the people, those gullible enough to take them seriously. Such democracy, like anything else in this form of late capitalism, is a product to be consumed. Thomas Jefferson said, “No people can be both ignorant and free,” and the mass of the American population is kept ignorant by the combined efforts of the media and the public education system. Famously, a majority of Americans believed that Saddam Hussain was responsible for the September 11th attacks. The fact that American heads are crammed with celebrity gossip, TV plots and brand names ensures a system in which the scum rises to the top.

The corporations own the two political parties, the presidential candidates, and the big TV stations and newspapers that cover them. This is not surprising. It would be naïve to expect the corporations to leave the world’s largest economy and military complex in the hands of the people. As in other ‘first world’ countries the range of debate is severely limited. A propagandistic consensus has been manufactured (to paraphrase Chomsky) on the economy (a ‘free market’ which is actually corporate controlled) and ‘security.’ Anyone who points beyond the limits of acceptable discourse is mocked or, more effectively, ignored. The result, as my grandfather used to say, is that whoever you vote for, the government always wins.

As soon as there is the possibility of any real change, or any real threat, ‘democracy’ shows its teeth. When the Black Panthers started to take their constitutional right to bear arms seriously, and to make links between the position of Blacks in America and that of other oppressed groups throughout the world, the state resorted to violent repression. I don’t accept the Syrian regime’s excuse for emergency rule – that the country is under attack – but the excuse does stand up better in Syria, with the Golan occupied and America and Israel threatening further war, with war on the eastern and south-western borders and chronic instability to the west, than it does in the United States. There it took one day of explosions for detention without trial and torture to be normalised, and for the Patriot Act to be ‘democratically’ passed by Congress. This awards the American government the freedom to read its citizens’ emails and keep files on which library books they consult.

More than 7 million Americans are in prison, on probation or on parole, a greater proportion of people than in any other country, and a disproportionate number of incarcerated people are poor and black. Blacks made up 45% of the prison population in 2002. More young black men experience prison than experience college. The American democracy seems to function as well for Black Americans as the Israeli democracy functions for Arab Israelis. If China or Saudi Arabia imprisoned similar numbers of an ethnic minority the Western media would rightly call it persecution.

Surely we need to step back from the word ‘democracy’ and examine the more meaningful concepts of law and rights. If a nation votes to invade another country, or to eradicate the Gypsies, must we regard its democratic choice as lawful?

We need to subscribe to the idea that people, and families, and communities, and nations, have the right not to be interfered with. The mirage of democracy obscures this bedrock of lawfulness.

We need also to establish as a principle of international relations that systems of government are not universally applicable, and that nations must be free to develop their own governments according to their own circumstances. In countries where loyalty to the official bureaucratic state identity is weak (which may not be a bad thing) people will feel loyalty primarily to their tribe, sect or ethnicity. In such countries, democracy in the Western sense may not be a wise idea. Sri Lanka, for instance, has always been populated by Tamil and Sinhala communities. When the modern state inherited ‘majority rule’ from the British, the more numerous Sinhalese defined the country as a Sinhalese homeland. Alienated Tamils became secessionist, and years of bloody war ensued. It would have been better to allow both communities to build institutions, to have a large degree of autonomy, and to coexist in a borderless island.

What we call ‘democracy’ exists most comfortably in nation states which have popular legitimacy and internal consistency, in which issues of tribe and sect have been settled. In most cases this has been achieved at the end of a long process of civil war and ethnic cleansing. America passed through the genocide of its indigenous inhabitants, revolutionary war, slavery, civil war, and the civil rights movement to reach its present imperfect state.

Democracy functioned – with severe hiccups – in Syria until the United Arab Republic, but this unwise and unequal union with Nasser’s dictatorship was at first wildly popular in Syria, precisely because ‘Syria’ in its reduced and mangled post-colonial form lacked legitimacy in the eyes of its own people.

This is not to say that democracy is not an admirable aim. I wish America really supported Middle Eastern democracy as it claims. If it did, it would have to talk to Hamas, Hizbullah, and the Egyptian Muslim Brothers, shut down its military bases in the region, switch its favour from the Saud monarchs to the Iranian parliament, and so on. Greater informed control of the people over the political process, the economy and the environment is desirable in every country of the world, and most crucially in what is still for a while the world’s most powerful country, America.

On Blacks incarcerated in the US:
http://www.blackcommentator.com/98/98_prisons_1.html

Syria's Regional Alliances

CreativeSyria (see the link on the left) organises a 'Creative Forum' where bloggers consider an aspect of Syrian politics. This time the topic is Syria's regional alliances. My contribution, which I copy below, is on CreativeSyria along with several more opinions. I think Wassim's is excellent, far more comprehensive than mine. But here's mine:

For a time the pattern of alliances in the Middle East was organised into monarchical-conservative and republican-nationalist camps. Following the 1991 Kuwait war, there was a realignment which pitted a Saudi-Syrian-Egyptian alliance against a disgraced and battered Baathist Iraq and its perceived allies such as the Jordanian monarchy. Because the Damascus Declaration countries were the three key Arab mashreq states, some pretence at the centrality of Arab alliances in the region was still possible. But since the 2003 invasion and subsequent dismantling of Iraq a new set up seems firmly established. On one side stands Syria, Iran, Hizbullah and Hamas; on the other Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the March 14th Lebanese, Mahmoud Abbas, and (implicitly) Israel.

The current regional division is often misleadingly cast in sectarian terms, despite the Syrian regime’s secularism and Hamas being a Sunni organisation. It is much more useful to understand these opposing alliances in terms of those who welcome US-Zionist hegemony underpinned by American military bases, control of resources and the unfettered penetration of regional economies by Western capital, and those who refuse to submit. It is my opinion that Syria is on the right side in this. In any case, she couldn’t be on the other side even if she wanted, unless she surrendered her right to the Golan and her principled opposition to the occupations in Palestine and Iraq.

The exception to this pro- or anti-US pattern is Syria’s deepening alliance with Turkey, a NATO member which hosts an important American military base at Ceyhan and cooperates militarily and economically with Israel. Although Turkey has been moving inevitably away from the West and towards the Arabs since the invasion of Iraq, the strength of the Syrian-Turkish relationship is Bashaar al-Asad’s achievement. Bashaar has calmed tensions over Wilayat Iskenderoon (Hatay) and retreated from his father’s support for Abdullah Ocalan’s PKK. As individuals, the Syrian president and especially his wife are said to be popular with the Turkish public.

Jalal Talabani’s recent criticism of Bashaar for supporting a potential Turkish incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan in pursuit of PKK fighters rings hollow, as Talabani encouraged the American invasion of Iraq on the pretext (amongst others) of chasing terrorist groups resident there. Syria’s Iraqi alliances are complex and usually intelligent, seeking to gain influence with all camps in the fractured country but tending to back more nationalist as opposed to separatist currents.

Despite its Arabism, Syria has always been prepared to go against the grain of Arab alliances in what it perceives as the true interests of Arab causes. Syria had the honour of being the only Arab state to support revolutionary Iran against Saddam Hussain’s barbarous Western-backed attack. Despite some conflicts of interest in Iraq, and despite the very different nature of the two regimes, Syria and Iran have preserved and developed their alliance. This is certainly a good thing. Whatever the future of the current clerical regime, Iran will continue to be a regional heavyweight, with a large population of well-educated people, with a crucial geo-strategic position and a wealth of resources. I know from my visit to the country that the alliance with Syria is popular even with opponents of the mullahs.

Syria’s regional allies are well-organised forces which will remain key players in the region indefinitely. Iran is one example of this, and Turkey, with its huge and growing economic power and connections to Europe and central Asia, is another. Hizbullah is by far the best-organised, deeply rooted and efficient political force in Lebanon, and perhaps the second most effective military force in the area after Israel. Indeed, despite Israel’s continuing technological superiority (which translates into a superior ability to kill civilians and destroy infrastructure), and despite the political-sectarian traps limiting its capacities domestically, the fact that Hizbullah frustrated all of Israel’s war aims in the summer of 2006 remains a matter of pivotal importance in the region and the world.

It is interesting that Syria’s regional allies are much more likely than her enemies to be democracies or semi-democracies. Iran is by no means a perfect democracy, but it is more democratic than any Arab state, with elections in which real issues are discussed. Arab visitors to the country will be impressed by the vociferous and often fearless political and religious debates happening in every tea house. Now that Turkey seems to be reconciling some of its worst contradictions – with the emergence of a moderate, modernising Islamist government which is as popular amongst Kurds as it is with ethnic Turks – it is the most democratic state in the region. (Unlike many Western propagandists, I do not consider Israel’s ethno-democracy, in which half the people ruled over by Israel are disenfranchised, to be ‘the only democracy in the Middle East.’) Hizbullah has a clear democratic mandate, as does Hamas.

Syria itself, while usually tolerant in sectarian and ethnic terms, continues to suppress pluralist politics and democratic debate. This does not mean, however, that public opinion counts for nothing in Syria. In fact, unlike the US-backed Arab states, Syria is beholden to public opinion for its legitimacy and long term survival. It is therefore no accident that its regional allies tend to be democratic forces.

In terms of Syria’s relationships with ‘great powers,’ not much can be done while America continues to pursue its unrelenting pro-Israel bias, and while most of Europe trails behind America. There are, however, steadily expanding trade and military ties with Russia and China, and these ties are sustainable because both of these states seek to erode American dominance in the medium to long term. America remains by far the greatest world power, but it is also in constant decline.

Syria has a great deal of work to do domestically on human rights, corruption, and the economy. If some branch or other of the regime was responsible for the Hariri assassination, they made a colossal and unforgivable blunder (I can’t believe Syria is responsible for the string of assassinations since then). But in the field of its regional alliances, Syria is on the right track.