We often project our current political concerns backwards in time in order to justify ourselves. I say ‘we’ because everyone does it. Nazi Germany invented a mythical blonde Aryan people who had always been kept down by lesser breeds. The Hindu nationalists in India imagine that Hinduism has always been a centralised doctrine rather than a conglomerate of texts and local traditions, and describe Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Sikh, Jain and animist influences on Indian history as foreign intrusions. Black nationalists in the Americas depict ancient Africa as a continent not of hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers but as a wonderland of kings and queens, gold and silk, science and monumental architecture. To our current cost, zionists and the neo-cons have been able to reactivate old orientalist myths in the West, myths in which the entirety of Arab and Islamic history has involved the slaughter and oppression of Christians, Jews, Hindus, women, gays, intellectuals .. and so on.
Such retrospective mythmaking frequently goes to the most absurd extremes in young nations conscious of their weakness or of a need for redefinition (America may be one of these). Probably for that reason it is particularly evident in the Middle East.
Many Muslims go beyond adherence to those concepts and taboos that are necessary for religious belief and idolise or demonise historical figures who have nothing to do with the divine revelation. For many Sunnis, the first caliphs were ‘rightly guided’ saints who could do no wrong. During their reign there was no crime, poverty or injustice in the realm of Islam. For many Shia, the same men (apart from Ali) were decadent criminals. These secular figures were not deities or prophets but human beings working in specific contexts, with all the good and bad and moral ambiguity that implies, but Muslims frequently hold religious positions on their worth. The same applies even to later worldly figures like Haroon ar-Rasheed (saint or criminal) and Salahuddeen al-Ayubbi (likewise; as well as Kurdish traitor and hero of Arabism).
It should be a matter of pride for the Turks that they are a linguistic, genetic and cultural mixture, but Ataturk invented for his new nation a mythology of ancient Turkish (or Turanian) glory. Because the Sumerian language was, like Turkish (and like many other languages), agglutinative, kemalists held the Sumerians to be ancient proto-Turks. Ataturk even promoted an absurd ‘sun-language theory’ which claimed that Turks had invented language itself. After the cultural vandalism done to the Ottoman language to strip it of foreign influence, contemporary kemalists will not admit the presence of loan words in modern Turkish. But still the Turkish words for ideas as basic as ‘thing’, ‘ok’, ‘famous’, ‘busy’ and ‘hello’ are from Arabic. The Turkish for library is ‘kutuphane’ – a mix of Arabic and Farsi. Ask a rigid kemalist about the Arabs, Persians or Kurds, and he’ll reply “kultur yok! – No culture!” Fortunately kemalism is finally on the retreat in Turkey.
In Iran I heard someone explain that Islam was a barbaric desert religion until it reached the cultured Iranians, who then civilised it. The philosophical, scientific and artistic glories of Islam, even when these flowered in Andalusia, were Persian achievements.
Zionism has created a myth of continuous Jewish bloodlines linking Israelis back to Roman Palestine, although a more scientific approach suggests that today’s Palestinians are at least as closely linked genetically to the ancient Israelites. Much more ignorant than Israelis, of course, are their supporters in the United States, many of whom believe that the state of Israel, rather than being founded by terror and ethnic cleansing in 1948, has been there since Moses crossed the Red Sea. They don’t know the difference between Syria and Assyria, or between Ahmadinejad and Nebuchadnezzar.
And then there’s someone called Amre el-Abyad, and people like him. I’m not publishing his comments on my blog because they are hysterical, racist and even on occasion personally threatening, but I wouldn’t want to deprive my readers of his point of view. So, if you are curious, you can enjoy his ravings here: http://el-abyad.blogspot.com/
On his blog Mr. el-Abyad says that the great Arab people invented writing, irrigation and cities, built the pyramids, and have been fighting to protect civilisation from Persian barbarians for thousands of years. Although he admits that Persians have been around for thousands of years, he says they aren’t part of the region, which is only Arab. Neither are Turks. We must assume that Turkmen, Kurds, Armenians and other non-Arabs are also foreigners in this pure Arab region.
President Nasser’s Arab nationalism considered any speaker of Arabic to be an Arab. Baathists in Syria and Iraq extended the definition through time to include past speakers of extinct Semitic languages – such as Aramaic, Hebrew, Phoenician and Babylonian – which are related to Arabic. There is no reason why Arabs should not take pride in the history of the peoples who lived in this area before us, and whose culture the Arabs have in some way or other inherited. But we need to keep this pride in perspective. Scientific definitions of peoples are linguistic, not racial, as there is no way to keep tabs on who breeds with who. Today’s Arabs are a mixture of Semitic, Indo-European, Turkic, Mongol and African genes. (So, for that matter, are today’s Iranians). The Sumerians were probably racially very similar to the people who live in southern Iraq today, but their language was not Semitic. It was the Sumerians who invented writing and cities – so you need to stretch reality further than it will comfortably go to say that writing was invented by the Arabs. As for fighting off the barbarians – the first barbarians the Sumerians had to deal with were Semitic barbarians invading the fertile river plains from the desert. These barbarians later became supremely civilised Akkadians. Some centuries later, the Semites of Mesopotamia were fighting off Amorites – more Semitic barbarians from the desert. What is now Iran was also the scene of constant barbarian invasion. The people of present-day Iraq invaded Iran, and the people of Iran invaded Iraq. Sometimes the Iraqis were more civilised than the Iranians, and sometimes it was the other way round. The first documented use of the term ‘Arab’ is in an Assyrian text of the 9th century BC, thousands of years after civilisation rose in Mesopotamia. In this context, a narrative of glorious Arabs in a millenial struggle to hold off Persian barbarians is clearly absurd.
The idea that Arabs built the pyramids is as bad. Ancient Egyptians were not even Semites. The ancient Egyptian language was a member of the Nilo-Saharan family, not the Semitic family (modern Ethiopians who speak Amharic, however, are the speakers of a Semitic language, although they don’t speak Arabic, and so are not considered part of the Arab world). Although Egyptians have often intermarried with Semites, especially since the arrival of Islam, there is still an obvious racial difference between them and their eastern neighbours.
It is good to be proud of the peoples who came before us, and legitimate to use their achievements to remind ourselves that Arabs are not programmed to be weak and subservient. But it is illogical to suppose that Arabs are the only inheritors of these ancient cultures. Agriculture started in the Middle East (maybe not something to be proud of), and ancient Middle Eastern genes spread into Europe and Russia as the first agriculturalists colonised outwards. Culturally, most of the world has inherited irrigation, the alphabet, the gods of the Orontes and the Nile, the stories of Noah and Job.
This isn’t an attack on Arabism or the Arab identity. I am a big supporter of an intelligent Arabism which recognises and celebrates the diversity of the Arab peoples, from Morocco to Oman, as well as their commonalities. I wish there were far more unity of purpose and cooperation between Arabs. This is an attack on intolerant Arabist mythmaking which, like its Turkish variant, is fortunately on the decline. People like Mr. el-Abyad are a very small but noisy minority, given more volume by the current tragedy in Iraq. In Syria the nationalist myths were never aggressively intolerant anyway, unlike in Saddam Hussain’s Iraq. But I ask the surviving dreamers: where has extreme mythical nationalism got anybody? Do you really think it will help to solve our region’s problems? It is possible to hold strong political positions and to desire true independence without being stupidly simplistic. It is possible to be proud of your people without being a fascist.
I previously wrote about Arabism here:
http://qunfuz.blogspot.com/2007/09/end-of-arabs-part-two.html
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
A Tour of Upper Egypt
For a long time I’ve been fascinated by the first Mesopotamian civilisations, the Sumerians (whose art, I think, has never been surpassed), Akkadians and Babylonians, but I didn’t have much of an interest in pharaonic Egypt before my recent visit. I’d seen the Pyramids five years ago, and they hadn’t done much for me – perhaps because Cairo has grown around them, or perhaps because I’d seen too many pictures.
But Luxor’s Temple of Karnak astounded me. Unlike the vast, inhuman pyramids, it gives you a sense of the scale and complexity of the people who worked and worshipped here three and a half to four thousand years ago. On the walls, ceilings, statues and obelisks there is plenty of realist depiction as well as the static, formulaic art I expected. In many of the buildings the roof, or at least the lower storey’s roof, is still on. Karnak is far older – and because of the truly ancient religion, it feels far older – than the equally intact Greek stuff I’ve seen in Turkey and Syria.
The architecture of Karnak’s Hypostyle hall must be among the most impressive in the world, and the impression of wandering through its forest of columns is entirely unphotographable. It feels fertile, like an organised swamp, and there are stars painted on the ceiling’s stone beams.
For the first time I saw a continuity between ancient Egyptian and Islamic architecture, the same focus on line, space and light.The arranged columns reminded me, for instance, of the Great Mosque in Fes, with its contradictory evocation of crowdedness and endless expanse. Like the great mosque complexes, Egyptian temple compounds functioned as schools, meeting halls, hospitals and libraries as well as places of worship. Karnak has a sacred lake, and its priests performed ritual ablutions before worship, as Muslims do.
As an Anglo-Arab, or a blue-eyed Arabic speaker, I had a double perspective on Upper Egypt. I don’t look like an Egyptian, but evidently I don’t look like a stereotypical foreigner either, and I was able to avoid most of the negative tourism interaction. My face and body language provoked only the occasional ‘hello, hello!’ When I replied in Arabic, I was asked where I was from. ‘British of Syrian origin,’ I said, and they said, with violent friendliness, ‘Nowurt al-makan! You’ve lit the place up!’
I spent two nights and a day and a half on a felucca staffed by two locals and enjoyed by foreigners. I inhabited both social worlds, local and foreign. Captain Fathi fed, warmed and sailed us. His English words were “Friend!” “Come!” and “Tea.” He grinned constantly. The marijuana on the boat didn’t bother him, he told me – in fact he could bring us some more – but the alcohol did a bit. There were Americans with a bottle of rum, a Scot, an Italian, a Norwegian. Two Americans were boy and girlfriend, publicly canoodling. In Upper Egyptian eyes, probably canoodling obscenely. Fathi avoided giving them direct looks, but grinned, and taught the word ‘habooba’, meaning ‘little darling.’ Fathi viewed the young foreigners with curious but detached sympathy, as strange, slightly damaged creatures. He certainly didn’t hold their foreignness against them. And generally the mix of people worked well. The only tense moment came when Fathi understood the American boyfriend calling him ‘dog’ – a heavy-duty insult in Arabic. Losing his smile Fathi waved at him: “What dog? Dog? Why dog?” Embarrassed and culture-shocked, the (white) American kept it up: “Yeah, dog! You don’t know gangsta rap, my dog? Yo! I’m a dog! You’re a dog! We’re all dogs!” Fathi got back to boiling the kettle.
The felucca took us from Aswan to Kom Ombo. A minibus took us to Luxor, via a couple of temples. From the window there was lots of sugarcane, a few fields of sunflowers, buffalo crossing the water. Villages are constructed with locally-made brown brick; many villages contain their own brick factories with distinctive tall, thin chimneys. Round-faced Saeedis go about their business in flare-bottomed gellabiyas and big turbans. There is a great deal of donkey transport. At one point a huge asthma-inducing cloud from an ammonia factory billows across the road and a section of village, reducing visibility. There is extreme poverty, and rubbish everywhere, but because they are built with traditional materials the villages are usually more beautiful than the richer breezeblock and plastic bag villages that make up much of Syria. There is also a laid-back, southern tone. Those buildings that are painted are coloured with similar pastel blues and ochres and pinks to the surviving paintwork at Karnak. A wealth of Sufi shrines line the irrigation channel and the road, silver or green domed, some hung with flags and fairy lights. Sufism used to be dominant here, and is still very strong. In contrast, Upper Egypt is also the home of the Gama’a al-Islamiya. A few years ago there were frequent gun battles in the cane fields. Now a tourist minibus is only permitted to travel in police convoy.
When I arrived in Luxor I was with the foreigners I’d met on the felucca. Walking with them in the streets was a different experience entirely. I think the obvious foreigners, who seem to walk only accompanied by a crowd, must suffer from the hassle in their judgment of the Egyptians. Tourists are seen as financial opportunities on legs by the thin section of society which is devoted to their milking. It’s a shame, because beyond this front the Upper Egyptians are warm, decent, simple people (I use the word ‘simple’ with all its positive force).
Contemporary Luxor is a strange place: not particularly large, rural, desperately poor, and now hosting the rich world’s package tourists. This is the reason for the hassle. Tourism is this poor country’s biggest business. There’s no use in pretending that it’s about cultural interaction or transnational brotherhood – it’s business plain and simple. And a lot of the hassle is totally genuine. In Arabic I heard several times: “Brother, my children are hungry. Can you help me?” Another refrain was: “Let me come and work where you are. I will do any work. I can clean, or build, or guard. I can work.”
And walking with the Westerners, I got a different kind of tourist hassle. It became: “Brother, my children are hungry. Tell those people to help me. They will listen to you.”
The felucca moored at night, and sometimes during the day too. I had a riverbank conversation with a local man who’d travelled and worked throughout the Arab world. “The Gulf Arabs,” he said, wrinkling his nose, “have forgotten how to live. They are full of arrogance and stupidity. They are ignorant like the Arabs before Islam. But the Syrians are true brothers, righteous people. And the Yemenis? Real Muslims! Muslim Muslims! They are like us. They’ll offer you their last piece of bread. They’ll take you into their homes.” These comments show what many poor Muslims understand by ‘Islam’, and the tremendous political force the word can exert on them. A ‘Muslim Muslim’ is someone who isn’t rich enough to be materialistic, who hasn’t yet been penetrated by late capitalist values, and who lives therefore according to traditional codes of cooperation, hospitality, mutual respect and brotherhood.
It’s hard not to read a fated and apocalyptic symbolism into the current state of Iraq and Egypt. Iraq where civilisation began, where agriculture and writing and cities and kings and armies first developed, now coated with depleted uranium and foreign mercenaries and blood and slogans. And Egypt, the first centralised state, the millenially unquenchable beacon of power and influence, now powerless, directionless, without influence or voice, utterly dependent. Egypt which in the fifties and sixties was the emblem of Arabism and the centre of cultural renaissance, now the clearest example of a client state. Egypt which arrests hundreds of moderate Islamists and liberal democrats every week, and is described as a ‘moderate Arab state’ by the official West. Egypt which last week violently suppressed the protests of striking textile workers and hungry masses complaining about rising food prices.
Egypt is lost, and the Arabs with it, but you feel, in the villages and towns of the south, not for ever. I don’t know if that feeling is illusory or not.
But Luxor’s Temple of Karnak astounded me. Unlike the vast, inhuman pyramids, it gives you a sense of the scale and complexity of the people who worked and worshipped here three and a half to four thousand years ago. On the walls, ceilings, statues and obelisks there is plenty of realist depiction as well as the static, formulaic art I expected. In many of the buildings the roof, or at least the lower storey’s roof, is still on. Karnak is far older – and because of the truly ancient religion, it feels far older – than the equally intact Greek stuff I’ve seen in Turkey and Syria.
The architecture of Karnak’s Hypostyle hall must be among the most impressive in the world, and the impression of wandering through its forest of columns is entirely unphotographable. It feels fertile, like an organised swamp, and there are stars painted on the ceiling’s stone beams.
For the first time I saw a continuity between ancient Egyptian and Islamic architecture, the same focus on line, space and light.The arranged columns reminded me, for instance, of the Great Mosque in Fes, with its contradictory evocation of crowdedness and endless expanse. Like the great mosque complexes, Egyptian temple compounds functioned as schools, meeting halls, hospitals and libraries as well as places of worship. Karnak has a sacred lake, and its priests performed ritual ablutions before worship, as Muslims do.
As an Anglo-Arab, or a blue-eyed Arabic speaker, I had a double perspective on Upper Egypt. I don’t look like an Egyptian, but evidently I don’t look like a stereotypical foreigner either, and I was able to avoid most of the negative tourism interaction. My face and body language provoked only the occasional ‘hello, hello!’ When I replied in Arabic, I was asked where I was from. ‘British of Syrian origin,’ I said, and they said, with violent friendliness, ‘Nowurt al-makan! You’ve lit the place up!’
I spent two nights and a day and a half on a felucca staffed by two locals and enjoyed by foreigners. I inhabited both social worlds, local and foreign. Captain Fathi fed, warmed and sailed us. His English words were “Friend!” “Come!” and “Tea.” He grinned constantly. The marijuana on the boat didn’t bother him, he told me – in fact he could bring us some more – but the alcohol did a bit. There were Americans with a bottle of rum, a Scot, an Italian, a Norwegian. Two Americans were boy and girlfriend, publicly canoodling. In Upper Egyptian eyes, probably canoodling obscenely. Fathi avoided giving them direct looks, but grinned, and taught the word ‘habooba’, meaning ‘little darling.’ Fathi viewed the young foreigners with curious but detached sympathy, as strange, slightly damaged creatures. He certainly didn’t hold their foreignness against them. And generally the mix of people worked well. The only tense moment came when Fathi understood the American boyfriend calling him ‘dog’ – a heavy-duty insult in Arabic. Losing his smile Fathi waved at him: “What dog? Dog? Why dog?” Embarrassed and culture-shocked, the (white) American kept it up: “Yeah, dog! You don’t know gangsta rap, my dog? Yo! I’m a dog! You’re a dog! We’re all dogs!” Fathi got back to boiling the kettle.
The felucca took us from Aswan to Kom Ombo. A minibus took us to Luxor, via a couple of temples. From the window there was lots of sugarcane, a few fields of sunflowers, buffalo crossing the water. Villages are constructed with locally-made brown brick; many villages contain their own brick factories with distinctive tall, thin chimneys. Round-faced Saeedis go about their business in flare-bottomed gellabiyas and big turbans. There is a great deal of donkey transport. At one point a huge asthma-inducing cloud from an ammonia factory billows across the road and a section of village, reducing visibility. There is extreme poverty, and rubbish everywhere, but because they are built with traditional materials the villages are usually more beautiful than the richer breezeblock and plastic bag villages that make up much of Syria. There is also a laid-back, southern tone. Those buildings that are painted are coloured with similar pastel blues and ochres and pinks to the surviving paintwork at Karnak. A wealth of Sufi shrines line the irrigation channel and the road, silver or green domed, some hung with flags and fairy lights. Sufism used to be dominant here, and is still very strong. In contrast, Upper Egypt is also the home of the Gama’a al-Islamiya. A few years ago there were frequent gun battles in the cane fields. Now a tourist minibus is only permitted to travel in police convoy.
When I arrived in Luxor I was with the foreigners I’d met on the felucca. Walking with them in the streets was a different experience entirely. I think the obvious foreigners, who seem to walk only accompanied by a crowd, must suffer from the hassle in their judgment of the Egyptians. Tourists are seen as financial opportunities on legs by the thin section of society which is devoted to their milking. It’s a shame, because beyond this front the Upper Egyptians are warm, decent, simple people (I use the word ‘simple’ with all its positive force).
Contemporary Luxor is a strange place: not particularly large, rural, desperately poor, and now hosting the rich world’s package tourists. This is the reason for the hassle. Tourism is this poor country’s biggest business. There’s no use in pretending that it’s about cultural interaction or transnational brotherhood – it’s business plain and simple. And a lot of the hassle is totally genuine. In Arabic I heard several times: “Brother, my children are hungry. Can you help me?” Another refrain was: “Let me come and work where you are. I will do any work. I can clean, or build, or guard. I can work.”
And walking with the Westerners, I got a different kind of tourist hassle. It became: “Brother, my children are hungry. Tell those people to help me. They will listen to you.”
The felucca moored at night, and sometimes during the day too. I had a riverbank conversation with a local man who’d travelled and worked throughout the Arab world. “The Gulf Arabs,” he said, wrinkling his nose, “have forgotten how to live. They are full of arrogance and stupidity. They are ignorant like the Arabs before Islam. But the Syrians are true brothers, righteous people. And the Yemenis? Real Muslims! Muslim Muslims! They are like us. They’ll offer you their last piece of bread. They’ll take you into their homes.” These comments show what many poor Muslims understand by ‘Islam’, and the tremendous political force the word can exert on them. A ‘Muslim Muslim’ is someone who isn’t rich enough to be materialistic, who hasn’t yet been penetrated by late capitalist values, and who lives therefore according to traditional codes of cooperation, hospitality, mutual respect and brotherhood.
It’s hard not to read a fated and apocalyptic symbolism into the current state of Iraq and Egypt. Iraq where civilisation began, where agriculture and writing and cities and kings and armies first developed, now coated with depleted uranium and foreign mercenaries and blood and slogans. And Egypt, the first centralised state, the millenially unquenchable beacon of power and influence, now powerless, directionless, without influence or voice, utterly dependent. Egypt which in the fifties and sixties was the emblem of Arabism and the centre of cultural renaissance, now the clearest example of a client state. Egypt which arrests hundreds of moderate Islamists and liberal democrats every week, and is described as a ‘moderate Arab state’ by the official West. Egypt which last week violently suppressed the protests of striking textile workers and hungry masses complaining about rising food prices.
Egypt is lost, and the Arabs with it, but you feel, in the villages and towns of the south, not for ever. I don’t know if that feeling is illusory or not.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Turf War
We went out for dinner last night with Iraqi friends, refugees from Basra. Muhammad received a call from his family conveying some fairly typical Iraqi news: his sister’s son had made the mistake of walking in a public area. As a result, a random bullet became lodged in his lower leg. At the hospital they sent him away, telling him his wasn’t a serious case.
Our Basrawi friends describe the recent fighting as a war of vested interests, gangs fighting over turf and plunder, with one side backed by the greatest militia presence in Iraq: the Anglo-American occupation. They don’t recognise the mainstream Western media explanation, of the ‘government’ – as if Iraq were an independent nation – ‘clamping down’ – as if the attackers were a consensually accepted authority – on ‘militias and criminal gangs.’
That fairytale, that simple-minded narrative for simple-minded folks, would in itself be enough to warrant the dismissals of journalists and news editors – if the media were free and informative rather than corporate and servile. Such ‘news’ isn’t worth switching the dial for. It isn’t worth the electricity, or the paper. It isn’t designed to inform but to lull, and many of us, evidently, are thoroughly lulled. It’s not as if it’s hard to stumble across the contradictions: mass defections from the police to the Sadr movement and hundreds of thousands in the streets carrying slogans like ‘we don’t want the new dictatorship to kill us’ suggest that the media’s is a simplified version. And the people who churn out the fantasy have neither shame nor fear of being found out.
All explanation is simplification, I know, and this is a complex situation. But still, allow me to explain (trust me, reader..).
Many militias operate in the Iraqi south. All contain a criminal element guilty of extortion and extra-judicial violence. And all the politically-relevant militias are angrily Islamist. But the Battle of Basra is essentially between two of them.
On the one hand, the Badr Brigade, which is the armed wing of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, led by the Hakeem family, founded in Iran but now solidly allied with the American occupation. The SIIC represents the merchant class and the conservative clergy. Because it led the list which was blessed by Ayatullah Sistani (who has since distanced himself) it did very well in the national elections, and so is the dominant power in the ‘government.’ The Badr Brigade staffed death squads unleashed on rebellious Sunni areas by the occupation (Negroponte’s Salvador option), a move which was a major contribution to catalysing the civil war. The SIIC also believes in a southern super-province which would keep southern oil revenues out of central government hands. This is the militia for which prime minister Maliki and ‘the government’ is a cover, and which serves, and depends on, the US military.
On the other hand, the Jaish al-Mahdi led by Moqtada as-Sadr (who, by the way, reminds me of the always-angry Abu’l’azz in Bab al-Haara – afficionadoes of the Syrian series will know the lovable man with the stick). Moqtada’s organisation was formed in Iraq after the invasion. While the Hakeems came in on American tanks, the Sadr family had always been in Iraq, and most of them died at the hands of Saddam Hussain’s torturers. The Sadrs represent what they have called the ‘vocal clergy’ – Shia ulama who take outspoken stands on behalf of the oppressed. Unsurprisingly, Sadr’s movement is wildly popular amongst the Shia poor. The Jaish al-Mahdi confronted the occupation in Najaf in 2004, and went some way towards building a resistance alliance with Sunni groups. After the attack on the Samarra shrine in April 2006, however, the Mahdi Army’s defence of Shia areas from Wahhabi-nihilists often spilled over into retaliatory ethnic cleansing. This, and Moqtada’s tenuous control over the wilder and more criminal fringes, has seriously damaged the organisation’s reputation, but its nativism and anti-occupation pedigree means that it could perhaps reconcile with Sunni forces in the future. The Badr Brigade never could.
Why has the attack has come now? Because the SIIC fears the Jaish al-Mahdi’s growing power. Moqtada has lately devoted himself to studies in Qom. When he achieves Ayatullah status he will have supreme religious clout as well as familial prestige and political influence. His nine-month-old ceasefire has allowed him to purge the Mahdi Army of some of its uncontrollable elements. There are reports that the Sadrists are receiving organisational and military help from Hizbullah. If true, this means that they will be a much more formidable force in the future. Finally, and crucially, local elections are scheduled for the autumn, and the increasingly unpopular SIIC worries that there will be a Sadrist landslide.
The attack on the Jaish al-Mahdi followed a visit by Dick Cheney to the Iraqi client militias and other regional clients, which suggests American direction as well as encouragement.
In the Guardian, Sami Ramadani connects the conflict to “the fact that oil and dock workers’ unions, declared illegal, are in full control of the ports and the major oil fields. These unions are strongly opposed to the US-backed oil law to privatise the Iraqi industry and allow the major oil companies to control production and marketing. The law is also opposed by the Sadr movement.”
The attack may also be connected to plans for Hizbullah in Lebanon. If a client government, pretending to be democratic but not in fact representing the majority, is able to provide propaganda cover for American firepower as it destroys a popular resistance movement, why not repeat the exercise in the Lebanese south? But the SIIC-American turf war against the Sadrists has already failed, and to imagine the destruction of Hizbullah requires several lines of Cheney cocaine in addition to the usual media fairytale.
Sami Ramadani’s article:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sami_ramadani/2008/03/
a_great_leap_backward.html
Watch the Real News report on Moqtada
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP2FNkJlk6U&eurl=http://fanonite.org/
And this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV55OwzIwM8&eurl=http://fanonite.org/
Thanks to the fanonite for this.
Our Basrawi friends describe the recent fighting as a war of vested interests, gangs fighting over turf and plunder, with one side backed by the greatest militia presence in Iraq: the Anglo-American occupation. They don’t recognise the mainstream Western media explanation, of the ‘government’ – as if Iraq were an independent nation – ‘clamping down’ – as if the attackers were a consensually accepted authority – on ‘militias and criminal gangs.’
That fairytale, that simple-minded narrative for simple-minded folks, would in itself be enough to warrant the dismissals of journalists and news editors – if the media were free and informative rather than corporate and servile. Such ‘news’ isn’t worth switching the dial for. It isn’t worth the electricity, or the paper. It isn’t designed to inform but to lull, and many of us, evidently, are thoroughly lulled. It’s not as if it’s hard to stumble across the contradictions: mass defections from the police to the Sadr movement and hundreds of thousands in the streets carrying slogans like ‘we don’t want the new dictatorship to kill us’ suggest that the media’s is a simplified version. And the people who churn out the fantasy have neither shame nor fear of being found out.
All explanation is simplification, I know, and this is a complex situation. But still, allow me to explain (trust me, reader..).
Many militias operate in the Iraqi south. All contain a criminal element guilty of extortion and extra-judicial violence. And all the politically-relevant militias are angrily Islamist. But the Battle of Basra is essentially between two of them.
On the one hand, the Badr Brigade, which is the armed wing of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, led by the Hakeem family, founded in Iran but now solidly allied with the American occupation. The SIIC represents the merchant class and the conservative clergy. Because it led the list which was blessed by Ayatullah Sistani (who has since distanced himself) it did very well in the national elections, and so is the dominant power in the ‘government.’ The Badr Brigade staffed death squads unleashed on rebellious Sunni areas by the occupation (Negroponte’s Salvador option), a move which was a major contribution to catalysing the civil war. The SIIC also believes in a southern super-province which would keep southern oil revenues out of central government hands. This is the militia for which prime minister Maliki and ‘the government’ is a cover, and which serves, and depends on, the US military.
On the other hand, the Jaish al-Mahdi led by Moqtada as-Sadr (who, by the way, reminds me of the always-angry Abu’l’azz in Bab al-Haara – afficionadoes of the Syrian series will know the lovable man with the stick). Moqtada’s organisation was formed in Iraq after the invasion. While the Hakeems came in on American tanks, the Sadr family had always been in Iraq, and most of them died at the hands of Saddam Hussain’s torturers. The Sadrs represent what they have called the ‘vocal clergy’ – Shia ulama who take outspoken stands on behalf of the oppressed. Unsurprisingly, Sadr’s movement is wildly popular amongst the Shia poor. The Jaish al-Mahdi confronted the occupation in Najaf in 2004, and went some way towards building a resistance alliance with Sunni groups. After the attack on the Samarra shrine in April 2006, however, the Mahdi Army’s defence of Shia areas from Wahhabi-nihilists often spilled over into retaliatory ethnic cleansing. This, and Moqtada’s tenuous control over the wilder and more criminal fringes, has seriously damaged the organisation’s reputation, but its nativism and anti-occupation pedigree means that it could perhaps reconcile with Sunni forces in the future. The Badr Brigade never could.
Why has the attack has come now? Because the SIIC fears the Jaish al-Mahdi’s growing power. Moqtada has lately devoted himself to studies in Qom. When he achieves Ayatullah status he will have supreme religious clout as well as familial prestige and political influence. His nine-month-old ceasefire has allowed him to purge the Mahdi Army of some of its uncontrollable elements. There are reports that the Sadrists are receiving organisational and military help from Hizbullah. If true, this means that they will be a much more formidable force in the future. Finally, and crucially, local elections are scheduled for the autumn, and the increasingly unpopular SIIC worries that there will be a Sadrist landslide.
The attack on the Jaish al-Mahdi followed a visit by Dick Cheney to the Iraqi client militias and other regional clients, which suggests American direction as well as encouragement.
In the Guardian, Sami Ramadani connects the conflict to “the fact that oil and dock workers’ unions, declared illegal, are in full control of the ports and the major oil fields. These unions are strongly opposed to the US-backed oil law to privatise the Iraqi industry and allow the major oil companies to control production and marketing. The law is also opposed by the Sadr movement.”
The attack may also be connected to plans for Hizbullah in Lebanon. If a client government, pretending to be democratic but not in fact representing the majority, is able to provide propaganda cover for American firepower as it destroys a popular resistance movement, why not repeat the exercise in the Lebanese south? But the SIIC-American turf war against the Sadrists has already failed, and to imagine the destruction of Hizbullah requires several lines of Cheney cocaine in addition to the usual media fairytale.
Sami Ramadani’s article:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sami_ramadani/2008/03/
a_great_leap_backward.html
Watch the Real News report on Moqtada
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP2FNkJlk6U&eurl=http://fanonite.org/
And this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV55OwzIwM8&eurl=http://fanonite.org/
Thanks to the fanonite for this.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
What Hamas Should Do
I’ve written a great deal about Israel’s crimes. Here I’ll write about what Hamas should do. I won’t criticise its choice to resist, which I see as entirely legitimate so long as there is no real peace process, and I won’t discuss its evolving methods of resistance, because I don’t think that’s my business or area of expertise. I won’t criticise the so-called ‘coup’ in which it took sole power in Gaza, because it is now common knowledge that it did this to pre-empt an American-Israeli-Dahlan coup against its democratically-elected government, and to restore some kind of order in the territory. And I’m not writing this in an attempt to be ‘objective’ or ‘balanced’; when faced by obvious injustice I see no point in equating the occupier and ethnic cleanser with the occupied and the refugees. I offer the following criticisms as advice, in the hope that it will help the resistance meet its goals.
Firstly, Hamas’s treatment of protesting Fatah supporters and of PLO-allied and other trade unions has not been ideal. Even if Fatah is the party unwilling to respect the people’s democratic choice, tactics of beatings and intimidation do not elevate Hamas to a much higher moral plane. I have heard that the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions building, which was recently bombed by Israel, had previously been taken over by Hamas and turned into a welfare office. Moves like this are counterproductive and will alienate a great deal of natural support for the resistance.
Next, Hamas needs to confront its misconceptions about Jews. Article 32 of the Hamas charter states: “The zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they have digested the region they have conquered, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”
Abdel-Wahhab el-Messiri, author of the eight-part encyclopedia ‘Jews, Judaism and Zionism’ and a scholar of undoubted anti-zionist credentials, has written that use of the Protocols “is unethical since it cannot be validated by any historical research, Arab or otherwise.” It is now accepted by the vast majority of scholars that the Protocols, supposedly a secret Jewish document calling for world domination, was in fact plagiarised by the Russian secret service from earlier French books which accused not the Jews of conspiracy but Napoleon III and Jesuit priests. It is interesting to note that many of the accusations implied against Jews in the Protocols have been made against Arabs and Muslims, particularly Palestinians, elsewhere.
For example, the Protocols allege that the Jews will stage catastrophes against their own people in order to generate sympathy. I have heard similar slanders made by zionists against Palestinians (notably, that the ethnic cleansing of 1947 and 48 was staged by the Arabs themselves) and by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims (that Muslims murdered Muslims in Srebrenica in order to get the Serbs in trouble).
The Protocols blame economic recessions on the Jews, deflecting blame from where it belongs, with the capitalist system. The Protocols aim to discredit all revolutionary ideas, from Marxism to anarchism, as part of a Jewish plot. As such, it vilifies both Jews as an ethnic group and all those who are dissatisfied with the status quo. The book is therefore profoundly conservative. It is impossible to use this book as part of a liberation project. It is possible and necessary to oppose the influence of the zionst lobby (which includes Christians and even some Muslims as well as Jews) without overgeneralising to blame all Jews for zionism, or to see zionism as more pervasive than it actually is. Zionism did, for instance, have a role to play in the invasion of Iraq, but not in the fall of the Soviet Union.
Believing that all Jews are collaborators in a vast conspiracy does not enable us to make alliances with those Jews who have done more than most Arabs to expose the crimes of zionism. I refer to Jewish anti-Zionists like the American Norman Finkelstein, who recently met the Hizbullah leadership, or the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, who has carefully documented the massacres and expulsions of 47 and 48. The anti-zionist Orthodox Jews of Neturei Karta believe that the state of Israel is a blasphemy against Judaism, and they campaign for Palestinian rights on this basis. And there were some early zionists, like Ahad Ha’am, who wanted Palestine to be a spiritual centre for the Jews rather than an ethno-state, and who condemned Jewish anti-Arab racism.
Next, Hamas leaders and many other Arabs have used the term ‘holocaust’ too easily to refer to Palestinian suffering, and have at times, like Ahmedinejad, come dangerously close to holocaust denial. It is true that Israeli Jewish leaders have themselves applied the word ‘holocaust’ to what they do to the Palestinians, and it is a sad fact that zionism has exploited the memory of the holocaust to justify the dispossession of the Palestinians. But still, holocaust denial is immoral and counterproductive, and the resistance should condemn it. Although some researchers do question the holocaust, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that it did happen. The holocaust is one of the best documented crimes in history. In every instance that I am aware of, researchers who question the holocaust have an antisemitic agenda.
I have met ignorant Arabs (I’m not talking about Hamas now) who think that Hitler was a great leader because ‘he stood up to the Jews’ – as if Hitler was a leftist liberator of the Arab nation. Hitler was not a hero but a racist. He didn’t murder Jews because he was an anti-zionist but because he believed them to be members of a subhuman race. This repulsive ideology contradicts morality, specifically Islam’s anti-racist tenets, and potentially targets the Arabs, also Semites, as much the Jews. Fortunately Europe at the time of fascist rule did not have an Arab population. The political descendants of Hitler in Europe would certainly burn Arab babies if they had a chance, just as the Nazis burnt Jewish babies.
Again, we can see many similarities between anti-Jewish and anti-Palestinian racism. One factor in Hitler’s antisemitism was Jewish prominence in the Communist Party and in the internationalist movement. One key factor in Arab and Western suspicion of the Palestinians is their justified reputation for involvement in politically subversive movements. Both the Palestinians and the Jews have (or had) good reason to be subversive.
In contradiction to the reason given above, Hitler’s antisemitism also claimed, also with some justification, that Jews played a disproportionate role in the power structure, as bankers, businessmen and media figures. Again, Levantine Arabs could with similar reasoning be accused of the same thing. In West Africa, the Carribean and South America people of Syrian-Lebanese background often control local economies. Carlos Menem was a Syrian Arab who became the president of Argentina. Lebanese Christians are a key lobby in Paris. In the diaspora, Syrian-Lebanese are often very wealthy. This results from cultural characteristics which Levantine Arabs share with Jews: ambition, respect for education, a certain clannishness. There’s a London joke about a Jewish mother who introduces her children as “My son the doctor, my son the engineer” – which could as easily be a joke about a Syrian mother.
Of course, recognition by Arabs and Muslims of Jewish suffering in Europe is not as morally imperative as recognition by Israeli Jews of Palestinian dispossession, because the Arabs are not responsible for Jewish suffering. But this recognition would help the Arabs to understand why so many Jews support zionism, which was an extreme minority ideology amongst Jews before the rise of fascism. Most European Jews in the 1920s were socialists, not zionists. Most had no desire to leave the European lands of their fathers to settle in a dusty Ottoman province. Many European Jews did not even consider themselves Jews until the Nazis declared them so. Without fascism and the holocaust there would have been no Israel, no nakba. We should blame Hitler every bit as much as we blame Balfour or Herzl.
Supporting, or seeming to support, European antisemitism makes the Arabs easy targets for those who claim that Arab opposition to zionism is racist. More than that, if the resistance cleans its language of racist generalisations and illogicalities it will be better able to fight the grotesque euphemisms of its opponents – such as the ‘peace process’ that is really a long version of what used to be called a ‘pacification campaign’, or Condoleezza Rice’s ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, which were in fact the agonies of mass murder in Lebanon.
As Nasrallah is wise enough to state, the Jews are not Israel, and Israel is not the Jews. Hamas should state this clearly too, again and again, and at the same time it should continue to build its capacity for resistance.
And finally, there is a gesture to be made which would reach towards a post-Zionist future: to offer Israeli Jews passports in the future Palestine, or to encourage Palestinians to apply for Israeli citizenship. But this gesture implies an acceptance that Palestine will never be an Islamic state, at least not as conventionally understood. It may be that Hamas will therefore be unable to take this step. We may need to wait for another movement, at a more positive stage of the struggle.
On the Protocols:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion
Firstly, Hamas’s treatment of protesting Fatah supporters and of PLO-allied and other trade unions has not been ideal. Even if Fatah is the party unwilling to respect the people’s democratic choice, tactics of beatings and intimidation do not elevate Hamas to a much higher moral plane. I have heard that the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions building, which was recently bombed by Israel, had previously been taken over by Hamas and turned into a welfare office. Moves like this are counterproductive and will alienate a great deal of natural support for the resistance.
Next, Hamas needs to confront its misconceptions about Jews. Article 32 of the Hamas charter states: “The zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they have digested the region they have conquered, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”
Abdel-Wahhab el-Messiri, author of the eight-part encyclopedia ‘Jews, Judaism and Zionism’ and a scholar of undoubted anti-zionist credentials, has written that use of the Protocols “is unethical since it cannot be validated by any historical research, Arab or otherwise.” It is now accepted by the vast majority of scholars that the Protocols, supposedly a secret Jewish document calling for world domination, was in fact plagiarised by the Russian secret service from earlier French books which accused not the Jews of conspiracy but Napoleon III and Jesuit priests. It is interesting to note that many of the accusations implied against Jews in the Protocols have been made against Arabs and Muslims, particularly Palestinians, elsewhere.
For example, the Protocols allege that the Jews will stage catastrophes against their own people in order to generate sympathy. I have heard similar slanders made by zionists against Palestinians (notably, that the ethnic cleansing of 1947 and 48 was staged by the Arabs themselves) and by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims (that Muslims murdered Muslims in Srebrenica in order to get the Serbs in trouble).
The Protocols blame economic recessions on the Jews, deflecting blame from where it belongs, with the capitalist system. The Protocols aim to discredit all revolutionary ideas, from Marxism to anarchism, as part of a Jewish plot. As such, it vilifies both Jews as an ethnic group and all those who are dissatisfied with the status quo. The book is therefore profoundly conservative. It is impossible to use this book as part of a liberation project. It is possible and necessary to oppose the influence of the zionst lobby (which includes Christians and even some Muslims as well as Jews) without overgeneralising to blame all Jews for zionism, or to see zionism as more pervasive than it actually is. Zionism did, for instance, have a role to play in the invasion of Iraq, but not in the fall of the Soviet Union.
Believing that all Jews are collaborators in a vast conspiracy does not enable us to make alliances with those Jews who have done more than most Arabs to expose the crimes of zionism. I refer to Jewish anti-Zionists like the American Norman Finkelstein, who recently met the Hizbullah leadership, or the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, who has carefully documented the massacres and expulsions of 47 and 48. The anti-zionist Orthodox Jews of Neturei Karta believe that the state of Israel is a blasphemy against Judaism, and they campaign for Palestinian rights on this basis. And there were some early zionists, like Ahad Ha’am, who wanted Palestine to be a spiritual centre for the Jews rather than an ethno-state, and who condemned Jewish anti-Arab racism.
Next, Hamas leaders and many other Arabs have used the term ‘holocaust’ too easily to refer to Palestinian suffering, and have at times, like Ahmedinejad, come dangerously close to holocaust denial. It is true that Israeli Jewish leaders have themselves applied the word ‘holocaust’ to what they do to the Palestinians, and it is a sad fact that zionism has exploited the memory of the holocaust to justify the dispossession of the Palestinians. But still, holocaust denial is immoral and counterproductive, and the resistance should condemn it. Although some researchers do question the holocaust, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that it did happen. The holocaust is one of the best documented crimes in history. In every instance that I am aware of, researchers who question the holocaust have an antisemitic agenda.
I have met ignorant Arabs (I’m not talking about Hamas now) who think that Hitler was a great leader because ‘he stood up to the Jews’ – as if Hitler was a leftist liberator of the Arab nation. Hitler was not a hero but a racist. He didn’t murder Jews because he was an anti-zionist but because he believed them to be members of a subhuman race. This repulsive ideology contradicts morality, specifically Islam’s anti-racist tenets, and potentially targets the Arabs, also Semites, as much the Jews. Fortunately Europe at the time of fascist rule did not have an Arab population. The political descendants of Hitler in Europe would certainly burn Arab babies if they had a chance, just as the Nazis burnt Jewish babies.
Again, we can see many similarities between anti-Jewish and anti-Palestinian racism. One factor in Hitler’s antisemitism was Jewish prominence in the Communist Party and in the internationalist movement. One key factor in Arab and Western suspicion of the Palestinians is their justified reputation for involvement in politically subversive movements. Both the Palestinians and the Jews have (or had) good reason to be subversive.
In contradiction to the reason given above, Hitler’s antisemitism also claimed, also with some justification, that Jews played a disproportionate role in the power structure, as bankers, businessmen and media figures. Again, Levantine Arabs could with similar reasoning be accused of the same thing. In West Africa, the Carribean and South America people of Syrian-Lebanese background often control local economies. Carlos Menem was a Syrian Arab who became the president of Argentina. Lebanese Christians are a key lobby in Paris. In the diaspora, Syrian-Lebanese are often very wealthy. This results from cultural characteristics which Levantine Arabs share with Jews: ambition, respect for education, a certain clannishness. There’s a London joke about a Jewish mother who introduces her children as “My son the doctor, my son the engineer” – which could as easily be a joke about a Syrian mother.
Of course, recognition by Arabs and Muslims of Jewish suffering in Europe is not as morally imperative as recognition by Israeli Jews of Palestinian dispossession, because the Arabs are not responsible for Jewish suffering. But this recognition would help the Arabs to understand why so many Jews support zionism, which was an extreme minority ideology amongst Jews before the rise of fascism. Most European Jews in the 1920s were socialists, not zionists. Most had no desire to leave the European lands of their fathers to settle in a dusty Ottoman province. Many European Jews did not even consider themselves Jews until the Nazis declared them so. Without fascism and the holocaust there would have been no Israel, no nakba. We should blame Hitler every bit as much as we blame Balfour or Herzl.
Supporting, or seeming to support, European antisemitism makes the Arabs easy targets for those who claim that Arab opposition to zionism is racist. More than that, if the resistance cleans its language of racist generalisations and illogicalities it will be better able to fight the grotesque euphemisms of its opponents – such as the ‘peace process’ that is really a long version of what used to be called a ‘pacification campaign’, or Condoleezza Rice’s ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, which were in fact the agonies of mass murder in Lebanon.
As Nasrallah is wise enough to state, the Jews are not Israel, and Israel is not the Jews. Hamas should state this clearly too, again and again, and at the same time it should continue to build its capacity for resistance.
And finally, there is a gesture to be made which would reach towards a post-Zionist future: to offer Israeli Jews passports in the future Palestine, or to encourage Palestinians to apply for Israeli citizenship. But this gesture implies an acceptance that Palestine will never be an Islamic state, at least not as conventionally understood. It may be that Hamas will therefore be unable to take this step. We may need to wait for another movement, at a more positive stage of the struggle.
On the Protocols:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion
Saturday, March 08, 2008
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
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
Saturday, March 01, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, February 15, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
“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.
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.
Monday, February 04, 2008
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?
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?
Thursday, January 31, 2008
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?
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?
Saturday, January 05, 2008
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/
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/
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