Asra Nomani, writing for The Daily Beast, points to the hypocrisy buried deep within certain strains of Islamism: a fascination with pornography. Islam, in clear distinction from much of Christianity, is not particularly hung up about sex. It has its rules and its cultures have their own take on those rules. Both religions share the view that sex is great—if it’s contained within marriage. But Islam does have a rule that doesn’t exactly exist within most Western societies, that is, it is sinful in itself to see certain parts of the body, male or female. This is why, if you go into a Muslim locker room, you will not find the casual nudity that exist in most others. It’s why, in a Turkish bath, men are always wearing something around the waist. [I'm citing men here because I am not experienced with either women's locker rooms or Turkish baths. Reports I've heard, though, suggest that Muslim women are not quite as fastidious as their male counterparts.]
For most Christians, this is at most an invitation to sin, but not a sin itself. It could become a sin if it leads to further thoughts or actions, but the mere view is not itself wrong. Indeed, much of Western art, even that sponsored by churches and popes, is of nudes or contains nudity. When I was young, organizations like the YMCA would, in single-sex environments, have children swimming nude. [This changed both as improved technology of pool filters and rising concerns about pedophilia took hold.]
If observing a nude body of anyone other than a spouse is a sin, then the abundance of pornography is very much a contradiction that rises to the level of hypocrisy. While extremists rail about how the West has ‘sold its daughters into prostitution and iniquity,’ they don’t seem to mind being paying customers.
Osama’s Dirty Mind
Asra Q. NomaniThe smut in bin Laden’s compound reveals the Muslim world’s dirty secret: porn is rife, everyone looks at it—and the U.S. finds it in militants’ hideouts all the time.
The discovery of an “extensive” porn library in Osama bin Laden’s compound kicked off the predictable wave of jokey headlines. Everyone from the New York Post (“Osama Gone Wild”) to Radar Online (“Debbie Does Pakistan”) delightfully reveled in the irony of the find.
But should we really be that surprised that leader of one of the world’s most notorious terrorist groups was living with a collection of smutty pictures or videos? In the Muslim world, conspiracy theorists are likely to call the porn story a hoax, claiming the stash was planted by the U.S. after killing bin Laden to embarrass him. Pornography, however, is the Muslim world’s dirty little secret, rife in even the most conservative realms—including among the extremists.
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There are two pieces of note discussing US-Saudi relations. Both find that the old relationship is defunct, but hesitate to draw the lines around what a new relationship might look like.
The first is a piece by Nawaf Obeid, a Saudi researcher, who wrote for The Washington Post:
Amid the Arab Spring, a U.S.-Saudi split
Nawaf ObeidA tectonic shift has occurred in the U.S.-Saudi relationship. Despite significant pressure from the Obama administration to remain on the sidelines, Saudi leaders sent troops into Manama in March to defend Bahrain’s monarchy and quell the unrest that has shaken that country since February. For more than 60 years, Saudi Arabia has been bound by an unwritten bargain: oil for security. Riyadh has often protested but ultimately acquiesced to what it saw as misguided U.S. policies. But American missteps in the region since Sept. 11, an ill-conceived response to the Arab protest movements and an unconscionable refusal to hold Israel accountable for its illegal settlement building have brought this arrangement to an end. As the Saudis recalibrate the partnership, Riyadh intends to pursue a much more assertive foreign policy, at times conflicting with American interests.
The backdrop for this change are the rise of Iranian meddling in the region and the counterproductive policies that the United States has pursued here since Sept. 11. The most significant blunder may have been the invasion of Iraq, which resulted in enormous loss of life and provided Iran an opening to expand its sphere of influence. For years, Iran’s leadership has aimed to foment discord while furthering its geopolitical ambitions. Tehran has long funded Hamas and Hezbollah; recently, its scope of attempted interference has broadened to include the affairs of Arab states from Yemen to Morocco. This month the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Gen. Hasan Firouzabadi, harshly criticized Riyadh over its intervention in Bahrain, claiming this act would spark massive domestic uprisings.
Such remarks are based more on wishful thinking than fact, but Iran’s efforts to destabilize its neighbors are tireless. As Riyadh fights a cold war with Tehran, Washington has shown itself in recent months to be an unwilling and unreliable partner against this threat. The emerging political reality is a Saudi-led Arab world facing off against the aggression of Iran and its non-state proxies.
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The second is by Chas. Freeman, former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and now Chairman of the Board of Projects International, Inc. A strong critic of US foreign policy, he continues his critique in an interview with the Saudi-US Relations Information Service (SUSRIS):
[SUSRIS] In our last conversation we talked about your new book “America’s Misadventures in the Middle East,” and now it seems like we’re witnessing some variation of everyone else’s misadventures in the Middle East. What are your impressions and assessments of the unrest and revolts of the so-called “Arab Spring” that have swept the region since the first of the year?
[Freeman] This is the end of the neo-colonial era in West Asia and North Africa and the end of foreign protectorates of particular leaders in particular countries in the region. I talked about this in a speech at the Camden Conference in February. The Arabs, in effect, are finally standing up for, demanding that their voices be heard, and insisting that their will be expressed in governments that are authentically theirs. Whether this means that some of them will embrace a democratic system as it is known in the West remains to be seen, but it’s very clear that no leader in the Arab world will any longer be able to ignore the popular will to the extent that some have in the past.
There are many aspects of this that are really interesting. Among them is, first, that Arab youth despite their pan-Arab connections, consider themselves first and foremost to be citizens of the particular country in which they live. It is certain that all politics is local and it turns out all these “revolutions,” if that’s the proper word for them, are local also. Arab youth are, however, to use a word that’s common in China, “netizens” of an electronic space that embraces the entire Arab world. They are all aware of what is going on in other countries. They seize upon precedents established elsewhere. They learn what works and what doesn’t work. They watch the developments in other countries as they affect political rights, economic standing and well-being there, and they then apply these general impressions from the broad Arab world to their own circumstances. So that’s something very new. The Arab world, which was always a cultural concept, has become a real, continent-wide chat room in which everybody is in touch with everybody else and in which ideas and actions are quickly contagious. That is remarkable.
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Both of these experts are correct: US-Saudi relations have taken a beating and as a result, they are in the process of change. The fulcrum they both identify is a lack of a unified, coherent world view in US foreign policy. US responses to actions across the Middle East have been reactions, usually of the too-little-too-late variety. The slowness off the mark is exacerbated by a seeming inability to explain its policies—a failing it shared with the previous administration—even when the policies were unquestionably good.
What seems to be lacking is a willingness to acknowledge that the US, as every other country, has mixed interests and sometimes these interests conflict. The US, necessarily will make choices that serve one end more than another. That is not perfidy, it is real life. But to acknowledge this fact means that some people are going to be annoyed by the choice, both foreign and domestic. Being in charge is taking the heat in the hot kitchen that Harry Truman warned about: It comes with the job and cannot be avoided. If you spend too much time worrying about who is going to be annoyed, nothing happens. If instead you spend that time figuring out what the right policy for the US is, and then state it clearly, unambiguously, without weasel-words, then you might get somewhere.
Here’s an interesting Arab News article about runaways. Unfortunately, is seriously misses the most interesting point.
The piece laments and cautions about the problem of Saudi girls running away from their families, becoming infatuated with handsome men, and for unknown reasons, running off with low-paid expat workers. It acknowledges that there are no studies of the phenomenon, but still warns parents to do something or not do something else… the writer isn’t entirely clear on this.
Worse though, is something she notes but doesn’t find worth writing about: Saudi boys are running away at nearly four times the rate as girls! This suggests, at least to me, that there’s a problem that goes far beyond an eye being attracted to some sports or TV figure. Indeed, this is something that probably does warrant serious scientific study. And yes, I’d start looking at conditions within the home.
Beware girls … that hunk may not be worth leaving family for
MUNEERAH AL-MATROUK | ARAB NEWSJEDDAH: Several social organizations are currently studying the growing tendency of young Saudi women running away from their homes.
A recent study of the Ministry of Interior put the number of such women at 850. The study also said that the total runaway cases including that of men were 3,285 with Riyadh and Makkah provinces topping the list.
Saudi writer Hanan Al-Ataallah blamed abusive parents and other relatives for the growing phenomenon. “Some girls are alienated from their homes when they see unfair treatment, such as restrictions on them but not on their brothers,” the writer said.
“Although no scientific study is available with data about the runaway phenomenon in the Kingdom, I hope that a girl weighs all her options before heading in an unknown direction,” she added.
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Well, this story is certainly not breaking at the most opportune of times for US-Pakistani relations…
Arab News carries this Reuters report on the arrest of a Miami imam, his son, also an imam of a mosque about an hour away, a second son in California, and indictments against three others in Pakistan, including the first imam’s daughter. The are accused of funding terrorist activities to be undertaken by the Pakistani Taleban.
Without assuming their guilt, I would use this event to point out something I’ve noticed. I find that certain expat populations, no matter their ethnicity or religion, have a tendency of becoming hyper-whatever-ethnicity. They seem to support the hardest-line conservative politics in the countries they have emigrated from. We see it in the UK, with Pakistani and Indian groups who support arch conservative interpretations of Islam and Hinduism. We see it in the Sikh populations in Canada and the US, who militate for an independent country while their co-religionists in India have abandoned that fight. We see it in Armenian groups in the West who are fighting a war nearly a century old, one in which Armenians, living in Armenia, have chosen to not let interfere with daily life.
Perhaps this holding on to a past—which appears to become more idealized at greater removes of distance and time—is a way to hold onto identity that might otherwise dissolve in the new culture they have chosen to live within. Whatever the cause, though, it does not help them or others who share their religion or ethnicity in their adopted homes. Instead, it casts a pall of suspicion on all of them. And when the surrounding population has trouble distinguishing between ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’—as is sadly the case in much of the US—the damage goes even further.
Florida imams arrested for aiding Pakistani Taleban
KEVIN GREY | REUTERSMIAMI: The imam of a Florida mosque and his two sons, one also a Muslim spiritual leader, were arrested on Saturday on charges of financing and supporting the Pakistani Taleban, US officials said.
The three Pakistan-born US citizens were among six charged in a US indictment that accused them of “supporting acts of murder, kidnapping and maiming in Pakistan and elsewhere” carried out by the Pakistani Taleban, which Washington calls a terrorist organization.
The indictment, announced by US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Wifredo Ferrer and the FBI, charged the six with creating a network that transferred funds from the United States to Pakistani Taleban supporters and fighters in Pakistan, including for the purpose of buying arms.
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Both Arab News and Saudi Gazette note that a group of licensed Saudi pilots are taking to the pages of Facebook to lament their lack of jobs. Over 700 of them, in fact. Most are complaining about a change in requirements for jobs at Saudi Arabian Airlines (Saudia). I don’t understand why the airline made these changes. Some of them—like a maximum age of 27—seem harsh. Others, like a decent level of English, the international language for pilots and control towers, seem commonsensical. Whether an expensive exam run by the German Space Agency is reasonable, I’ll leave to the experts.
There seem to be several things going on here. First, there are too many people with pilot qualifications for the jobs available. This is a brutal fact that’s appearing across the globe as an ‘eduction bubble’ has risen to the surface and is beginning to pop. Higher education and specialized education programs are useful in themselves to some extent. But their true utility lies in how well they prepare people for the workplace. Here, there’s massive failure. The fact is, paper qualifications, whether a degree or license, do not guarantee jobs. No one, outside of state-created bureaucracies, hires solely on the basis of education. There’s always something more that’s required.
Then there’s the point that universities and technical schools turn out more graduates than there are jobs. When I was in Damascus, it was noted that Syrian universities were producing more PhDs in Refrigeration Engineering, annually, than there were jobs in the entire world. My university, Georgetown, shut down its doctoral program in Astronomy back in the early 70s because it was producing more PhDs than there were jobs available to them. To a greater or lesser extent—mostly greater—universities and schools are bureaucratically hide-bound. They do not change gears or directions quickly. Not only do they have faculty (whose degrees may be two or three decades old) in tenured positions, thus hard to get rid of, but the structures of various departments tend toward stasis. They know what they know, don’t really want to learn new things, and certainly don’t want to be told their hard-earned (and expensive) wisdom is no longer useful.
Private institutions, among which are the majority of flight schools, might be quicker to change. But they are not necessarily geared toward the specific requirements of every single airline. It falls on the student to ensure that the education he’s paying for is going to achieve his own goals. Private schools are geared toward making a profit. They will happily—and correctly—go for the lowest common denominator when it comes to requirements unless they see some advantage to tuning their programs to meet very specific student needs. The Saudia training program is, of course, geared toward the needs of Saudia, a quasi-governmental airline. The training folks, though, are not the final policy decision-makers. They teach what they’re told to teach. If requirements change, they’ll change, but they won’t be ahead of those policy changes.
And for some reason (well, actually, 9/11) Saudi pilots have an additional hurdle to surmount when it comes to being hired internationally, no matter how well qualified. To my knowledge, none of the pilots on 9/11 were Saudis, but the majority of the terrorists taking part in that atrocity were. The would-be pilots can thank Al-Qaeda for that impediment to employment.
It is interesting, though, that these men are taking to the social networks to air their gripes. As Saudi Arabia prohibits public demonstrations, they’re precluded from doing that. As they’re spread around the vast country, there’s little likelihood of their bumping into each other and gathering, even in private. Facebook, though, provides a venue otherwise lacking in the Kingdom, even if virtual. We’ve seen that social media can play a role in effecting change in Egypt and Tunisia. Whether it will result in the creation of jobs for an oversupply of pilots, though… I doubt it.
Arab News:
Saudi Gazette
I’m please to see that Foreign Policy Journal thinks that President Obama should be reading Crossroads Arabia if he wishes to stay informed about Gulf affairs!
Now, Saudi Arabia is a big country—as big as the whole of western Europe or the US east of the Mississippi River. There are long highways connecting Saudi cities. There are massive spaghetti bowls of roads throughout the major cities. Given a generally inadequate public transportation system, that means there are lots of cars on the road, big cars. And given a general sense of entitlement and egocentricity [see post below], that means that drivers have a tendency to speed. The inevitable result of that is a very high rate of carnage on Saudi roads.
The government is trying to reduce the bloodshed. It has introduced a system of speed cameras, Saher, to record speeders’ license numbers and send them notice that they owe fines. This makes speeders unhappy, of course. [We won't get into the issue of unpaid fines escalating; that's an issue noted in this Saudi Gazette/Okaz article, but not germane.]
So, the government is seeking to give drivers a bit of leeway, a 10% buffer in speed before a ticket is issued. That’s not good enough for some, though. They’re sure their speedometers must be off by 20% or more. Modern car electronics are extremely accurate, with margins of error in the range of 1%-2%. But car manufacturers tend to have their meters read higher than actual speed. (It is assumed this is so that they aren’t sued by people getting speeding tickets.) So if your car says you’re within the posted speed limit, you can count on its being right.
But whining is fun. So whine these drivers do. What they don’t seem to do is change their driving behavior much as the story notes drivers who say they just cannot afford to pay their fines. With a translation into reality, that means that they cannot afford to drive, as there’s no subsidy for dangerous driving.
New Saher rules provide small comfort for public
HASSAM AL-SHEIKHJEDDAH: The recent announcement that speed cameras will give motorists a margin of 10 percent before registering a driving offense against them has not been welcomed by some members of the public, while others have expressed dismay at the continued bickering.
Okaz/Saudi Gazette reported Wednesday the head of Traffic Police in Madina as saying the new margin of error was “not inconsistent with traffic safety regulations”.
“On roads with speed limits of 100 kilometers per hour offenses will only be registered when vehicles travel at 111 kilometers per hour or more,” Muhammad Al-Shanbari explained. “Where speed limits are 110 kilometers per hour, offenses will be registered at 122 kilometers per hour or over.”
Reacting to the news on the Okaz website, however, some motorists expressed their perplexity at the move.
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Note, of course, that the whiners are all men because women can’t drive in Saudi Arabia…
The un/under-employment situation in Saudi Arabia must be pretty extreme. Tens of thousands of Saudis have found the time to complain about the banner search-engine giant Google used to mark the 117th birthday of American choreographer Martha Graham, according to this story in Saudi Gazette, which originated in the Arabic daily Al-Watan.
Graham is considered one of the most important choreographers of the 20th C. She broke dance out of rigid postures and the purely ‘classical’ music repertoire and created an excitement that had never been seen in dance before. While one could assume that she had strong feelings about women, there’s nothing in her life to suggest any animus toward Islam or Arab customs.
Too much time on their hands is only part of the issue here. It also shows an unseemly degree of egocentricity. Not everything is about you, Saudi dudes.
Saudis complain about Google doodle
ABHA: Tens of thousands of Saudis have reportedly complained to Internet search engine Google after the company celebrated the 117th birthday of the late “Mother of Modern Dance” Martha Graham with an animated logo depicting dance motions.
Al-Watan Arabic daily reported that the complaints asked Google to remove the images “as a gesture of respect for Muslims’ feelings”, with members of the public saying that they “encouraged Saudi women to remove the veil”.
The “Google doodle”, which depicts a woman casting her veil behind her and starting to dance, was placed on the company’s international zone, and Al-Watan said that complaints from Saudis asked the company to “respect the privacy of its Saudi zone” and remove the images.
Martha Graham was born on May 11, 1894 in Pennsylvania, USA, and received the country’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for her lifetime’s work in dance and choreography.
Here’s the heading the oh-so-easily-outraged Saudis found objectionable:
And here is an explanation from the Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance explaining each of the images. [Note, this link will decay rather rapidly as it only goes to the front page of the Center's site.]
Thanks to a reader for pointing me to this blog post from Harry’s Place. It talks about internal Iranian politics and a rift that has developed over the timing of the appearance of the Mahdi, who appearance will start the 19-year clock ticking toward the end of time.
Theorizing about the end of time, Eschatology, is fraught with political import. In the case of Iran, the concern is that when the Mahdi reappears, he will rightfully take control of government. The current government will be excess to needs. If people are convinced that the Mahdi is due to appear soon, they’ll simply disregard government because they know that its days are numbered. While it is a matter of faith for Shi’ites to anticipate the return of the Occulted Imam, there is great disagreement about just when that might happen. The belief that worries the Iranian religious establishment at present is claiming that the death of Saudi King Abdullah will be among the triggers, that three years after his death is when the 13th Imam will reappear.
Looking at this through the lens of comparative anthropology, I see this as a manifestation of immense pressure on Iran’s Shi’ites. They are being confronted with social, economic, and political change that is far beyond their ability to control. As a result, they are moving toward mystical interpretations that seek to make sense of these pressures. People are searching through the hadith and interpreting them in much the same way that many Westerners go through the writings of the 16th C. French ‘seer’ Nostradamus, looking for hints about what the future holds.
I see this as a sign of very dangerous unrest within Iran. Lacking my own crystal ball, I’ve no idea how it will come out, but I’m sure that the process will be violent.
On Mahdism, Millenarianism and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Joseph WCNN reports on the arrest of Abbas Amirifar, the head of the Presidential Council in Iran, and a close ally of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his chief of staff:
Top officials and media outlets close to Khamenei have mounted a campaign of criticism targeting Ahmadinejad, while several of his top aides have reportedly been arrested.
The reported arrest of presidential palace prayer leader Abbas Amirifar on charges of “sorcery” is perhaps the best sign of how serious the political feud in Tehran has gotten.
Amirifar produced a controversial film predicting the imminent return of the Shiite saint Mehdi, a messianic prediction that Ahmadinejad often refers to in his speeches.
Potkin reports on the arrest of the exorcist and mystic Abbas Ghaffari, another religious ally Ahmadinejad.
You might have seen the word “sorcery” in the CNN article, and you might be tempted to dismiss the whole affair as a superstitious tale of wizardry and alchemy, in a country where the government routinely uses religion to manipulate people.
But there is a more profound story within these accusations.
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While there’s no proof that the death of Usama bin Laden has undermined the will of terrorists to continue their war, there’s suggestive behavior pointing in that direction. Arab News reports that three more Saudis have turned themselves in to security authorities this week. The paper notes that the surrenders follow bin Laden’s death, but without details—or statements by those surrendering—we can’t really tell what the motivations are. Early media reports are limited in their utility in assessing just what’s going on.
It’s possible that the killing of their spiritual/ideological figurehead has persuaded them that it’s time to quit. It’s possible that it’s simple coincidence. I suspect, however, that if bin Laden’s death is the motivating factor, the Saudi government will make it known, loudly.
Three terror suspects surrender
MUHAMMAD AL-SULAMI | ARAB NEWSJEDDAH: Three most-wanted Saudi militants who were operating abroad at an undisclosed area of conflict have surrendered to authorities, the Interior Ministry announced Wednesday.
“The three contacted Saudi authorities and expressed their desire to return to the Kingdom,” said ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour Al-Turki. “We made arrangements for their return and for them to reunite with their families.”
The three men were not identified and their method and location of surrender was not disclosed. Earlier this month Khaled Hadal Al-Qahtani, another wanted militant, surrendered to Saudi authorities. Qahtani was the first publicly acknowledged surrender following the killing of Osama Bin Laden on March 2 in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by US Navy SEALs.
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Arab News runs an article looking at the progress women have made in Saudi Arabia’s brief history. It is considerable, given the starting point, but leaves much to be achieved. The article notes that it wasn’t until 1959 that women had a right to a state education. That same year, Tunisia was giving its women full voting rights.
Saudi women are not ignorant of the deficit they face when it comes to basic rights. The articles quotes several who point to areas that need to be addressed, like guardianship of adult women and their absence from the Shoura Council, though they note that women are making gains within the government bureaucracy. The other GCC states are expanding women’s political rights now, in the 21st C., and I think it won’t be long before Saudi Arabia is forced to catch up. If the government doesn’t bend to pressure from its own women, it may be forced to do so through the shame of unfavorable comparisons with its sister GCC states.
Saudi women ‘gaining ground after long struggle’
ABDULHAI YOUSEF | ARAB NEWSRIYADH: The late introduction of women’s education in Saudi Arabia has not limited their ability to make considerable gains and rights.
On the local front, Saudi women have been able to reach official decision-making positions in a number of ministries. Externally, they have occupied high executive posts in many international organizations.
The story of Saudi women striving to gain their legitimate rights in education and work, and to make their own decisions on personal affairs is an interesting one, characterized by long years of hard labor by pioneering women. Whether in big cities or remote villages, the battles are the same.
The first of these battles was in the field of education. During the 1920s, education for Saudi women was an “impossible dream.” The culture then was replete with the idea that girl’s education was “sedition” and a source of corruption. Moreover, society considered education of women as opposed to Islam, making its presence in the land of the two holy mosques unimaginable. Girls then had two directions to go to: either her husband’s house or the grave.
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Arab News also runs a related piece on how some Saudi women are finding it useful to ‘bribe’ their husbands into letting them work. By seeing it as a literal ‘cost of doing business’, the women are promoting their own social value even if the economics don’t make it profitable on paper. I think this is a not-bad approach. Once the barriers to women’s entry into the workplace are demolished, the women can work on reducing their ‘subsidies’ to their husbands!
Here’s an interesting Boston Review essay from by Sadik Al-Azm, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Damascus. In it, he argues that with the passing of bin Laden, the days of terrorism in the name of Islam are numbered. Much as the ultimate outrages committed by the German Bader-Meinhoff Gang and Italian Red Brigades marked both their high points and the turning points that led to their ultimate unraveling, the 9/11 atrocity had its inevitable end. The removal of the leaders of the various movements, through death or prison, pointed out the futility of their actions, themselves rear-guard fights in ideological battles already lost.
Al-Azm notes that as with the European groups, Islamists are in a ‘…desperate attempt to break out of the historical impasse and terminal structural crisis….’ They find themselves in a world they do not like, a world they believe they do not deserve, and a world they do not know how to change. Lacking any other means to success, they are left with terrorism. He points to the 1979 takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca as an indication of which way the winds were blowing—though he erroneously calls that occupation ‘peaceful’. It was not as Juhaiman and his followers started the incident with a shooting and were very well armed. Al-Azm also claims that the Saudi establishment is takfiri in its orientation. I don’t think it ever actually was, but it certainly is not today.
The author spells out in some detail how the Arab/Muslim world seems to be caught in a form of schizophrenia, seeing itself as the makers of a great civilization that was mysteriously usurped by Western culture. He uses an extended metaphor derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to make his point. He also notes the irony in the fact that the only ones acting on Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ are the Islamists as it is the only way they can make sense of the modern world.
Seeking such a clash, though, is fatuous. As the saying goes, ‘If a stone falls on an egg, the egg breaks; if an egg falls on a stone, the egg breaks.’ The way the world has developed over the past several hundred years has turned Western civilization into the stone in this trope. The eggs will have to learn to live in a world of stones.
Time Out of Joint
Western dominance, Islamist terror, and the Arab imagination
Sadik J. Al-AzmThere is a strong injunction in Arab Islamic culture against shamateh, an emotion—like schadenfreude—of taking pleasure in the suffering of others. It is forbidden when it comes to death, even the violent death of your mortal enemies. Yet it would be very hard these days to find an Arab, no matter how sober, cultured, and sophisticated, in whose heart there was not some room for shamateh at the suffering of Americans on September 11. I myself tried hard to contain, control, and hide it that day. And I knew intuitively that millions and millions of people throughout the Arab world and beyond experienced the same emotion.
I never had any doubts, either, about who perpetrated that heinous crime; our Islamists had a deep-seated vendetta against the World Trade Center since their failed attack on it in 1993. As an Arab, I know something about the power of vengeance in our culture and its consuming force. I also knew that the United States would respond with all its force to crush the Islamist movement worldwide into oblivion. But I didn’t understand my own shameful response to the slaughter of innocents. Was it the bad news from Palestine that week; the satisfaction of seeing the arrogance of power abruptly, if temporarily, humbled; the sight of the jihadi Frankenstein’s monsters, so carefully nourished by the United States, turning suddenly on their masters; or the natural resentment of the weak and marginalized at the peripheries of empires against the center, or, in this case, against the center of the center? Does my response, and the silent shamateh of the Arab world, mean that Huntington’s clash of civilizations has come true, and so quickly?
In the end, no. Despite current predictions of a protracted global war between the West and the Islamic world, I believe that war is over. There may be intermittent battles in the decades to come, with many innocent victims. But the number of supporters of armed Islamism is unlikely to grow, its support throughout the Arab Muslim world will likely decline, and the opposition by other Muslim groups will surely grow. 9/11 signaled the last gasp of Islamism rather than the beginnings of its global challenge.
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