In a way, we have all been taken
by surprise by the abrupt confrontation taking place between the governed and
governments of the despotic Arab world.
The potential was always there since Gandhi. We in the West have also been taught to
believe in the will of the people even when we despaired. Thus after half a century of Middle Eastern misery,
we see the people demand their voice.
This item is excellent and captures
the sense that we are seeing something new in the Islamic world. Secular Islam
is now the majority and demands status and human rights. They have been able to watch other peoples gain
their own rights and a government they deserve. They are now demanding the same.
We do not know how all this will
play out over the next two decades. Quite
well actually if the eruption of 1848 is any rational guideline and I think it
is. The old elites are been ushered out
and multiparty democracies are now been ushered in. That is will be messy is a given. That it will now be democratic is certain
since few future rulers want to sit on a gilded throne waiting for the mob to
run him out of town.
The African revolts are also on
today’s agenda as is that of China
The Disappearance of the Nightmare Arab
Since 2001, Americans have been living with a nightmare Arab, a Muslim
monster threatening us to the core, chilling our souls with the cry, “God is
great!” Yet after two months of world-historic protest and rebellion in streets
and squares across the Arab world, we are finally waking up to another reality:
that this was our bad dream, significantly a creation of our own fevered
imaginations.
For years, vestigial colonial contempt for Arabs combined with rank
prejudice against the Islamic religion, exacerbated by an obsession with oil,
proved a blinding combination. Then 9/11 pulled its shroud across the sun. But
like the night yielding to dawn, all of this now appears in a new light.
Americans are seeing Arabs and Muslims as if for the first time, and we are,
despite ourselves, impressed and moved. In this regard, too, the Arab
revolution has been, well, revolutionary.
For those same two months, jihadists who think nothing of slaughtering
innocents in the name of Allah have been nowhere in sight, as millions of
ordinary Arabs launched demonstration after demonstration with a non-violent
discipline worthy of Mohandas Gandhi. True, rebels in Libya
In the meantime, across North Africa and the Middle East , none of the usual American saws about
Islamic perfidy have been evident. The demonizing of Israel
Perhaps the two biggest surprises of all here: out of a culture that
has notoriously disempowered women has sprung a protest movement rife with
female leadership, while a religion regarded as inherently incompatible with
democratic ideals has been the context from which comes an unprecedented
outbreak of democratic hope. And make no mistake: the Muslim religion
is essential to what has been happening across the Middle
East , even without Islamic “fanatics” chanting hate-filled
slogans.
Without such fanatics, who in the West knows what this religion
actually looks like?
In fact, its clearest image has been there on our television screens
again and again. In this period of transformation, every week has been
punctuated with the poignant formality of Friday prayers, including broadcast
scenes of masses of Muslims prostrate in orderly rows across vast squares in
every contested Arab capital. Young and old, illiterate and tech savvy, those
in flowing robes and those in tight blue jeans have been alike in such
observances. From mosque pulpits have come fiery denunciations of despotism and
corruption, but no blood-thirst and none of the malicious Imams who so haunt
the nightmares of Europeans and Americans.
Yet sacrosanct Fridays have consistently seen decisive social action,
with resistant regimes typically getting the picture on subsequent
weekends. (The Tunisian prime minister, a holdover from the toppled
regime of autocrat Zine Ben Ali, for example, resigned on the last Sunday in
February.) These outcomes have been sparked not only by preaching, but by the
mosque-inspired cohesion of a collectivity that finds no contradiction between
piety and political purpose; religion, that is, has been a source of resolve.
It’s an irony, then, that Western journalists, always so quick to tie
bad Muslim behavior to religion, have rushed to term this good Muslim behavior
“secular.” In a word wielded by the New York Times, Islam is now
considered little but an “afterthought” to the revolution. In this, the media
is simply wrong. The protests, demonstrations, and uprisings that have
swept across the Middle East have visibly built their foundations on the
irreducible sense of self-worth that, for believers, comes from a felt
closeness to God, who is as near to each person -- as the Qu’ran says -- as his
or her own jugular vein. The call to prayer is a five-times-daily reminder of
that infinite individual dignity.
A Rejection Not Only of Violence, But of the Old Lies
The new Arab condition is not Nirvana, nor has some political utopia
been achieved. In no Arab state is the endgame in sight, much less played out.
History warns that revolutions have a tendency to devour their children, just
as it warns that every religion can sponsor violence and war as easily and naturally
as nonviolence and peace.
History warns as well that, in times of social upheaval, Jews are the
preferred and perennial scapegoat, and the State of Israel
Because so many people have believed in themselves -- protecting one
another simply by standing together -- they have been able to reject not
only violence, but any further belief in the lies of their despotic rulers. The
stark absence of Israel as a major flashpoint of protest in these last weeks,
to take a telling example, stands in marked contrast to the way in which the
challenged or overthrown despots of various Middle Eastern lands habitually
exploited both anti-semitism (sponsoring, for instance, the dissemination through
Arab newsstands of the long-discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and
the plight of Palestinians (feigning sympathy for the dispossessed victims of
Israeli occupation while doing nothing to help them, precisely because Arab
dictators needed suffering Palestinians to distract from the suffering of their
own citizens).
Not surprisingly, if always sadly, the Arab revolution has brought
incidents of Jew-baiting in its wake -- in late February in Tunis, for example,
by a mob outside the city’s main synagogue. That display was, however, quickly
denounced and repudiated by the leadership of the Free Tunisia Cairo
To be sure, Arabs broadly identify with the humiliated Palestinians,
readily identify Israel as an enemy, and resent the American alliance with
Israel, but something different is unfolding now. When the United States Gaza
The Mainstreaming of Anti-Muslim Prejudice
Conditioned by whom? Prejudice against Arabs generally and Islam in
particular is an old, old story. A few months ago, the widespread nature of the
knee-jerk suspicion that all Muslims are potentially violent was confirmed by
National Public Radio commentator Juan Williams, who said, “I get worried. I
get nervous” around those “in Muslim garb,” those who identify themselves “first
and foremost as Muslims.”
Williams was fired by NPR, but the commentariat rallied to him for
simply speaking a universal truth, one which, as Williams himself acknowledged,
was to be regretted: Muslims are scary. When NPR then effectively reversed itself
by forcing the resignation of the executive who had fired him, anti-Muslim
bigotry was resoundingly vindicated in America
Scary, indeed -- but no surprise. Such prejudice had been woven into
every fiber of American foreign and military policy across the previous decade,
a period when the overheated watchword was “Islamofascism.” In 2002,
scholar Bernard Lewis’s book What Went Wrong? draped a cloak of
intellectual respectability around anti-Muslim contempt. It seemed not to have
occurred to Lewis that, if such an insulting question in a book title deserves
an answer at all, in the Arab context it should be: “we” did -- with that “we”
defined as Western civilization.
Whether the historical marker is 1099 for Crusader mayhem; 1417 for the
Portuguese capture of Ceuta, the first permanent European outpost in North
Africa; 1492 for the expulsion from Spain of Muslims (along with Jews); 1798
for Napoleon’s arrival as a would-be conqueror in Cairo; 1869 for the opening
of the Suez Canal by the French Empress Eugenie; 1917 for the British conquest
of Palestine, which would start a British-spawned contest between Jews and
Arabs; or the 1930s, when vast oil reserves were discovered in the Arabian
peninsula --- all such Western antecedents for trouble in Arab lands are
routinely ignored or downplayed in our world in favor of a preoccupation with a
religion deemed to be irrational, anti-modern, and inherently hostile to
democracy.
How deep-seated is such a prejudice? European Christians made expert
pronouncements about the built-in violence of Islam almost from the start,
although the seventh century Qur’an was not translated into Latin until the
twelfth century. When a relatively objective European account of Islam’s origins
and meaning finally appeared in the eighteenth century, it was quickly added to
the Roman Catholic Index of forbidden books. Western culture is still at the
mercy of such self-elevating ignorance. That’s readily apparent in the
fact that a fourteenth century slander against Islam -- that it was only
“spread by the sword” -- was reiterated in 2006 (on the fifth anniversary of
9/11) by Pope Benedict XVI. He did apologize, but by then the Muslim-haters had
been encouraged.
Western contempt for Islam is related to a post-Enlightenment distrust
of all religion. In modern historiography, for instance, the brutal violence
that killed millions during paroxysms of conflict across Europe in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is remembered as the “religious wars,” even
though religion was only part of a history that included the birth of nations
and nationalism, as well as of industrial capitalism, and the opening of the
“age of exploration,” also known as the age of colonial exploitation.
“Secular” sources of violence have always been played down in favor of
sacred causes, whether the Reformation, Puritan fanaticism, or Catholic
anti-modernism. “Enlightened” nation-states were all-too-ready to smugly
denounce primitive and irrational religious violence as a way of asserting that
their own expressly non-religious campaigns against rival states and aboriginal
peoples were necessary and therefore just. In this tale, secular violence is as
rational as religious violence is irrational. That schema holds to this day and
is operative in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States and its NATO
allies pursue dogmatically ideological and oil-driven wars that are nonetheless
virtuous simply by not being “religious.”
No fatwas for us. Never mind that these wars were declared to be
“against evil,” with God “not neutral,” as George W. Bush blithely put it. And
never mind that U.S. America
The Revolution of Hope
The new Arab revolution, with its Muslim underpinnings, is an occasion
of great hope. At the very least, “we” in the West must reckon with this
overturning of the premises of our prejudice.
Yes, dangers remain, as Arab regimes resist and revolutionaries prepare
to erect new political structures. Fanatics wait in the wings for the democrats
to falter, while violence, even undertaken in self-defense, can open onto
vistas of vengeance and cyclic retribution. Old hatreds can reignite, and the
never-vanquished forces of white supremacist colonial dominance can reemerge.
But that one of the world’s great religions is essential to what is unfolding
across North Africa and the Middle East offers the promise that this momentous
change can lead, despite the dangers, to humane new structures of justice and
mercy, which remain pillars of the Islamic faith. For us, in our world, this
means we, too, will have been purged of something malicious -- an ancient
hatred of Muslims and Arabs that now lies exposed for what it always was.
James Carroll, bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword, is a
columnist for the Boston Globe and a
Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk
University in Boston
Copyright 2011 James Carroll
Tomgram: James Carroll, Where Did All the Fatwas Go?
Posted by James Carroll at
10:05am, March 8, 2011.
[Note to TomDispatch Readers: I have a special offer to make
today. Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern
World, a new book by Boston
Globe columnist and bestselling author of Constantine New York City
A week or so ago, a friend of mine noticed a poster taped to a wall
inside the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol building, where American
demonstrators were camped
out. It showed a lone demonstrator walking toward a line of
helmeted Egyptian police, holding high a protest sign. Under the photo, a
caption said simply: “Walk like an Egyptian.”
If you want to know something new about our American world, just think
about that. No further explanation was needed. Across this country
Americans undoubtedly understood just what that meant and what it represented:
an unbelievably brave explosion of desire for freedom in the Arab world.
If that caption had said, “Walk like a Tunisian (or Bahraini, Algerian,
Iranian, Iraqi, Omani, Libyan, etc.),” few would have found that strange
either. It’s already as normal here as mom and apple pie. And yet,
had you predicted that this was coming as 2010 ended, you would have been
laughed out of the American living room by experts, among others, who assured
you that Arabs were incapable of such acts, that their religion prevented it,
and that “walk like an Egyptian” was nothing more than a 1986
hit by the Bangles about the bizarre way Egyptians of old moved.
Sometimes the tectonic plates of our cultural world shift radically and
we hardly know it’s happened. This seems to be such a moment and today
one of my favorite columnists, James Carroll of the Boston Afghanistan Iraq
He’s still ahead of the game. As he so strikingly summed up events in the Middle East in his column last
week, “The revolutions in the Arab streets, whatever their individual outcomes,
have already overturned the dominant assumption of global geopolitics -- that
hundreds of millions of impoverished people will uncomplainingly accept their
assignment to the antechamber of hell.” Tomorrow, his newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern
World, is officially published. It is a stunning reconsideration of
much of Western (even American) as well as Middle Eastern history. It
offers a new way of looking at the origins and development of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, of the Christopher Columbus story, of the history of
printing, and of so much else, including the moment in 1973 when the Middle
East nearly went nuclear. There is no way to sum it up, except to
indicate that the bestselling author of Constantine
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