The Gertrude Bell Jar

Contra Pape

I like Martin Kramer’s response to the Pape theory about suicide terrorism. Some highlights:

Professor Pape’s thesis has resonated quite widely, and before I approach it, let me say a word about why I think it has had such an appeal. Why are people eager to find his thesis plausible?

First, it is reassuring. No one likes the idea that we may have embarked on a generations-long struggle against growing tides of suicidal fanatics. Professor Pape tells us that it need not be so, that we have it in our power to stop it now ...

Second, it is empirical. The speculative and polemical interpretations and counter-interpretations of the threat confuse us. We want metrics, pie charts and graphs—something quantifiable and proven. Even when we know that databases can be flawed, samples can be too small, and statistics can be misleading, we still perk up at the first slide of the Powerpoint.

Third, it is secular. The idea of religion as an independent variable is foreign to our mode of thought. As a result, our political sciences have almost nothing to say about it. And what really scares us is Islam, which seems to combine bottomless grievance and limitless ambition. But nationalism—well, that’s a horse of a different color: we have faced it before, its aims are limited, and with nationalists you can sometimes cut a deal and split the difference. Say that Al-Qaeda is really just Arabian nationalism, and people will listen.

Kramer goes on to describe how Pape’s thesis doesn’t really fit the Israel/Palestine conflict, concluding:

The suicide bombings, pioneered by Hamas originally in open defiance of the PLO, were superficially an emulation of the Lebanese precedent. But they have never served a conventional nationalist concept of liberation. By bombing in Israel proper and against civilians, Hamas and its rivals actually achieved the opposite of nationalist goals: the attacks brought about a reoccupation of much of the West Bank, the legitimation of Israel’s security fence, and the loss of international sympathy, traditionally a core element of Palestinian national strategy. It substituted for these tangible assets a crowd-pleasing spectacle of death in Israel’s cities, which other groups were quick to copy to preserve their market share.

So the suicide attacks seem disconnected from a nationalist “strategic logic.” What the attacks have unquestionably achieved is shattering the political monopoly of the PLO. I submit that was their purpose. True, the Islamized strategy bears a superficial resemblance to a nationalist one. But look closely: the objectives have grown larger (all of Palestine, elimination of Israel), the timeline has grown longer, winning minds has become more important than regaining territory, and international sympathy has lost its strategic significance. In the Palestinian case, the occupation is the context of the suicide bombing, and it is the fuel. But ending the occupation is not the prime objective of the suicide campaign. The Palestinian bombings are spectacles intended to win over converts and build an identity over time.

Yet another reason why Pape’s thesis is so comfy is the seamless way it appeals to our ethnocentrism. It is apparently counter-intuitive to think that Arabs or Muslims could be doing all these earth-shattering things primarily to influence each other rather than us. Yet the stated aim of Islamist political groups is to replace all existing governments of Muslim countries with a Caliphate, and to do that Islamists need to beat their political rivals on their home territories. Ambulance chasing and seeking to exploit and and capture the initiative on any conflict involving Muslims anywhere in the world is their most persistent strategy, regardless of which tactics are in vogue at any given time. Conflicts which they think benefit political rivals more than themselves will be ignored, foreign occupation or no. Gilles Kepel argues persuasively in Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam that the purpose of switching to Western targets was to reinvigorate a political movement which had seemingly exhausted every means within the Middle East to effect the desired revolution.

(And yes, I’m way overdue on posting a review of Kepel’s book along with many others ...)

Arab Opinion On Reform

Abu Aardvark has an interesting post about the results of a (non-scientific) public opinion poll by Al-Arabiya:

More than 80% of participants said that the delayed development of the Arab world is the fault of the reluctance of their governments about changes and reforms. Since the other options on this question included "the Arab Israeli conflict" and "terrorism", this result seems significant. As for the reasons why people don't participate in political life in the Arab world, 61% said that lack of confidence in political parties was the main reason they abstained, while some 94% mentioned "fear" as a reason not to participate. I found it somewhat disheartening that only 23% saw freedom of expression as the fastest way to develop, although I wonder if the framing of the question mattered there. In a different part of the survey, 59% saw "the absence of democracy and freedom of opinion" was the most important challenge confronting political development.

The (also non-scientific) Al Jazeera poll he posted about earlier was also pretty interesting. Abu comments:

Second, the 37%-35% net in favor of reform and democracy over Palestine/Israel as the highest priority issue should actually be the headline finding here. In past surveys of this kind, you were far more likely to find 60-70% choosing Palestine first, which crowded out all other issues. That Palestine is not now crowding out reform is encouraging and interesting.

And later, in his comments section, he adds,

Reform and democracy and human rights are not alternatives to caring about Palestine. Posing them as such has been standard practice for Arab rulers for many years, and it's been all too effective as an excuse for refusing change. My sense of this is not that pushing for domestic reform comes at the expense of caring about the Palestinians, but that the two issues go together for a lot of Arabs today. Certainly that's the way it's been framed on al Jazeera for years now...

All Roads Lead To Denial

I picked up a remaindered copy of Sacred Rage: the Wrath of Militant Islam by Robin Wright last weekend; it's one of those insta-books that appeared shortly after 9/11. I've gradually realized that avoiding this particular publishing category in the assumption that it was likely to be hysterical and unhelpful was probably a mistake, for one thing because it has meant that I don't know what everybody else believes about Islamism based on that type of publication, and am continually flummoxed and irritated by what seems to me to be the extremely weird and beside-the-point sort of things people say about it in the media and in conversation. But it turns out this is actually a book originally published in 1985 by a journalist who had spent a lot of time in Iran, with a couple of new chapters about Al Qaeda slapped on at the end.

It's from the era people are talking about in publications from the 1990s when they say "Everybody expected the Islamic revolution in Iran and Khomeinism to have huge influence and impact throughout the Muslim world, but then it didn't so much." Not least, it appears, because the Sunni version of Islamism draws heavily on the theology of medieval-era Islamic jurist Ibn Taymiyya, who considered Shiism a form of apostasy. So it is that a 1981 conference Wright is warming up to do a chapter on, between Khomeinists and Sunni Islamists from several nations, which he describes as having been unjustly neglected by journalists at the time who only now are beginning to realize how important it was, has apparently been forgotten again, or at least hasn't been mentioned in any of the other more recent books and articles I've read.

The book begins by carefully noting that, even though Khomeini and the Iran-sponsored Shia Islamist group Hizbollah in Lebanon are at the top of the news right now for all of their attacks on Americans, Islamism doesn't really "come from" Iran or Shiism, then goes on to obsess about them anyway, much in the same way a current book might duly note that Islamism isn't merely an emanation of Saudi Arabia or Wahhabism before going on to talk about nothing else. (Incidentally, Wright does not use the term Islamism, which possibly had not yet been coined at the time. Instead he refers to "the Crusade," the nearest English language equivalent to jihad. The question of what effect different linguistic approaches to translating Islamic concepts has on how outsiders understand them would be an interesting one for somebody with a lot more time on their hands than myself). I wonder if the average person picking up this book would notice how it illustrates the contingent and ultimately self-preoccupied way Westerners tend to approach this subject, or simply conclude that Islamism "really" came mostly from Iran. (A book has recently been published on just that theory, actually, tracing it a little further back to mid-20th Century U.S. foreign policy there; it passed across my desk at the library a few weeks ago but I haven't read it).

In any case, we seem to have a persistent not-seeing-the-forest-for-the-trees problem in grappling with Islamism. It's a little dispiriting to me that, three full years past the point when this ideology finally captured the rapt attention of the Western public, many intelligent and educated people still consider "capturing Osama" and "destroying Al Qaeda" to be the alpha and omega of the war on Islamism and Islamist terrorism. It would of course be beneficial to capture Osama in particular; he is a very charismatic leader and therefore quite useful to the cause. But the primary contribution of Al Qaeda to the movement--that of bumping everything up one organizational tech level in terms of finally figuring out how to make the movement as transnational operationally as it has always been ideologically, in a way that greatly multiplies its effectiveness--is a permanent one that cannot be undone by capturing any number of Al Qaeda members, or even all of them.

There's a default sort of way of thinking about this, which tends to treat Al Qaeda as some kind of extremely insane and evil mafia or James-Bond-style supervillain organization, instead of as merely the latest iteration of a broad political movement that's been forming up for at least 100 years, and a major player in Middle Eastern politics since the late 1960s. I liked this quote Robin Wright uses from Marvin Zonis:

The message from Iran--no matter how bizarre or trivial it sounds on first, second, fourth, or thirty-ninth hearing--is in my opinion the single most impressive political ideology which has been proposed in the 20th Century since the Bolshevik Revolution … If we accept that Bolshevism is a remnant of the 19th Century, then I want to argue that we've only had one good one in the 20th Century--and it's this one … This powerful message will be with us for a very long time--no matter what happens to Ayatollah Khomeini.

… mostly because it partly illustrates why it's hard to talk honestly about how powerful Islamism really is. Clearly there's a bit of a danger that one's abstract admiration for it as an ideological construct--the way it answers every question, and ties up every loose end of Islamic history into a very neat and attractive package, and twists the lens on Islam itself, bringing the background suddenly into the foreground, in an oddly compelling way that makes many say "Ah, yes, this is what is always has been and was supposed to be all along," the way it neatly enlists the logic and rhetoric of secularist revolutionary movements and re-deploys it to denounce their perfidy and failure in the Muslim world--can turn into real approval. Zonis of course was not alone in seeing Khomeinism at the time as an "authentic" Muslim liberatory politics. (Events have largely overtaken that interpretation in the West, but not so much in the East). To me the really interesting question is not why any Muslims in the Middle East have embraced Islamism to the extent of being willing to kill and die for it, but instead, why haven't they all?

I don't really know the answer to that question, but I suspect part of it might lie in how extensively Westernized the Arab and Muslim world already is. And it turns out we're in pretty deep denial about that as well. A friend sent me a link a while back to an essay by Ian Baruma, in which the author, in discussing the civilizational aspects of the Western-Islamist conflict, simply puts Nazism in the "non-Western" category, which allows a fairly interesting discussion of Eastern perceptions of the West to end up a nonsense. What has the Middle Eastern experience with Western secularism actually been? How much does this experience account for Eastern "ignorance" of Western virtues? Because of course Nazism and Communism are no less iterations of Western thought and history for having been ultimately defeated within it. We are accustomed to thinking of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as "ours" because that's the way the Cold War sorted them, when the "other" was the Westernized Soviet Union rather than the East, but in any intellectual honest notion of a "clash of civilizations," Assad and Saddam and Nasser have been "ours" as well, along with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. I do understand the ideological need to define 20th Century Western totalitarianisms as "not us" for the purpose of preserving the gains we've made by defeating them, but it makes for one hell of a big blind spot (and perhaps a crucially enabling one) when discussing Middle Eastern politics in terms of "us" and "them." It also, I think, helps to obscure the obvious influence of the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th Century on Islamist thought; the eerily familiar tone and vocabulary of Islamist rhetoric jumps so clearly off the page when you read unvarnished quotations that you would think this would be impossible to conceal. Yet we still seem to prefer to see Islamists as "medieval" or "savage." I once answered a person who said to me "The terrorists are just not like us, you know," with "No, they're pretty much like us, it's just that they're like the Nazis of us," which certainly ended the conversation. I think we like to think of Nazis as almost supernatural devils too, or the outcome of some unaccountable episode of German mass hysteria, or something local and containable like that, rather than as part of our collective history as Westerners, emanating in a logical way from risks posed by our secular and rationalist world view. Perhaps our habitual trivialization of the Islamist enemy (whether as confined to a single shadowy group, or as consisting of a purely reactive phenomenon that we can somehow control with our own behavior) ultimately serves as a similar type of false comfort.

I Abjure The CIA And All Its Spooks

Boy, you just can't beat a former CIA agent for stunning cultural insights about foreigners, can you? "Afghans didn't need training in murder. They learned that when they crawled out of the crib." Oh tell me more, Robert Baer, former agent, author of See No Evil and Sleeping With the Devil, man of the world and sooper genius.

On 9/11, when all the news websites were down and spotty reports from co-workers with radios just weren't enough, I logged onto my favorite society and politics discussion forum (Hissyfit forums, RIP), read news updates from participants with tvs, and posted this link, to a worrysome article I'd read back in 1998 about the CIA's complete and ongoing failure to develop and maintain any kind of real human intelligence pretty much anywhere in the world. I believe I said something like, well, at least they'll have to do something about this now. Well, silly me. Dubya doesn't like to fire people, it turns out. But actually it's not clear that firing a few people at the top would have helped anyway; according to the article, the CIA's problems are deep and institutional and cut across administrations. And according to a PBS documentary and online report (and reportedly also according to the 9/11 Commission report, which I haven't read yet), the FBI response to terrorism has similarly been hampered by its institutional culture. (And even beyond its law enforcement mindset; John O'Neill's problems with FBI higher-ups apparently began because they didn't like his flashy suits.) It now appears that whoever wins the election in November will have to implement at least some of the 9/11 Commission recommendations. I am hopeful but not sanguine, unless one of the recommendations is: Fire everybody at CIA, start over with completely different people. That would probably work; the U.S. created a pretty good intelligence agency out of pretty much nothing during WWII, though it did take a year or so. But the 9/11 Commission recommendations don't seem to contain anything as drastic as that.

And another reason to doubt that the CIA will get the spanking it deserves is the emergence of the agency over the last year in the unlikely role of champion of the American people, in what has become the default narrative of approximately a third to a half of the electorate, in opposition to a domineering and dishonest White House. The BUSH LIED theory has an unfortunate tendency to obscure just how badly the CIA punted on the question of WMD in Iraq. The CIA may have wanted to add more admission of uncertainty to intelligence reports to be presented to the public about WMD's, which makes them closer to right than Dubya was, but at the same time they had absolutely no clue as to what was actually going on in Iraq. The causes and nature of this massive intelligence failure is presented I think most concisely and accurately in Kenneth Pollack's post-mortem. And as Christopher Hitchens has noted, the Plame affair has led left-of-center types to bizarrely treasure the self-serving aspects of the agency's secrecy in a way they never did before.

It's a big, big mistake to forget to mistrust the CIA, not least because the CIA never learns to mistrust itself, not even a little bit. Lately I've been slogging through Robert Baer's Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, and the hubris is just astonishing. Whenever I pick up another book about the Middle East and Islamism, the first order of business is to determine the author's agenda and try to correct for it to the extent that I can; the competition to capture the representation and interpretation of any given event in this area tends to be fierce and political, just as you would expect. With Baer it's becoming clear that the agenda is not so much a political one (though the title seems aimed at catching a particular political wave, and may well have been the publisher's decision) as a personal, self-aggrandizing one. Robert Baer's basic thesis is that the CIA was blinded by its preoccupation with the Soviet Union to the danger posed by rising Islamism, which is all too true. But, he also wants to argue that they could have overcome these difficulties by giving real men like Robert Baer a freer hand, instead of acting like a bunch of grandmas (or "AARP bluehairs" as he puts it). So though he poses as a critic of the CIA, he must leave its basic legitimacy and efficacy (if run aggressively enough) unchallenged if he's to argue how he might have acted more effectively within it. So far as I'm able to tell, his bias here is pretty much unconscious.

Once you get past the basic "The CIA knows nothing; trust me to know everything because I was in the CIA" contradiction (and many people presumably have; the cover to the paperback edition proclaims bestseller status, and Amazon consumer reviews are appallingly glowing), you're ready to be sucked into the Soviet preoccupation story. The story has the advantage of being true, but, the fact that Baer presents this as a "dirty little secret" which he is uniquely qualified to share with the reader (as opposed to an obvious phenomenon that has been duly noted by nearly everyone who's ever written anything about U.S. history in the Middle East) lends a completely unearned credibility to the rest of his theory. Because while Baer is mocking the CIA for its Soviet-influenced preconceptions, you might not notice that the Cold War wore a pretty important groove in his brain too. I had been attributing his habit of ignoring all kinds of distinctions and making all kinds of sloppy connections without showing his work (real men don’t need bibliographies or footnotes, apparently) to maybe an attempt to "dumb it down" for a general audience, and his emphasis on Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood to the exclusion of all other relevant actors to a desire to exaggerate the importance of his own work, since these are apparently the areas he happened to be focusing on as a CIA man, and indeed it seems the Muslim Brothers are the sole Islamist organization with which he managed to make one (possibly imaginary, IMHO*) contact. But it may also be that Baer is not merely sloppily implying that Saudia Arabia is behind the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood is behind all Islamist terrorism, but that he actually believes that, perhaps as the result of a Cold-War-influenced institutional comfort level with having a single tentacular actor as an enemy.

Most of what he says is, so far as I know, reasonably close to true, so far as it goes. But it is so selective that it amounts to looking at the situation from a pinhole. You would never know, reading this book, that the Muslim Brotherhood has episodically operated above-ground as a legitimate social organization, that it has openly participated in elections, that its slogan "Islam is the solution" means different things to different people, and that a great deal of its ability to function as a legitimate organization depends on its ability to distance itself from terrorism. You would never know that it is not the only Islamist organization to establish chapters in different countries (the Jamaat Islamiyya, for example, originating from Pakistan and beholden to Mawdudi rather than the Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb as an intellectual father, is another big one, and IIRC actually more successful at grass-roots organizing throughout the Middle East than the MB has been). You would never know that there have been genuine disagreements over tactics among Muslim Brothers, that sub-groups have splintered from the MB many times, that Muslim Brothers insist that the assassination of Sadat was carried out by a splinter group from the MB rather than the MB itself, and that it has never been proven that the alleged MB assassination plot against Nasser was anything more than a pretext to legitimate Nasser’s brutal suppression of the MB. You would never know that there are hundreds of local Islamist organizations throughout the Middle East that have no connection to the MB whatsoever (or, at most, have some individual members who passed through the MB at some time in the past), and you would especially never know, due to Baer’s relentless cherry-picking, that there have ever been acts of Islamist terrorism that were not associated with the MB. He can’t ignore 9/11, obviously, since it is the incident that he wants to argue the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia has been leading up to all this time; about a third of the way through the book he simply asserts that 9/11 was "the Muslim Brotherhood through and through," even though the Taliban are actually Soviet-Afghan War orphans educated in Pakistani Islamist schools, and no operational connection between 9/11 and the MB has been found (so far as I know; feel free to enlighten me if you’ve heard otherwise).

I’m no apologist for the MB, but it’s absurd to think everything traces back to them somehow, even ideologically. Baer’s James Bond villain characterization (all-powerful, relentless, fiendishly clever) of the Muslim Brotherhood and denial of a whole spectrum of competing Islamic and Islamist organizations above all obscures why any of these movements exist in the first place, and periodically resort to terrorism. Islamism is above all an idea, not an organization, and one that seems to address the political and economic dysfunction of the post-colonial, partially Westernized Middle East from within its own cultural and religious framework. It cannot be killed by killing some random portion of those who carry its message. The single-actor approach ignores the deep political implications of the rise of Islamism and the broad social phenomenon of cultural "Islamization" across the Middle East and Muslim world.

And it does so in a way that validates the CIA way of looking at the world, a highly "pragmatic" and amoral worldview in which shadowy actors move leaders and weapons and money around like pieces on a chessboard. (Except in free and democratic nations like those in Western Europe, in which CIA operatives are for the most part cruelly reduced to the role of mere observers, poor things.) In advocating a more aggressive role for the CIA, Baer never pauses for a moment to consider that the very susceptibility of despotic regimes to the kind of internal and external manipulation and gamesmanship he so treasures might be part of the problem, and he completely glosses over how many CIA and State Department misfires have contributed materially to the rise of Islamism. He is quite correct to point out that Saudi Arabia pursues multiple and sometimes contradictory agendas with respect to Islamists despite its status as a U.S. ally. But so does everybody else we deal with in the Middle East. He does mention in passing that the CIA funded Islamist jihadis in Afghanistan (a crucial part of the Soviet preoccupation story), but fails to mention that this happened because CIA funds were funneled through our ally Pakistan’s security services, which then as now were riddled with Islamist sympathizers. In mocking the Carter and Reagan administrations for their "overfocus" on Iran (because, really, it’s not like Iran ever did anything to attract so much of our attention), he omits to mention that Iranian revolutionaries took U.S. hostages because they interpreted the granting of asylum to the Shah in the U.S. as a sign that we intended to restore the Shah power in Iran, and that they believed that because the CIA had done precisely that 30 years before, the last time Iran had a revolution against this very same Shah. In fact the entire history of the causes of the Islamic Revolution in Iran is completely ignored here, presumably because CIA cock-up + plus Shi’a (rather than Sunni and therefore putatively MB) Islamists** = no good for Baer’s story at all.

So what’s a good, practical approach to containing terrorism according to Baer? We might be able to gather a thing or two from his discussion of Hafez al-Asad. Baer describes how, following an assassination attempt in 1980, Asad had all suspected Muslim Brothers then being held in Syrian jails, some 500 hundred of them, shot in the head on a single afternoon. In 1982, when MB members seized control of the town of Hama and began executing government officials, Asad ordered his army to shell the town until everyone in it, 20,000 men, women, children altogether, were dead. Quoth Baer:

Asad wasn’t happy to go down in history as the butcher of Hama or the man who destroyed a world-class historic city, but it was either that or run for it, along with one million other Alawites [the minority Muslim sect that forms the ruling class in Syria]. The Brothers would never again pose a serious threat to Asad.

Poor little Hitler Jr, what else could he do? And, hey presto, no more jihad! Pay no attention to the supposedly non-existent Syrian jihadis who poured over the border in their thousands 20 years later to aid in the "resistance" to the U.S. invasion of Iraq at the start of the war. And there is of course absolutely no relationship whatsoever between state persecution and the gradual escalation in Islamist violence, both in frequency and choice of target, over the last 50 years.

Baer’s discussion of the Saudi royal family, Wahhabism, Islamism and terrorism is too muddled and incoherent to discuss at length here; sometimes he seems to understand aspects of it, sometimes he seems to misunderstand those same aspects, and there are a lot of things he never really explains at all. He does understand that the Saudi royal family has funded terrorism in the past; he doesn’t seem to understand that this is bribery (or protection money, as the American mafia would call it) rather than enthusiastic sponsorship, or that the recent increase in terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia is probably an indication that they have at least temporarily suspended this practice (though who knows, maybe they’re in on it and bluffing us). Flipping ahead, it looks like he thinks the U.S. should just go ahead and seize the Saudi oil fields. Awesome!

I see in this month’s Atlantic that yet another CIA man, "Anonymous," has published a book on the subject of containing terrorism called Imperial Hubris; the reviewer lauds Anonymous’ advocacy of a policy called "neo-Isolationism", which would involve "a less multilateral approach to national-security policy and a far more ruthless use of military power than the Bush Administration embraces." Wow, that sounds pretty awesome too!

I haven’t read Anonymous’ book, and I probably should, if only because it sounds like just the kind of thing that general readers might seize upon as the real, inside dirt. But I do wonder if Anonymous, unlike Baer, has noticed that decades of neglect of human intelligence recruitment and practice at CIA have left us utterly dependent on the security services and intelligence provided us by foreign "client" nations, and that as a result a "CIA expert" may very well have abolutely no idea what he’s talking about, and not even know that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Because I know next to nothing about any of this, really. We’re talking about a movement with hundreds of years of relevant historical context spanning over a dozen countries and multiple tidal shifts in forms of governance and political movements in the last hundred years. I don’t speak any of the relevant languages, I’ve never read the Koran, reading up on this stuff has been just a hobby of mine over the last year and a half or so, not my job, and it is not even my only or most time-consuming hobby. Yet I’ve learned enough to be able to spot errors ranging from subtle to spectacular on nearly every page of a book written by a former CIA agent who spent 20 years in the Middle East as an intelligence officer. If you’re not laughing you’re crying, I guess. Except when they’re pushing "solutions" that can only duplicate past errors because they can’t even imagine maybe losing the chessboard set-up that makes all their bullshit possible in the first place, then you’re pretty much back to crying.

*His anecdote involves a Sufi Shari’a Court judge in Sudan, who happened to be an old friend of his who was educated in the U.S. Baer is shocked when he attends the court and finds his old friend handing down harsh punishments for violations of Shari’a. Because of this apparent fundamentalism, Baer asks the judge if he is a Muslim Brother. The judge says no, how can I be when I am a Sufi? Baer thinks this answer is disingenuous. One day the judge disappears from his home, and there’s a story in the paper that the Sudanese government had rounded up Islamist opposition leaders the night before. Baer concludes, Aha, he was a Muslim Brother! This particular anecdote and the "proof" it provides that Baer once knew a real live Muslim Brother in person involves a whole cascade of false assumptions. 1) Fascist dictatorships always confine their persecutions to the truly deserving, and always tell the truth about what they have done in their state-controlled media.(This doozy permeates the entire book, particularly with respect to Nasser and the MB in Egypt). Whereas in fact the judge would not necessarily have to be directly involved in any sort of Islamist activism to be perceived as a threat to the regime; Shari’a courts, like mosques, represent religious power structures that have traditionally served the central government, whatever it might be, but can sometimes act to undermine it as well. A threatened regime would not necessarily have to have specific information about a particular judge to include him in a round-up if an Islamist movement appeared to be gathering strength. 2) Sufis are not Islamists; the judge would have to be MB rather than Sufi to be involved in any way in Islamist activities. Except the Islamists who currently rule Sudan are in fact Sufis. Sudanese Muslims have always been primarily Sufi, and Sudan was home to an intriguing precursor to the Islamist movement, in which a Sufi mystic declared himself the Mahdi, and led his ecstatic followers to drive out Egyptian colonialists and establish an Islamic state, back in the 19th Century. Hassan al-Turabi, who ascended to rule after the coup d’etat that established Sudan as an Islamist state in 1989, had indeed established a local chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood as a student at the University of Khartoum, but within a few years shaped it into a specifically Sudanese and Sufi movement called the National Islamic Front. Most of the Islamists operating in Sudan at the time Baer visited are more likely to have been local Sufi NIF than MB. 3) The judge’s answer was disingenuous, because obviously a Sufi would never run a Shari’a court in a fundamentalist vein. Whereas Sufis have often been as conservative as Sunni Muslims with respect to application of Shari’a; defining differences are more about other theological issues. (This varies by place and time, and there are what we would call liberal versions of Sufism, the most liberal variant being the one that has been most successfully popularized on the fringes of the Muslim world and among Westerners).

**Not that he necessarily recognizes the latter distinction anyway; at one point he implies that Yassir Arafat, a Christian, is a Muslim Brother.

CORRECTION: A reader questioned whether Arafat is really a Christian, and indeed it turns out he was at one point a Muslim Brother at least. According to this bio, Arafat:

1948: Flees Palestine, after the establishment of Israel. He settles in Cairo, where he starts to study engineering at University of Cairo.

1952: He joins the Muslim Brotherhood and Union of Palestinian Students, where he becomes president.

That’s what you get for calling other people ignorant, I guess. Now I have to go find out which and why other sources say he’s Christian. The PLO has generally been criticized by Islamists for being too dominated by Christians; maybe this is a "slander" against him on the pretext of his having a Christian wife (not that there’s anything wrong with that in Islam) that has been picked up uncritically by some commentators? (Or maybe he did convert at some point?)

MORE CORRECTION: Arafat is definitely a Muslim. I can’t remember exactly where I read that he’s a Christian, but I’m sure I’ve seen that many times, and it turns out that if you Google "Arafat is a Christian" you get all kinds of sources. An unnamed Palestinian activist, a Weekly Worker contributor taking another to task on the finer points of the Palestinian struggle, posters on an Islamic message board, posters on a discussion board for vaguely leftish Westerners, a guy twitting other commentors on some kinda Christian conservative blog, etc.

It’s an urban legend!

It may originate from the fact that Aarafat’s wife is a Christian, or because of his sometimes publicized attendance at Christian churches (or banning from same, as the case may be) on Christmas Eve (which he might do either because he attends with his wife, or because he’s making an interfaith gesture as the leader of an organization that includes Muslims and Christians; the news item doesn't explain), or from some other source I don’t know about. The idea seems plausible because quite a few highly-placed or well-known PLO officials are in fact Christian. It seems to serve a couple of purposes in the way people tend to bring it up: 1) To argue with the idea that Muslims or Islam are inherently or uniquely bloodthirsty in some way (because Christians can be terrorists too); 2) To point out how ignorant Westerners are about religious and ethnic diversity in the Arab and Muslim worlds, since Arafat’s putative Christianity is obviously never mentioned in Western media. Saying that Arafat is a Christian packs a bigger punch on both counts than it would to note truthfully, for example, that Hannan Ashrawi is a Christian, since she’s just that nice lady who discusses Palestinian issues with Tom Brokaw sometimes instead of a man who’s been denounced and vilified for years in Western media.

So Baer was right and I was wrong. Except, typically, even when he’s right he still manages to be wrong, because it’s still completely off to imply that Arafat currently is a Muslim Brother or that the MB is behind him in some way. Arafat came of political age when secular Arab nationalist politics were ascendant; Morris notes that his formation of Fatah was inspired by the successes of the Algerian FLN (which had an Islamic wing) and Nasser in Egypt. The relationship between an Arab identity that cuts across religious affiliations and an Islamic identity that cuts across ethnicities and how those identities have been deployed politically over time in the Middle East is necessarily complicated and often too slippery for outsiders to easily get much of a handle on (trust me). But, broadly speaking, when Arafat was a University student, Islamic political organizations were more or less subordinate to secular nationalist ones, and tended to understand themselves more as a variant of nationalism than as their own revolutionary movement. The pattern was for Islamic movements to lend their organizing power to nationalist movements and then get screwed over in the event of success; the Islamic wing of the FLN was crushed by the predominant secular and military wing of the organization when it gained power, and Nasser had every Muslim Brother he could get his hands on in jail by the mid-50’s, even as he legitimized his economic program as "Islamic Socialism." (The historical experience of secular nationalist ascendancy in revolutionary politics in the region perhaps explains why Iranian secular leftist intellectuals who participated in the Islamic Revolution were so surprised to see "their" revolution "hijacked" by the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini). The relationship has flipped in the Palestinian movement (as with opposition politics everywhere in the Middle East), which was "Islamized" around the time of the Intifada. So it is possibly stretching a point to include Arafat’s joining the MB alongside his heading of the Palestinian Student’s Union as a student then as a sufficiently significant event to include on a biographical timeline of his life now. Arafat is not an Islamist and never has been; to exaggerate the importance of his connection to the MB has a lot more to do with back-projecting the organization’s eventual importance across its entire history than about understanding anything about Arafat as a political actor.

More Details

I got an interesting news analysis in my mailbox today from IPO. I Googled around a bit for more information on Pachachi and found some comments to some blogs accusing him of being a Nazi sympathizer (a truism for secular pan-Arab nationalist leaders of Pachachi’s era, particularly in Iraq, which sided with anti-Britain Germany and the Axis during WWII; the Ba’ath Party, which took power in 1963 and whose government Pachachi served, was modelled ideologically on German National Socialism, though the Party itself is believed to have been initally bankrolled by the Soviet Union) and a supporter of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (also true, I found). I thought this interview conducted by Amir Taheri during the Iraq War was interesting. He appears no longer to be an unreconstructed Arab nationalist, but he also appears to be campaigning pretty hard, no? It has not been difficult to know what the U.S. wanted to hear from possible Iraqi leaders then or now.

At the same time, though, he may be sincere. Some people really do become wiser as they get older, and Pachachi is in his 80’s. And the IPO’s contention that Iraq must have a Shia leader in the Presidency to prevent an explosion of Shia protest ignores the fact that a great deal of the violence in Sunni areas of Iraq is driven by insecurity about what a government that reflected a Shia majority might bring to the Sunni minority.

I don’t know what the ideal solution to the problem of having to pick one or the other for the Presidency would be. Maybe favor neither by appointing a Kurd? That would show them! And then what?

The Arab Predicament/Fouad Ajami

The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 by Fouad Ajami.

This book deals with the dilemma posed by the perceived failure of Arab nationalism in the wake of the 1967 defeat of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria by Israel in the Six Day War, and explains how political Islam evolved out of the ashes of the statist nationalist ideologies embraced by Nasserite Egypt and the Baath Party in Syria and Iraq by constructing and objectifying an idealized Islamic past. Includes a detailed analysis of 20th Century Egyptian political history and a survey of the thought of leading intellectuals in the nationalist and Islamist movements, including many figures whose works are still not available in English. A valuable resource, but not friendly to the general reader without a basic grounding in Middle Eastern history.

Know Your Fascist Anti-Semites

A friend sent a link to a What He Said article for me from Paul Berman. I particularly like this bit (the article is presented in the form of a conversation):

”A lot of people honestly believe that Israel's problems with the Palestinians represent something more than a miserable dispute over borders and recognition--that Israel's problems represent something huger, a uniquely diabolical aspect of Zionism, which explains the rage and humiliation felt by Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. Which is to say, a lot of people have succumbed to anti-Semitic fantasies about the cosmic quality of Jewish crime and cannot get their minds to think about anything else.

"I mean, look at the discussions that go on even among people who call themselves the democratic left, the good left--a relentless harping on the sins of Israel, an obsessive harping, with very little said about the fascist-influenced movements that have caused hundreds of thousands and even millions of deaths in other parts of the Muslim world. The distortions are wild, if you stop to think about them. Look at some of our big, influential liberal magazines--one article after another about Israeli crimes and stupidities, and even a few statements in favor of abolishing Israel, and hardly anything about the sufferings of the Arabs in the rest of the world. And even less is said about the Arab liberals-our own comrades, who have been pretty much abandoned. What do you make of that, my friend? There's a name for that, a systematic distortion--what we Marxists, when we were Marxists, used to call ideology."

And I got around to reading this excellent essay by Omer Bartov last night, ostensibly reviewing the new English translation of Hitler’s second book (unpublished during his lifetime). Bartov does a better job than I ever could of connecting the dots between Nazism and Islamism, primarily by quoting liberally from both. There are many quotable quotes but I liked this one best (probably because I tend to be preoccupied with academia for obvious reasons):

Throughout campuses in the United States, students associated with Arab and Islamic organizations, Christian groups, and the left carried flags, banners, and posters that were mostly focused on one theme: the equation between Zionism, or Israel, and Nazism. Banners portrayed a swastika joined by an equal sign to a Star of David and an Israeli flag featuring a swastika instead of a Star of David. Placards issued the call to "End the Holocaust," and proclaimed that "Zionism = racism = ethnic cleansing," and that "Zionism is Ethnic Cleansing," and that "Sharon = Hitler." A particularly ingenious sign asserted: "1943: Warsaw 2002: Jenin." While some summarized their views with the slogan "Zionazis," others warned, "First Jesus Now Arafat."

What makes this virulent anti-Semitism respectable is that it presents itself as anti-Nazism. To accomplish this sinister exculpatory purpose it needs only to declare that Zionism equals Nazism, just as the old canard of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world is legitimized by its association with American imperialism, capitalism, and globalization. That the vocabulary of this rhetoric is taken directly (whether consciously or not) from Nazi texts is so clear that one wonders why there is such a reluctance to recognize it. In part this is owed to ignorance, which is as rampant today in journalism and political commentary as it always was. In part this is owed to the fact that those who would most readily identify the provenance of these words and ideas are largely liberals, some of whom also happen to be Jewish, and thus are likely to be most harmed, both personally and ideologically, by making this identification. By exposing the anti-Semitic underbelly of this phenomenon, they would expose themselves as Jews and friends of Jews, and would open themselves to the argument that precisely their opposition to this phenomenon is the best proof of Jewish domination in the world.

Update: A reader asks, what is an appropriate comparison to Israel?

I replied: I tend to think of the creation of Israel in terms of the displacement of Native Americans with the European and then U.S. conquest of the North American continent. Except without the genocide, with a UN Charter, and smaller. Well actually maybe there's a better analogy out there. (Nearly every existing nation is chock full of people who shoved somebody else out at some point in history, so there's gotta be something).

D. replied: I've had my ass handed to me for proposing analogies in the past. Since there are no close analogies, what you pick depends entirely on what you're trying to emphasise. Rightly or wrongly, Native American removal immediately equates to "genocide" in most people's minds, so that's flat out. Actually, most people-shoving analogies founder on the fact that the Hebrews originated as a people in Palestine (or thereabouts), so, according to them, they're merely returning from exile rather than colonising new territories.

Of course, arguments like these are greatly complicated by the kind of interbreeding and acculturation that follows in the wake of most significant migrations. The wholesale replacement of peoples, like what happened in the New World and the Antipodes, was uncommon in the ancient world where there wasn't such a huge mismanage in tech levels and disease resistence. I wouldn't be in the least surprised to find that modern Palestinians have more genetic material in common with Moses' little band than most European Jews.

However, the kind of protesters you're talking about aren't interested in historical analogies for the greater situation or they wouldn't gravitate to the Nazis in the first place (who were seeking primarily to expand their "homeland", which they'd never left, not "reclaim" it). They want negative comparisons for the Israeli's behaviour. Their ideology won't let them choose the ethnic cleansers nearest to hand--Ba'athists and Stalinists (and, in both cases, you end up invoke genocide again)--so I'm not sure what that leaves. No other villain--not even Bolshies--excites the imagination as generally and as forcefully as the Nazis.

M. replied: Of course, arguments like these are greatly complicated by the kind of interbreeding and acculturation that follows in the wake of most significant migrations. The wholesale replacement of peoples, like what happened in the New World and the Antipodes, was uncommon in the ancient world where there wasn't such a huge mismanage in tech levels and disease resistence. I wouldn't be in the least surprised to find that modern Palestinians have more genetic material in common with Moses' little band than most European Jews.

Though genetics doesn't necessarily map to the way peoples are defined (by themselves or others) in any case. To pick an obvious example, Americanness has nothing to do with a genetic connection to previous generations. Traditionally, Judaism has defined membership primarily in terms of female descent, so that people of identical genetic relationship to previous Jewish generations may or may not be automatically Jewish depending on which line of ancestry the relationship runs.

However one gauges the connection of the Jewish people to Israel, percent of genes that came from around there seems like a weird way to do it. It's not, as far as I know, the basis of anyone's claims to the area. (Even if you look at it as a modified version of inheritance, there's no requirement that an heir be a genetic descendant, or that genetic descendants be heirs.) There's no serious question that modern Judaism is a community with a continuous history tracing back to pre-diaspora Israel/Judah/Judea.

Whether that in itself functions as a right to that land is a reasonable question, but it's one that was asked and answered in 1948. (Taking into account other factors in addition, of course.) That answer may no longer be convincing to some, but if we start disestablishing countries based on how and why they they began, I'm not sure where we're going to stop. (Compared to "it's empty except for all these Indians, so we might as well take it," Israel has a pretty solid legal title.)

D. replied: However one gauges the connection of the Jewish people to Israel, percent of genes that came from around there seems like a weird way to do it. It's not, as far as I know, the basis of anyone's claims to the area.

As I understand it, claims to territory are usually based, as you say, on legal inheritance and continuous occupation. On those criteria, the Israelis don't have much of a claim to most of the territory they're occupying, so it has to be based on some other factors. I've never been completely clear on what those are. Whenever I mention that other peoples (however defined) with historic possession of a territory aren't considered to have a legitimate claim to it anymore I've gotten, as I said, my ass handed to me.

But the history of the Jews really is unique in the world and, as I said, any attempt to relate it to that of other groups is going to founder somewhere. The closest analogy I can think of is the Armenians and they still haven't gotten Ararat back.

M. replied: Whenever I mention that other peoples (however defined) with historic possession of a territory aren't considered to have a legitimate claim to it anymore I've gotten, as I said, my ass handed to me.

The most recent historic possessors of Israel's territory prior to its establishment were the Ottomans (unless you're counting the League of Nations or the Brits). Its successor state, AFAIK, hasn't shown any recent problems with the existence of Israel. (Not that I'd expect them to have much of a brief for giving land back to its previous possessors, though there are probably a number of Greeks, particularly of Ionian ancestry, who wish they did.)

There are reasonable questions about what sorts of financial compensation, if any, are owed to people displaced by changing borders. (*If* said people choose to avail themselves of legal means of conflict resolution. If they resort to arms first, then arms will generally settle the matter. Cf. CSA sympathizers who make a big issue of the legal right of secession. The choice to assert the right by firing on Ft. Sumter rather than by bringing a Supreme Court action was the South's, and once you choose to try your cause by war I don't think you can go back to legal action just because the war went badly for you.) I note that thus far, we've rather limited our interest in compensating the previous owners of our own territory. In any case, changing the borders back is pretty much a nonstarter everywhere else in the world. Germany isn't getting East Prussia back. Oklahoma isn't going to be turned back into Indian Territory. Independent Granada isn't going to reappear on the map of Iberia. Despite grave temptation from all the relevant countries, it seems unlikely that we're going to put Kurdistan on the map either. Why is this one slip of land subject to so much more scrutiny than all the other involuntary border changes and population movements in the last couple of centuries?

D. replied: Why is this one slip of land subject to so much more scrutiny than all the other involuntary border changes and population movements in the last couple of centuries?

Probably because people are dying daily because of it. The Basques' grievances at being incorporated into the Spanish state used to get a lot more airtime when they were blowing up things regularly. Likewise Northern Ireland. Compensation for displaced Germans was a very emotional topic after the fall of the Wall and has had a huge impact on post-Communist relations between Germany and the Czech Republic and Poland. The organisations of Sudeten Germans, Danubian Swabians, East Prussians, etc. have powerful lobbies, but they're not in the habit of denotating themselves on buses, so their actions aren't reported on in the USA. (Also, they're quietly dying off, whereas Palestine, with its pre-modern demographics, is producing more hotheaded teenagers every day.) Issues of self-determination and territorial claims in ex-Yugoslavia pushed the Middle East out of the headlines for a time due to their higher body counts; I suspect they will again when the simmering conflict there inevitably turns hot.

None of these other issues has become a cause célèbre in the West (and I think you have your own suspicions why that is), but that doesn't mean they've been forgotten and ignored.

Mr. Bell Jar said: As sound as Bartov's argument is in sum, in fine he does need to deal with the fact that Zionism did, in fact, equal ethnic cleansing, in the aftermath of the 1948 War (see, for example, Binny Morris' books, and his recent interview with Haaretz, IIRC, which was all over the web), and in the minds of many of the "Eretz Israel" wackjobs it still does.

It's also important to remember that ethnic cleansing does not necessarily equal genocide: there was no genocide of Germans during their ethnic cleansing by Czechs and Poles from the Sudetenland and Silesia in 1946, and I don't think the evidence supports genocide against the Palestinians in 1948, so "Zionism = Nazism" is still completely invalid, not to mention obscene. (Although there is a disturbing trickle of Nazi-fascination in some right-wing Israeli circles, it's not remotely representative of the Israeli polity, and it's nothing compared to the full-blown Hitler-worship in mainstream Arab culture.)

Any comparisons with, say, our Indian Removal policies in the American West I'll leave for another day.

In the Shadow of the Prophet/Milton Viorst

In the Shadow of the Prophet: the Struggle for the Soul of Islam by Milton Viorst.

Viorst is a journalist who has managed to gain access to many important figures in Middle Eastern and Islamic politics over the years, and perhaps therein lies the rub. Shortly after beginning this book I read apostablog taking Viorst to task for a laudatory profile of Muammar Qaddafi, and it's easy to see how a journalist might be dazzled by such a colorful and charismatic figure ("A James Bond villain trapped in our world," as Mr. Bell Jar likes to describe him). I found this bit of transcript from an interview with the late King Hussein of Jordan interesting in this respect:

MV: Leaving aside insults to the Prophet, do you feel there is a line that can be drawn in politicalspeech?
KH: No, as witnessed by what you hear and see in Jordan.
MV: Well, a Jordanian went to prison recently for what he said, though you pardoned him soon afterward. There is also a press law which, I am told, is designed to limit free speech.
KH: I don't know that it's designed to limit free speech but it is certainly designed for the judiciary to address distortions of truth and morality. I believe this would happen anywhere in the world. We opened up here in Jordan without having the time to develop codes for preserving our coherence and our unity and our dialogue as they should be. So we had to look at certain--not restraints, people can write whatever they feel like writing--but if they infringe on certain areas in a blatant way …
MV: What areas?
KH: For example, attacking people in a manner that is incompatible with the truth, false accusations. There is no restraint. But undermining the very roots of society is not what freedom is about. Freedom is your freedom to do whatever you like without infringing on the freedoms of others. That is precisely the line we are trying to draw. Are people in Jordan telling you there is no freedom? There is freedom. Too much at times.
MV: Shifting the subject ….

One is left to wonder whether there isn't always a little shifting of the subject in Viorst's interviews with political figures (no other interviews are presented in transcript form), and if being willing to do so when the interviewee becomes uncomfortable isn't a condition of being allowed to talk to them at all, and whether adoption of the view, which permeates this book, that Arabs--alone, of all the peoples of the earth--need to be ruled with a firm hand, isn't a consequence of making such accommodations over and over again. The most reprehensible example of this tendency is his acceptance of the Saudi self-characterization as the "most Islamic" Arab nation (which is a lot like calling Pat Robertson the "most Christian" religious leader in the West). However, this bias tends to be a matter of spin rather than actual accuracy with Viorst, and in any event his viewpoint is common enough in the West to be worth understanding on its own terms. Moreover, the book contains some interesting chapters on often-neglected subjects, like the Islamist (but Sufi!) government of the Sudan, the civil war over Islamism in Algeria, the surprising story of what actually happened to the Mu'tazilites, and a welcome history of the methodology of Islamic interpretation during the Abbasid period. Overall, well worth the read.

Harem Years/Huda Shaarawi

Harem Years : the Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist by Huda Shaarawi, translated and introduced by Margot Badran.

Shaarawi is perhaps the best-known Middle Eastern feminist leader among Westerners, having made international headlines when she publicly removed her veil on a train platform in Cairo upon her return from an international women's conference in 1923. She became politically active through her male relatives' involvement with the Egyptian nationalist movement and eventually headed the women's branch of the Wafd Party; these memoirs are compiled from papers found after her death, and end just before her emergence as a feminist leader, detailing for the most part her personal life in what became the last decades of harem life for women in Egypt. Shaarawi is an ambiguous figure among contemporary Islamic feminists, accused of following too Westernized an approach to women's issues, a preoccupation with veiling and other issues that are in some respects considered to be of greatest concern to upper class women. And indeed, Huda is hard to love. The well-loved and indulged daughter of a wealthy and prominent family, she describes without a hint of disapproval the obsequiousness of the slaves at an uncle's home, or the lavish display of wealth at a charity event she helps to organize for a hospital fund. Permitted to return to live with her parents when she finds she does not like the marriage they arranged for her (her husband--a cousin--shows up periodically over the following 8 years to ask her to come back), Shaarawi scarcely seems aware of how much more burdensome life is for less privileged women in her society. The sole chapter in this memoir about the "Hard Life of a Woman" is really more of an adventure story about how a female acquaintance made her way home from Mecca unaccompanied by a male relative, having precipitously asked her husband to divorce her while they were making the Hajj together. Shaarawi's feminism seems to spring more from a sense of entitlement than of injustice. Not that there's anything wrong with that--I feel rather entitled to personal freedom myself--but it's not all that inspiring, in a cue-the-swelling orchestra sort of way.

What Went Wrong/Bernard Lewis

What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East by Bernard Lewis.

This book is based on a series of lectures Lewis gave at the Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna in 1999; a sort of precis of some of the themes of the book are given in Lewis' 2002 Atlantic article entitled "What Went Wrong." Lewis traces the history of Arab awareness of and interactions with the West from the time of the Caliphate to the present day, focusing first on the initial and long-standing preeminence of Islamic Civilization, and then on the Islamic world's selective attempts to assimilate some Western concepts in order to reverse its own decline, and why these efforts have come to nothing, or worse helped to birth a particularly vicious and virulent movement in political Islam. Lewis ends up plumping for actual political freedom in the Middle East, since it is the one thing that has not yet been tried.

(Btw, Lewis' role in advising Dubya in the run-up to the Iraq War is not actually the cause of Said's recent lenghthy ad hominem attack on Lewis as an Orientalist; instead Said has always thought and said this about him. It has been sort of interesting finding so many bibliographical references to Lewis in the works of the Muslim progressives I've been reading lately; I don't know if they're making a point with that or just ignoring the whole thing and relying on Lewis as if his reputation as the preeminent Western historian of the Middle East were unchallenged).