The Gertrude Bell Jar

Hybrid of Doom

Today I came across this highly useful website (packed to the gills with Islamist texts which should make some good lunchtime reading this Christmas week, if I’m quick enough the next time nobody’s hanging around the laser printer at work), which had this quote on its main page:

In reality Islam is a revolutionary ideology and programme which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals. 'Muslim' is the title of that International Revolutionary Party organized by Islam to carry into effect its revolutionary programme. And 'Jihad' refers to that revolutionary struggle and utmost exertion which the Islamic Party brings into play to achieve this objective. --Sayeed Abdul A'la Maududi, Jihad in Islam p8.

Then tonight I was reading the new Christopher Hitchens collection, Love, Poverty, and War, and in a chapter on Pakistan around the time of the invasion of Afghanistan, Hitchens writes:

The historic essence of Fascism is the most retrograde people using the most revolutionary rhetoric.

Well, there ya go.

Maududi, btw, is the founder of the Pakistani Islamist group Jamaat Islamiyya, and along with Sayyed Qutb (Muslim Brotherhood) and Ali Shariati (Khomeinism, i.e. Shia Islamism), is considered one of the main intellectual fathers of modern Islamism. The Marxist-Leninist influence is obvious in both his and Shariati’s writings (Shariati is reputed to have spent his youth hanging out in Parisian cafes with Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon, as a matter of fact); I haven’t been so sure about Qutb, mostly because I haven’t been able to figure out how to get my hands on his writings without potentially giving money to very bad people. (Thanks, internet! You couldn’t have violated the copyright of a nicer guy.)

Mr. Bell Jar asked me a while back if I thought Islamism was a true hybrid of Islam and Marxism, or if Islamists had merely grafted Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and organizing tactics onto their own mostly unique ideology. (Theoretically, it could be the latter; Islamist movements have always conceived of themselves primarily as revolutionary opposition movements against corrupt secular Middle Eastern regimes, as defined mostly by Nasserism and Baathism. It would make sense to co-opt the revolutionary rhetoric of these regimes as a means of critiquing their ugly reality. And on some level, this was simply the language of reformist political discourse in the Middle East at the time. And of course Nasserism and Baathism both borrowed freely from both fascist and Marxist thought and practice, so a mix-and-match approach appears to be something of a local habit as well.) But I don’t know either Marxist or Islamist theory well enough to even attempt that kind of analysis.

Whatever the origins, it makes a nice fit; the early history of Islam, as encoded in the Koran and the Hadith, conflates religious community and political identity in a way that makes it quite susceptible to collectivist interpretations, if that’s what you’re looking for. For example, Muhammad said "My community cannot agree on a lie." Historically, this has been understood to confer legitimacy on whichever ruler Muslims have accepted, and to give settled interpretations of Islamic law moral force whether they appear literally in the source material or not. In the modern day, Muslim progressives interpret this as an expression of confidence in the ability of a Muslim community to govern itself properly through deliberative democracy, and as Islamic permission to do so. But you can see as how it might be considered a warrant to prosecute thought crime by Islamist radicals.

Update: A friend commented that the Maududi quote would make an excellent response to those who say jihad does not mean holy war, and Islam is a religion of peace. But the thing is, such people are often arguing with Maududi as much as with you, and so they should. Holy war has always been one meaning of the word jihad, but one that most Muslims regard as part of their history rather than their present. What the Islamists have basically done is ripped it from its original context and drafted it into a modernist revolutionary cause. I agree that it is misleading for Muslims or anyone else to imply that the "holy war" meaning of jihad is an invention of either a demonizing Western media or the Islamists alone, but that doesn't mean that the opposite is any more true (i.e., that jihad really does secretly mean holy war to most Muslims).

Reality One Paging Reality Two, Please

I'm currently reading New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism by Barry Cooper, a political philosopher by trade who is looking at a variety of 20th Century violent religio-political cults through the lens of a framework developed primarily by Eric Voegelin and Hannah Arendt to describe the totalitarian impulse. I think it would be of great interest to anyone who found Lee Harris' essay on fantasy ideology persuasive, because it provides a more precise and consistent conceptual framework for what the true believer is actually doing emotionally and intellectually. It also avoids the main weakness of Harris' argument, the assumption that the political goals of such actors are necessarily fantastic.

Put very crudely, Cooper theorizes movements like Islamism as an effect of a spiritual disorder he calls pneumopathology, a term he borrows from Voegelin. The essence of the disorder is a conscious act of "honest dishonesty," an adoption of a "second reality" independent of commonsense reality (although the second reality is often adopted in response to real grievances). Once the second reality is adopted, the imaginator finds the conflict between commonsense reality and the second reality unbearable; instead of containing this conflict within himself, the imaginator will seek to externalize the second reality, making the conflict the world's problem instead of his own. This sounds kind of airy and Freudian or whatever, but will make immediate sense to anyone who's ever had an "Hello, earth to Joshua/Heather/whoever" moment when talking to a member of, say, the Spartacist Youth League. (My vivid memory of the almost irresistible urge to snap my fingers in front of their eyes to awaken them from what seemed like a hypnotized daze is part of why, I think, I feel that I already kind of know people like al-Zarqawi, and why it makes such sense to me that Islamist terrorist tend to hail from the educated upper crust of their own societies, rather than being the superstitious medieval peasants that the idea of religious fanaticism suggests in the modern West.)

I'm not sure I completely understand the more theoretical part of Cooper's justification for regarding this as an essentially spiritual disorder, but what I do get is the way he explains that fully adopting a second reality involves the destruction of the imaginator's moral self, which was bound by the precepts and limitations of commonsense reality. The act of replacement of commonsense with second reality grants permission to actualize that second reality; methods of attempting to do so are understood as predictions rather statements of intention. For example, Stalin says that the Kulaks are a dying class. In commonsense reality, this means that he is about to have them all killed. But to Stalin this is merely a prediction about the future, which was already true when he made the initial statement. In the same vein, the Aum Shinrikyo cult turned the Buddhist concept of pao, which refers to a course of spiritual reflection undertaken near death, on its head by making it an active verb: they were pao-ing "enemies" of the cult, not murdering them. To cult members, their prediction that the time for the entire world to be paoed had come was being partially fulfilled by their act of planting nerve gas on Tokyo subways, whereas in commonsense reality, they had merely decided they wanted to kill everyone outside the cult, and proceeded to attempt to do so. In this way the essential connection between intention and action is lost, and is instead ascribed to the workings of a fictional reality; commonsense morality is abandoned absolutely.

What Harris' articulation of this phenomenon lacks is Cooper's recognition that sometimes commonsense reality is actually altered by imaginative religious and political movements. Aum Shinrikyo failed to murder the world, but Stalin did do a pretty good job on the Kulaks. Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, about Nazi death squads populated by middle-aged non-ideological family men, presents a good account, I think, of how non-cult members will naturally adapt to a consensus reality created by cult members, if the cultists manage to accede to political power and impose it upon everyone. Among the examples of "second reality" movements cited by Cooper--Aum Shinrikyo, bolshevism, Nazism, the Witch Craze in Europe, Christian Identity, Heaven's Gate, Islamism, the revolutionary in general as a type, etc.--are of course many that succeeded in actually altering political reality for long periods of time; arguably in the cases of Nazism and bolshevism the alteration may have been permanent in the absence of powerful external enemies.

Cooper has avoided mentioning the American Revolution so far, but it is interesting to look at it through this framework. The central assertion of the Declaration of Independence amounted to standing the then-governing assumption about the relationship between divine and political authority on its head; the Divine Right of Kings was replaced by God's endowment instead of every man with inalienable political power. Note that we date the birth of the USA from this simple assertion of a new reality; the actual expulsion of the King's authority through the War of Independence and concretization of the new order in the Constitution followed much later. We have been living in this reality for so long that it is as if the previous one never existed; we are nearly incapable of conceptualizing the pre-Revolutionary mindset that accepted monarchy as the natural and divine order of things. The tendency of Westerners today to make movies about the history of Europe like King Arthur and Braveheart that project our current understanding of justice infinitely backwards is I think a consequence of that. In these types of movies, good men and true were always rebelling against authority in the name of "freedom," because that is what good people who have accessed the "real" nature of things always do (in a sense, they can't actually be good unless they are good within our reality). But of course this is revisionist nonsense.

The revolution that replaces existing reality with one that turns out to be actually better on a practical and moral level is a rare bird indeed, as 200 subsequent years of revolutions worldwide have clearly demonstrated. But how do you know your revolution isn't just such a good revolution that will be blessed by history? Apparently, you don't.

I'm skipping over Cooper's discussion of the tendency of religious "second-reality" movements in particular to assume an increasingly annihilatory character over time, because I'm just tucking into the part where he's going to talk about Islamism in particular (and, evidently, some specifics about the Abrahamic tradition in general, beginning with the implications of the Israelites' understanding of their covenant with God as history, which I imagine will connect up with the similar Islamic sense of history in some interesting ways.)

Update:
A reader objected that the idea of the divine right of kings was already pretty much dead by the time of the American Revolution.

C. replied: Predictably, it's even more complex than that. The Divine Right of Kings, formally speaking, is a rather late development of the theory of monarchy, going along with the appearance of absolutism and monarchies that were a great deal more powerful -- both in theory and in practice -- than the prior medieval types. Opposition to it crops up in odd places, like the Spanish political theorist (I'm blanking on the name) who published a justification of tyrannicide (and dedicated it to the newly crowned king, which I believe was Philip II's successor).

This should not denigrate the accomplishment of the Founders. The idea of consciously designing a system of government was intellectually "in the air" by this time, but I'm not sure that it was expected to be brought into the real world any more than the various utopias which had been proposed going back to the Renaissance. And it certainly does seem to be true that it's hard for Americans to grasp other political mentalities, now that ours is so firmly established.

One could also look for examples of a revolutionary "replacement of reality" in religious history: the rise of Christianity for sure; possibly the Protestant Reformation.

I replied: The idea of consciously designing a system of government was intellectually "in the air" by this time, but I'm not sure that it was expected to be brought into the real world any more than the various utopias which had been proposed going back to the Renaissance.

And indeed I did not mean to suggest that there was anything particularly sudden about the Declaration; obviously it was the outgrowth of a particular line of thought that had been developing for some time. I was noticing instead the fact that real-world actualization of it followed rather than preceded the assertion of its reality in the real world (We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, etc. etc.) in precisely the same fashion Cooper finds in the methodology of many other imaginitive political and religious movements.

C. added: ...though of course there are obvious differences between the American Revolution and the Rise of Christianity on the one hand, and Stalin and Aum Shinrikyo on the other, even apart from the level of success. For starters, that business about abandoning commonsense morality and confounding predictions of the future with statements of intent has no obvious parallels.

And: I'll have to look up Cooper: it's a promising line of analysis. I've never read anything by Voegelin, but the strand he pulls out of Arendt is certainly present in The Origins of Totalitarianism (the bit about Stalin and the "dying" kulaks is taken directly) and seems like it might well apply. Though she interpreted the totalitarian impulse as a response to specifically modern conditions, I'm not sure that's crucial to her argument.

(If the phrasing is too much in terms of "new realities" and "altering reality" I will have to wince a lot in the process of mental translation. Oh well.)

I replied: Though she interpreted the totalitarian impulse as a response to specifically modern conditions,

As it happens, it seems likely to me that Islamism is a response to modern conditions, most specifically the particularly totalitarian and repressive character of movements that managed to acquire and hold on to power in the Middle East. There are antecedents to the basic theology of Islamism going back to the very beginning of Islam--indeed it understands itself as reproducing the original project of Muhammad in the modern era. But as Cooper points out, the most logical and literalist methodology suggested by the Koran for reenacting the early years of Islamic history would be a new hijra, and in fact early versions of Islamist movements did center on withdrawing from society to perfect a "pure" Islam in a committed community, often literally in the desert. But it is impossible to have a wholly separate self-governing society within a totalitarian state, or in any version of a modern nation-state, really, and these communities were uniformly attacked and repressed wherever they arose. Time to cut straight from hijra to jihad!

Of course, there are many other ways of looking at this; objectively the hijra movement was short-lived and pretty spotty, and would have been viewed suspiciously by any type of formal government; the original hijra occurred within the context of warring tribes each controlling their own patch, so all Muhammad had to do was find a host tribe. But it does seem that the justification for jihad, now, rests heavily on the sense of constant and pervasive attack on Islamists by the state, which objectively is very much the case.

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.

Great Moments in Bad Timing

I picked up Ronald Radosh’s Commies: a Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left during a bout of insomnia last night. I was enjoying it mainly because Radosh’s family is like a cookie-cutter duplicate of the family of an old boyfriend of mine, right down to residence in the ILGWA coop in Chelsea and the dad (or uncle in Radosh’s case) in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain. It was from the top of a pile of books my husband had assembled after I’d asked him earlier last night about what was up with those pro-fascist lefty intellectuals of the 20s-40s, anyway? before optimistically going off to bed.

Most intriguing fact so far: Pete Seeger and his Almanac Singers somewhat unfortunately released an album of anti-war songs the exact same week Hitler broke the Hitler-Stalin pact and invaded Russia. Whoopsy! The album was quickly recalled and Seeger published an apology to FDR, explaining he was "ready to turn my banjo in for something that makes a little more noise," i.e. a machine gun. Apparently only a few copies of Songs for John Doe survived the recall, but through the miracle of the net you can read a complete set of lyrics here. My personal favorite:

WASHINGTON BREAKDOWN (PETE SEEGER/LEE HAYS) (1941) (Tune: "Ida Red")

Franklin D., listen to me,
You ain't a-gonna send me 'cross the sea,
'Cross the sea, 'cross the sea, You ain't a-gonna send me 'cross the sea.

You may say it's for defense,
But that kinda talk that I'm against.
I'm against, I'm against,
That kinda talk ain't got no sense.

Lafayette, we are here, we're gonna stay right over here...

Marcantonio is the best, but I wouldn't give a nickel for all the rest...

J. P. Morgan's big and plump, eighty-four inches around the rump...

Wendell Wilkie and Franklin D., seems to me they both agree,
Both agreed, both agreed,
Both agree on killin' me.

You gotta love the big FU to France just dropped right in the middle there. Some things never change! The web page itself is worth reading, both for an explanation of references in the lyrics and for quotes from people describing how Seeger was breaking various anti-sedition laws with this record. Different times.

The Partly Cloudy Totalitarian

(Note: I started this entry back in October, and just got around to finishing it this morning. I was putting it off because I was going to go into the role of anti-Semitism in Islamist and Arab politics, but wandered so far off course that I've decided it would just be easier to do a separate entry about that sometime).

So the other night I read Dr. Kaukab Siddique’s The Struggle of Muslim Women, and it was being all wonderful, pitched to the level of an ordinary Muslim and with all the relevant authorities persuasively cited in the cause of Islamic feminism, and doing, I might add, an excellent job of smacking down the alleged wife-beating sura that gave Amina Wadud such a problem. His argument was so good that I was reflecting on how, if they had freedom of speech in most Islamic countries, the feminist interpretation of the Koran could win so easily in a fair fight; it’s all there in black and white, after all, straight from the mouth of the Prophet, crystal clear. And what a beautiful religion Islam is, really, when you understand it properly, and how much more auspicious for women the Koran was, in the beginning, than the Old and New Testaments were, and how all of this really can be put right, eventually.

Then I got to a collection of essays at the end, apparently articles from the New Trend magazine for American Muslims that Dr. Siddique publishes (the book itself was published in 1982), and the little drips and drabs of ignorable hints, scattered throughout the text, that he is something of an Islamist suddenly coalesced in a rather chilling interview (1979) with Azam Taleghani "on Women’s Role after the Islamic Revolution in Iran." The money quote:

Tell the Iranian students in America that this is part of the struggle against Zionism and Imperialism … Tell them also that we want to get hold of Mahnaz Abkhani of the so-called "Voice of Iranian Women" (under the Shah). She escaped to the U.S. They should help us to put her on trial.

For "trial" read "execution," if I’ve got the time period pegged correctly. Taleghani is the daughter of Ayatollah Taleghani, whose defense of the re-imposition of htjab is one of the primary documents included in the book on the women’s movement in Iran I reviewed earlier. When women were protesting the new hijab requirement just after the Revolution, he said:

The question of hejab is one of the manifestations of this movement and of this Revolution. No one forced women to come with hejab on demonstrations … But they themselves felt an Islamic responsibility to make this dress one of their Islamic and Iranian slogans, to show their genuine feelings and to show it to the world. And the world marvelled at them. And now whether they want to wear a scarf or not, no one is forcing them, we are requesting it. Ayatollah Khomeini has not expressed it in terms of imposition and force either. But we want to show that there has been a Revolution, a profound change, in our offices and ministries. For this reason I ask of our women not to be played upon by others, not to make such a hue and cry. And I repeat again and again that in Islam, and in Islamic Republic all their rights will be protected.

This being the initial "oh, no, it’s only for government workers" line the Ayatollahs adopted in the face of large protests, gradually extending the requirement to women in all spheres of life over the next year, failure of women to dress Islamically becoming punishable by 30 lashes in due course of time.

In a second interview, conducted in 1982, Azam asks Dr. Siddique what he thinks of the progress of the revolution, and he says, in part:

By and large the developments are positive. The Islamic militancy and general mobilization of the people seems to be at a qualitatively much higher level. Islam has become much more important. There are, however, certain negative trends which can prove very damaging in the future. 1. The MKO has created a situation where criticism of the government has become very difficult. Any criticism can arouse suspicion. The revolution is winning the war with Iraq, alhamdulillah, but after the war the government officials will be the heroes of the revolution and it will be even more difficult to criticize them. Unless the revolutionary institutions work hard to open channels for expression of genuine criticism, freedom, which was one of the three planks of the revolutionary platform, will be stifled permanently. Freedom has never survived the stages of counterrevolutionary terror and war in any revolution previous to this.

He goes on to complain also of the apparent evolution of a state Shi’ism, as opposed to unification of Sunni and Shia Muslims through the Revolutionary apparatus. Azam ignores the point about freedom, but acknowledges the influence of Shi’ism, concluding "However, you should know that Sunni in Iran are cooperating more and more with the revolution." For a given value of "cooperating," no doubt.

Many well-intentioned people clung to the idea that the Islamic Revolution in Iran was something other than what it was for a surprisingly long time. Reading progressives and feminists commenting on it through the early 1980s, I never know whether to condemn their apologism, or break my heart for their naivete and wishful thinking.

So what does Dr. Siddique think of the Islamic Revolution now? A Google search turns up a mostly unremarkable 9/11/03 interview in The Final Call, in which he voices opposition to U.S. policy re: Iraq and Israel and the imprisonment of certain Muslim activists by the U.S., but those sentiments appear to be nearly universal among politically active (and non-Iraqi) Muslim expats, so little may be deduced from it. The current web address of New Trend magazine, however, is given at the end of the article (www.newtrendmag.org) The web page of Jamaat al-Muslimeen, the organization Siddique endorses throughout his book, appears to have stopped updating early in 2001, and most of the links are dead, but the New Trend site is still very much alive. On this site, the "boycott" page turns out to be about Israel only (and what was I expecting, Amina Lawal? Well, yes, actually.) At the top of the page, an "in memoriam" photo of the mother of Wafa Idriss (the first female Palestinian suicide bomber--woo, feminism) holding a photo of her daughter. Beneath that, a large graphic illustrating the Blood Libel (a mutilated Palestinian baby between two halves of a hamburger bun, his/her blood draining into Coke and Pepsi bottles; bloody American and Israeli hands reaching into the frame to menace the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Ka’ba in the background). The Links page includes, nestled among links to al-Jazeera and this quite nice page about Arab contributions to the arts & sciences throughout history, a link to "Taliban & Mujahideen News," at www.allahuakhbar.com, no longer working, go figure. I don’t find any specific references to Iran at the New Trend site, but I think my question has been answered anyway.

So, is there really any such thing as a "moderate Islamist?" And by Islamist, I mean one who believes in instituting Islam as government and politics, not just one who adopts that perverse interpretation of Islam which has come to be known as "fundamentalist" (a very bad misnomer, given how far away from the Book it really is) or "conservative" (another misnomer, given how far away from actual Islamic tradition it really is). The two are frequently related, but theoretically separable. The Taliban and Khomeini were both; Dr. Siddique is the former only. Fatima says "no," and I am inclined to agree, not because I think all Islamists are lying about their real purpose or intentions--I have no reason to think Siddique is not perfectly sincere, for example--but because I think political Islam will inevitably trend towards the despotic and repressive no matter how it is begun.

(And actually if your definition of "moderate Islamist" is only "one who does not endorse the use of terrorism in pursuing Islamist political aims," I believe we may stop wondering about whether or not Dr. Siddique is one right now).

I have never made a particular study of Marxism, or Soviet politics and history. But obviously there is something about Communism as a political system that produces, like clockwork, in every instance, the killing of people in numbers that strain human capacity to even conceptualize them. I used to wonder why that was, exactly, since obviously the agenda of socialism doesn’t kill people. You have all these democratic European countries, they have socialist parties that get elected from time to time, and the socialists tend to do a lot of wealth redistribution through taxes and welfare programs and work regulations and whatnot. It seems to cause economic stagnation, but if you prioritize the equality of the slices over the size of the pie, it’s all good, and anyway they are still free people who may change course whenever they want. So the problem is in the structure of power in a country that has constituted itself as a Communist state. And I think the X Factor of Evil there is the very notion of a government that, in itself, is supposed to always already embody the unitary will of the people, as the very basis of its legitimacy, because this is of course impossible. It would be impossible in a group of 20 people let alone 20 million. My old boyfriend, known as "anthro boy" to some of my friends, told me once that in every single tribe or group of people on the face of the earth, there is always at least one person who doesn’t buy the religion or general worldview of the group. You could be talking to some little bunch of people in the depths of the Amazonian jungle whose only contact with the outside world is through anthropologists, and there will always be one guy who takes the anthropologist aside and says "You know what they were saying to you earlier, about the river god? That’s all a load of crap that somebody made up a long time ago."

Since the government cannot actually be made to match "the people," "the people" must somehow be made to match the government that supposedly automatically embodies its will. Hence, some trimming is in order from time to time. The citizenry learns to attend the rallies, get the voting card stamped, keep its head down. Or else.

How does a government that is supposed to be enacting the will of God work, exactly? Well, it cannot really be democratic, for one thing, since obviously human beings cannot write the law better than God can. And obviously the selection of persons most qualified to discern the will of God cannot be left to the caprices of election politics, those popularity contests between scheming political parties and self-serving politicians. Instead they must be chosen from among the community of religious scholars, and their decisions may not be second-guessed by any secular human authority. Not that anyone would try to second-guess the will of God. As Ayatollah Taleghani explained, it is not that anyone would force Muslim women to wear hijab; it is that Muslim women want to wear hijab. If there are non-Muslims, apparently, in the Islamic Republic, then that is a separate issue altogether and will be dealt with in due course.

In traditional Islam, the concept of the Ummah lies, in Western terms, somewhere between "flock" and "nation." In political Islam, it becomes analogous to "Volk" or "proletariat," as well it might do, given the tremendous influence of Nazism and Marxism on Islamist intellectuals. The theory is that properly Islamic institutions will unleash the power of the Ummah, allowing it to unite politically and rule the word as God intended. Ultimately, then, the Islamist state derives its political authority from its supposed stewardship of the Ummah; its basis in God's law is both the justification and the proof of this stewardship. The role of force in maintaining political power, however, places the burden of maintaining this relationship on the ruled rather than the ruler. The Ummah must be the kind of Ummah that justifies the rule of the Mullahs, just as Hitler needed the Volk to be his kind of Volk and the proletariat had to act like the proletariat as theorized.

The centrality of personal status and sex laws in Islam make it an excellent instrument of totalitarian power, authorizing a limitless surveillance of private life by the state, or, more likely, by one's neighbors seeking favor from the state. Wielding this instrument is always job one in an Islamist state; doing so both places the citizenry in a permanent state of disadvantage and susceptibility to persecution by the state, and enacts the state's Islamic "authenticity," not only through the supposedly divinely ordained oppression of women and denial of personal freedom, but also through the resolutely and self-consciously anti-Western character of the revisionist "conservative" version of Shari'ah law. Dr. Siddique appears to believe that there would be some room for disagreement about what the law is in an Islamist state; I think this is naïve, and more importantly, ahistorical, as we now know what an Islamist state looks like in Shia (Iran), Sunni (the Taliban's Afghanistan) and even Sufi (Sudan) hands. Basically, all the goddamn same, at least as measured by the status of women. An actual Islamist revolution would transform Dr. Siddique from an ally in the Islamist cause into a dissident within its ranks, and he would likely be among the first to swing.

C. said: ...obviously there is something about Communism as a political system that produces, like clockwork, in every instance, the killing of people in numbers that strain human capacity to even conceptualize them. I used to wonder why that was, exactly, since obviously the agenda of socialism doesn’t kill people.... So the problem is in the structure of power in a country that has constituted itself as a Communist state. And I think the X Factor of Evil there is the very notion of a government that, in itself, is supposed to always already embody the unitary will of the people, as the very basis of its legitimacy, because this is of course impossible.

I don't disagree with this, I just don't think there's only one X Factor of Evil. One of the things I took away from Arendt on totalitarians is the idea that they disregard mere human laws in favor of a superior source of law and morality -- History, for communists; Nature, for fascists. This tendency is in tension with the idea of representing The People, and it fairly often ends up dominating. For communism, boilerplate about false consciousness, objective class interests and so forth is the bridge I remember seeing. God, of course, outranks even History and Nature.

There are probably other X Factors, too. The ordinary corrupting influence of power, for starters.

How does a government that is supposed to be enacting the will of God work, exactly? Well, it cannot really be democratic, for one thing, since obviously human beings cannot write the law better than God can.

This is the political legitimacy problem that has plagued Islam for pretty much its entire history -- if God is the legislator, where does that leave human-made laws?

You will commonly see talk of how Islamic civilization hasn't really had any generally-accepted idea of legitimate government since the Caliphate fell. I actually think it's worse than that: in my reading, the Caliphate had legitimacy problems too.

I replied: You will commonly see talk of how Islamic civilization hasn't really had any generally-accepted idea of legitimate government since the Caliphate fell. I actually think it's worse than that: in my reading, the Caliphate had legitimacy problems too.

That seems quite true to me; it was certainly implied in the historical review of the relationship between religion and political authority in the lands of Islam in that Zubaidi book that was ripped from my hands the other day.

And you know, really, even the Four Rightly-Guided Caliphs had legitimacy problems, or so one may gather from all the assassinations and whatnot. I've read a few sources who consider the assassins from this period (and specifically the Khawarij (sp?)) the ancestors of Islamism and Islamic fundamentalism (but I'm not sure if I completely agree with that; it seems a little pigeon-holey). And Zubaidi was arguing that the Umayyads regarded themselves as properly Islamic Caliphs as well, and perhaps were only denounced as usurpers by later generations (perhaps, I speculate, as a way of fixing blame on someone for the Shia/Sunni split? Or for some other reason I can't even fathom right now?)

Shift That Paradigm Why Don't You

So I was reading along in Albert Hourani's excellent A History of the Arab Peoples yesterday, and out jumped this paragraph:

On matters of substance as well as on principles of interpretation there were some differences between the various madhhabs [schools of Islamic law], but most of them were of minor importance. Even within a particular madhhab there could be differences of opinion, for no code, no matter how detailed and precise, could cover all possible situations. A maxim often repeated declared that from the tenth century onwards there could be no further exercise of individual judgment: where consensus had been reached, 'the door of ijtihad [interpretation] is closed.' There seems to be no clear evidence, however, that this precept was ever formulated or generally accepted, and within each madhhab ijtihad was indeed carried on, not only by judges who had to make decisions, but by jurisconsults (muftis). A mufti was essentially a private scholar known for his learning and his ability to give rulings on disputed questions by means of the exercise of ijtihad. The opinions (fatwa) given by a famous mufti could be incorporated in authoritative books of fiqh [Islamic jurisprudence] after a time, but the activity of giving fatwas had to continue. From perhaps the thirteenth century onwards rulers appointed official muftis, who might receive salaries, but the private scholar, who was paid a fee by those who sought a ruling from him, and was under no obligation to the ruler, had a position of special respect in the community.

The notion that the "door of ijtihad" closed long ago in Sunni Islam (and stayed open in Shia Islam, constituting one of the more irreconcilable differences between the two branches) has been repeated uncritically in every book I've read so far that touches on the subject, regardless of its ideological orientation. I have in my turn repeated it uncritically here and in verbal discussions with people because, hey, I only know what I'm told. But in retrospect it should have been obvious that this wasn't true, what with Al Azhar having issued useful new opinions every other day to sanction government policies during the nationalist period, to pick only one example from those that tumble into consciousness now. (The Faridah should have been denounced as a heretical exercise on its face rather than answered on points if this type of argumentation itself really were forbidden in the Islamic world, to pick another). Yet I have no reason to believe that any of the Muslim authors I've been reading were lying on purpose in this regard; there would be more rather than less hope for Mernissi's agenda, for example, if ijtihad were regarded as an acceptable, living practice.

Instead this is perhaps one of those lies that civilizations tell themselves, and believe. If I had to lay odds, I'd think it probably dates from the late 18th Century, right around when Islamic civilization began to lose confidence in itself in the face of challenges from the West. I would speculate that the purpose of saying that interpretation ended in the 10th Century might have been to shore up contemporary beliefs and sources of authority by giving them an age-old pedigree, to pretend that what goes on now is authentic because it always has been thus, as well as to wall the existing order off from divergent intellectual influences (or at least to make it appear as if it had been). It may have been a defensive as well as an authoritarian move, in other words.

The actual answer is probably in this book Law and Power In the Islamic World by Sami Zubaida, but I don't know if I'll manage to get it read before I have to return it, since it has been recalled, dammit. But while I still have it on hand, I give you this Quote of the Day:

As we have seen, many Muslim and Western commentators see 'Muslim society' as being impervious to secularization, and view the recent Islamic resurgence as an indication that religion is the only ideology which can animate the masses. My argument is that the recently resurgent political Islam is directed precisely against the secularization and the secularizing reforms that have occurred extensively in the region for two centuries, and which are irreversible. In Egypt, Turkey, Iran and most other countries, we see this secularization in government and its institutions, in the law, in education, in the economy and, most important for our argument, in the cultural fields. Print media, radio, cinema, television and most recently the internet have all acted as secularizing media. Even when the media relay religious messages they contribute to its secularization, because religion in them features alongside news and music, films and soaps, and as such loses its aura of sanctity. It is 'banalized.' It is related that soon after the installation of the Islamic Republic in Iran and the Islamization of television, the most popular programme featured a senior cleric answering practical questions from viewers in terms of fiqh rulings. Viewers derived pleasure and amusement in getting the cleric to rule on obtuse questions of sexuality. Egyptian clerics currently broadcast homilies of morality and order, and warn of the torments of the grave, much like their Christian counterparts in the U.S. But these are not dedicated channels, and the sermons alternate with films and soaps.

Indeed, an examination of the last century or so proves Muslims in the Islamic world all too susceptible to foreign influences, often tragically so. I've been eavesdropping on a discussion in D.'s journal about whether Iraqis have the right "mentality" for democracy, with a German national who says no, and denies any parallel between the German and Iraqi occupations, since Germans were after all Europeans, and hence much more like their occupiers than the Iraqis are. (Assuming I am reading this correctly: I don't put that much faith in Babelfish, which is why I'm not arguing with him). He appears to be blissfully unaware of the tremendous and doleful impact a pair of Germans had on the largely failed theory and practice of Arab post-colonialism. The philosophies of Marx and Hitler ultimately failed the West too; perhaps we are all much closer than he thinks. I don't know what the polite way of discussing the legacy of Nazism in the Middle East with contemporary Germans might be, but I do wonder how any of us can go on regarding Islamic terrorists as at all alien when we keep learning things like, for example, the fact that the murderer of Daniel Pearl could recite entire pages of Mein Kempf from memory. That Islamism is fundamentally and authentically Eastern is a twin fallacy to the notion that democracy and the idea of human rights is exclusively Western. Amartya Sen recently published a nice summary debunking the latter (and could have gone on in much greater detail regarding the Arab world; as always, if you'd like to see it without registering, email me for a copy). If anybody has seen a good single source eviscerating the former, I'd appreciate a reference; I find the counter-argument for that one has a tendency to hide in the margins.

D. replied: I arrived at the same conclusions, so either (1) Babblefish is better than I though or (2) my m@|> gEr|\/|E|\ $k1LLz aren't as m@|> as I thought. His reply, btw, was basically, "I think the Iraqis should have democracy, but not democracy imposed from without." Even after all our discussion, I'm not sure whether this opinion stems more from Orientalist essentialism or extreme pacificism. I just can't get past the idea that leaving Iraq alone to develop at its own pace, no matter how many generations of suffering that entails, is morally superior to violently-enforced regime change. I simply don't have the appropriate spiritual orientation to accept that. If only I could believe there were an afterlife/rebirth in which the injustices of this bleeding world were rectified and that it wasn't up to us fallible humans to attempt it.

Terror and Liberalism/Paul Berman

Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman.

Traces the sometimes surprising history of Western intellectuals' dark romance with nihilism and political death cults disguised as utopias, from a left perspective, and examines contemporary liberal reactions to terrorism. I found his chapter on the history of the left's disdain for the notion of radical evil itself particularly interesting:

The apocalyptic and death-obsessed mass movements of the past aroused many responses among good-hearted and intelligent people around the world during these last eighty years, and one of those responses is worth recalling. It came from people who were themselves liberals, who revered every aspect of liberal civilization and accepted its values, who did not quarrel with any aspect of liberalism and its principles--and who, even so, gazed at the craziest and most violent of the anti-liberal movements, and blinked, and saw no reason for upset. And this response, an earnest dismissal of the dangers emanating from irrationalist mass movements, was entirely normal and understandable.

For it is very odd to think that millions or tens of millions of people, relying on their own best judgments, might end up joining a pathological political movement. Individual madmen might step forward--yes, that is unquestionable. The Reverend Jim Jones might lead the demented residents of his pathetic Jonestown in Guyana to their collective suicide. But, surely, millions of people are not going to choose death, and the Jonestowns of this world are not going to take over entire societies. The very idea of a pathological mass movement seems too far-fetched to be believable.

Journalists and writers and politicians may go on reporting that, even so, such movements do exist and inspire followers and wreak their damage. But shouldn't we train a skeptical lens on those alarming reports? Mightn't some of those frightening accounts be exaggerated, perhaps even untrue? It might be in some people's interest to report that pathological mass movements roam the earth, posing dangers to everyone else. Maybe some of those allegedly sinister mass movements are, in reality, not very sinister at all, and ought to be recognized, instead, as progressive, positive, and admirable. Maybe those movements have stuck a well-deserved pin in the sides of the rich and powerful, and the rich and powerful have responded with a campaign of slander, nattering on about evil. Isn't that possible? Such a thing is definitely possible. Which interpretation to believe, then--that millions of people have gone out of their minds and have subscribed to a pathological political tendency? Or that small numbers of corrupt and zealous journalists and propagandists are painting distorted pictures, at the behest of powerful and conservative social classes? The second explanation asks so much less of us--seems less extravagant, more reasonable, more plausible.

Or, let us suppose that, in some remote tropical backwater or untracked desert, a social or political movement does appear to be showing, in fact, signs of a pathological attachment to murder and suicide. In that case, there has got to be a rational explanation. Perhaps some unspeakable social condition has provoked the murderous impulse. Perhaps small groups of exploiters or imperialists, through their terrible deeds, have driven thousands or even millions of people out of their minds. Perhaps a population has been humiliated beyond human endurance. Unbearable social conditions might well breed irrational reactions--though, in such a case, the irrational reactions ought not to be seen as irrational. For the human race does not act in irrational ways.

He is speaking here of liberal skepticism of the evils of Soviet-style Communism and, initially, National Socialism. He goes into detail about the reaction of French socialists to the rise of Hitler (a response which, as I understand it, was widely echoed in the very large American pacifist movement before WWII):

[Leon] Blum and his supporters regarded Hitler and the Nazis with horror, and figured that France ought to put up a stern resistance and get ready for war. The Paul-Faurists, too, took a dim view of Hitler. But mostly they remembered the First World War, and shivered with fear at the prospect of another calamity. They were eager, they were desperate, to find a description of reality that did not point to a new war in the future. They grew thoughtful, therefore. They did not wish to reduce Germany in all its Teutonic complexity to black-and-white terms of good and evil. The anti-war Socialists pointed out that Germany had been wronged by the Treaty of Versailles, at the conlusion of the First World War. The anti-war Socialists observed that Germans living in the Slavic countries to the east were sometimes cruelly treated by their neighbors, and that Germany in the 1930s had every right to complain about its neighbors, and that Germany's people were, in fact, suffering, just as Hitler said. And, having analyzed the German scene in that manner, the anti-war Socialists concluded that Hitler and the Nazis, in railing against the great powers and the Treaty of Versailles, did make some legitimate arguments--even if Nazism came from the extreme right and was not at all to the Socialists' taste.

The anti-war Socialists wanted to know: why shouldn't the French government show a little flexibility in the face of Hitler's demands? Why not recognize that some of Hitler's points were well taken? Why not look for ways to conciliate the outraged German people and, in that way, to conciliate the Nazis? Why not make every effort, strain every muscle, to avoid a new Verdun?

The anti-war Socialists of France did not think they were being cowardly or unprincipled in making those arguments. On the contrary, they took pride in their anti-war instincts. They regarded themselves as exceptionally brave and honest. They felt that courage and radicalism allowed them to peer beneath the surface of events and identify the deeper factors at work in international relations--the truest danger facing France. This danger, in their judgment, did not come from Hitler and the Nazis, not principally.

The truest danger came from the warmongers and arms manufacturers of France itself, as well as from the other great powers--the people who stood to benefit in material ways from a new war. The danger came from bellicose French leaders who, in their greed and selfishness, were going to bring on the new Verdun. Those were the arguments on the anti-war left, the political arguments. But the political arguments rested on something deeper, too--a philosophical belief, profound, large, and attractive, which was reassuring instead of terrifying. It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable.

The belief underlying those anti-war arguments was, in short, an unyielding faith in universal rationality. It was the old-fashioned liberal naivete of the nineteenth century--the simple-minded optimism that had blown up in the First World War but that, even so, indestructible, had lingered into the twentieth-century imagination. That belief was the other face of liberalism--not liberalism as the advocacy of freedom, rationality, progress, and the acceptance of uncertainty, but liberalism as a blind faith in a predetermined future, liberalism as a fantasy of a strictly rational world, liberalism as denial. That was the philosophical doctrine lurking within the anti-war imagination in France. And, stirred by that antique idea, the anti-war Socialists gazed across the Rhine and simply refused to believe that millions of upstanding Germans had enlisted in a political movement whose animating principles were paranoid conspiracy theories, blood-curdling hatreds, medieval superstitions, and the lure of murder.

It's All Hitler's Fault!

Further to yesterday’s entry, Bernard Lewis has an article online about how and why national socialism and communism came to be the only models for "modernization" in the Middle East (it’s all about WWII and the Cold War; isn’t everything?), and what that history has to say about the prospects of democracy in Iraq now:

"I say again: To blame the Saddam Hussein-type governments on Islamic and Arabic traditions is totally false. Those traditions led to the development of societies that, while not democratic in the sense of having elected bodies, produced limited governments. That is, governments limited by the holy law, limited in a practical sense by the existence of powerful groups in society, like the rural gentry and the military and religious establishments. These acted as constraints on the power of the government. The idea of absolute rule is totally alien to Islamic practice until, sad to say, modernization made it possible."

Barnes & Noble finally delivered my copy of his Crisis in Islam yesterday; it goes into somewhat more detail about this history while placing it in the broader historical context, though it’s still extremely concise.

Sullivan on Berman

Andrew Sullivan discusses Paul Berman’s new book Terror and Liberalism:

Perhaps Berman's most important contribution is to uncover the real roots of today's political ideologies in the Middle East, from Saddam's corrupted form of national socialism to the Islamist revolutionaries waging war against the West and their own autocracies. He notices less a class of civilizations, than yet another instance of Western nihilism and totalitarianism popping up in cultures that had never known it before. There is nothing in Arab culture or history that should lead political or religious leaders to embrace totalitarian terror, as in Saddam's Iraq, or fundamentalist suicide bombing and mass murder, as among al Qaeda, the Taliban or Islamo-fascist Iran. This fusion of totalitarian politics and the methods of terror were imports from the West, Berman shows, from the nihilists of the late nineteenth century, and the fascists and Stalinists of the twentieth. Who is Saddam, after all, but another Mussolini or Hitler*, reborn in Islamic guise? Look at the personality cult, the secret police, the mass murders, the purges, the vast and inhuman wars, the scapegoating of the Jews, the vicious genocide against the Kurds (whose only crime was not to be Arabs). This kind of regime was invented not in Mesopotamia but in Europe. Likewise, the roots of Islamism - in the early years of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood - are also directly linked to the fascist movements in twentieth century Europe. A man like bin Laden is a classic Western figure, educated in the West, with a vast fortune built on Western oil trade, and methods that have far more to do with Stalin than with Islamic tradition.

What Berman is essentially arguing is that the notion that Arab or Muslim societies and cultures are somehow indigenously incapable of liberal democracy, that they should be consigned indefinitely to rule by fascist tyrants is a form of racist condescension that has no place in civilized discourse, let alone on the left. Iraq is no less capable of becoming an open free society than Germany or Japan in 1945, or even post-Soviet Russia in the 1980s.

This sounds very much like what I’m already thinking; my broad impression of the history of politics in the Middle East in the last hundred years or so is that the Western notion of secularism has always come in the form of a boot in the face. National socialism for some, communism for others, always degenerating into a purely self-maintaining police state. It’s as if the entire region has absorbed all the toxic sludge of Western ideology and is now spitting it back out at us. I’ve been encountering the evidence for this over and over again, in everything I read. I’ll probably get around to posting something about it sometime, but I’m still getting a handle on it. But if you’re at all anxious to hear about this stuff, it sounds like you can just pick up a copy of Berman’s book.

*This is not just name-calling; the founders of the Ba’ath Party were great admirers of Hitler and were strongly influenced by national socialist thought. It’s interesting that this fact has been so little exploited in pro-war propaganda. The other night, a friend of mine speculated that it might be because it just sounds so crazy and fantastical: "There aren’t any Nazis anymore! We killed ‘em!" Indeed, Bush senior was widely derided for comparing Saddam to Hitler in his time; it sounded like pure sputtering demagoguery. But the truth is, it’s just not accurate to call Saddam a Nazi. For one thing, that title refers to a very historically specific incarnation of the ideology. For another, whatever the Ba’ath Party meant to its founders, it seems clear that Saddam just isn’t guided by some demented vision of furthering the greatness of Iraq in the way that Hitler was regarding the grand destiny of Germany. Instead, he seems to have mined the machinery of both the Nazi and Stalinist police states purely for the purpose of elaborating and perfecting his own apparatus of power. Thus we have Saddamite equivalents to the SS and the cult of personality and the development of an elaborate network of informers throughout society, etc. The goal seems to be to stay in power, and gather more when possible, period.

I also think the charge of "racism" against liberals suspicious of the possibility of democracy in the Middle East is pretty harsh, but I don’t know whether it comes from Berman or Sully, who enjoys spotting liberal racism wherever he may (although it certainly does exist) and may just be repeating the part he likes the best. My impression at the moment is that, while latent racism will always make the idea that some group of brown people or another "can’t" govern themselves democratically go down a little easier with some people, liberals and particularly the left have gotten the wrong end of the stick about Arab politics for more complicated reasons than that. My suspicion is that the decision to treat the opinions of certain factions of the Arab world as the "authentic" representation of the whole as a means of critiquing U.S. policy, probably originating in the decision to more or less adopt the mindset (while objecting to the methods, as if they are separable) of the PLO, has led liberals to adopt a variety of false assumptions about Middle Eastern politics that have been piling up and reinforcing themselves for years. I don’t really know that yet, though. Hence Berman goes on the to-read pile.

The Neglected Duty/Jansen

The Neglected Duty : the Creed of Sadat's Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East by Johannes J.G. Jansen (1986).

This is a translation with commentary of al-Faridah al-Gha'ibah, or "The Neglected Duty," a pamphlet which was left behind with Sadat's body by his assassins, who were members of the Muslim Brotherhood; their lawyers argued that it presented "a valid, Islamic defense" of the assassination. The neglected or forgotten duty, of course, is the duty of jihad, "war against unbelievers."

After Sadat's assassins were executed, it was felt necessary to publish a refutation of the pamphlet by the Mufti of Egypt, Shayk al-Haqq, which in turn made it necessary to publish the pamphlet itself. Thus, according to Jansen, did a long-suppressed discourse finally break into print in Egypt.

Through a close analysis of the text, Jansen argues persuasively that the document represents a culmination of sorts of a debate that had been taking place among many parts of Egyptian society, but up to that point had been completely censored by the state under Nasser and then Sadat. The argument is structured point-by-point as if in response to an imaginary questioner (most arguments in the pamphlet begin with some variation of "some people say …"). Jansen is able to guess which entities are being addressed -- the Islamic authorities at al-Azhar University, the Sufi community, various notable Muslim scholars and authorities -- and further presents some of the responses to the document by these very same groups and individuals. Many of the refutations don't refute nearly as much as one might have expected, and to the extent that they do, are presented with various degrees of qualification, implying that the Muslim Brotherhood had already at that point gained considerable ground in the debate.

To an extent, the document serves as a sort of Rosetta Stone for some Islamic writing that was publishable under state censorship, because it was encoded in the terminology of the Muslim Brotherhood. For example, Jansen argues, using the Faridah as a key, that when Shayk al-Sharawi, (whose weekly religious tv show Nur'ala Nur ("Light on Light") was broadcast in Egypt and other Arab nations in the early 1970's) writes: "Glory to God … who preserved cells of belief, which heathendom does not know how to exterminate, and the core of which tyranny does not know how to corrupt," what he really means is "Glory to God who preserved cells of activists which our pagan government does not know how to exterminate, and the core of which the present regime does not know how to buy off by offering them jobs and salaries."

The central thesis of the Faridah is that "the establishment of an Islamic State and the reintroduction of the Caliphate were not only already predicted by the Apostle of God--God's peace be upon him--but they are, moreover, part of the Command of the Lord--Majestic and Exalted He is--for which every Muslim should exert every conceivable effort in order to execute it." All sources of Islamic authority, the Qur'an, the sunna (the traditions set by the exemplary life of the Prophet), the hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet that were reported by his associates after his death) and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) are employed to demolish objections to this vision and to exhort the reader to jihad in its pursuit. (It will be of some interest to infidels to note that the greater part of the debate here is about whether it is permissible to accuse other Muslims of apostasy and engage in jihad against them, since the heads of all the secular Arab states at the time, including Sadat, were practicing Muslims. Implicitly, then, the killing of actual infidels is considered uncontroversial by the author(s)).

It is difficult to overstate the logical force of the arguments presented in the Faridah. As Jansen remarks, "When even a non-Muslim reader of the Faridah has every now and then the impression that everything he ever read from the Qur'an, the Tradition, and the books of fiqh suddenly falls into place, how much more will the text of the Faridah evoke this feeling with Muslim readers? The Faridah strongly suggests that it offers a comprehensive view of the history of Islam which is based on all relevant sources, and it does so impressively." It is really a shame that this book is not more widely available (I couldn't find a used copy anywhere), because it does conclusively demonstrate that Islamic "fundamentalism" is not "crazy," but instead makes almost oppressively logical sense within its own terms.

It also makes a great deal of sense within its own political and historical context. The work of Muhammad Jalil Kishk, "a prolific writer with Muslim Brotherhood affinities," is even less available to Westerners, because, so far as I have been able to discover, none of his books have been translated from Arabic. But Fouad Ajami summarizes his work at length in The Arab Predicament (1981), and it is worth quoting at length here:

Kishk's writings belie the notion that Muslim fundamentalists are reactionaries fixated on the image of a theocratic past that has to be restored. In Kishk's world view, cultures clash for preeminence: Some rise and conquer, and others surrender and are subjugated. An old-fashioned thinker, Kishk has no appreciation for what he sees as a fraudulent kind of cosmopolitanism propagated by the West and subscribed to by fifth-column Muslim Arabs. For Kishk there is no such thing as a world civilization; cosmopolitanism is the pretension of the ascendant culture "that asks others to abandon their identity and sovereignty, to dismantle their culture," and gives them a choice between adherence to its postulates or extinction. According to Kishk, what we are witnessing now is the third crusade against the Arab people. The first crusade, using the sword and the cross, realized some victories but was eventually overwhelmed. The second crusade -- the age of imperialism -- began with Napolean's invasion of Egypt in 1798 and succeeded in destroying the self-confidence of the Muslim world. The third crusade picks up where the second left off: It accommodates itself to political independence; instead of using armies, it seeks to penetrate the mind of the Muslim and rearrange it. Once the Muslim accepted the "supremacy of the West -- not just material supremacy but cultural and spiritual supremacy as well -- the Muslim's resistance would collapse; he would become like an open, defenseless city, vulnerable to every plunderer and invader" ….

Kishk argues that cultural and ideological penetration are to the twentieth century what gunboats were to the nineteenth. Marxism, which has succeeded in seducing Arab intellectuals, is but another weapon in the West's ideological assault. For Kishk, it is the westernism of Marx that matters, not his opposition to capitalism. In the duel of civilizations, Marx is clearly on the other side: "Marx did not call for a new civilization: he is a faithful son of Western civilization who formed his theory out of Germany philosophy, French socialism, and English political economy … Marx believed in the values and the history of Western civilization; he was proud of that history which he considered as a triumph for humanity on its way to its final victory. He considered the crimes of Western civilization a historical necessity and did not trace those crimes to the philosophy of that civilization but, rather, to economic necessities."

Marxism was not the only European affliction forced upon the Arab-Muslim world: Another, earlier one was secular nationalism. Kishk is even more contemptuous of secular nationalism than he is of Marxism, more certain of its disruptive consequences. Arabs were so convinced of the power of secular nationalism, so taken by its mystique, he says, that they were willing to set aside their own religious beliefs in pursuit of the nationalist dream. But the history of secular Arab nationalism was a chronicle of defeats and setbacks. It does not strike Kishk as a paradox that the force that generated power for Europe brought weakness to the Arab world. Europe needed secular nationalism, which provided an effective way of organizing a community. But things were different in the Muslim world. Under the banner of Islam, disparate populations and ethnic groups had long been organized into a community. A unique kind of socialist ethos had been part of this community's creed and practice. At the height of its glory, it had laid siege to Vienna and outstripped Europe in the realms of science, philosophy, and culture, as well as war. Then the Muslims caught the germ of nationalism. The Ottoman Turks were the first victims of nationalism; the Arabs were next. The house of Islam was now divided, and Europeans could easily subdue the Muslim world. Minorities were now warring against each other. The concept of nationality, held in check by Islamic universalism, had shattered the basis of the community…

Kishk does not consider the military officers the only culprits [in the 1967 defeat by Israel]. He also blames the radical intellectuals who hammered at the foundations of belief, imported false doctrines, and unleashed the moral confusion that paved the way for the defeat. The radical intellectuals put their faith in concepts such as world peace, brotherhood among nations, and humane socialism, but such beliefs put nations that take them seriously at the mercy of aggressive ones. In this world, the eagle and the sparrow cannot coexist; there can be no brotherhood between the killer and the victim. Human history is built on strife. Islam recognized this truth. The Muslim battle cry "Jihad" was the only thing that frightened the Europeans; it drew the boundaries between belief and unbelief, setting Muslims apart from other men.