The Gertrude Bell Jar

Added to The Blogroll

1. MahdiWatch, a blog by Timothy Furnish, author of Holiest Wars: Islamic Madhis, their Jihads and Osama bin Laden, keeping an eye on eschatological rhetoric in missives from Islamist imams so you don’t have to!

2. Mooselim.ca. According to an article in the Toronto Star, “Tired of the so-called "community leaders" who purport to speak on their behalf, a group of half a dozen twentysomethings are finding the voice of the average young Canadian Muslim – and sharing it at a unique blog cheekily named mooselim.ca.” It looks interesting.

"Kiss the Koran, big guy."

I found that Michael Cook link in a series of interesting posts on the Pope kerfuffle from a Christian perspective at GetReligion: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. I found the discussion of universalism (see links 3 & 5) particularly interesting because I am currently working on an article about the treatment of Islamist terrorism in Bollywood movies (which I may try to flog to a print outlet somewhere--I'll let you, my faithful 3 readers, know if anything comes of it). Indian patriotism rests on the proposition that all sectarian differences can be overcome by loyalty to the Indian nation and Indian identity, but sometimes this belief seems to be an expression of Hindu universalism. In one scene in Zakhm, for example, a woman whose very existence is posited by the movie as the proof of the nationalist claim is shown first to pray in the Muslim fashion, then kiss a crucifix, then honor a portrait of a Hindu god. This might be seen by Hindus as a legitimate faith practice, but neither Christians nor Muslims would see it as a practice of Christianity or Islam. Hindus undoubtedly believe that all faith traditions can be safe in a Hindu-dominated nation, and this is most likely true. But is this claim likely to be persuasive to fundamentalist monotheists? Probably not.

In other Pope news, Austin Bay has an interesting article up about the propaganda value of "Muslim rage" media events for Islamists.

Cook Lecture

I’m adding a new item to the sidebar, a transcript of a talk by Michael Cook, a scholar of medieval Islam and Islamic history, with follow-up questions from assorted journalists. He addresses questions of jihad, the status of Muhammad, the political nature of Islam, etc. etc. It covers a lot of a ground, it’s all worth a read. A new name for my infinitely lengthening "to read" list!

Imperial Hubris by "Anonymous"

Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror by "Anonymous."

I've mentioned this book (which is now known to have been written by former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer) before, in a brief comment about one of its many flaws, but got hung up on writing the review, I think because I wanted to write the mother of all scathing indictments, but was honestly too infuriated and exasperated by this whole book to be able to sustain any coherent writing on it.

But time heals! I find, looking it over again, that a response I posted in another forum to a query about Scheuer a long while ago will do as a review. The questioner had seen Scheuer among the talking heads on tv commenting on the 7/7 London bombings, and was flummoxed by his "provocative yet ultimately mystifying talking points," and asked if anyone knew what was up with that.

I replied: I didn't hear what Scheuer was saying last week, but I have read his book. His basic argument is: nearly all Muslims in the Middle East are secretly Islamists, no matter what they try to tell you. Our policy options therefore are: 1. To withdraw entirely to fortress America (no more oil-buying or any other kind of trading relationship with any regime in the Middle East, and no support whatsoever for Israel or any other nation in the region and indeed no diplomatic relationship with anyone of any kind there, no more pc environmentalism preventing full exploitation of our own oil resources, no more pc civil-rights concerns preventing full defense of the homeland) or 2. Go on a total war footing, in which we understand that our purpose is to kill as many Middle Eastern Muslims as possible, or at least sufficiently to fully subjugate and terrify any survivors (hence, the book has chapter titles like "Get Good At And Used to Killing.") Pull completely out or kill 'em all, basically.

To Scheuer, in other words, the uber-fallacy is to believe that there are any Muslims in the Middle East who do not secretly want to overthrow their governments and install Osama bin Laden as their caliph in a Talibanesque Islamic state. The neocon agenda is therefore delusional, since the establishment of such a caliphate would be the inevitable outcome of allowing Muslims to vote. A right-wing militaristic response is delusional to the extent that it continues to attempt to minimize civilian casualties and be somewhat selective in regards to targets. A left-wing negotiation response is delusional because there is no negotiating with this basic antipathy to our very existence; there can be only stupid good faith on our part and lying for temporary advantage on theirs.

It's difficult to overstate the magnitude of his error here. (Although the bibliography to his book offers a partial explanation of it; Scheuer does not read Arabic nor has he made any effort to read about any of these issues from a Muslim or Arab perspective in English or English translation. His whole reading diet from the Middle Eastern perspective has apparently been propaganda missives from al Qaeda and a handful of fellow-travellers as provided by CIA translators, and from the Western perspective various iterations of conservative national defense punditry, plus the literature that has grown up around the "clash of civilizations" theory as applied in the Middle East.) But his argument for it is: Condemnation of Israel and U.S. support for Israel is nearly universal in the Middle East; al Qaeda condemns Israel and the U.S. on the same basis; therefore support for al Qaeda must be universal in the Middle East. This is a little like saying: Nearly all Americans condemn terrorism on their own soil; Bush condemns terrorism also; therefore nearly all Americans must be Bush supporters. Whereas of course we know that all significant political actors in the U.S. condemn terrorism; the competition among them is not about whether to be against terrorism, but about what to do about it. And in fact the same is true of the Middle East (though for equivalency in at least numbers read "Pat Buchanan" supporters for "Osama bin Laden" supporters); all political actors in the Middle East have condemned Israel and U.S. support for it to varying degrees since 1948; the question of which group is best able to mobilize and maintain support for itself based on its approach to the issue is the highly variable and contigent one. And all of this is trivially obvious from even a cursory glance at Middle Eastern history or at the very small amount of public polling data available.

I found myself worrying a lot more about the quality of foreign policy analysis at the CIA than about the Iraq War after reading this book. Some of his criticism of U.S. policy is quite correct, and his knowledge of al Qaeda itself at the operational (but not ideological) level is very useful. But the underlying perspective is just warped and flat-out wrong.

Another commenter asked if I thought any of this theory could be based on ancient views of warfare, when people believed that the only way to successfully assimilate another culture was to kill all the men and take all the women for the conquerors, and also, " … what does he think the remaining portion of these civilizations would do while the other 75%+ is being wholesale slaughtered?"

I replied: I haven't read any of theory of warfare type books that were listed in his bibliography, but it wouldn't surprise me if a fair number of them went into the kind of discussion you're talking about and might have influenced his own take on things. IIRC the specific historical example he used to critique the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was WWII, or specifically the Allied occupations of Germany and Japan, to make the point that the post-WWII occupations were much easier to handle than either of the current ones because such a large portion of the civilian population as well as the military had been killed already in the war; the Germans and Japanese were totally beaten down and hence docile at war's end in this view.

I mean, what does he think the remaining portion of these civilizations would do while the other 75%+ is being wholesale slaughtered?

Cowering and awaiting instructions, presumably. So would the occupations of Germany and Japan lead one to believe. Of course there was little else they could have done at the time, the idea of international terrorism by nonstate actors not having been thought of yet, and not as easily done anyway with the available technology. But this is where his notion of fortress America comes in, I suppose.

The original questioner commented that Scheuer had indeed given off a bit of a "crackpot" vibe, and that perhaps he was intentionally a little cagey about what he was actually saying, since being too clear might well put him on the "do not call back" list.

I replied: I think he manages to sound reasonable enough even in most of his book. It's common enough, after all, to point out the differences between the German and Iraqi occupations as I mentioned below. But to most people this is just a difference in the outcome of two very different approaches to warfare in which the latter version is vastly preferable on its own hook; the point of bringing it up is just to recognize the difficulties that seem to follow comparatively low casuality warfare and propose ways to address them, or to critique Dubya for failing to plan for them in advance, etc. I think Scheuer is probably the only commentater I've encountered who thinks the correct answer would have been to have gone all Dresden on Iraq in the first place. I'm guessing he just doesn't include the crazy part when he's talking on tv.

Today In Islamophobia

City of Brass has an excellent essay answering science fiction writer Dan Simmons’ blog post about a “Century War with Islam” and the Eurabia argument in general. Meanwhile, reason columnist Cathy Young argues with Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch et al and Oriana Fallaci, and replies to Spencer’s replies here and here.

Suicide Geeks Redux

Further to my earlier posts on the strange relationship between geekiness and suicide terrorism (1, 2, 3), I just came across a couple more theories on the subject, in Khaled Abou El Fadl’s The Great Theft (El Fadl prefers the term "puritans" for Islamists):

… puritans reject inquiries into philosophy, political theory, morality, and beauty, as too subjective -- and, even worse, as Western inventions that lead to nothing but sophistry. With the majority of the puritan leadership comprised of people who studied the physical sciences, such as medicine, engineering, and computer science, they avowedly anchor themselves in the objectivity and certitude that comes from empiricism. According to puritans, public interests, such as the interest in protecting society from the sexual lures of women, can be empirically verified. However, in contrast, they say, moral or ethical values and aesthetic judgments about what is necessary or compelling cannot be empirically quantified, and therefore must be ignored. So values like human dignity, love, mercy, and compassion are not subject to quantification, and therefore cannot be integrated into Islamic legal judgments. (p. 99)

And:

Puritans are not opposed to modernism, but, somewhat inconsistently, they believe that modernity is a culturally biased concept. For puritans, the culture of modernity, with its concepts of human rights, women’s rights, minority rights, religious freedom, civil society, pluralism, and democracy, is largely Western, and therefore both alien and alienating. However, puritans strongly distinguish between the culture of modernity and modernization. Often this amounts to differentiating between modernization and Westernization -- the former is acceptable, but the latter is not. To become truly modernized, according to the puritans, means to regress back in time and recreate the golden age of Islam. This, however, does not mean that they want to abolish technology and scientific advancements. Rather, their program is deceptively simple -- Muslims should learn the technology and science invented by the West, but in order to resist Western culture, Muslims should not seek to study the social sciences or humanities. This is the reason that a large number of puritans come to the West to study, but invariably focus their studies on the physical sciences, including computer science, and entirely ignore the social sciences and humanities. Armed with modern science and technology, puritans believe that they will be better positioned to recreate the golden age of Islam by creating a society modeled after the Prophet’s city-state in Medina and Mecca. (p. 170-171)

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 ...)

Cartoon Comment

Aziz Poonwalla has an excellent post up at City of Brass about the “Cartoon StupidStorm,” with links to a great deal of worthwhile commentary on the controversy. I would draw your particular attention to the Mona Eltahawy piece from which Poonwalla quotes extensively in his own earlier post at Dean’s Place:

Lost amid the ashes of torched embassies and the senseless deaths of Muslim protestors is the fact that the cartoon controversy is as much about freedom of expression in the Muslim world as it is about freedom of expression in Europe.

The violence and the bitter words exchanged over the past few days have little to do with Islam but everything to do with those who want to be its sole guardians and spokespeople. [...]

This is not a clash of civilizations but a battle between the extremists - Muslims and non-Muslims alike - and the rest of us who refuse to allow them to speak for us. This is about control. So of course it is about freedom of expression - in Denmark and in the Muslim world.

Also, another book to add to the reading list: Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained. Sounds like essential reading based on the GNXP comment Poonwalla highlights.

Apocalypse Then And Now

Well, the David Cook books, Understanding Jihad and Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, have come in the mail, and dipping into the latter, I find that its relevance to parsing the public statements of our Shia Persian of interest will be uncertain, since Cook notes that he is focussing exclusively on Arab Sunni sources. (In his introduction to another book I found at the library, Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden, author Timothy R. Furnish states that he will deal exclusively with Sunni Mahdist movements, and further that he began working on correcting the misperception that Madhism is primarily a Shia phenomenon in his own doctoral dissertation, so perhaps that will be the best place for me to look for references to works that deal with Shia variants of Mahdism).

Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature looks like it will be a profitable read nonetheless. See this, for example:

[One level] of the anti-Semitic conspiracy stems from the frustrations Muslims feel about their inability to deal with Israel and their inability to convince the larger world of the justice of their concerns.

He continues the thought in a footnote:

There is also the inability to understand the freedom of choice and the marketplace of ability created by a free society, which promotes the view that since the Jews are prominent in Western society (and are regarded as even more so by the exagerrations created by discovery of "hidden Jews"), there must be some conspiracy to explain this fact. Coming from a hierarchical society where ability is not necessarily rewarded and where it is more important to have a protective group supporting an individual than to get a good education and to work hard, the conspiracy accusation at this level is understandable.

Ah. The footnotes concludes, "See H. 'Abd-al Hamid (1996, 5-6)," but probably you don't want to, since the reference is to his work Yajuj and Majuj, or, Gog and Magog, so the book most likely presents an example of this phenomenon rather than a critique of it. On the other hand, it's an English translation, so go nuts if you want to, I guess.

Beyond this, it looks like Cook will be fleshing out one of the central claims in Bernard Lewis' Semites and Anti-Semites, that modern Arab anti-Semitism is almost entirely dependent on European and Christian sources and influences for its theory, and pretty much dates from the latter half of the 20th Century. As Lewis explains, though Jews and Christians were indeed thought inferior and assigned secondary dhimmi status and subject to many special restictions in Islamic civilizations, the notion that Jews are any kind of threat to Muslims is a modern one. After all, in Islamic history the Muslims triumphed over Jews on the battlefield, and though the Jews did plot to kill Jesus, they were too incompetent to succeed (Muslims believe that Jesus did not really die on the cross and was simply taken bodily into heaven by God rather than resurrected). Persecution of Jews in Islamic civilization did occasionally occur, but was exceptionally rare as compared to Europe, which is why Muslim lands were a haven for European Jews during the European Middle Ages.

Cook states that the so-called "rocks and trees" hadith,

The time [of Resurrection] will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, and until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees whence the call is raised: ‘Oh Muslim, here is a Jew hiding! Come and kill him.’

which is cited repeatedly by Islamists and apocalypticists alike (and even appears verbatim in the Hamas Charter) is actually the only hadith or reference of any kind in classic Muslim apocalyptic literature which assigns the Jews a particular role in the end times, and that in some versions of the hadith, the Jews are not mentioned at all. This is too slender a reed for contemporary apocalyptic writers who want to connect theories about the end times to the International Jewish Conspiracy, so they tend to lean heavily instead on sources from outside the Islamic tradition, chiefly Biblical passages, European anti-Semitic writing (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a core text), and all manner of Western crackpot books on topics like the Masons and UFOs.

Questions For Hamas

Marc Lynch had some interesting comments about the Palestinian election yesterday:

The Bush administration has talked a lot about democracy, about past mistakes in American policy towards democracy in the region, and so forth, but I think it's fair to say that most Arabs remain deeply suspicious. Recent Arab elections haven't really tested whether this has changed. Iraq under American military occupation is sui generis. In Egypt there was never any chance that the Muslim Brotherhood would be allowed to actually win, and even if it somehow had Mubarak would have remained in control over a relatively impotent Parliament. Jordan's Parliamentary elections have been sufficiently gerrymandered (via electoral law) to ensure a strict ceiling on Islamist seats. Sudanese Islamists arrived on the back of a military coup.

Hamas winning and presumably moving to form a government is the first real instance of an Islamist movement on the brink of winning power democratically since 1992.* If they take power, we are going to see some major political science propositions put to the test: does power moderate or radicalize Islamist groups? Will they be willing and able to work with non-Islamist parties in a coalition? Will they use their democratic victory to abolish democracy? Will Islamist groups concentrate on the pragmatics of rule or resort to foreign policy grandstanding? Will they use their position of power to pursue terrorism? Will they be willing to set aside doctrine and work pragmatically with Israelis and Americans? Will they use government power to impose unpopular sharia rule over their people? Will they oppress Christian and non-Islamist Muslims? Most academic and policy analysis of these questions has remained counterfactual and hypothetical, since there have been no actual examples of an elected Islamist group in power. That could now change ....

For America, I think it's extremely important right now to handle this right: honor the will of the people, demonstrate a commitment to democratic process, and see what happens. Give Hamas the chance to prove its intentions. Don't get too upset about the inevitable bursts of objectionable rhetoric by excited victors - test deeds, not early words. Above alll, don't give the Islamist hardliners the winning argument they crave about American hypocrisy. Refusing to deal with Hamas right now could effectively kill American attempts to promote democracy in the Middle East for a generation.

That sounds about right to me. Dubya seemed to follow roughly this line in his press conference yesterday when questioned about the election. He made no outright refusal to deal with Hamas and many feel-good statements about the democratic process represented by the election.

But he also made it clear that U.S. willingness to deal with Hamas will be conditioned on Hamas abandoning its call for and commitment to the destruction of Israel. I’m not sure whether refusal to recognize the outcome of the election based on who won vs. refusal to deal with that government based on total opposition to its major policy will be viewed as much more than a distinction without a difference in the Arab world. It is surely an improvement on the outcome in Algeria; there will be no coup, U.S.-backed or otherwise. However, U.S. vs. Arab nation beliefs about what is fair and reasonable when it comes to Israel differ so radically that it may be a mug’s game for the U.S. to try and court Arab public opinion on the issue without substantially altering our policy, and well beyond anything that would be considered acceptable in the U.S.

Lynch is keeping an eye on the Arab media to see how the Palestinian election is being viewed in other Arab countries, so his blog will be well worth checking for the next few days (even more so than usual, I mean).

*Some commenters at Lynch's blog pointed out that an Islamist party had already won a majority, in Turkey. True, but not really comparable since that party is so much more moderate than Hamas, and the tradition of democracy is so much more firmly entrenched (and independently supported by the army) in Turkey than in Palestine. When AK won in Turkey, people were mostly worried about the impact on women’s rights and on Turkey’s ability to join the EU and that sort of thing, not whether there would ever be another election in Turkey. But with Hamas in power, a transition to theocratic fascism is indeed one possible outcome for Palestine.