Today's quotes of the day come to you courtesy of Fouad Ajami's Dream Palace of the Arabs and, in the case of the first, by my adopted Chicago parochialism, triggered by the sudden appearance therein of Steve Kerr's winning three-point shot in the final game of the 1997 NBA championships:
In the dispatches of the Chicago Bulls, it was reported that Kerr had once had a scuffle with Jordan and that he stood his ground against 'His Airness.' That reporter had filed the dispatch as something wondrous and unexpected. But for the grandson of a man who went into the hills around Aleppo and Marash with a pistol at his side to retrieve Armenian waifs and take them on a caravan to Beirut, a boy who had endured his father's loss [Malcom Kerr was assassinated in Beirut by persons unknown in 1984, while serving as the president of the American University of Beirut], the struggles of the NBA must seem quaint in the extreme.
And, discussing the life of the Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi (who committed suicide on June 6, 1982, on the eve of the day of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon):
A cultural tide had carried Hawi from his village and his manual labor to university life in Beirut and Cambridge. A vast world had opened up to him. In his early years as an academic, he wrote of the cultural tide, of the educational awakening among Arabs, with painstaking detail and veritable awe. He had been attentive and respectful, perhaps bedazzled, by what the pioneers in Arabic letters and thought had accomplished, but this faith deserted him toward the end. The tradition that had sustained him--the literary tradition he had chronicled, the Islamic philosophy he had come to master--had been unable to prevent the culture's descent into hell; he became increasingly dismissive of what the preceding century in Arabic culture and political thought produced. He had exalted the modernists in Arabic letters and politics and had labored in their shadow. He now wrote off what they had brought from the West and tried to graft onto indigenous culture as nothing but mimicry, the stale effort of those who had carried from the West only 'those things that were superficial and easy to carry.' That whole Arab awakening, he was to write in an essay two years before his death, had been a pretense that had 'covered up the total backwardness of Arab society.' The modernists, he said, had not understood the West itself, let alone laid foundations for a viable Arab renaissance. From distant Western shores these claimants had brought only those 'colored empty sea-shells that the tide brings to shore.' The society had traded its old forms of backwardness for new ones. Old habits of domination, old ways of political thinking, had simply donned new masks. And political men and women had become good at taqiyya, dissimulation, hiding what they really thought, in the process hiding their society from genuine scrutiny and assessment. In the 'modern' political movements littering the landscape, he saw nothing but the hold of old 'tribal, sectarian, and clannish loyalties.'
Uh-oh.