Archive for the 'Islam' Category

[ by Charles Cameron -- cross-posted from Zenpundit -- see also part I: Scenario planning the end times ]

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Today I received a book in the mail from Powell’s: C Christine Fair and Sumit Ganguly‘s Treading on Hallowed Ground: Counterinsurgency operations in Sacred Spaces. That covers the spread of my interests pretty concisely. I’m reminded that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was complicit in several attempts to assassinate Hitler, once said, “Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants” – again, the intersection of the sacred and harsh “facts on the ground”.

I am interested in this intersection partly because my father was a warrior and my mentor a priest and peace-maker, and partly because that mentor, Fr. Trevor Huddleston CR, taught me to anchor my life in the contemplative and sacramental side of things, then reach out into world with a view to being of service – an idea that he movingly expressed in this key paragraph from his great book, Naught for your comfort:

On Maundy Thursday, in the Liturgy of the Catholic Church, when the Mass of the day is ended, the priest takes a towel and girds himself with it; he takes a basin in his hands, and kneeling in front of those who have been chosen, he washes their feet and wipes them, kissing them also one by one. So he takes, momentarily, the place of his Master. The centuries are swept away, the Upper Room in the stillness of the night is all around him: “If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another’s feet.” I have knelt in the sanctuary of our lovely church in Rosettenville and washed the feet of African students, stooping to kiss them. In this also I have known the meaning of identification. The difficulty is to carry the truth out into Johannesberg, into South Africa, into the world.

A few days ago I saw a film that encompasses that same range – from the contemplative to the brutal – telling the story of the Cistercian (Trappist) monks of Tibhirine in the Atlas mountains of Algeria, the warmth of affection that existed between them and their Muslim neighbors, the mortal threat they came under from Muslim “rebels” whose wounded they had cared for, their individual and group decisions to stay there in Tibhirine under those threats, and their eventual deaths.

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It is an astonishing story, and my copy of John Kiser‘s book, The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love and Terror in Algeria, which also tells that story, already has more tabs in it noting phrases and whole paragraphs I’ll want to return to than any altar missal – and I’m only two-thirds of the way through it.

I don’t wish to retell the story – I’d rather you saw the film, Of Gods and Men, in the theater if possible, on DVD if not, or read the book, or both – but a few of those book-marked passages stand out for me.

Read the rest of this entry »

Senator Lindsay Graham, in response to the Koran-burning incident and subsequent riot, had this to say:

I wish we could find a way to hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war. During World War II, we had limits on what you could say if it would inspire the enemy.

“Inspire” is an interesting word in this context. If someone during WWII had gone around giving speeches asserting that a German/Japanese victory would be a good thing, yes it is possible that the FDR administration would have found a way to get him arrested and kept in prison for the duration of the war. And if someone during WWI had done the same thing,the Wilson administration would almost certainly have had him arrested.

The present-day analogy for such speech giving, though, would be something like Michael Moore’s 2004 statement:

The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow—and they will win.

Read the rest of this entry »

[ by Charles Cameron -- cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

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Okay. When what goes into the opening paragraphs of an editor’s note at the front of a magazine corresponds pretty exactly to what’s on the back cover, you have a sort of conceptual bracket that’s “holding” the rest of the content, and it pays to pay attention.

Here are the first paras of the “Letter from the Editor” that is featured on page 5 of the latest issue of AQAP’s English language magazine, Inspire, immediately after the front cover and index pages:

The cover of this issue is about the Tsunami of change that is sweeping the Arab world. With the removal of the despots, the ummah will speak its voice, and when it does, it will chant: Here we start and in al-Aqsa we’ll meet.The biggest barrier between the mujahidin and freeing al-Aqsa were the tyrant rulers. Now that the friends of America and Israel are being mopped out one after the other, our aspirations are great that the path between us and al-Aqsa is clearing up.
 
There could be no freeing of Palestine with the presence of the likes of King Abdullah to the East, Hosni Mubarak to the West and al-Saud to the South. Now that Hosni is gone, we heard the Imam of the Friday prayers praying: “O Allah we ask you to allow us to meet in al-Aqsa,” and the millions in Tahrir square roared with one voice: Amin.

Note that this explicitly ties the front cover (“about the Tsunami of change that is sweeping the Arab world”) with the back (“Here we start and in al-Aqsa we’ll meet”), shown here:

[ graphic courtesy of Ibn Siqilli ]

As I’ve noted before, al-Aqsa isn’t just the focal point of the Palestinian / Israeli question, nor it is only the place at which the Prophet alighted from his steed, Buraq, and ascended to receive the divine instructions for prayer in the Miraj — it is also the destination of the Mahdi‘s victorious army in the Khorasan strand of ahadith.

Indeed, it has been suggested that the Pierced Rock of the Dome of the Rock in al-Aqsa is closely related to the Black Stone of the Kaaba. Kanan Makiya, in his part-fictional part-documentary book, The Rock, quotes Charles Matthews‘ translation of Burhan al-Din ibn Firka al-Fazari‘s Kitab Ba’ith al-Nufus ila Ziyarat al-Quds al-Mahrus (The Book of Arousing Souls to Visit Jerusalem’s Holy Walls) from Matthews’ Palestine: Mohammedan Holy Land:

Verily, the Kaaba is in an equivalent position to the Frequented House in the Seventh Heaven, to which the angels of Allah make pilgrimage. And if rocks fell from it, they would have fallen on the place of the Rock of the Temple of Mecca [i.e. the Black Stone]. And indeed, Paradise is in the Seventh Heaven in an equivalent position to the Holy Temple (in Jerusalem) and the Rock; and if a rock had fallen from it, it would have fallen upon the place of the Rock there. And for this case the city is called Urushalim, and Paradise is called Dar al-Salam, the House of Peace.

Indeed, David Roxburgh mentions all these matters, writing in Salma Khadra Jayyusi et al., The city in the Islamic world, vol. 1. p 756:

This movement corresponded to other efforts — before, during, and after the Crusades — to establish “geo-theological” connections between Jerusalem and Mecca, whose preeminent sanctity was inviolable up until the end of days. Examples linking Mecca to Jerusalem include the Prophet Muhammad’s nocturnal journey from Mecca to Jerusalem (isra) and his ascension from Jerusalem to the throne of God (miraj); the underground joining of the waters of Zamzam to Silwan (var. Siloam) during the “feast of the sacrifice” (id al-adha); and the transfer of the Kaba and its black stone from Mecca to Jerusalem during the last days. these various traditions linked Jerusalem to Mecca, sometimes by sets of doubled features, in a near symmetry and in a calendar that will culminate during the end of days.

So there’s an eschatological dimension to all these parallelisms, too…

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And if for no other reason, then because I happen to love doubled features, symmetries and analogies of all sorts (and we were already speaking of graphics and Inspire #5), let me add this:

A tweet from @webradius via @azelin that I saw today noted that “the cover of Inspire 5 is remarkably similar to a wikileaks logo”.

I liked it. And I’ve translated it here into my own DoubleQuotes format:

For those who are unfamiliar with the phrase, graphic match is another term for match cut — the gambit whereby one shot in a movie is directly juxtaposed to another with which it bears a close resemblance – essentially, a film director’s equivalent of rhyme.

Wikipedia gives two classic examples which are of particular interest to me because there is a “rhyme” between them, too, albeit a far more indirect one – the second being an hommage to the first.

Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey contains a famous example of a match cut. After an ape discovers the use of bones as a tool and a weapon, there is a match cut to a spacecraft or satellite in orbit. The match cut helps draw a connection between the two objects as exemplars of primitive and advanced tools respectively.
 
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger‘s A Canterbury Tale contains the influence for the 2001: A Space Odyssey match cut in which a fourteenth century falcon cuts to a World War II aeroplane. The sense of time passing but nothing changing is emphasised by having the same actor, in different costumes, looking at both the falcon and the aeroplane.

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Conclusion:

Parallelisms really are worth watching — always bearing in mind that one thing is never quite the same as another…

[ by Charles Cameron -- cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

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Issue #5 of the AQAP magazine Inspire is now available for viewing.

I am reasonably confident that with attention focused on such things as al-Awlaki‘s response to the various uprisings across the middle east, the delightful computer graphic (a throw back to the era of green print on black screens) which shows Ben Ali and Mubarak “booted” and Gadhafi and Saleh “in progress” – and the translation of a chunk of Abu Musab as-Suri on “Individual Terrorism Jihad and the Global Islamic Resistance Units” – a lot of eyes will glaze over during the course of reading “My Life In Fallujah” (pp. 56 ff).

The piece sounds promising – something to read about Fallujah from the enemy viewpoint for after action / lessons learned purposes… but then it gets into miracles:

The brothers received extraordinary miracles from Allah as a sign to strengthen them and these miracles were in all different forms. It got to the point where some of the things that occurred might not have been believable to the brothers had they not seen them with their own eyes but that is the grace of Allah which He bestows on whom He wills.

… and my bet is that snoring ensues…

Though not among the readers to whom it is pitched.

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One:

What if we don’t regard the piece as a mirror for our own knowledge of events in Fallujah, but as an opening into the enemy’s grand narrative and – gasp – spirituality?

The piece continues:

Now let me relate some of the stories of fighting with the enemy and the miracles some of the brothers received. I will start mentioning some of these great miracles
 
There was a brother named Abu az-Zubair as-Sana’ani. He was killed at the beginning days of the battle. We used to go out in the daytime to engage with the enemy. Hardship and severe exhaustion were afflicting us due to the hot weather that was in the beginning of Ramadan.
 
So that brother came at the time of afternoon and sought permission from the Amir to break his fast. Some brothers advised him to have patience and suggested to him that he could have a shower and then rest for a while. The brother went inside to sleep out of fatigue and we were sitting in front of that house. The brother didn’t sleep long and we saw him coming out towards us with a cheerful face saying to us that he had seen a dream while he was asleep. The brothers asked him what was it; he told them that he saw a very beautiful woman coming to him, carrying a plate full of all kinds of fruits. She was waking him up, standing by his head and telling him: O Abu az-Zubair, don’t break your fast. You are invited to break your fast with us today. The brother then said that he felt comfort and relief. There was a brother called Abu Tariq who interpreted dreams so he told him that by Allah’s will, it will be something good. After that the brother decided to continue fasting.
 
We had a timetable for twelve people to cook food and that day was his turn. He went to the kitchen and we stayed outside, sitting next to the wall of that house so that we weren’t seen by the spy planes. We stayed there until it was about time to break fast. Suddenly an F-16 jet showed up in the horizon and targeted that kitchen with a missile where that brother was! A while after when the dust had settled, we went in the kitchen and saw that brother had been martyred. It was amazing how the smell of musk was all over the room, how the smile was on his face!
 
Thereupon the brothers’ moral was raised and they were making takbir. These were from the unforgettable moments.

It seems wise to compare this with the Miracle of Uthmaan recounted by Abdullah Azzam on p. 27 of his book, The signs of Ar-Rahmaan in the Jihad of Afghanistan – indeed, I’m surprised Inspire didn’t make the connection:

One morning Uthmaan (ra) said: Last night I saw Rasulullah sallAllaahu alayhi wa sallam in my dream, and he said: Oh Uthmaan, break your fast with us. He was martyred that same day, whilst in the state of fasting.

If one considers such stories not as “superstitious” or examples of “magical thinking” – one easy way to discount them – nor as “diabolic” and emblematic of a “false religion” – another – if, in fact, one reads them with some empathy for their content as faith-narratives, they are profoundly moving, and will no doubt be so to many of their intended readers.

This particular narrative – an earthly fast broken in heaven – could well be a motif in the Aarne-Thompson classification system for folkloric motifs.

Note also the reliance on dreams and dream interpretation – a reliance which also figures prominently in the transcript of bin Laden‘s discussion of 9/11.

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Two:

Another miracle was the incident of Abu Abd ar-Rahman at-Turki who was a student of knowledge that memorized the Qur’an and the six books of hadith. He was amongst a group that went out to confront a breakthrough of the enemy. While the brothers were gathered to organize a defensive plan, this brother made takbir and rushed towards the enemy. Some brothers called him back but he didn’t pay attention to their words. He shouted back to them saying “I am seeing the hoor! I am seeing the hoor!” When this brother reached the enemy’s area, he was shot by a tank shell leaving his lower body completely severed. Some brothers managed to drag him out of there to a safe house which I was in. Even though the brother was between consciousness and unconsciousness, he was still advising brothers to fear Allah and to keep firm upon the truth. His lower half was ripped out, yet he was still reassuring the brothers and would always raise his vision upwards telling them that he is seeing the hoor coming, and that they should keep firm because this is the path of jannah. At hearing that, the brothers’ spirits were high and they felt relieved. Abu Abd ar-Rahman declared the shahada and then kept fainting until his soul departed his body. At that point we smelled the musk coming out of him and saw peace on his face. This smell of musk from the mujahidin would be something that was smelt regularly.

This “smell of musk” too (also found in the story of Abu az-Zubair above) is a regular feature of martyrdom tales, and features in the same work by Azzam, for instance in this report:

Moulana Arsalaan narrated to me:A student named Abdul Baseer attained shahaadat while with us. It was very dark. Fathullah, another mujaahid, and I went in search of his body. He said to me: “Is the Shaheed close. I perceive a fragrant scent”. I picked up the scent, and we reached the body by following the scent. In the darkness, I could see a noor (light) in the blood, which was gushing forth from his wound.

Indeed, as I have pointed out before, this motif has a parallel in the Catholic tradition of the “odor of sanctity” – “the perfume-like scent given forth by the bodies of saints during their lifetime or after death … symbols of the fragrance of extraordinary virtue” [as defined in Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary].

It appears in the Arthurian legends, too, as Malory describes the death of Sir Lancelot – notice here, too, the motif of the joyous dream:

And so after midnight, against day, the Bishop [that] then was hermit, as he lay in his bed asleep, he fell upon a great laughter. And therewith all the fellowship awoke, and came to the Bishop, and asked him what he ailed. Ah Jesu mercy, said the Bishop, why did ye awake me? I was never in all my life so merry and so well at ease. Wherefore? said Sir Bors. Truly said the Bishop, here was Sir Launcelot with me with mo angels than ever I saw men in one day. And I saw the angels heave up Sir Launcelot unto heaven, and the gates of heaven opened against him. It is but dretching of swevens, said Sir Bors, for I doubt not Sir Launcelot aileth nothing but good. It may well be, said the Bishop; go ye to his bed, and then shall ye prove the sooth. So when Sir Bors and his fellows came to his bed they found him stark dead, and he lay as he had smiled, and the sweetest savour about him that ever they felt.

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Three:

There was a brother named Abu Dujanah at-Taifi. As soon as he entered Fallujah at the beginning of the battle, he asked the brothers to let him go to the front lines but the brothers told him that he had to learn shooting first. He replied, “By Allah! I won’t be anywhere except the front lines.” His brother was present there so they agreed to his request and allowed him to go there.Thereupon he said: ”By Allah! If the Americans come forward, then Allah will see from us that which He loves.” He then went to stay inside a trench to keep an eye on the front lines.On the second day when he saw the enemy breaking through, he jumped out and got ready to strike them with an RPG but before he could fire it, he was struck by a tank, and as a result, his body was torn apart. His body stayed there for six days before we were able to retrieve it.
 
To our surprise, blood was still coming out of his body even though the weather was so hot that if you were to place a piece of meat outside for half a day, it would eventually get rotten.

His blood was seeping as if he was just killed and his index finger was in the position of tashahud [that section of Muslim prayer where the index finger is raised while reciting the shahada or confession of faith]. His brother was a little bit sad at hearing the news but once he saw his body, he felt so much comfort.

E Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Miracles: Imitative, Realistic, and Dogmatic looks to be a terrific source for the kind of research I’m doing here – that’s the “Brewer” of Brewer’s Dictionary of phrase and fable – and p 372 of the 1894 edition has a section on “Bodies of Saints Incorruptible” prefaced by a quotation from Psalm 16.10: “Thou wilt not suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption”.

His body preserved, his finger raised in the gesture of salat … powerful.

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Four:

Another incident that has to be mentioned is when the Americans were breaking-through from the direction of the Shuhada district. The brothers in that area were few in numbers so they were attacked fiercely and their lines were nearly broken but all praise be to Allah, it started drizzling all of a sudden, and then the brothers were strengthened and encouraged. The enemy was fleeing so we did not know whether they fled because of the brothers fighting or because they saw something else. The enemy acted as though they had been frightened by something. The brothers only numbered six. The enemy was massive as they were accompanied by tank corps and armoured vehicles but their withdrawal was bizarre. At that time we remembered the verse of the Qur’an where Allah says:
 
…And sent down upon you from the sky, rain by which to purify you and remove from you the evil [suggestions] of Shaytan and to make steadfast your hearts and plant firmly thereby your feet [8: 11].

Once again, the motif of merciful rain should not be unfamiliar to us – if not from the New Testament‘s “He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” then at least from Shakespeare‘s “The quality of mercy is not strain’d, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath…”

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Five:

How many references to literary analysis, or archetypal analysis for that matter, can you find in Heuer‘s classic Psychology of Intelligence Analysis?

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

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Okay, I’d say things are heating up. Here’s a screen grab from what we are led to believe is a recent video from Iran, made with government backing as described below the fold.

This does not bode well…

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The Christian thriller novelist Joel Rosenberg (author of The Twelfth Imam) has a new blog post up, in which he cites a Christian Broadcasting Network story — which in turn refers to a video posted with some introductory materials on his blog by Reza Kahlili (author of A Time to Betray: The Astonishing Double Life of a CIA Agent Inside the Revolutionary Guards of Iran).

According to Kahlili, who has also posted the full video to YouTube, it is a half-hour long program sponsored by the Basij militia and the Office of the President of Iran, affirming the soon-return of the Mahdi.

And containing “inflammatory language” about King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (see subtitle above)? Can I say that?

For what it’s worth, the supposed “hadith” about the death of King Abdullah is discussed in some detail at The Wake-Up Project, so it’s definitely “in the air” — but I don’t recall seeing any references to it in Abbas Amanat, Abdulazziz Sachedina, or any of the lists of Signs of the Coming I’ve read, so my suspicion is that this is an opportunistic addition to the corpus rather than a reliable hadith.

Which brings me to my last point:

I am not posting these materials to encourage panic — that’s what terrorism strives for, and it is the very opposite of what I would wish to see. If anything, these stirrings of Mahdist sentiment should make us more careful and attentive to the serious scholarly work that has been done in this area. Jean-Pierre Filiu‘s book Apocalypse in Islam, which I reviewed for Jihadology, would be an excellent place to start.

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There are plenty of other things going on that I would love to track, blog about or comment on these days, but for the next while I shall try to restrain myself and focus in on this particular issue and its ramifications:

• Contemporary Shi’ite Mahdist expectation
• The Iranian nuclear program in the light of Mahdist expectation
• Iranian attempts to use Mahdism to unite Sunni and Shi’a
• Mahdism and jihad
• The role of Khorasan in Mahdist rhetoric
• Christian apocalyptic responses to Mahdist stirrings
• Joel Rosenberg‘s book, The Twelfth Imam
• Joel Richardson‘s book, The Islamic Antichrist
• Glenn Beck‘s increasing focus on Iranian Mahdism
• The increasing influence of Islamic and Christian apocalyptic on geopolitics

This is a pretty complex and potent mix of topics, and while I’ll post some individual pieces of the puzzle as I see it, I shall also try to put together a “bigger picture” piece with the whole mosaic laid out.

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Apart from that, I remain deeply committed to questions of chivalry and peace-making, and will continue to monitor developments and write what I can on those topics as time allows…

This is how I see America’s definition of victory in the current Libyan War:

Total American Victory

1) Qadaffi dead or fled and,
2) A stable successor state that is not a terrorist haven, and,
3) A democracy.

American Victory

1) Qadaffi dead or fled and,
2) A stable successor state that is not a terrorist haven.

Marginal American Victory

1) Qadaffi dead or fled and
2) Unstable state run by junta or autocrat, very anti-Israel to maintain power, hostile to Al-Qaeda.

Marginal American Defeat

1) Qadaffi dead or fled and
2) Unstable state run by junta or autocrat, very anti-Israel to maintain power, neutral to supportive of Al-Qaeda.

American Defeat

1) Qadaffi dead or fled and
2) Iranian aligned, Al-Qaeda terrorist supporting state.

Total American Defeat

1) Qadaffi survives in power, or

Special Victory Conditions:

1) America suffers total defeat if we get a 9/11/2001 class terrorist attack connected to the Libyan fighting, regardless of any other outcome.

2) Drop our victory level by one level for every successful, less than 9/11/2001 class, domestic terrorist attack linked to foreign terrorists during Libyan fighting.

3) Drop victory level by two levels if the victory requires extended commitment of a division plus (20,000) of American troops for more than a year.

This is what comes of President Obama channeling Theodore Roosevelt:

America wants Perdicaris alive, or Raisuli dead!

At about this time every year, Texans and others mark the anniversary of the siege of the Alamo (Feb 23–March 6, 1836), sometimes referred to as the thirteen days of glory.

At about the same time, for the last several years, college campuses in the U.S. and elsewhere in the western world play host to something called Israeli Apartheid Week…a very long week, apparently running from March 7 to March 20: indeed, we could (and I will) refer to it as the fourteen days of vileness.

Information and analysis concerning the 14 days of vileness can be obtained from Phyllis Chesler, CAMERA, Judith Levy, and many other sources,

Hostility toward Israel has become a defining characteristic of the “progressive” Left, and the recent NPR case shows just how acceptable anti-Israel attitudes–even extremely strident ones–have become to the mainline liberal establishment. Especially when they don’t think anyone is listening.
Read the rest of this entry »

I had occasion today to give myself a quick refresher course on honor killings, one form of which is already present in the Torah as of Leviticus 21.9:

And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.

and found myself once again noting that there is a substantial swathe of regions of the world where honor killings are found, and that where it is found (including in immigrant communities from those parts of the world) the practice is not confined to any one religious group.

Hence this DoubleQuote:

I think it is appropriate to consider honor killing a form of religious violence when the claim is made by those who do the killing that they are acting in the name of their religion — but that it is also important to distinguish such acts committed in a cultural context in which they are practiced across religions from acts that are the exclusive province of one religious tradition.

There are examples of honor killings which are performed in the name of Islam, and/or advocated by Islamic scholars — and the same could no doubt be said of other religious traditions — but honor killing as a genre is fundamentally more cultural than religious.

Sources: Brandeis study — BBC — Sydney Morning Herald

The analytic point:

From my point of view as an analyst, it is important to note and compare both religious and cultural drivers — neither avoiding mention of the one out of “correctness” — nor overlooking the other for lack of comparative data.

Two weeks ago, I posted a pessimistic piece about Egypt post Mubarak. Now, Austin Bay has posted a pretty optimistic piece that may be better informed than mine. I hope so.

My fear was stated here:

“One of the most publicized figures outside Egypt in this story the last few weeks is a Google executive who is Egyptian.

One of the western media’s favorite Egyptian rebels is Google executive Wael Ghonim. No surprise there: if you had to choose among radical clerics like al-Qaradawi, hooligans like those who assaulted Lara Logan, and a suave, Westernized Google exec, whom would you want to interview? Ghonim was present on Friday and intended to address the crowd, but he was barred from the platform by al-Qaradawi’s security. He left the stage in distress, “his face hidden by an Egyptian flag.” Is Ghonim Egypt’s Kerensky? Well, at least Kerensky got to rule for a while.”

I went on to say:

Ghonim is one more proof, as if we needed any more, that brilliance in another field is no guarantee of common sense in politics, especially revolutionary politics. We are now about to move to the next stage, which in the French Revolution ended with the Terror. In Iran, it still goes on.

Austin Bay has the advantage of two more weeks of observation of the rapidly evolving situation. He quotes Haaretz, a rather left wing Israeli newspaper that is more hopeful. Hope is not a policy but Israelis are far more interested in the situation in Egypt than we are. They have to be as they share a border.

The revolution in Egypt is far from over. The popular uprising may have succeeded in ousting president Hosni Mubarak and most of his top associates, but the young people who led the protests at Tahrir Square are certainly not resting on their laurels.

Tens of thousands returned to the square on Friday, this time demanding to shut down the internal security authority, Amn al-Dawla. By yesterday, dozens of young people had already taken over the headquarters of the organization, notorious for terrorizing Egyptian citizens under Mubarak’s rule. The takeover was prompted by fears that organization officials were destroying evidence of their involvement in torture and other human rights violations.

This may be good news but I keep going back to the French Revolution, which set the standards for all revolutions to come.

Until the election, both Israeli and international observers agree Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, chairman of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, remains the key authority in Cairo. The mission facing Tantawi and his generals is to take Egypt safely through a transition period that will culminate with the establishment of civilian and democratic rule. The army is maneuvering between the establishment it knows well and the street, a new and not yet entirely familiar player.

The Army is the best hope for Egypt, as it has been for Turkey. A key factor in our failure to do better in Afghanistan is the fact that a crude and stupid Congressional reaction to the news that Pakistan had a nuclear bomb was to cut off all contact between Pakistan’s army and ours. That was nearly fatal as there are few ties between Pakistani officers and the US army, which are usually established as junior officers. These contacts were abolished by a Congress that knows little about foreign relations, especially those not published in the New York Times.

If we finally have to leave Afghanistan under unsatisfactory conditions, much of the failure should be attributed to Congress and its crude attempts to manage US policy it knows little about.

The following is good news, if true.

The Muslim Brotherhood, meanwhile, is seen as the opposition body most prepared for a general election, but the chances it will seize power are seen by Egyptians as slim. Most observers believe that the Brotherhood will assume a similar position to the ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel, influencing the government but not leading it.

Just keep remembering that the Kerensky government thought it had the Bolsheviks under control in 1917. Bay is still optimistic for another unusual reason.

The article argues that “the real power belongs to the young people [in Egypt] who managed to change political reality.” Media in Israel are missing “the generational shift taking place in Egypt and perhaps the entire Arab world.”

But once again back to Haaretz, this time on the Muslim Brotherhood. Yes, it will be a factor but “the chances it will seize power are seen by Egyptians as slim. Most observers believe that the Brotherhood will assume a similar position to the ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel, influencing the government but not leading it.” Interesting analogy. Remember, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is factionalized — but so are ultra-Orthodox Israeli parties.

We will see. I hope he is right. Unfortunately, Turkey is slipping into Islamist hands as the AKP party continues to arrest army officers on phony charges.

Here are Annie and her mother in an Istanbul restaurant. Everybody spoke English and were more than courteous.

I have tried to explain to my daughter Annie how the friendly Turks, who did so much to make her visit to Istanbul pleasant, want to arrest large numbers of Army officers, like the one who gave her a tour of the Scutari Barracks, a major Army headquarters.

This officer is a major, spoke English perfectly and gave her a tour.

I guess I will have to do a post on the history of Turkey for her. She certainly wouldn’t learn anything about it in college. She was 14 when those photos were taken. I wonder if the Turks would be as friendly now. I suspect they are because we were in Istanbul, the westernized and secular part of Turkey.

I hope Egypt will learn a lesson from Ataturk, who is still revered in Turkey, at least modern Turkey.

UPDATE: I am not at all surprised by this. If Gadafi can hold out in Tripoli, I could see Egypt carve off the eastern section as it has the largest Libyan oil fields and the lowest population. The Libyans might choose to be Egyptians if necessary.

[Cross-posted from zenpundit.com]

J. Scott Shipman, the owner of a boutique consulting firm in the Metro DC area that is putting Col. John Boyd’s ideas into action, is a longtime friend of zenpundit.com and Chicago Boyz and an occasional guest-poster. Scott has an important report regarding the “war of ideas” against the Islamist-Takfirist enemy in Afghanistan after attending a workshop hosted by DARPA.

DARPA, STORyNet and the Fate of the War

by J. Scott Shipman

I had the opportunity to attend a DARPA workshop yesterday called STORyNet. The purpose was to survey narrative theories, to better understand the role of narrative in security contexts, and to survey the state of the art in narrative analysis and decomposition tools (see below):
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[ by Charles Cameron - cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

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The description of Egyptian troops attacking a Christian monastery that forms the first quote in this DoubleQuote is horrifying in many ways.

Recent events in Egypt had featured mutual support between Muslims and their Coptic Christian neighbors, each group in turn acting as human shields to protect the other while they were praying. Here, by contrast, the army – which is effectively now “ruling” Egypt in the interregnum between the fall of Mubarak and the election of a new President and government – is attacking the humans it is supposed to protect.

But what does that have to do with Bach?

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Part I: a monastery attacked in Egypt

This is vile.

Those who are being attacked happen to be Christians and monks, no less human on either account, and just as subject to bleeding as others – so they might ask, with Shakespeare‘s Shylock speaking for the Jews:

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

That last question of Shylock’s is an interesting one, and gets to the heart of what I want to discuss here, as we shall see.

Specifically, these human beings were monks. Muhammad had a higher opinion of monks than of many others. In the Qur’an, we find:

The nearest to the faithful are those who say “We are Christians.” That is because there are priests and monks among them and because they are free of pride.

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Sigh.

These “followers” of Muhammad were attacking Christian monks with live ammunition and RPGs continuously for 30 minutes, wounding 19.

They felt superior to their compatriots the monks, they cried “God is Great” and “Victory, Victory” as they did it.

In this they resemble GEN Boykin, who famously responded to a Somali warlord claiming that God would protect him, “Well, you know what? I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”

I could easily have made that my second quote here, pairing it with the description of the Egyptian army attack on the monastery, for between the two of them they raise the question of whether weaponry is stronger than belief – and while some Christians might agree with General Boykin, some Muslims might agree no less strongly with the members of the Egyptian military shouting “Allahu Akbar”.

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I believe that taking sides here misses the point.

Which I am happy to say, Abraham Lincoln made with considerable eloquence in his Second Inaugural Address in 1865, almost a century and a half ago:

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

That point is one which HaShem made to his angels, according to rabbinic teaching:

The Talmud teaches us that on the night that the Egyptian army drowned in the Red Sea, the first true moment of freedom for the Jews fleeing Egypt, God refused to hear the angels sing their prayers, and said “my creations are drowning in the sea, and you will sing songs?”

So, no — revenge is not the way to go…

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But please note that the point I am making is not one of moral equivalence.

That God which created “both sides” in any human conflict and loves each and every one of his own creations, might indeed find one creed superior to another, as he might find one scientific law more accurately describing the workings of, say, gravitational attraction than another – or the night sky at Saint-Rémy portrayed by Van Gogh more or less moving than the thunderous sky over Toledo of El Greco.

In the view I am proposing, the “God who takes neither side” in fact takes both, but with this distinction: he sides with the wounded more than with those who inflict wounds – not because one side has a better creed than the other, but because he made us to learn not to unmercifully maim and destroy one another…

…one of whose names is The Merciful, in whose scriptures it is written:

If thou dost stretch thy hand against me, to slay me, it is not for me to stretch my hand against thee to slay thee: for I do fear Allah, the cherisher of the worlds.

…one of whose names is The Lord is Peace, in whose scriptures it is written:

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

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Part II: Bach and contrapuntal analysis

All of which brings me to the second “quote” in my DoubleQuote above: JS Bach‘s “concordia discors” canon in two voices, BWV 1086 – which you can hear or purchase here.

Bach’s mastery was in counterpoint, the play of one musical idea against another, and in this particular work, the two ideas are exact opposite: in musical terms, the melody is played here against its inversion. And the point of counterpoint, if I may put it that way, is not to provide “harmony” but to show how discord can become harmonious and concordant — or to put that in the geopolitical terms that interest me, how conflict and opposition can be resolved…

Not, you understand, that this state of affairs then leads necessarily to the singing of Kumbaya or the kind of ending in which “they all lived happily ever after”.

Concordia discors: the resolution of the present conflict, in a continuing overall “music” of great power and beauty, in which further conflicts will inevitably arise and find resolution.

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Here’s the essence: Bach takes contrasting and at times conflicting melodic ideas and makes music.

He teaches us to hear distinct and differing voices, to allow ourselves to hear and feel both the discomfort that their disagreements raise in us, and the satisfaction that comes as those disagreements are worked out. He does this by teaching us to hear them as voices within a choir, ribbons in a complex braid, making together a greater music that any of them alone could give rise to. And in this process, their differences are neither denied nor lost, but resolved and transcended.

Edward Said, whose politics my readers may dislike or like or even perhaps be unaware of, was for years the music critic for The Nation, wrote three books (and an opus posthumous) on music, and with his friend the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, named for the West-östlicher Diwan, Goethe’s collection of lyric poems.

Barenboim (the Israeli) wrote of Said (the Palestinian):

In addition to being well versed in music, literature, philosophy, and the understanding of politics, he was one of those rare people who sought and recognized the connections between different and seemingly disparate disciplines. His unusual understanding of the human spirit and of the human being was perhaps a consequence of his revelatory construct that parallels between ideas, topics, and cultures can be of a paradoxical nature, not contradicting but enriching one another.

And there we have it again: Bach’s insight, this time transposed by an accomplished musician into the key of thoughts and ideas…

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Said talks quite a bit about counterpoint, both musically:

Musically, I’m very interested in contrapuntal writing, and contrapuntal forms. The kind of complexity that is available, aesthetically, to the whole range from consonant to dissonant, the tying together of multiple voices in a kind of disciplined whole, is something that I find tremendously appealing.

[Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 99.]

and politically:

When you think about it, when you think about Jew and Palestinian not separately, but as part of a symphony, there is something magnificently imposing about it. A very rich, also very tragic, also in many ways desperate history of extremes — opposites in the Hegelian sense — that is yet to receive its due. So what you are faced with is a kind of sublime grandeur of a series of tragedies, of losses, of sacrifices, of pain that would take the brain of a Bach to figure out. It would require the imagination of someone like Edmund Burke to fathom.

[Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 447.]

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As I commented in an earlier post that ties in with this one, the great pianist Glenn Gould was also preoccupied with counterpoint, both in Bach’s music and in conversations overheard at a truck-stop cafe or on long train journeys — he too was “working” the parallel between melodic and verbal forms of counterpoint.

And JRR Tolkien made the reconciliation of discordant musics in a greater concord the central to his creation myth in The Silmarillion, “The Music of the Ainur”, which can now be read online at the Random House site.

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Part III: invitation

May I strongly commend to your attention the movie, Of Gods and Men, which just opened in limited release, having won the grand jury prize at Cannes…

Brendan O’Neill quotes journalist John Pilger:

“Until the Palestinians are given back their rights we’re going to have instability throughout the Middle East,” declared John Pilger on ABC1′s Q&A last night. “That is central to everything.”

O’Neill responds:

Yet, one of the most striking things about the uprising in Egypt was the lack of pro-Palestine placards. As Egypt-watcher Amr Hamzawy put it, in Tahrir Square and elsewhere there were no signs saying “death to Israel, America and global imperialism” or “together to free Palestine.” Instead, this revolt was about Egyptian people’s own freedom and living conditions.

This reveals something important about the Palestine issue. . . . [It] has become less important for Arabs and of the utmost symbolic importance for Western radicals at exactly the same time.

I’m not so sure O’Neill is right about the lack of anti-Israel sentiment among the Egyptian revolutionaries and elsewhere in the Arab world—I certainly hope so, but have seen several items pointing in the opposite direction. For example, USA Today reported that “the top leaders of the protest movement that toppled the regime of Hosni Mubarak” have demanded that the government cut off the flow of natural gas to Israel, on grounds that “the Zionist entity” is mistreating those same Palestinians. I’m not all that positive that USA Today or anyone else can clearly identify “the top leaders of the protest movement” so clearly at this point in time, but this report is surely grounds for serious concern about the attitude of the emerging Egyptian government toward Israel. And here is a very disturbing report about anti-Semitism in Tunisia. Again, I hope O’Neill is right about declining anti-Israel sentiment in the Arab world, but I have my doubts.

O’Neill is clearly correct, though, about his other point: the absolute centrality of the anti-Israel (“pro-Palestinian”) cause to the leftist movement throughout the western world.
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This is the second of two posts dealing with less widely-known figures in the Middle East who may yet have significant impact, at a time when most media focus is on nations and rulers rather than on religious figures who have been locked away in prison for years…

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

Fouad Ajami’s The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon was among the first books I read about matters Islamic, and the close parallel between the vanishing of Musa al-Sadr and the vanishing — or, more properly speaking, Ghayba or occultation — of the Twelfth Imam or Mahdi struck me forcibly at the time.

I don’t have my copy to hand, so I can’t tell how strongly Ajami himself made the comparison — but I was certainly not alone. Daniel Pipes, in his review of Ajami’s book writes:

What made the Imam’s vanishing so significant is that it exactly fit the millennial expectations of Shiism, a faith premised on the disappearance of righteous leaders and their reappearance at the end of time.

And now it may be — the report has yet to be confirmed — that Imam Musa is back among us.

@rallaf is an Associate Fellow at London’s Chatham House.

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The mind sees one thing, which reminds it of something else. It’s the oldest trick in the book, and it depends on the recognition of pattern, or you might say, parallelism.

The return of Imam Musa would be significant not merely for his admirers, not only for what he might have to say or what role — now aged 82, after 30 years in prison — he might yet play, but also, I suspect, for the vivid premonition of the Mahdi his return might stir…

This is the first of two posts dealing with less widely-known figures in the Middle East who may yet have significant impact, at a time when most media focus is on nations and rulers rather than on religious figures who have been locked away in prison for years…

[ cross-posted with a minor update from Zenpundit where it appeared a week ago ]

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Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, popularly known as Dr Fadl, wrote two of the key works of jihadist ideology, The Essential Guide for Preparation and the thousand-page Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge, in the late 1980s — thereby providing his friend from student days, Ayman al-Zawahiri, with powerful scholarly backing for the doctrines of militant jihad and takfirism. Lawrence Wright refers to Fadl as an “Al-Qaeda mastermind” in a detailed 2008 New Yorker analysis.

Dr Fadl was imprisoned without trial in the Yemen shortly after 9/11, but it was after he had been transferred to an Egyptian prison in 2004 that he wrote Rationalizing Jihad, the first volume of his “retractions” — a work so powerful in its attack on his own earlier jihadist doctrine that al-Zawahiri felt obliged to respond with a two-hundred page letter of rebuttal. A second volume from Dr. Fadl followed more recently.

Here’s the point: as far as we (the “open source reading” public) know, Dr Fadl remains in Tora Istikbal prison in Egypt, and thus far it has been possible for Al-Qaida and others to argue that his “retractions” were the result of coercion.

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In recent days, however, Egypt has been in considerable flux.

There were reports before the fall of Mubarak of prisoners being liberated or escaping from prison — either as part of the revolution, or alternatively to supply Mubarak with groups of paid thugs who could attack the demonstrators. More recently, the freeing of political prisoners has been one of the demands the demonstrators have made of the military, and it is here that Robert Fisk’s report in The Independent today fits in:

As for the freeing of political prisoners, the military has remained suspiciously silent. Is this because there are prisoners who know too much about the army’s involvement in the previous regime? Or because escaped and newly liberated prisoners are returning to Cairo and Alexandria from desert camps with terrible stories of torture and executions by – so they say – military personnel. An Egyptian army officer known to ‘The Independent’ insisted yesterday that the desert prisons were run by military intelligence units who worked for the interior ministry – not for the ministry of defence.

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Every major act on the world stage has consequences that ripple out in unexpected directions.

If Dr Fadl regains his liberty, the question arises whether he will claim his critiques of jihadist dictrine were obtained by force, and effectively retract his retractions – or whether he will stand by them, as I somehow expect he might — still declaring, this time as a free man, that “There is nothing that invokes the anger of God and His wrath like the unwarranted spilling of blood and wrecking of property,” and “There is nothing in the Sharia about killing Jews and the Nazarenes, referred to by some as the Crusaders. They are the neighbors of the Muslims … and being kind to one’s neighbors is a religious duty.”

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I haven’t seen any discussion of this question in the western press, and it was only a tweeted nudge from Leah Farrall on January 31 that set me thinking about Dr Fadl, and the questions that his possible release from prison might raise.

Is he free? Will he be freed? If he is, what will he say?

Whichever tack he takes, his statements will have impact.

And as Leah points out, there are parallels between Dr Fadl’s critique of al-Qaeda and that of Abu Walid al-Masri — which just gives me further reason to be interested in what we might hear next from either one.

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UPDATE:

On February 19th the researcher and author Evan Kohlmann @IntelTweet tweeted:

Groups of hardline jihadists have reportedly escaped from at least three Egyptian prisons: Wadi al-Natrun, Al-Tura, and Wadi al-Hadid.

As far as I know, Dr Fadl was in the "Scorpion" high security section of al-Tura / Tora.
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I’ll update here or in a new post if I learn more.

Richard Fernandez:

Why would anyone believe, even for a moment, that any Western state could “pre-emptively” nuke the Muslim world when it cannot muster the will to secure its borders, balance its budget, get Pakistan to release a diplomat or get Argentina to release a C-17′s cargo load of equipment? That would be like thinking that man who can’t run 50 yards can run the 100 meter dash in 9.5 seconds.
 
The path to nukes is far more probably going to take the path of use in desperation. And in fact a country which secured its borders, drilled for its own oil, got Pakistan to release diplomats, and did the normal things would be the only kind of country which might use nukes pre-emptively because it conceive of such a strategy. Yet ironically it would be the kind of country that wouldn’t have to attack pre-emptively. The idea of country going straight from supine behavior to nuking pre-emptively is a fantasy built on the awareness of weakness. Solve the weakness and then your enemies will consider you capable of pre-emption. But guess what: solve the weakness and you won’t have to pre-empt. They will back away.
 
This is all elementary game theory; and tried, true and hoary deterrence theory. Be strong and you won’t need to use nukes. Be weak and you’ll use them for sure.
 
The problem of radical Islam is the problem of Western weakness. That is the problem to which the policy nuking Muslims is an impertinent answer. Who’s going to do it? Obama? And yet if Obama lost the next election in favor of someone who might actually resist, then the probability of having to pre-empt declines dramatically.
 
The logical problem is that any strategy which requires pre-emptively nuking the Islamic world implies a President who is too weak to do it anyway. But that doesn’t mean it might not happen. As I’ve argued ad nauseam, the biggest danger to nuclear use, in both the Israeli and general Western case, is via the act in desperation.
 
As long as Israel’s strategic position is strong, it will not unleash the nukes. But only in its dying gasp will that be certain. So what do the geniuses at State do? Bring Israel to the point of strategic death.
 
For the same reasons, the weaker Obama makes America the more its enemies are emboldened. Yet this does not bring pre-emption closer. That becomes more and more unthinkable until the last push, when desperation takes hold. Then the probabilities go from near zero to near 1.
 
The Pakistanis and even the rapists in Tahrir Square are testing, testing. And they are finding no resistance. Therefore they will push and sooner or later, they will push too far. Why not since no stop signal will be received from the Smartest Man in the World.
 
Then when things go too far, desperation, not calculation, will unleash the Apocalypse. It’s happened before. In 1939. It’s not impossible, just conveniently forgotten. The Western elite are like the Bourbons, who remember everything and have learned nothing.

Geert Wilders, the Dutchman who is Parliamentary Leader of that country’s Party for Freedom, is currently being prosecuted for “incitement to hatred and discrimination” owing to things he has said about Islam. Rick Darby has an eloquent post in which he excerpts several passages from Wilders’ statement to the court. Note especially:

The lights are going out all over Europe. All over the continent where our culture flourished and where man created freedom, prosperity and civilization. The foundation of the West is under attack everywhere…My trial is not an isolated incident. Only fools believe it is. All over Europe multicultural elites are waging total war against their populations.

Be sure to read Rick’s entire post. See also Robert Spencer, who says:

If the farrago of “hate” charges against Wilders stick, and he is convicted, it will herald the end of the freedom of speech in the West, as a precedent will have been set that other Western nations (urged on by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which is the organization most responsible for the global assault on free speech) will be certain to follow. The era of enlightenment and the understanding that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights will be definitively drawing to a close, and a new darkness will descend over Europe and the free world in general.

Sadly, this sort of thing is not limited to the Netherlands. In Austria, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is being prosecuted under “hate speech” laws for her statements about Islam–many of them based on citations of the Koran and the hadiths–and is facing up to 3 years in prison.
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Here’s the evidence I’m seeing for one hopeful outcome…

From an Egyptian FaceBook page:

I will NOT accept that religious groups hijack what we have been doing for their own agenda. A large group of the ones organizing them yesterday were people in galabeyas and long beards shouting “Al Jihad fe Sabeel Allah (Jihad in the name of Allah), you have to continue fighting, we will win this war, if you die here today, you will be a martyr and go straight to heaven, don’t stop, fight, fight, fight”. NO! This is NOT why we were in the streets on Friday being tear gassed and dodging rubber bullets and it is not why we have been going to Tahrir everyday to be heard. The reason why this revolt went through and became successful was because it was not religiously or politically charged.
 
quoted on the The International Centre For The Study Of Radicalisation blog – ICSR is a joint venture between King’s College London, the University of Pennsylvania, Israel’s Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, and the Jordan Institute of Diplomacy.

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This DoubleQuote first presents a jihadist spin on things, from a legal team member at Minbar al-Tawhid wa’l-Jihad, in Quote #1:

Below that, and lending it both context and irony, is a comment from one of our best analysts of the situation in the Yemen, a former editor for the Yemen Observer.

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John Robb gives the same general message a little strategic push…

What’s the best way to defuse Islamic radicalism across the ME and beyond? Help make the protest in Egypt work.

Sources: ICSR — Shanqiti — O’Neill — Robb Feb. 3, 2011.

Television is providing, as usual during momentous events, all noise and no signal, plus random images which may or may not be intelligible.

Today, while I was not watching TV, I finished John O’Sullivan‘s book about Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II. It is a very good book, about an important period in our history. Reagan and Thatcher and John Paul II were heroic figures, and they are under relentless attack by the people who hold the commanding heights of the media, the academy and the entertainment industry. The relentless tide of their lies eventually effaces, and replaces the truth, though we do have other options these days and things may be getting better. (O’Sullivan figures prominently in Richard Brookhiser’s book about William F. Buckley, which I devoured last weekend, also very good.)

It was a better use of my time than watching blather about Egypt from people who don’t know any more than I do about it.

Blogs are a little better but not much. All kinds of conventional wisdom seems to bloom and wither and rebloom based on not much of anything. The only person I see who seems to have anything interesting to say is John Robb, e.g. this: this and this. But I don’t know if he is just guessing, either.

And just today, a book came in the mail, which I got for one cent + plus postage: To War with Whitaker: Wartime Diaries of the Countess of Ranfurly, 1939-45, which I read a rave review of somewhere. I opened the package, opened the book at random, and saw this diary entry for 3 November, 1940:

“My name,” he said, “is Wingate, Orde Wingate. I am going south in five days’ time. I shall raise a revolt in Abyssinia. First I shall go to Khartoum — the Emperor is there. Then I shall drop behind the lines and stay there till, with the aid of the Abyssinians and my small force, we can overthrow the Italians. Now I want you to come as my secretary — you can type, do shorthand, cope with signals?”
 
I nodded.
 
“Can you ride, and speak French?”
 
I nodded again.
 
“You might have to be dropped by parachute — you wouldn’t mind that?”
 
“Not if I am supplied with the right kind of underwear,” I laughed.
 
“Lady Ranfurly, I must have an English secretary. There are none to be found in the Middle East. Will you come and help me? Can you be ready by Tuesday? You will be back in six months.”

Who could turn down a job offer like that? I will soon find out what happens. This one is going to the top of the pile.

The only thing that compares to the benefits of not having a TV is deactivating a Facebook account. One month Facebook free. I liked it, I like my FB friends. But it was taking up way too much time.

Someone posted a slightly longer version of the interview with Khaled Hamza, the webmaster of the Muslim Brotherhood, as a comment on an earlier post of mine here on ChicagoBoyz, and it was removed by admin since it had no direct connection to the post in question – but I was interested enough to track the original interview down, and have presented the key points of the excerpt here in Quote #1.

I am pairing it, in Quote #2, with an excerpt from an interview the BBC recently conducted with Mortimer Zuckerman – because I find the two quotes taken together suggest something of the complexity of the breaking situation in the Middle East.

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I’d like to float a trial balloon / try a though experiment, if I might. And since I’m more “tail” than “left” or “right wing”, I’ll be posting this in more than one place, and hope to get comments from all sides…

On the face of it, Zuckeman is applying what’s arguably a racist double-standard. He advocates democracy, “totally” and “without question” – but not for the Egyptians, or at least not today or tomorrow.

On the face of it, the Egyptian public seems distinctly unenthused by Mubarak’s regime and will, in a democratic election, presumably vote in a fair number of Muslim Brotherhood representatives – though it’s by no means clear that they would be in the majority, and their present ideology in any case is closer to the processes of electoral politics than those of violent jihad.

So there is reason for Israel to be concerned, and reason for those who support democracy to see some hope for democracy, in the ongoing events in Egypt.

Let me put it this way: Quote #1 illustrates why Zuckerman might make the remarks quoted in Quote #2, while Quote #2 illuminates why Hamza might make the remarks quoted in Quote #1.

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And here’s the thought experiment — I’d like to come at this from a Maslovian angle.

 
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

I’d like to suggest that “democracy” is an ideal, or to get away from that word with its somewhat ambiguous political connotations, an activity of the “the better angels of our nature” – and thus, from a Maslovian perspective, an aspect of a group or nation’s “self-actualization” level of interest, whereas “stability” would fall under “safety” or even “physiological”.

If that’s right, Zuckerman is at least arguably articulating a “stability first, eventual democracy would be ideal” position.

Does that “Maslovian” formulation throw any additional light on the situation?

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The problem with the position I just described is nicely articulated by Mohammad Fadel at the very end of a Foreign Policy post, Can Black Swans lead to a sustainable Arab-Israeli peace? — and it’s only his conclusion I’m quoting here:

Tunisia and Egypt have demonstrated categorically that any peace which relies on the stability of police states is doomed from the outset.

If a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can in theory cause a tornado in Texas – heaven alone knows what someone blinking in Cairo or Jerusalem or Washington can do.

Myself, I pray for empathy, which seems a reasonable request, I hope for wisdom, which seems a great deal more chancy — and I long for peace.

In the current environment of hatred and mistrust, that seems entirely beyond the capacity of anyone’s present thinking to achieve.

[ cross-posted from Brainstormers on the Web ]

For location / background, see Helena Cobban, Tactical deployment of Muslim prayer in nonviolence.

The image is from the middle of this YouTube video — you can see the prayers begin around the 3.25 mark, and the ending is also worth watching, as Cobban notes.