Middle East

Return of the Vanished Imam?

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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 ]

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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…

Will Dr Fadl retract his Retractions?

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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.

Gene Sharp

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit, with thanks to Lex for the nudge ]

I was impressed by him in London in the early sixties.

Okay, I was young and impressionable. But others have noticed him more recently, too: Hugo Chavez accused him of being a conspirator with the CIA, and the Iranians thought he, George Soros and John McCain were in cahoots.

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Gene Sharp has been in the news quite a bit recently [1, 2, 3, 4], because he pretty literally wrote the book on non-violent resistance.

The young leaders of the Egyptian revolt that toppled Mubarak studied tactics with members of the Serbian Otpor youth resistance who topped Milosevic, Otpor studied tactics in the writings of Gene Sharp, specifically his 90-page pamphlet From Dictatorship to Democracy [download as .pdf]. Sharp wrote that handbook for use in Burma, where it was apparently translated at the request of Aung San Suu Kyi — who once cautioned her readers that that phrase they kept hearing wasn’t “jeans shirt”, it was “Gene Sharp”.

And before that, he’d penned his masterful 900-page, three-volume work, The Politics of Nonviolent Action…

I told you he was impressive.

Recommended reading:

From Dictatorship to Democracy is now available in Amharic, Arabic, Azeri, Belarusian, Burmese, Chin (Burma), Jing-paw (Burma), Karen (Burma), Mon (Burma), Chinese (Simplified Mandarin), Chinese (Traditional Mandarin), English, Farsi, French, Indonesian, Khmer (Cambodia), Kyrgyz, Pashto, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Ukrainian, Tibetan, Tigrigna, and Vietnamese.

Gaddafi Loses Benghazi; Expat Workers Attacked

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The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were mere warm-ups; the revolution in Libya definitely looks more like a civil war. The city of Benghazi has apparently fallen to the protesters – they raised the old tri-color flag prior to Gaddafi’s takeover (which is just a green flag, apparently the only flag in the world with no additional markings).

I am not an expert on Libya by a long shot but apparently the tribes in the region near Benghazi have now said Gaddafi must go so it is unclear how the government could conceivably re-take the area short of a concentrated military campaign. The history of Libya under Gaddafi is littered with military adventures of this sort that turned out disastrously (see the Chad war) so it seems highly unlikely that this is in the cards.

Little is verified but it appears that soldiers were executed for failing to shoot protesters and likely much more will come out now that the city has been taken over by the insurgents.

In Tripoli there are major reports of heavy violence including the use of sniper units to kill protesters and thugs just driving around and shooting out of cars and running people over; also in calls sounds of rocket fire and heavy weapons.

It is telling to me at least that the government is now saying that the West wants to “take over” Libya including the Turks and the Italians; I guess they played out the Zionist card.

The other element is that apparently expat workers from South Korea, Bangladesh and Turkey were attacked by mobs. These workers were in Libya likely on construction projects in support of the oil industry. Like the BP spill, the major companies have likely under-estimated the chance of a major conflagration and the danger to their staff on the ground in being caught in the midst of a civil war.

Finally, for humor there is an Al Jazeera editorial blaming the West for all of this “Has West Failed to See Inevitability of Freedom” which blames the US and the West for the fact that the Arab world is ruled by despots and dictators. I was waiting for the inevitable “spin” of how all the Arab world’s problems come from the West and not from within their own sphere of influence and I am sure that this is the first of many; actions on the ground are moving faster than their ability to spin stories.

I also would like to see how these stories play out among the youth (over half the population is under 20) who have known nothing but oppression at the hands of their fellow Arabs and they know that the dictators that run the country and their families walk away with all the value from their oil and other resources. Colonialism is as distant to them as the US civil war is to us; generations away. And not only that, Colonialism and the West have always been the “whipping boy” for why repression is needed in the first place, so that argument is completely played out. But expect to see variants of this coming in the next days, months, and years. And for many Western journalists to write them, as well.

Gaddafi the Innovator

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I generally do not link an old-school dictator like Gaddafi with innovation but here is one in my book from the Al Jazeera live blog:

He also provides another account of security forces using high-caliber, possibly anti-aircraft guns against protesters.

In other posts the doctors mentioned seeing bullets “as big as their fists” in the dead and wounded that they are treating.

I am unaware of any other incidents in recent times when the army began directing high caliber high velocity weapons like this against (unarmed) protesters. I have seen water cannons, tear gas, and then escalating to small arms fire but using these sorts of weapons against civilians from your own nation is truly an innovation by Mr. Gaddafi.

As a commenter noted on my last post Gaddafi is on the United Nations Human Rights Council as you can see here. I would be interested in how directing anti-aircraft weaponry against unarmed protesters plays in the UN – probably not a big deal there, I would imagine.