Rejoice not…’

May 31, 2011

Americans celebrate bin Laden’s death

In the western world, few will mourn Osama bin Laden but god forbid that anyone should gloat

Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth, Lest the Lord see [it], and it displease him, and he turn away his wrath from him.”

This is one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible (Proverbs 24:17-18), and indeed in the Hebrew language. It is beautiful in other languages too though no translation comes close to the beauty of the original.

Of course, it is natural to be glad when one’s enemy is defeated, and the thirst for revenge is a human trait. But gloating – schadenfreude – is something different altogether. An ugly thing.

Ancient Hebrew legend has it that god got very angry when the children of Israel rejoiced as their Egyptian pursuers drowned in the Red Sea. “My creatures are drowning in the sea,” god admonished them, “And you are singing?”

These thoughts crossed my mind when I saw the TV shots of jubilant crowds of young Americans shouting and dancing in the street. Natural, but unseemly. The contorted faces and the aggressive body language were no different from those of crowds in Sudan or Somalia. The ugly sides of human nature seem to be the same everywhere.

The rejoicing may be premature. Most probably, al-Qaeda did not die with Osama bin Laden. The effect may be entirely different.

In 1942 the British killed Avraham Stern, whom they called a terrorist. Stern, whose nom de guerre was Yair, was hiding in a cupboard in an apartment in Tel Aviv. In his case too, it was the movements of his courier that gave him away. After making sure that he was the right man, the British police officer in command shot him dead. That was not the end of his group – rather, a new beginning. It became the bane of British rule in Palestine. Known as the “Stern Gang” (its real name was “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel”), it carried out the most daring attacks on British installations and played a significant role in persuading the colonial power to leave the country.

Hamas did not die when the Israeli air force killed Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the paralysed founder, ideologue and symbol of Hamas. As a martyr, he was far more effective than as a living leader. His martyrdom attracted many new fighters to the cause. Killing a person does not kill an idea. The Christians even took the cross as their symbol.

What was the idea that turned Osama bin Laden into a world figure?

He preached the restoration of the caliphate of the early Muslim centuries, which was not only a huge empire but also a centre of the sciences and the arts, poetry and literature when Europe was still a barbaric, medieval continent. Every Arab child learns about these glories and cannot but contrast them with the sorry Muslim present. (In a way, these longings parallel the Zionist romantics’ dreams of a resurrected kingdom of David and Solomon.)

A new caliphate in the 21st century is as unlikely as the wildest creation of the imagination. It would have been diametrically opposed to the zeitgeist were it not for its opponents – the Americans. They needed this dream – or nightmare – more than the Muslims themselves.

The American empire always needs an antagonist to keep it together and to focus its energies. This has to be a worldwide enemy, a sinister advocate of an evil philosophy. Such were the Nazis and Imperial Japan but they did not last long.

Fortunately, there was then the Communist empire which filled the role admirably. There were Communists everywhere. All of them were plotting the downfall of freedom, democracy and the United States of America. They were even lurking inside the US, as J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joe McCarthy so convincingly demonstrated. For decades the US flourished in the fight against the Red Menace; its forces spread all over the world, its spaceships reached the moon, its best minds engaged in a titanic battle of ideas, the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness.

And then – suddenly – the whole thing collapsed. Soviet power vanished as if it had never existed. The American spy agencies, with their tremendous capabilities, were flabbergasted. Apparently, they had no idea how ramshackle the Soviet structure actually was. How could they see, blinded as they were by their own ideological preconceptions?

The disappearance of the Communist Threat left a gaping void in the American psyche, which cried out to be filled. Osama bin Laden kindly offered his services.

What was the idea that turned Osama bin Laden into a world figure? A new caliphate in the 21st century is as unlikely as the wildest creation of the imagination. It would have been diametrically opposed to the zeitgeist were it not for its opponents – the Americans. They needed this dream – or nightmare – more than the Muslims themselves

It needed, of course, a world-shaking event to lend credibility to such a hare-brained utopia. The 9/11 outrage was just such an event. It produced many changes in the American way of life. And a new global enemy.

Overnight, medieval anti-Islamic prejudices are dusted off for display. Islam the terrible, the murderous, the fanatical. Islam the anti-democratic, the anti-freedom, anti-all-our-values: Suicide bombers, 72 virgins, jihad.

The US springs to life again. Soldiers, spies and special forces fan out across the globe to fight terrorism. Bin Laden is everywhere. The War Against Terrorism is an apocalyptic struggle with Satan. American freedoms have to be protected; the US military machine grows by leaps and bounds. Power-hungry intellectuals babble about the Clash of Civilisations and sell their souls for instant celebrity.

To produce the lurid paint for such a twisted picture of reality, religious Islamic groups are all thrown into the same pot – the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Ayatollahs in Iran, Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, Indonesian separatists, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere, whoever. All become al-Qaeda despite the fact that each has a totally different agenda, focused on its own country, while bin Laden aims to abolish all Muslim states and create one Holy Islamic Empire. Details, details.

The Holy War against the Jihad finds warriors everywhere. Ambitious demagogues, for whom this promises an easy way to inflame the masses, spring up in many countries, from France to Finland, from Holland to Italy. The hysteria of Islamophobia displaces good old anti-Semitism, using almost the same language. Tyrannical regimes present themselves as bulwarks against al-Qaeda, as they had once presented themselves as bulwarks against communism. And, of course, our own Binyamin Netanyahu milks the situation for all it is worth, travelling from capital to capital, peddling his wares of anti-Islamism.

Bin Laden had good reason to be proud, and probably was.

When I saw his picture for the first time, I joked that he was not a real person but an actor straight from Hollywood’s Central Casting. He looked too good to be true – exactly as he would appear in a Hollywood movie – a handsome man, with a long black beard, posing with a Kalashnikov. His appearances on TV were carefully staged.

Actually, he was a very incompetent terrorist, a real amateur. No genuine terrorist would have lived in a conspicuous villa which stood out in the landscape like a sore thumb. Stern was hiding in a small roof apartment in a squalid quarter of Tel Aviv. Menachem Begin lived with his wife and son in a very modest ground floor apartment, playing the role of a reclusive rabbi.

Bin Laden’s villa was bound to attract the attention of neighbours and other people. They would have been curious about this mysterious stranger in their midst. Actually, he should have been discovered long ago. He was unarmed and did not put up a fight. The decision to kill him on the spot and dump his body in the sea was evidently taken long before.

So there is no grave, no holy tomb. But for millions of Muslims, and especially Arabs, he was and remains a source of pride, an Arab hero, the “lion of lions”, as a preacher in Jerusalem called him. Almost no one dared to come out and say so openly, for fear of the Americans, but even those who thought his ideas impractical and his actions harmful respected him in their hearts.

Does that mean that al-Qaeda has a future? I don’t think so. It belongs to the past – not because bin Laden has been killed but because his central idea is obsolete.

The Arab Spring embodies a new set of ideals, a new enthusiasm, one that does not glorify and hanker after a distant past but looks boldly to the future. The young men and women of Tahrir Square, with their longing for freedom, have consigned bin Laden to history months before his physical death. His philosophy has a future only if the Arab Awakening fails completely and leaves behind a profound sense of disappointment and despair.

In the western world, few will mourn him but god forbid that anyone should gloat.

This article was posted on the website of the peace bloc Gush Shalom on May 7, 2011; http://zope.gush-shalom.org

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden

Dead and alive

May 31, 2011

Osama bin Laden’s American legacy

Back in the 1960s Senator George Aiken of Vermont offered two American presidents a plan for dealing with the Vietnam war: declare victory and go home. Roundly ignored at the time, it is a plan worth considering again today for a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan now in its 10th year.

As everybody not blind, deaf and dumb knows by now, Osama bin Laden has been eliminated. Literally. By Navy Seals. Or, as one of a crowd of revellers who appeared in front of the White House on May 1 put it, on an impromptu sign riffing on The Wizard of Oz: ‘Ding, Dong, Bin Laden Is Dead’.

And wouldn’t it be easy if he had indeed been the Wicked Witch of the West and all we needed to do was click those ruby slippers three times, say “there’s no place like home” and be back in Kansas. Or if this were VJ day and a sailor’s kiss said it all.

Unfortunately, in every way that matters for Americans, it is an illusion that Osama bin Laden is dead. In every way that matters, he will fight on, barring a major Obama administration policy shift in Afghanistan, and it is we who will ensure that he remains on the battlefield that George W. Bush’s administration once so grandiosely labelled the Global War on Terror.

Admittedly, the Arab world had largely left bin Laden in the dust even before he took that bullet to the head. There, the focus was on the Arab Spring, the massive, ongoing, largely non-violent protests that have shaken the region and its autocrats to their roots. In that part of the world, his death is, as Tony Karon of Time magazine has written, “little more than a historical footnote” and his dreams are now essentially meaningless.

Consider it an insult to irony, but the world bin Laden really changed forever wasn’t in the Greater Middle East. It was here. Cheer his death, bury him at sea, don’t release any photos and he’ll still carry on as a ghost as long as Washington continues to fight its deadly, disastrous wars in his old neighbourhood.

The Tao of Terrorism

If analogies to The Wizard of Oz were in order, bin Laden might better be compared to that film’s wizard rather than the wicked witch. After all, he was, in a sense, a small man behind a vast screen on which his frail frame took on, in the US, the hulking proportions of a supervillain if not a rival superpower. In actuality, al-Qaeda, his organisation, was at best a ragtag crew that even in its heyday, even before it was embattled and on the run, had the most limited of operational capabilities. Yes, it could mount spectacular and spectacularly murderous actions but only one of them every year or two.

Bin Laden was never “Hitler”, nor were his henchmen the Nazis, nor did they add up to Stalin and his minions, though sometimes they were billed as such. The nearest thing al-Qaeda had to a state was the impoverished, ravaged, Taliban-controlled part of Afghanistan where some of its “camps” were once sheltered. Even the money available to bin Laden, while significant, wasn’t much to brag about, not on a superpower scale anyway. The 9/11 attacks were estimated to cost $4,00,000 to $5,00,000 which, in superpower terms, was pure chump change.

Despite the apocalyptic look of the destruction bin Laden’s followers caused in New York and at the Pentagon, he and his crew of killers represented a relatively modest, distinctly non-world-ending challenge to the US. And had the Bush administration focused the same energies on hunting him down that it put into invading and occupying Afghanistan and then Iraq, can there be any question that almost 10 years wouldn’t have passed before he died or, as will now never happen, was brought to trial?

The world bin Laden really changed forever wasn’t in the Greater Middle East. It was here. Cheer his death, bury him at sea, don’t release any photos and he’ll still carry on as a ghost as long as Washington continues to fight its deadly, disastrous wars in his old neighbourhood

It was our misfortune and Osama bin Laden’s good luck that Washington’s dreams were not those of a global policeman intent on bringing a criminal operation to justice but of an imperial power whose leaders wanted to lock the oil heartlands of the planet into a Pax Americana for decades to come. So if you’re writing bin Laden’s obituary right now, describe him as a wizard who used the 9/11 attacks to magnify his meagre powers many times over.

After all, while he only had the ability to launch major operations every couple of years, Washington – with almost unlimited amounts of money, weapons and troops at its command – was capable of launching operations every day. In a sense, after 9/11, bin Laden commanded Washington by taking possession of its deepest fears and desires, the way a bot takes over a computer, and turning them to his own ends.

It was he, thanks to 9/11, who insured that the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan would be put into motion. It was he, thanks to 9/11, who also insured that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be launched. It was he, thanks to 9/11, who brought America’s Afghan war to Pakistan and American aircraft, bombs and missiles to Somalia and Yemen to fight that Global War on Terror. And for the last near-decade he did all this the way a Tai Chi master fights: using not his own minimal strength but our massive destructive power to create the sort of mayhem in which he undoubtedly imagined that an organisation like his could thrive.

Don’t be surprised then that in these last months or even years bin Laden seems to have been sequestered in a walled compound in a resort area just north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, doing next to nothing. Think of him as practising the Tao of Terrorism. In fact, the less he did, the fewer operations he was capable of launching, the more the American military did for him in creating what collapsing Chinese dynasties used to call “chaos under heaven”.

Dead and alive

As is now obvious, bin Laden’s greatest wizardry was performed on us, not on the Arab world where the movements he spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven remarkably peripheral and unimportant. He helped open us up to all the nightmares we could visit upon ourselves (and others) – from torture and the creation of an offshore archipelago of injustice to the locking down of our own American world where we were to cower in terror while lashing out militarily.

In many ways, he broke us not on 9/11 but in the months and years after. As a result, if we don’t have the sense to follow Senator Aiken’s advice, the wars we continue to fight with disastrous results will prove to be his monument and our imperial graveyard (as Afghanistan has been for more than one empire in the past).

At a moment when the media and celebratory American crowds are suddenly bullish on US military operations we still have almost 1,00,000 American troops, 50,000 allied troops, startling numbers of armed mercenaries and at least 400 military bases in Afghanistan almost 10 years on. All of this as part of an endless war against one man and his organisation which, according to the CIA director, is supposed to have only 50 to 100 operatives in that country.

Now he is officially under the waves. In the Middle East, his idea of an all-encompassing future “caliphate” was the most ephemeral of fantasies. In a sense though, his dominion was always here. He was our excuse and our demon. He possessed us.

When the celebrations and partying over his death fade, as they will no less quickly than did those for Britain’s royal wedding, we will once again be left with the tattered American world bin Laden willed us and it will be easy to see just how paltry a thing this “victory,” his killing, is almost 10 years later.

For all the print devoted to the operation that took him out, all the talking heads chattering away, all the hosannas being lavished on American special ops forces, the president, his planners and various intelligence outfits, this is hardly a glorious American moment. If anything, we should probably be in mourning for what we buried long before we had bin Laden’s body, for what we allowed him (and our own imperial greed) to goad us into doing to ourselves and what, in the course of that, we did, in the name of fighting him, to others.

Those chants of “USA! USA!” on the announcement of his death were but faint echoes of the ones at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001 when President George W. Bush picked up a bullhorn and promised that “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” That would be the beginning of a brief few years of soaring American hubris and fantasies of domination wilder than those of any caliphate-obsessed Islamic fundamentalist terrorist and soon enough they would leave us high and dry in our present world of dismal unemployment figures, rotting infrastructure, rising gas prices, troubled treasury and a people on the edge.

Unless we set aside the special ops assaults and the drone wars and take a chance, unless we’re willing to follow the example of all those non-violent demonstrators across the Greater Middle East and begin a genuine and speedy withdrawal from the Af-Pak theatre of operations, Osama bin Laden will never die.

On September 17, 2001 President Bush was asked whether he wanted bin Laden dead. He replied: “There’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that said ‘wanted dead or alive’.” Dead or alive. Now it turns out that there was a third option. Dead and alive.

The chance exists to put a stake through the heart of Osama bin Laden’s American legacy. After all, the man who officially started it all is theoretically gone. We could declare victory, Toto, and head for home. But why do I think that, on this score, the malign wizard is likely to win? n

This article was posted on TomDispatch.com on May 5, 2011; www.tomdispatch.com

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden

The land of make-believe

May 31, 2011

Pakistan: A state of perpetual self-denial

How gullible do the Americans think we are? Do they actually think that we Pakistanis would believe the lies they are spreading about Osama bin Laden’s tragic murder and his demeaning burial at sea?

We are just too smart to be made fools of like this. There was no Osama in that compound in Abbottabad. The Americans killed a lookalike. The real Osama died of gall bladder failure in a bush in Sudan in 2002. What’s more, his supposed wives that were captured from the Abbottabad compound were look-alikes too and so were the children.

But it doesn’t stop here. We Pakistanis know that the news about Osama’s death from a gall bladder ailment in Sudan in 2002 is also suspect. That guy too was a lookalike. So yes, it can safely be said that the guy they killed in Abbottabad in 2011 was actually a lookalike of the lookalike.

So when did Osama die if not in 2002 or 2011? According to a super-famous journalist and TV anchor, Tipu Sultan, who interviewed Osama in an impoverished disco in Kandahar in 1998, Osama was actually dead at the time of the interview. He said that the guy he talked to was actually a man called Abdul Al-Bakir Al-Shaikh Al-Qaedawallah, an expert Osama lookalike who told him (off the record) that Osama actually died (of malaria) in the jungles of the Congo in 1991.

Nevertheless, there is every likelihood that the Congo guy was a lookalike as well. So, in other words, the guy who the Americans claimed to have killed in Abbottabad was really a lookalike of a lookalike of a lookalike of a lookalike. But if we really come to the truth and reality, things do not seem so complicated. So what is this truth and reality? Simple. There never was an Osama. He was never born. It was all an American concoction.

The character of Osama bin Laden was first conceived by America’s 15th president, James Buchanan, in 1859 when, along with the queen of England, he decided to begin a new crusade against Muslims. According to the well-known Muslim historian, Naseem Hijazi, the British monarchy had accused a man called Osama bin Laden of financing and instigating the 1857 Indian army mutiny against the British imperialists.

The Americans and the British then claimed they had suppressed the mutiny by killing Osama in a daring raid. He was claimed to have been hiding in the hookah lounge of the last Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Zafar denied the accusations, saying no such man was seen on his radar.

The British exiled Zafar to Burma and destroyed the radar, saying there was no such thing as a radar. By the way, the guy the British claimed was Zafar was not exiled to Burma. He was only a lookalike. The real Zafar died of dengue fever in Guatemala where he had gone to raise an army against the British and to study tropical plants. Famous thinker and horticulturalist, Noam Chomsky, confirms this.

This concocted episode was rightly expunged from history books by Muslim historians until America brought the invisible Osama character back to life in the 1990s. They had originally planned to use him as a bogey to invade Canada but changed their plans when they got jealous of all the amazing and unprecedented economic, cultural and military progress taking place in Afghanistan under the Taliban and Pakistan under a bunch of handsome military men.

Thus, not surprisingly, the 9/11 episode happened. We all know who was responsible. Not a single Jew died in that attack. Neither did any animists or pagans, nor any Hindus, Christians and Sikhs. The truth is, only Muslims died in that attack. The proof? Simple. Log on to YouTube and check out the brilliant, award-winning documentaries, Loose Nut and The Drivels. Popcorn is on the house.

The guy the western media showed praising the 9/11 attacks on video was not Osama. He was just some Arab skiing enthusiast telling (with gestures) his Afghan friends about his latest skiing trip to the Alps. There never was an Osama. Just like there is no Mullah Omar, no Taliban, no al-Qaeda. They are all American concoctions.

Furthermore, America never won the war against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s break-up was also a concoction. The Soviet Union is still alive and thriving. We don’t hear about it because the Jewish-controlled media has blocked all news about the Soviet Union. That is because the Afghan and Arab mujahideen who fought against it liberated Afghanistan and conquered the Soviet Union and turned it into a caliphate. That’s why America’s next target will be Vladimir Putin (real name Valeed Amir Butinov). So if one day you hear that Americans have assassinated Putin, don’t believe it. The real Putin died of a kidney ailment in 1045 AD.

The president and prime minister of Pakistan should resign for making America make fools of Pakistanis. The army is not to be blamed. The radar that did not pick up American helicopters on May 2 was not a radar. It was a lookalike of the real thing that the Americans didn’t give us. Only the mighty Imran Khan hinted at this while picking his nose on TV the other day. It was a sign: ‘Dig deep, dear patriots. You have nothing to lose but your heads.’ Well said, Imran (real name Genghis), because, after all, who needs heads when the knees can perform the same function?

This article was published on Dawn.com on May 15, 2011.Courtesy: Dawn; www.dawn.com

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden

Islam after Osama

May 31, 2011

An unintended gift to the faith

Behind the ugly reality, there is poetic justice. Osama bin Laden was finally bearded in the world’s most ‘happening’ terror den: Pakistan. Osama is no more but who does not know that the cult of violence that he practised and preached in Islam’s name is alive and kicking in Pakistan as nowhere else? This article however is about Osama’s unintended gift to post-9/11 Islam.

Step back just a decade and you’d think that Muslims engaged with the ‘Islam and Modernity’ paradigm were few and far between. The dominant voices in the world of 20th century Islam, especially its latter half, were those of Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi (founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami on the Indian subcontinent), Sayyid Qutb (leading theologian of the Egypt-born Muslim Brotherhood) and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (who gave birth to Wahhabism, the rigid, intolerant Islam of Saudi Arabia).

Born and bred as a devout Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia, it was easy for Osama to embrace the shared belief of Maududi and Qutb that all man-made ideas and systems – pan-Arabism, democracy, socialism, communism – were bankrupt: only Shariah law, ruthlessly enforced by an Islamic state, could restore divine order in the world. Thanks to an intermixture of Wahhabism, Qutbism and Maududism, what would otherwise have been an Afghan national liberation movement against the occupying Soviet forces in the 1980s turned into a laboratory of violent, global jihad. Osama was the most lethal product of this cross-fertilisation. And then there was 9/11, al-Qaeda’s own welcome message to the 21st century and the new millennium.

Call it the Hegelian dialectic: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Some Muslims rejoiced over this “humiliation” of the only global superpower (so soon after the mujahids had facilitated the demise of the rival superpower). Others insisted that 9/11 was a mean CIA-Mossad conspiracy to fan Islamophobia. But saner members of the ummah were horrified that such a monstrosity could be committed in the name of a faith that literally means peace. The poison that Osama and al-Qaeda injected into Islam found its antidote within Islam. Thank you, Hegel.

“Islam was hijacked on 9/11”, declared the American convert Shaykh Hamza Yusuf. The UK-based scholar Ziauddin Sardar was as prompt in issuing his ‘fatwa against the fanatics’. With such opening salvos, the last decade has seen an ever growing number of Muslim voices eager not only to reclaim their faith from the extremists but also, in the words of Sardar, to “rebuild Islam brick by brick”.

Though Osama has now been rendered inactive, the terror machine is yet to be dismantled, the theology of violent jihad is yet to be pushed out of the marketplace of ideas. But there are reasons to nurture hope. You can today build a small personal library just with books entitled Seeds of Terror, The Nuclear Jihadist, Terror in the Name of God, Sacred Rage, Talibanisation of Pakistan, Descent into Chaos and so on. But should you feel so inclined, you will need to multiply shelf space several times over to add the books and videos infused with the spirit of a New Age Islam.

A decade ago the theologians of a tolerant, plural, gender-just, rights and freedom-friendly, pro-democracy Islam were few in number. Today not only is their tribe growing rapidly but an ever increasing number of Muslims, both men and women, are reading and interpreting the Koran and the traditions of the prophet in sync with modern sensibilities.

Sadly, we in India aren’t familiar with them yet. But they are important, influential names across much of the world. The US-based Dr Khaled Abou El Fadl, for example, is a strong proponent of human rights, a staunch advocate of gender equality and is among the most critical and powerful voices against puritan and Wahhabi Islam today. Then there is Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, co-founder of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California. Jordan’s Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre includes him in its list of the top 50 most influential Muslims in the world. The magazine Egypt Today described him as a kind of theological rock star, “the Elvis Presley of western Muslims”.

Or take Tariq Ramadan, the UK-based author of Radical Reform. An online poll by the American Foreign Policy magazine in 2009 placed Ramadan at the 49th spot in a list of the world’s top 100 contemporary intellectuals. And let’s not forget Amina Wadud, Islamic feminist, imam and author of Inside the Gender Jihad. In March 2005 she stirred up quite a storm in the Muslim world after leading a Friday prayer for over 100 male and female Muslims in New York.

In the first year of the 21st century Osama stretched the dominant Islamic thought of the 20th century to its extreme. A decade later, there is a growing body of books, lectures and the World Wide Web propounding an Islam that is at home with the modern world and vice versa. And in the last few months such intellectuals and scholars have struck common ground with the masses on the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain…

Osama must have had many a nightmare during his last days of hiding.

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden

‘Like being in love’

February 28, 2011

Alaa Al Aswany: Literary reflections on the Egyptian revolution

For the best-selling author and star of a new generation of Egyptian novelists, there is much in common between a revolution and being in love. “When someone is in real love, he becomes a better person,” says Alaa Al Aswany, the celebrated author of The Yacoubian Building and Chicago. “A revolution is like that.” Everyone who takes part knows what kind of person he was before the protests started “and now he is going to feel different. We have dignity. We are not scared any more.”

Aswany has participated in the protests with a passion. He will write a book about the events still unfolding here: “It has been a unique experience not to read about history but to live inside history,” he told The Independent.

The 53-year-old author is an acute observer of what he and many millions of other Egyptians now fervently hope will be the final days of the autocrat who has ruled them for the past 30 years. The atmosphere reminds him of that surrounding the fictional Caribbean dictator conjured in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch.

First, he says, there is the phase of “total denial”. Second, the preposterous accusations that those protesting are being “used and manipulated [by those] who hate our country”. Third, the “new game” of doing anything to stay in power. And only after all that, to run away.

The writer, a long-time critic of Mubarak’s regime, senses something “medieval” about the concentration of presidential power. He also rails against what he sees as government propaganda. Aswany says he has seen a leaked ministry of interior document containing “a very clear instruction that Egyptian TV should interview women, saying how afraid they are and… calling on Mubarak to save them [from the criminals]”.

Like many fellow Egyptians, Aswany is at pains to play down fears that the protests might usher in rule by the Muslim Brotherhood. The fears have been cooked up to create the misconception that “either you accept Mubarak or you need to get prepared for another Hamas or Taliban in power,” says Aswany. “This revolution has nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood.”

A comparison the former dentist prefers is to Spain returning to freedom after the Franco years and a return to Egypt’s 19th century standing as a bastion of liberalism and democracy.

He also rejects another western and Israeli “stereotype” that a new Egypt would cancel the three-decade-old Camp David accord with Israel. He is puzzled that Israeli officials cannot “see that making a peace treaty with a responsible democracy is much better than making a peace treaty with a corrupt dictatorship. If you respect the Egyptian people and their choice, they are going to keep the peace process on a very steady and strong course.”

Aswany is contemptuous of the new Vice-President Omar Suleiman’s planned consultations with opposition political parties, adding that “the opposition is the street, not in the political parties”. The movement will throw up its own, predominately young, leadership and if it needs older figures to advise it, they should be the ones to choose.

He is not talking about Mohamed ElBaradei, whom he says many young Egyptians respect for his integrity, while emphasising that this is not “ElBaradei’s revolution”.

And a role for him in the new Egypt, minister of culture perhaps? “It is much better to be a good novelist,” he says.

Courtesy: The Independent; www.independent.co.uk

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2011, Year 17, No.155 – Revolution.

The uprising

February 28, 2011

Democratic Turkey is the template for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood

Even as the mass demonstrations began in Tunisia, who would have thought that Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s regime would have collapsed so quickly? Who could have predicted that Egypt would soon witness such unprecedented popular protest? A barrier has fallen. Nothing will be the same again. It is quite likely that other countries will follow the lead of Egypt, given its central and symbolic significance. But what will be the role of the Islamists after the collapse of the dictatorships?

The Islamist presence has for decades justified the West’s acceptance of the worst dictatorships in the Arab world. And it was these very regimes that demonised their Islamist opponents, particularly Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood which historically represents that country’s first well-organised mass movement with the political influence to match. For more than 60 years the Brotherhood has been illegal but tolerated. It has demonstrated a powerful capacity to mobilise the people in each relatively democratic election – to trade unions, professional associations, municipalities, Parliament and so on – where it has been a participant. So are the Muslim Brothers the rising power in Egypt and if so, what can we anticipate from such an organisation?

In the West, we have come to expect superficial analysis of political Islam in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. However, not only is Islamism a mosaic of widely differing trends and factions but its many different facets have emerged over time and in response to historical shifts.

The Muslim Brothers began in the 1930s as a legalist, anti-colonialist and non-violent movement that claimed legitimacy for armed resistance in Palestine against Zionist expansionism during the period before World War II. The writings from between 1930 and 1945 of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Brotherhood, show that he opposed colonialism and strongly criticised the fascist governments in Germany and Italy. He rejected the use of violence in Egypt even though he considered it legitimate in Palestine, in resistance to the Zionist Stern and Irgun terror gangs. He believed that the British parliamentary model represented the kind closest to Islamic principles. Al-Banna’s objective was to found an “Islamic state” based on gradual reform, beginning with popular education and broad-based social programmes. He was assassinated in 1949 by the Egyptian government under orders of the British occupiers.

Following Gamal Abdel Nasser’s revolution in 1952, the movement was subjected to violent repression. Several distinct trends emerged. Radicalised by their experience of prison and torture, some of its members (who eventually left the organisation) concluded that the state had to be overthrown at all costs, even with violence. Others remained committed to the group’s original position of gradual reform. Many of its members were forced into exile: some in Saudi Arabia where they were influenced by the Saudi literalist ideology, others in countries such as Turkey and Indonesia, Muslim-majority societies where a wide variety of communities coexist. Still others settled in the West where they came into direct contact with the European tradition of democratic freedom.

Today’s Muslim Brotherhood draws these diverse visions together. But the leadership of the movement – those who belong to the founding generation are now very old – no longer fully represents the aspirations of the younger members who are much more open to the world, anxious to bring about internal reform and fascinated by the Turkish example. Behind the unified, hierarchical façade contradictory influences are at work. No one can tell which way the movement will go.

The Muslim Brotherhood is not leading the upsurge that is bringing down Hosni Mubarak: it is made up of young people, of women and men who have rejected dictatorship. The Muslim Brotherhood, and the Islamists in general, do not represent the majority. There can be no doubt that they hope to participate in the democratic transition when Mubarak departs but no one can tell which faction will emerge in a dominant position. That makes it impossible to determine the movement’s priorities. Between the literalists and the partisans of the Turkish way, anything can happen; the Brotherhood’s political thinking has evolved considerably over the past 20 years.

Neither the United States nor Europe, not to mention Israel, will easily allow the Egyptian people to make their dream of democracy and freedom come true. The strategic and geopolitical considerations are such that the reform movement will be, and is already, closely monitored by US agencies in coordination with the Egyptian army which has played for time and assumed the crucial role of mediator.

By deciding to line up behind Mohamed ElBaradei, who has emerged as the chief figure among the anti-Mubarak protesters, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership has signaled that now is not the time to expose itself by making political demands that might frighten the West, not to mention the Egyptian people. Caution is the watchword.

Respect for democratic principles demands that all forces which reject violence, which respect the rule of law (both before and after elections), participate fully in the political process. The Muslim Brotherhood must be a full partner in the process of change – and will be, if a minimally democratic state can be established in Egypt (though no one can define the intentions of foreign powers).

Neither repression nor torture has been able to eliminate the Brotherhood. The opposite is true. It is only democratic debate and the vigorous exchange of ideas that have had an impact on the development of the most problematic Islamist theses – from understanding of the Shariah to respect for freedom and defence of equality. Only by exchanging ideas, and not by torture and dictatorship, can we find solutions that respect the people’s will. Turkey’s example should be an inspiration to us observers.

The West continues to use “the Islamist threat” to justify its passivity and outright support for dictatorships. As resistance to Mubarak mounted, the Israeli government repeatedly called on Washington to back his junta against the popular will. Europe adopted a wait-and-see stance. Both attitudes are revealing: at the end of the day, lip service to democratic principle carries little weight against the defence of political and economic interests. The US prefers dictatorships that guarantee access to oil and allow the Israelis to continue their slow colonisation, to credible representatives of the people who could not allow these things to continue.

Citing the voices of dangerous Islamists to justify not listening to the voices of the people is short-termist as well as illogical. Under both the Bush and Obama administrations, the US has suffered heavy losses of credibility in the Middle East; the same is true for Europe. If the Americans and Europeans do not re-examine their policies, other powers in Asia and South America may begin to interfere soon with their elaborate structure of strategic alliances. As for Israel, which has now positioned itself as friend and protector of the Arab dictatorships, its government may well come to realise that those dictatorships are committed only to its policy of blind colonisation.

The regional impact of Mubarak stepping down will be huge yet the exact consequences are unpredictable. After both the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, the political message is clear: with non-violent mass protest anything is possible and no autocratic government is safe and secure any longer.

Presidents and kings are feeling the pressure of this historical turning point. The unrest has reached Algeria, Yemen and Mauritania. One should also look at Jordan, Syria and even Saudi Arabia: preventive reforms have been announced, as if there were a common feeling of fear and vulnerability. The rulers of all these countries know that if the Egyptian is collapsing, they run the risk of the same destiny. This state of instability is worrying and at the same time very promising. The Arab world is awakening with dignity and hope. The changes spell hope for true democrats and trouble for those who would sacrifice democratic principle to their economic and geostrategic calculations. The liberation of Egypt seems to be just the start. Who will be next? If Jordan and Yemen follow, so will Saudi Arabia – the heart of the Muslim world – and Riyadh would be in a critical position with no choice but to evolve towards a more open political system.

Around the world, among Muslims, there is a critical mass that would support this move, the necessary revolution at the centre. In the end, only democracies that embrace all non-violent political forces can bring about peace in the Middle East, a peace that must also respect the dignity of the Palestinians.

Courtesy: The Huffington Post; www.huffingtonpost.com

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2011,Year 17, No.155-Revolution

Why fear the Arab revolutionary spirit?

February 28, 2011

The western liberal reaction to the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia frequently shows hypocrisy and cynicism

What cannot but strike the eye in the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt is the conspicuous absence of Muslim fundamentalism. In the best secular democratic tradition, people simply revolted against an oppressive regime, its corruption and poverty and demanded freedom and economic hope. The cynical wisdom of western liberals, according to which, in Arab countries, genuine democratic sense is limited to narrow liberal elites while the vast majority can only be mobilised through religious fundamentalism or nationalism, has been proven wrong. The big question is what will happen next? Who will emerge as the political winner?

When a new provisional government was nominated in Tunis, it excluded Islamists and the more radical left. The reaction of smug liberals was: good, they are basically the same; two totalitarian extremes – but are things as simple as that? Is the true long-term antagonism not precisely between Islamists and the left? Even if they are momentarily united against the regime, once they approach victory, their unity splits, they engage in a deadly fight, often more cruel than against the shared enemy.

Did we not witness precisely such a fight after the last elections in Iran? What the hundreds of thousands of Mousavi supporters stood for was the popular dream that sustained the Khomeini revolution: freedom and justice. Even if this dream was utopian, it did lead to a breathtaking explosion of political and social creativity, organisational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. This genuine opening that unleashed unheard-of forces for social transformation, a moment in which everything seemed possible, was then gradually stifled through the takeover of political control by the Islamist establishment.

Even in the case of clearly fundamentalist movements, one should be careful not to miss the social component. The Taliban is regularly presented as a fundamentalist Islamist group enforcing its rule with terror. However, when, in the spring of 2009, they took over the Swat valley in Pakistan, The New York Times reported that they engineered “a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants”. If by “taking advantage” of the farmers’ plight the Taliban are creating, in the words of The New York Times, “alarm about the risks to Pakistan which remains largely feudal”, what prevented liberal democrats in Pakistan and the US from similarly “taking advantage” of this plight and trying to help the landless farmers? Is it that the feudal forces in Pakistan are the natural ally of liberal democracy?

The inevitable conclusion to be drawn is that the rise of radical Islamism was always the other side of the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries. When Afghanistan is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country, who still remembers that 40 years ago it was a country with a strong secular tradition, including a powerful communist party that took power there independently of the Soviet Union? Where did this secular tradition go?

And it is crucial to read the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt (and Yemen and… maybe, hopefully, even Saudi Arabia) against this background. If the situation is eventually stabilised so that the old regime survives but with some liberal cosmetic surgery, this will generate an insurmountable fundamentalist backlash. In order for the key liberal legacy to survive, liberals need the fraternal help of the radical left. Back to Egypt, the most shameful and dangerously opportunistic reaction was that of Tony Blair, as reported on CNN: change is necessary but it should be a stable change. Stable change in Egypt today can mean only a compromise with the Mubarak forces by way of slightly enlarging the ruling circle. This is why to talk about peaceful transition now is an obscenity: by squashing the opposition Mubarak himself made this impossible. After Mubarak sent the army against the protesters, the choice became clear: either a cosmetic change in which something changes so that everything stays the same, or a true break.

Here then is the moment of truth: one cannot claim, as in the case of Algeria a decade ago, that allowing truly free elections equals delivering power to Muslim fundamentalists. Another liberal worry is that there is no organised political power to take over if Mubarak goes. Of course there is not; Mubarak took care of that by reducing all opposition to marginal ornaments so that the result is like the title of the famous Agatha Christie novel, And Then There Were None. The argument for Mubarak – it’s either him or chaos – is an argument against him.

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong’s old motto is pertinent: “There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent.”

Where then should Mubarak go? Here the answer is also clear: to The Hague. If there is a leader who deserves to sit there, it is him.

Courtesy: guardian.co.uk

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2011,Year 17, No.155-Revolution

Overcome 9/11 through 2/11

February 28, 2011

The road to reconciliation leads not through Baghdad or Kabul but through Tahrir

Perhaps the most effective antidote to 9/11 will prove to be 2/11, the day Hosni Mubarak conceded the game was up with his 30-year-old dictatorship and left town under military escort for the beach.

We’ve tried invasions of Muslim lands. We’ve tried imposing new systems of government on them. We’ve tried wars on terror. We’ve tried spending billions of dollars. What we haven’t tried is tackling what’s been rotten in the Arab world by helping a home-grown, bottom-up movement for change turn a US-backed police state into a stable democracy.

This is the critical opportunity Egypt now presents. Islamist radicalism has thrived on the American double standards evident in strong support for the likes of Mubarak’s regime. It has prospered from the very brutal repression that was supposedly essential to stop the jihadists. And it has benefited from the reduction of tens of millions of Arab citizens to mere objects, shorn of dignity, and so more inclined to seek meaning in absolutist movements of violence.

If westernised Egyptians and the Muslim Brotherhood can coexist in Egypt’s nascent Second Republic, and if a long subjugated Arab people can show that it is an actor of history rather than its impotent pawn, the likelihood of another Mohamed Atta walking the streets of Cairo will recede.

In 18 riveting days Egypt has become a key to the unresolved 9/11 conundrum, the one President Obama promised to tackle by building bridges to the Muslim world, before Afghanistan diverted him.

“If we get Egypt right, it could be the best medicine to get rid of radicalism,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize-winning opposition figure, told me.

In the Middle East, you expect the worst. But having watched Egypt’s extraordinary civic achievement in building the coalition that ousted Mubarak, having watched Tahrir Square become cooperation central and having watched the professionalism of the Egyptian army, I’m convinced the country has what it takes to build a decent, representative society – one that gives the lie to all the stereotypes associated with that dismissive shorthand “The Arab Street”.

In fact, post-Tahrir, let’s retire that phrase.Speaking of streets, I watched them get cleaned the morning after the revolution. All the sweeping, dusting and scrubbing tempted me to suggest that there was no need to get carried away and try to turn the glorious metropolis of dust, Cairo, into Zurich. But Marwa Kamal put me right.

Kamal, 26, looked proud in her purple hijab. She was next to a sign saying, ‘Sorry for disturbance, we build Egypt’. I asked why she swept. “All the dirt’s in the past,” she said. “We want to clear out the old and start clean.”

A retired chemist, Mahmoud Abdullah, stepped in: “This is a very precious generation,” he told me, pointing at her. “They did what we failed to do.”

Right now Egypt has no president, no vice-president, no Constitution, no Parliament and no significant police presence on the streets. But it has the meeting of generations between these two Egyptians; and it has a new sense of nationhood forged through countless other barrier-breaking discoveries of 18 shared revolutionary days.

Perhaps it was a good thing that, cocooned with his yes-men, Mubarak proved so stubborn, locked in the prison of his formal Arabic and his hubris while language and nation unloosed themselves. I think it was over once the army declined to shoot. But by lingering Mubarak gave Egyptians time to get to know each other.

Revolutions, like wars, have their interludes of boredom. They were filled with chat. And what did Egyptians find? Here’s one scene: Marwa Kassem, 33, westernised, living in Geneva, talking to bearded Magdy Ashour of Muslim Brotherhood sympathies. She’d rushed to Cairo after the uprising began. He’d joined the protests after a friend was killed. If they’d passed each other in the street a month ago, each would have pulled back from the other, divided by fear.

He tells her he was arrested at regular intervals. How often? Sometimes twice a month. And? Ashour’s 14-year-old son is watching. He asks him to leave, saying, “I want to show him freedom, not my cowardice.”

A frisson of tension stirs. Ashour stands up. They stripped me naked, he says, blindfolded me. He links his hands behind his back: this is how Mubarak’s security goons shackled him. They hung me from a hook on the wall, he says. Then came the electric shocks: to his toes, nipples, genitals.

There are tears in his eyes now. There are tears in Kassem’s, too. He pulls up his pants to his knee, revealing a terrible black scar on his calf. She cannot look. Why this treatment? “They wanted to know if I knew Osama bin Laden.”

What they both want now, this secular woman and this religious man, these two Egyptians, is a state of laws and rights.
Overcome 9/11 through 2/11: the road to reconciliation leads not through Baghdad or Kabul but through Tahrir.

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2011,Year 17, No.155 – Revolution

Courtesy: The New York Times;http://www.nytimes.com

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Rejoice not…’

In the western world, few will mourn Osama bin Laden but god forbid that anyone should gloat

Dead and alive

Osama bin Laden’s American legacy

The land of make-believe

Pakistan: A state of perpetual self-denial

Islam after Osama

An unintended gift to the faith

‘Like being in love’

The uprising

Why fear the Arab revolutionary spirit?

Overcome 9/11 through 2/11

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