We Americans are caretakers of a noble experiment that goes back 235 years. Since 1776, we have attempted to govern ourselves through consensual politics that is enabled and protected by a constitution. When it comes to democracy, we are perhaps grand old masters of the game; but when it comes to fledgling democratic impulses in a 21st-century world, we are the new kids on the block, trying to puzzle out what is going on while the rest of the world moves too quickly for us to assimilate.
During the fiery days of our revolutionary birth, the urges for freedom had been squeezed out of a painful crucible of Christian Reformation and Enlightened humanistic Rationalism.
But now we are witnessing, through media, nascent democratic movements in Muslim North Africa and the Persian Gulf. We must understand, however, that we see this amazing roll of events only through a myopic, self-deceiving lens of electronic images and theoretical biases.
We must not deceive ourselves into thinking we know anything about what is going on over there, although the consequences can be huge for us and for the world if things go wrong. There is a lot at stake, including, just go ahead and admit it, the frigging oil supply.
With or without full understanding, we as Americans must necessarily support the democratic movements that prove to be authentic, even if the resultant chaos is scary as hell.
In Egypt, for instance, the united front of idealistic, young reformers emanating from Tahrir is now fracturing into a collection of disparate groups. Which faction will emerge with the mantle of leadership?
It needs to be all of them, and none of them. What do you expect from a democracy?
Look at our own inception. We had the Patriots and the Tories, then the Federalists and the Democrats, the Whigs (whatever they were), then the Republicans and the Democrats, which we still have today. Who came out on top? Both of them, and neither of them, and that's the way it should be. What do you expect in a democracy?
In contemporary Egypt, they have--let's just say for the sake of rhetorical simplicity--two poles of political possibility. On one end are the "democrats." That's the broad, generic meaning of the word. They're the ones who got on Twitter and Facebook and made this whole thing happen. But they are young and disjointed, zealous but politcally inept, and certainly naive when it comes to dealing with the army, the police, and entrenched political structures. Charles Levinson offers, in the Wall Street Journal, an initial inventory of some leaders who may emerge there:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703561604576150604132131990.html
So, on one end of Egyptian political possibilities we have these liberators. On the other end are the Islamists, aka known most commonly in that particular country as the Muslim Brotherhood. They are well-established, well-organized, legalistic, and (to this American Christian) scary as hell.
But in a free society you can't have one without the other. You're always going to have the wild-eyed democrats on one end and the fanatical legalists on the other. I mean, look at Wisconsin.
Anyway, we Americans need to support the thrust of democratic reform in Egypt. And if we must take sides as events further unfold, I say it is necessary for the cause of freedom that we support fully the young secular whippersnappers with their tweets and facebooks.
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2011/02/15/live-blog-egypt
When the time comes for Egyptians to select between them and the Islamists, the young democratic-republicans need to have our full support, lest the "brotherhood" muscle their way into a new repression based on Khomeini-style religion instead of human (and I believe, Creator-endowed) rights.
There are of course many dark clouds on the horizon.
Daniel Greenfield opines on the Bahrain situation, which is very different from Egypt, for numerous reasons, the two major ones being 1.) puppeteering hegemony between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and 2.) the labor constituency in Bahrain being largely foreign ( ie Pakistani) imported labor, instead of native citizenry.
Mr. Greenfield also links to a report on a Tunisian mob gathering vindictively outside a synagogue in Tunis, which is quite alarming when you think about it from an historical standpoint, pogromically speaking. And Mr. Greenfield also mentions the emergence, back in Egypt, of one Qaradawi, whose high-profile leadership in the Muslim Brotherhood could indicate what direction that well-organized force will take in politics along the Nile.
The energetic impulse for political reform in the middle east is forged, like ours was, partly upon religion. But this time the religion is not a blooming protestant Christianity tempered with latent humanistic rationalism, but rather a fierce Islam that considers itself restricted by the historical dominance of Europe and USA.
The rolling revolutions in North Africa and the middle East--are they Islamist or democratic?
They are both. But for the sake of true political freedom, that's a chance we'll have to take.
Glass half-Full
Showing posts with label Muslim Brotherhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Muslim Brotherhood. Show all posts
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Saturday, February 5, 2011
The dynamics of revolution?
The cynical realist says: After what has happened in Iran since 1979, you cannot blame vigilant observers of history for harboring a skeptical wariness about popular revolutions.
The idealist says: On the other hand, there are some very real societal injustices and inequalities that legitimately demand periodic restructuring of governments, and this can be accomplished.
The debate that arises between these two perspectives, as pertaining to Egypt, is persuasively represented by two opposite perspectives:
~ Daniel Greenfield, aka Sultan Knish, http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2011/02/friday-afternoon-roundup-pulling-back.html
~ Max Ajl, in Truthout, http://www.truth-out.org/egyptian-protests-grounded-decades-struggle-portend-regional-transformation67425
A third voice in our analysis appears as the voice of experience:
~ Kasra Naji, on NPR, 2009 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111944123
To facilitate your thinking about this, I'll furnish two quotes from each above source:
Daniel Greenfield says:
~"The fundamental difference between the protests in Iran and those in Egypt, is that Iranians were protesting a stolen election, and in Egypt the protesters want to steal an election before it actually takes place."
~"The Egyptian 'Bread Riots' of 1977 which rocked most major cities in Egypt from January 18-19 of that year, were a spontaneous uprising by hundreds of thousands of lower class people protesting World Bank and International Monetary Fund-mandated termination of state subsidies on basic foodstuffs. As many as 800 people were wounded, and the protests were only ended with the deployment of the army." (Mr. Greenfield's source was an Associated Press report.)
Max Ajl says:
~"The January 25 protests that began the current stage of social revolt were organized by several groups, including the April 6 movement, a wide-based group with overwhelmingly young leadership that emerged to mobilize support for the April 2008 strikes at Mahalla al-Kubra, a textile manufacturing center in the Nile Delta. In Mahalla, 25,000 workers went on strike amidst deteriorating standards of living as the prices of basic foodstuffs careened upwards. The workers won their demands - their strike was the crest of a massive wave of labor unrest that has hit Egypt hard since 1998. Between 1998 and 2008, two million Egyptian workers participated in over 2,600 factory occupations. In the first five months of 2009, over 200 industrial actions took place, a trend that continued through 2010. Stanford historian Joel Beinin calls it the "largest and most sustained social movement in Egypt since the campaign to oust the British occupiers following the end of World War II."
~"Predictably, Western media is misreporting the role of both labor and the Muslim Brotherhood, understating the role of the former and overstating the role of the latter. The agenda is to obscure socioeconomic grievances and promote the narrative that the choice is between an authoritarian but secular government, or a democracy that will bring Islamists - code for the Taliban - to state power. The corollary is that people are not in the streets struggling for social revolution but to put in place a variant of Islamofascism. Thus, people shrug, the revolt must be drowned in blood. This narrative is indefensible."
Kasra Naji says:
~"He (Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 Iran) played a very clever game. Those days, before he returned to Tehran, all he would talk about was democracy and freedom. He would not talk about a religious revolution. He wouldn't talk about a religious state, and democracy and freedom worked for us too, on the left, in a sense that we wanted to have a say. And freedom and democracy would provide that."
~"This whole (revolutionary) establishment is divided into an extremist wing and a moderate wing, and they fight each other, and the moderates are eliminated. And then you'll have the extremists taking over."
Let's take an abbreviated look, though, at my oversimplified assessment of modern revolutionary history. It shows us that:
1.) The human race is caught up in cyclical tides of history; one of those tides is the never-ending exploitation of the have-nots by the haves.
2.) In any given society, nation, or empire, when that cycle of labor expolitation reaches a critical mass of hunger/deprivation, the oppressed workers revolt.
3.) Although the victims of oppression are mostly poor people who suffer a dearth of food/shelter, their discontent is propelled by the theoretical and rhetorical support of some comfortably educated symathizers.
4.) Those literate supporters are fundamentally idealistic. In modern history, their idealism has manifested as, first, communism, and then secondly, as socialism. These days, both of those camps are appropriating the more viable and elder "democratic" rationale.
5.) The rhetoric and politics of literate, idealists can, and does, eventually motivate the hungry masses to effectively assemble and attempt to overthrow the powers that be.
6.) But--and here's the rude awakening lesson of history--those idealists whose rhetoric and politics have fueled a revolution become powerless to implement their theories in real government.
7.) In the wake of their failed theory-driven revolution, intrepid strongmen commandeer the disputing factions and manipulate their naive aspirations into new channels of abusive power.
8.) Think about it:
~The fraternité, legalité, egalité, of the French revolution was overtaken with a brutal, guillotining mob led by Robespierre.
~The rose-colored bolshevism of the Russian revolution was manhandled by Stalin through his gulags.
~The reactionary pride of German defeat after WWI was manipulated by Hitler to become the Nazi wehrmacht.
~The peasant revolution of China devolved into humiliating Maoist forced communilization.
~The nascent democratic impulses of Iran were strangled in the bondage of Islam fanaticism.
9.)~~ Exception to the rule: The American revolution produced a reasonably democratic republic, albeit with some serious structural deficiencies. Slavery was the most reprehensible of those defects. Nevertheless, perhaps our enterprising contributions to human progress could be construed as evidence of some kind of American exceptionalism. Haha
But hey--let this optimistic American pose a rose-colored question: Can the fatalistic degeneration of revolutionary dynamics ever be amended to yield a reasonably favorable outcome?
In light of present Egyptian hopes for systemic reform, can the alleged Muslim Brotherhood and Kafayah extremism lurking beneath modern Islam be tempered with consensual democracy? Who knows?
Not me, but there may be a twitter of hope in this predicament somewhere.
Glass half-Full
The idealist says: On the other hand, there are some very real societal injustices and inequalities that legitimately demand periodic restructuring of governments, and this can be accomplished.
The debate that arises between these two perspectives, as pertaining to Egypt, is persuasively represented by two opposite perspectives:
~ Daniel Greenfield, aka Sultan Knish, http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2011/02/friday-afternoon-roundup-pulling-back.html
~ Max Ajl, in Truthout, http://www.truth-out.org/egyptian-protests-grounded-decades-struggle-portend-regional-transformation67425
A third voice in our analysis appears as the voice of experience:
~ Kasra Naji, on NPR, 2009 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111944123
To facilitate your thinking about this, I'll furnish two quotes from each above source:
Daniel Greenfield says:
~"The fundamental difference between the protests in Iran and those in Egypt, is that Iranians were protesting a stolen election, and in Egypt the protesters want to steal an election before it actually takes place."
~"The Egyptian 'Bread Riots' of 1977 which rocked most major cities in Egypt from January 18-19 of that year, were a spontaneous uprising by hundreds of thousands of lower class people protesting World Bank and International Monetary Fund-mandated termination of state subsidies on basic foodstuffs. As many as 800 people were wounded, and the protests were only ended with the deployment of the army." (Mr. Greenfield's source was an Associated Press report.)
Max Ajl says:
~"The January 25 protests that began the current stage of social revolt were organized by several groups, including the April 6 movement, a wide-based group with overwhelmingly young leadership that emerged to mobilize support for the April 2008 strikes at Mahalla al-Kubra, a textile manufacturing center in the Nile Delta. In Mahalla, 25,000 workers went on strike amidst deteriorating standards of living as the prices of basic foodstuffs careened upwards. The workers won their demands - their strike was the crest of a massive wave of labor unrest that has hit Egypt hard since 1998. Between 1998 and 2008, two million Egyptian workers participated in over 2,600 factory occupations. In the first five months of 2009, over 200 industrial actions took place, a trend that continued through 2010. Stanford historian Joel Beinin calls it the "largest and most sustained social movement in Egypt since the campaign to oust the British occupiers following the end of World War II."
~"Predictably, Western media is misreporting the role of both labor and the Muslim Brotherhood, understating the role of the former and overstating the role of the latter. The agenda is to obscure socioeconomic grievances and promote the narrative that the choice is between an authoritarian but secular government, or a democracy that will bring Islamists - code for the Taliban - to state power. The corollary is that people are not in the streets struggling for social revolution but to put in place a variant of Islamofascism. Thus, people shrug, the revolt must be drowned in blood. This narrative is indefensible."
Kasra Naji says:
~"He (Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 Iran) played a very clever game. Those days, before he returned to Tehran, all he would talk about was democracy and freedom. He would not talk about a religious revolution. He wouldn't talk about a religious state, and democracy and freedom worked for us too, on the left, in a sense that we wanted to have a say. And freedom and democracy would provide that."
~"This whole (revolutionary) establishment is divided into an extremist wing and a moderate wing, and they fight each other, and the moderates are eliminated. And then you'll have the extremists taking over."
Let's take an abbreviated look, though, at my oversimplified assessment of modern revolutionary history. It shows us that:
1.) The human race is caught up in cyclical tides of history; one of those tides is the never-ending exploitation of the have-nots by the haves.
2.) In any given society, nation, or empire, when that cycle of labor expolitation reaches a critical mass of hunger/deprivation, the oppressed workers revolt.
3.) Although the victims of oppression are mostly poor people who suffer a dearth of food/shelter, their discontent is propelled by the theoretical and rhetorical support of some comfortably educated symathizers.
4.) Those literate supporters are fundamentally idealistic. In modern history, their idealism has manifested as, first, communism, and then secondly, as socialism. These days, both of those camps are appropriating the more viable and elder "democratic" rationale.
5.) The rhetoric and politics of literate, idealists can, and does, eventually motivate the hungry masses to effectively assemble and attempt to overthrow the powers that be.
6.) But--and here's the rude awakening lesson of history--those idealists whose rhetoric and politics have fueled a revolution become powerless to implement their theories in real government.
7.) In the wake of their failed theory-driven revolution, intrepid strongmen commandeer the disputing factions and manipulate their naive aspirations into new channels of abusive power.
8.) Think about it:
~The fraternité, legalité, egalité, of the French revolution was overtaken with a brutal, guillotining mob led by Robespierre.
~The rose-colored bolshevism of the Russian revolution was manhandled by Stalin through his gulags.
~The reactionary pride of German defeat after WWI was manipulated by Hitler to become the Nazi wehrmacht.
~The peasant revolution of China devolved into humiliating Maoist forced communilization.
~The nascent democratic impulses of Iran were strangled in the bondage of Islam fanaticism.
9.)~~ Exception to the rule: The American revolution produced a reasonably democratic republic, albeit with some serious structural deficiencies. Slavery was the most reprehensible of those defects. Nevertheless, perhaps our enterprising contributions to human progress could be construed as evidence of some kind of American exceptionalism. Haha
But hey--let this optimistic American pose a rose-colored question: Can the fatalistic degeneration of revolutionary dynamics ever be amended to yield a reasonably favorable outcome?
In light of present Egyptian hopes for systemic reform, can the alleged Muslim Brotherhood and Kafayah extremism lurking beneath modern Islam be tempered with consensual democracy? Who knows?
Not me, but there may be a twitter of hope in this predicament somewhere.
Glass half-Full
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
From bitches to burqas
We in America and other postchristian societies have among us a widespread cadre of libertines whose identity is founded upon crossing the old fuddy-duddy moral boundaries. A voraciously sensuous video-cinema media/web feeds the frenzy of sex obsession that goes viral every time a new star is found among the constellation of party-down celebrity icons.
From Hemingway to Kerouac to Hefner to James Dean, James Bond and the Jagger blather, through Gurley Brown, gaypride and Gaga, downward toward gahenna, ever-more-permissive westerners celebrate their taboo-busting liberation. Woohoo.
Meanwhile on the other side of the world, Muslims say no thank you to all that western decadence. One way that they public reject our degenerative licentiousness is by seeking to embrace their legalistic Islamic heritage. Women wearing burqa and hajib is the most obious religious practice by which the neo-Islamists publicly refuse to submit to Euro/American hedonism.
As a Christian who has struggled most of my life to resist sexual provocation of all kinds, I can relate to their resistance.
The aidsy-douchy end of our libertine ways takes many forms: sexually transmitted diseases; epidemic abortions; disappearance of romantic love, of fidelity and of marriage itself. I came across a video this morning that illustrates how far our descent into the libido inferno has taken us. Its one of those undercover videos stealthily obtained at a Planned Parenthood office in New Jersey by a faking pimp/prostitute due. Its a real ear-opener:
http://www.redstate.com/mdannenfelser/2011/02/01/planned-parenthood-caught-aiding-and-abetting-sex-trafficking-of-minors/
Meanwhile, there are among us a few sycophants who have traveled the paths of liberality and lived to tell about it. Phyllis Chesler, erstwhile feminist/neoconservative shares her concerns today--prompted by the current rumblings in Egypt--about the victimization of women in fundamentalist Islam. She posts an alarm today about the trend among women in Islamic countries back to the burqa and the hajib. She includes some "revealing" photos:
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/02/01/am-i-the-only-one-troubled-by-cairo-street-scenes/
The class pictures show, as Phyllis says, "Cairo University graduates in 1959, 1978, 1995, and 2004. Clearly, there is a progression—a regression really, in terms of women’s rights. Former feminist gains have, increasingly, been washed away."
Most of the students in the earlier pics appear very much like you or I would have dressed for a class portrait in 1959, '78, or '95. But the 2004 photo with the Cairo women mostly clothed in burqa and hajib is real eye-opener.
I can see Phyllis' point about the "Islamization" of women in Muslim cultures. From a democratic standpoint, I share her concern, especially with the looming possibility of the Muslim Brotherhood strongarming their way into power in post-Mubarak Egypt.
On the other hand, the Islamists have a legitimate point. It just could be that societies function better when women are willing to keep themselves modestly clothed. In that sense, I think the revolution in Egypt, and even the one that happened in Iran, is about more than politics. Its about the clashing worlds of fundamentalism and libertinism.
As for me and where I stand on this--I'm caught in the middle, like many an existentialist post-religiot westerner, and like many an Egyptian citizen standing in Tahrir right now, somewhere between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Mubarak police.
Glass Chimera
From Hemingway to Kerouac to Hefner to James Dean, James Bond and the Jagger blather, through Gurley Brown, gaypride and Gaga, downward toward gahenna, ever-more-permissive westerners celebrate their taboo-busting liberation. Woohoo.
Meanwhile on the other side of the world, Muslims say no thank you to all that western decadence. One way that they public reject our degenerative licentiousness is by seeking to embrace their legalistic Islamic heritage. Women wearing burqa and hajib is the most obious religious practice by which the neo-Islamists publicly refuse to submit to Euro/American hedonism.
As a Christian who has struggled most of my life to resist sexual provocation of all kinds, I can relate to their resistance.
The aidsy-douchy end of our libertine ways takes many forms: sexually transmitted diseases; epidemic abortions; disappearance of romantic love, of fidelity and of marriage itself. I came across a video this morning that illustrates how far our descent into the libido inferno has taken us. Its one of those undercover videos stealthily obtained at a Planned Parenthood office in New Jersey by a faking pimp/prostitute due. Its a real ear-opener:
http://www.redstate.com/mdannenfelser/2011/02/01/planned-parenthood-caught-aiding-and-abetting-sex-trafficking-of-minors/
Meanwhile, there are among us a few sycophants who have traveled the paths of liberality and lived to tell about it. Phyllis Chesler, erstwhile feminist/neoconservative shares her concerns today--prompted by the current rumblings in Egypt--about the victimization of women in fundamentalist Islam. She posts an alarm today about the trend among women in Islamic countries back to the burqa and the hajib. She includes some "revealing" photos:
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/02/01/am-i-the-only-one-troubled-by-cairo-street-scenes/
The class pictures show, as Phyllis says, "Cairo University graduates in 1959, 1978, 1995, and 2004. Clearly, there is a progression—a regression really, in terms of women’s rights. Former feminist gains have, increasingly, been washed away."
Most of the students in the earlier pics appear very much like you or I would have dressed for a class portrait in 1959, '78, or '95. But the 2004 photo with the Cairo women mostly clothed in burqa and hajib is real eye-opener.
I can see Phyllis' point about the "Islamization" of women in Muslim cultures. From a democratic standpoint, I share her concern, especially with the looming possibility of the Muslim Brotherhood strongarming their way into power in post-Mubarak Egypt.
On the other hand, the Islamists have a legitimate point. It just could be that societies function better when women are willing to keep themselves modestly clothed. In that sense, I think the revolution in Egypt, and even the one that happened in Iran, is about more than politics. Its about the clashing worlds of fundamentalism and libertinism.
As for me and where I stand on this--I'm caught in the middle, like many an existentialist post-religiot westerner, and like many an Egyptian citizen standing in Tahrir right now, somewhere between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Mubarak police.
Glass Chimera
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Leon Uris' "The Haj"
Leon Uris published an historical novel in 1984 which he entitled The Haj.
The protagonist is a boy, Ishmael, who is growing up in a Bedouin Arab village, Tabah, in Palestine, now Israel.
Ishmael was a son of Ibrahim, the Muktar of Tabah; he had been born during the Palestinian riots of 1936, which were a violent resistance against British occupation of their land, and especially against the British policies which were allowing immigration of many Jews from Nazi Germany into Palestine.
The character Ishmael recalls political developments soon after World War II, in the mid-1940s, when he was about eleven years old. Here is an excerpt from page 157:
"
One night, just after the war ended, Radio Damascus broadcast news that death camps had been discovered in Germany and Poland. Many millions of Jews had been gassed to death by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. In the following days all the newspapers were filled with the revelation and every night on the radio it seemed another new dath camp was discovered. Radio Cairo said that Churchill, Roosevelt, and the holy Pope in Rome had already known about the death camps during the war but kept quiet about it and let the Nazis kill the Jews without protest....
I was still going to school at the time and in Ramle there were street celebrations over the death camps led by members of the Moslem Brotherhood. Mr. Salmi read surah after surah from the Koran to prove to us that the death camps were the fulfillment of Mohammed's prophecy of the Day of the Burning of the Jews. It was all in the Koran, Mr. Salmi reasoned, so Mohammed obviously had a magical vision from Allah, and it proved the major point of Islam; what would happen to nonbelievers.
"
-- from Leon Uris' novel, The Haj, published in 1984 by Doubleday and Sons
Glass half-Full
The protagonist is a boy, Ishmael, who is growing up in a Bedouin Arab village, Tabah, in Palestine, now Israel.
Ishmael was a son of Ibrahim, the Muktar of Tabah; he had been born during the Palestinian riots of 1936, which were a violent resistance against British occupation of their land, and especially against the British policies which were allowing immigration of many Jews from Nazi Germany into Palestine.
The character Ishmael recalls political developments soon after World War II, in the mid-1940s, when he was about eleven years old. Here is an excerpt from page 157:
"
One night, just after the war ended, Radio Damascus broadcast news that death camps had been discovered in Germany and Poland. Many millions of Jews had been gassed to death by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. In the following days all the newspapers were filled with the revelation and every night on the radio it seemed another new dath camp was discovered. Radio Cairo said that Churchill, Roosevelt, and the holy Pope in Rome had already known about the death camps during the war but kept quiet about it and let the Nazis kill the Jews without protest....
I was still going to school at the time and in Ramle there were street celebrations over the death camps led by members of the Moslem Brotherhood. Mr. Salmi read surah after surah from the Koran to prove to us that the death camps were the fulfillment of Mohammed's prophecy of the Day of the Burning of the Jews. It was all in the Koran, Mr. Salmi reasoned, so Mohammed obviously had a magical vision from Allah, and it proved the major point of Islam; what would happen to nonbelievers.
"
-- from Leon Uris' novel, The Haj, published in 1984 by Doubleday and Sons
Glass half-Full
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
