Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Islamic Fundamentalism in Iraqi University

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According to the Times of London, Christian women attending university in Basra have been threatened with death if they do not conform to Islamic standards of dress while attending school.  How’s that democracy going, anyhow?  

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  1. Broadly speaking, the Middle East has seen four modern waves in how it is governed:

    1. Until the end of World War I, it was governed mostly by the Ottoman Empire under a very loose system that was rather tolerant of a multiplicity of religions. Persia, was of course, not part of the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt was sort of autonomous and sort of a British colony.
    2. After World War I, various kings and notables were installed: King Fuad, in Egypt, a relative of the king of Jordan in Iraq, various arrangements under the French mandates in Syria and Lebanon. (Exceptions: Turkey, Iran already had a king, the UAE’s kings came pre-installed.)
    3. Except for Iran, Jordan, and Turkey, these kings and notables were then mostly replaced by nationalist military governments. Think Nasser in Egypt, Qassim and the Arifs in Iraq, and the civil war in Lebanon.
    4. After Israel’s humiliating defeat of Nasser’s Egypt allied with Syria and Jordan in the Six Day War, the heirs of the military rulers now face Islamist opposition.

    The strongest play for a secular state came from the military junta period in the Middle East. (Military juntas in the Middle East have a very different flavor from military juntas in Latin America. Nasser and Pinochet have little in common.) When their promise of pride, modernization, agricultural reform, and the benefits of socialism foundered, the next most popular movements were movements to return to a more pious Islamic society. The appeal of the Islamists is something like this:

    • In more pious days, Islamic empires covered a big chunk of civilization. (Think the Ottoman Empire at the gates of Vienna, the Persian Empire, and the Mogul Empire. That’s a lot of Islamic real estate.)
    • Islam has always had a social justice appeal. (It’s not my idea of social justice, certainly.)
    • All the other options appear to have been exhausted.

    In a sense, the Middle East’s problem is keenly ideological. With the nationalists and the left vanishing, Islamists are in ascendancy.

    • Fantastic snyopsis…. I think your last point — that all other options appear to have been exhausted — is a particuarly interesting one.

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      p>Last week, as some may have noted, the Christian Science Monitor had an interesting article on whether Sufism could be “an antidote to Isalmic extremism.”

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      “What the Western world is not seeing,” says Akbar Ahmed, a renowned Pakistani anthropologist who teaches at American University in Washington, “is that there are three distinct models in play in the Muslim world: modernism, which reflects globalization, materialism, and a consumer society; the literalists, who are reacting, sometimes violently, against the West and globalization; and the Sufis, who reject the search for power and wealth” in favor of a more spiritual path.

      Feeling under siege, the average Muslim today is in turmoil, Dr. Ahmed says. To which of these answers will he or she turn? He believes that the spiritual hunger is deep and resonates widely.

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      p>Of particular interest are the areas in which the Sufi tradition is strongest: Iran and Pakistan.

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      p>Of course it’s also worth noting that Sufi “heroes” such as Algeria’s Amir Abd al-Kader were as much revolutionaries as reformers….

        • Your excellent summary, I’d have added a reference to the rise and fall of Pan-Arabism under Nasser and the first Assad.  Arab states (west of Iran) have always thought of themselves as one culture and nationality and basically were constituted that way under different regimes with a few exceptions from the time of Muhammed until the fall of the Ottomans.  So that’s an undercurrent in arab political thought worth considering.

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          p>Of course, in practice, they could never decide on whether the capital should be Cairo or Damascus and then it went downhill from there.  That slides right into where we are now with the secular regimes discredited for not producing enough and the disenfranchised turning to fundamentalism.

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          p>I really like the CS Monitor middle east reporting and wonder why they don’t get more credit for it — much better journalism than the NYT or WaPo in the region.  They tend to lean towards the optimistic side but I think Americans need to see the good trends so we’re conscious of what/how we should encourage in our foreign policy.  

          • The territory to Iraq’s west, including from Israel to the border with Turkey, all of it had a name.

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            p>It used to be called Syria.

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            p>The present rump of Syria was the part of the French mandate that had too many non-Christians. The French wanted to make Lebanon a Christian or Christian-dominated nation. There’s long been a feeling that it all should be united. The colonial administrations in the mandate period worked very hard at keeping everyone divided up. For example, the French played at giving the Allawites and Druze separate states as well as splitting Syria north-sourth between Damascus and Aleppo. When Syria achieved independence, it had almost no one with experience governing. The British played the two major rival Arab families in Palestine off against each other.

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            p>(Agree too: The Christian Science Monitor does have excellent Middle East coverage.)

      • This week’s American Public Media show, Speaking of Faith, focuses on the 13th century Sufi poet Rumi. It’s a fascinating show in general, but I thought the conversation was particularly interesting when host Krista Tippett and her guest Fatemeh Keshavarz get to talking about what Sufism can add to the dynamics of contemporary Islam. Great stuff:

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        p>http://speakingoffaith.publicr…

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