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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Islamic Fundamentalism in Iraqi University
Broadly speaking, the Middle East has seen four modern waves in how it is governed:
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 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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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….
and thank you for the kind words.
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…
Also appeared with Rumi translator Coleman Barks on WBUR’s On Point back in October.