In Chris Hedges' New York Times bestselling, Oprah-endorsed book American Fascists, Hedges repeatedly uses the term 'Christo-fascism'.

Hedges essentially equates fundamentalist Christians in the deep South with Nazis and Japanese fascists. I have no love for Evangelicals -- especially given my time among them -- but it's obvious that Hedges has not read any Yukio Mishima. Fascism was directly connected with racial purity and physical prowess. Christian fundamentalism is not. If it's not okay to use the term 'Islamo-fascist' because Islamists aren't corporatists, then it's not okay to use 'Christo-fascist' because fundamentalist Christians aren't concerned with biology.

It's sad that men like Rove and Bush, who cared nothing for Evangelicals, have givenShould read "No to 'Bush Christian Fascists'" Evangelicals such a bad rap that you can now reach bestseller status by calling them names. But 'Fascism' is a term with a particular meaning and reference, and shouldn't be inflated to include just any extremist movement.

It certainly shouldn't be inflated to include a movement that is not universally malign. There are some great Evangelicals like Jim Wallis, and even Mike Huckabee is intellectually honest (as per his appearance on the Tyra Banks show). During the Pastor Wright flap, Huckabee said that it was unfair to read too much into Obama's connection with Wright. That doesn't sound like the making of totalitarianism.

Those who (like me) oppose using the term 'Islamo-fascist' and opposed "Islamo-fascism Awareness Week" ought to have the intellectual consistency not to use 'Christo-fascist'. (Encouragingly, another Muslim writer, Shadi Hamid of the Project for Middle East Democracy, agrees.)

The case is different with the terms 'Islamist' and 'Christianist', frequently used in in political parlance as synonyms for 'Islamo-fascist' and 'Christo-fascist'. That conflation is mistaken. Islamism is political Islam of the non-violent variety, i.e the sustained political program by conservative Muslims to acquire --- not impose --- theocratic rule within their nation-state.

It is unhelpful, even from a pragmatic perspective, to collapse 'jihadism' (which refers to a violent movement) and 'Islamism'. The reason is that equating Islamism with violence ruins the opportunity to encourage post-Islamist groups -- who are roughly akin to Germany's Christian Democratic Party and represent a case of Islamism defeating itself using self-evaluation. On the same grounds, if Hedges had been more careful with his language, he would have used the term 'Christianism' to apply to the Evangelicals in his book, since by his analysis, they too are seeking to acquire --- not impose --- theocratic rule using non-violent means.

The Kissers: John Currin's paintings spark controversy The artist John Currin is striving to bring sexy back, and he believes that the future of civilization depends on it.

The New Yorker profiled the artist's career last week, focusing on his recent pornography-inspired paintings. (A small portion of the article with artwork is online.)

Through "painting porn," Currin says that he seeks to challenge liberal, western societies that have disavowed -- and refused to defend -- artists who critique and attack puritanical, anti-sex ideologies, or offend the sensibilities of religious fundamentalists. His interest was piqued by the controversy over cartoons of Mohammed in European newspapers:

"That the Times decided it was not going to show the cartoons-O.K., they're terrible-ass cartoons from a quality standpoint, but the idea that those thugs get offended and we just acquiesce, that was the most astonishing display of cowardice. And the killing of Theo van Gogh, the film director, by some jihadist in Amsterdam-all of a sudden the most liberal societies in the world were having intimidation murders happen. That's when it occurred to me that we might lose this thing-not the Iraq war but the larger struggle." ... Currin talked about low birth rates in Europe, and people having sex without babies, and pornography as a kind of elegy to liberal culture...

Will Currin succeed in politicizing porn? Will his reaction-provoking paintings, such as "The Danes" and "Women of Franklin Street" inspire liberal societies to rise up against the forces of violent religiosity?

Maybe, but Currin fails to address an ominous paradox: He wants to spark resistance to censorship, but he's using a medium that has lost its ability to shock anyone. The pornography industry is suffering at the creatively destructive hands of the market. Sex has been sold, sold and sold. Consumers are past the point of saturation. The corporate extensions of the biz are in crisis due to Internet piracy and amateur video. High definition is "ruining" the "quality" of porn because every blemish becomes magnified, reducing those perfect bodies to flawed flesh with wrinkles and surgical scars.

Even the definition of pornography has been lost. The hyper-publicized paparazzi trophies of 2007 -- crotch-shots of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan -- blurred the line between pornography and celebrity gossip-mongering.

The label "pornographic" no longer elicits major outrage. The majority of our population would no longer hold book burnings to purify the world of sinful material. Instead pornography simply bores us.

Unless the mullahs of London and Amsterdam subscribe to the New Yorker or take a pilgrimage to the Gagosian Gallery, Currin's jabs at sexually repressed extremists might very well go unnoticed. (Will the same newspapers that were afraid to run the Mohammed cartoons decide to spotlight Currin's provocations?)

Nevertheless, Currin's intermingling of Hustlerian voyeurism with "Mannerist compositions echoing Old Masters from Baldung to Parmigianino" makes his work striking. Even if no political mobilization arises, Currin's "elegy to liberal culture" is a solace for those who are disgusted with flaccid western complacency.

Related: Arabs Hot For Israeli Porn  

[Nick Cohen, author of the bestselling polemic What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way (the subtitle's slightly different in the UK), has generously agreed to let us reprint his new preface for the paperback edition. In August, I defended Cohen's book, and the Euston Manifesto, against the mendacious attacks of Johann Hari. --MW]

Tony Blair: There is global struggle in which we need a
policy based on democracy, on freedom and on justice . .
John Humphrys (a BBC presenter): Our idea of
democracy. . .
Blair: I didn't know that there was another idea of
democracy. . .
Humphrys: If I may say so, that's naïve . . .
Blair: The one basic fact about democracy, surely, is that you
can get rid of your government if you don't like them.
Humphrys: The Iranians elected their own government, and
we're now telling them. . .
Blair: Hold on John, something like 60 per cent of the
candidates were excluded.
BBC Radio 4, February 2007

WHEN I published What's Left? I did not expect to be universally loved. I have lived among London's liberal intelligentsia long enough to know that while it is hard on others it is always easy on itself, and would not take kindly to a history of how leftish people had ended up apologizing for the ultra-right. The reviewers who praised this book are all over its cover, what surprised me about the critics was their denial. A few said the book was a defence of the second Iraq war, even though every time I mentioned opposition to the war I said the opponents were right in nearly all their arguments but had astonished me and others by their inability to support those Iraqis who wanted something better after thirty-five years of a vile dictatorship.
More common was a transparent shiftiness.

All right, critics conceded, a few leftists had flipped over and gone along Islamism and Baathism. But these people were not worth bothering with. No connection existed between the ideological contortions of the extremes and a liberal mainstream that remained wedded to the highest principles. All I had done was use odious but fringe figures to smear decent and moderate men and women, such as themselves. As an account of my argument, this was partial in the extreme. What's Left? looks at how the Left picked up and then dropped the opponents of Saddam Hussein; why the European Union stood by and allowed Slobodan Milosevic to ethnically cleanse the Balkans; the reasons for the liberal middle class's disillusion with democracy and free speech; the instant willingness of respectable writers to excuse Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks; the inability of the British Liberal Democrats and European Social Democrats to oppose George W. Bush while supporting a free Iraq; the growth of polite antisemitism; and the propensity of liberals everywhere to portray a global clerical fascist movement as a rational response to Western provocation. Say what you will, but these were and are mainstream phenomena. Liberal writers did not examine them and explain why I was mistaken. They just ignored what I had written and hoped that if they insisted on their righteousness with sufficient vehemence, others would believe them - and maybe they would believe themselves.

For denial about what had happened to the liberal-left was not confined to the reaction of a couple of reviewers to one political book. In Europe and North America intellectuals worked ferociously to maintain the illusion that a principled consensus survived the mayhem after 9/11. I can sympathize with them to an extent because although it is essential to realize where the received wisdom is going wrong it is rarely a simple or painless task. Historians have it easy. They can look back at another time and see the faults in what almost everyone took for granted. In theory, we know future historians will do the same to us and find elements of our beliefs as wrong-headed and narrow-minded as we find many of those of our ancestors. In practice, however, self-examination is psychologically impossible for many. When you live in a consensus, it does not feel as if you have an ideology that needs examining. If the overwhelming majority of people you meet agree with you, your assumptions do not appear tenuous or debatable. They are just there - as natural as the air you breathe and as unquestionable as the weather.

Continue reading...

There’s little to say about l’affaire bear that isn’t already apparent to anyone with the intellect of a toothpick. Even so, I think it deserves more aggressive scrutiny than it’s received thus far.

It’s too bad about that writers’ strike: This debacle could have been a virtually inexhaustible vein of comic gold, on the order of an OJ Simpson or a Monica Lewinsky. In a sense, though, it’s good that it hasn’t worked out that way. The Islamic world has a knack, though it may be a calculated knack, for going berserk about insults—like cartoons, ice cream bars, and teddy bears—that are so out-and-out preposterous that Westerners can do little in response but crack jokes. The time for jokes is over. Note that every atheist tract on the bestseller list in the past year or two contains explicit insults to the so-called Prophet. Why isn’t anyone “protesting” Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens with a gigantic machete? I suppose all those words were too much of a brain teaser for the Teddy Bear Martyrs Brigade; I suppose it was much easier to go after this living caricature of kind-heartedness.

That’s what demands our outrage. When Jyllands-Posten published cartoons insulting the Prophet, it meant to do just that. Gillian Gibbons, on the contrary, is guilty only of trying to bring a single Lite-Brite peg of happiness to one of the darkest hellholes on earth. Of course, it doesn’t matter whether one is guilty of any provocation; a provocation can be manufactured easily enough. Bullies have operated in this fashion since the dawn of time, and likewise there have always been victims willing to pay the danegeld. Consider the reaction of some Western Muslims, reported in The Economist:

Many stressed that the treatment of Ms Gibbons was at odds with a Koranic injunction to treat visitors hospitably. “Sudan’s official response to this incident is the exact opposite of the model that Muslims are supposed to emulate,” said Firas Ahmed, deputy editor of Islamica, a glossy magazine. Musharraf Hussain, a well-known imam from the English Midlands, said Ms Gibbons had set out to help Sudanese children with “great enthusiasm and sincerity” and it was embarrassing for British Muslims to see her being punished for making an unintentional cultural mistake.

Perhaps the hardest question that Muslims in the West face from sceptical fellow-citizens is whether they are prepared in any circumstances to defend the harsh penalties, such as lashing and stoning, which the sacred texts of Islam prescribe, in particular for sexual offences, or blaspheming against the faith.

Tariq Ramadan, an influential Muslim philosopher, has called for an indefinite moratorium on capital and corporal punishment, using elaborate theological arguments to support his view that these penalties have resulted in horribly cruel treatment for vulnerable people, including women and the poor. Scholars in the Muslim heartland do not go far enough when they say the necessary conditions for the application of these traditional punishments are “almost never” fulfilled, Mr Ramadan has argued. Some westerners (including France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, in the days when he was interior minister) taunted Mr Ramadan over the use of the word moratorium: did that mean stoning might resume in the future? But to traditional scholars, Mr Ramadan is clearly going too far. The gap he is trying to straddle is already a wide one, and the story of Ms Gibbons suggests that it risks growing even wider.

There is something almost sweetly naive about appealing to various “Koranic injunctions” to try to influence the behavior of radical Muslims. Anyone with the slightest insight into human behavior knows that the desire to punish very often precedes the justification for punishment, and anyone who can get riled up over a stuffed animal is stuck squarely in the “desire to punish” stage.

It’s an appropriate coincidence that the article quoted above refers to the “gap [Ramadan] is trying to straddle,” because several days ago I read this Telegraph piece on the teddy bear fiasco just moments before noticing, in the obituaries section, that Evel Knievel had died. I felt a slight twinge of disgust when I saw a photo captioned: “Evel Knievel: appealed to America’s love of excess.” Fine, but the excess that America loves is a distinctively American variety, dramatic, individualistic, and wild at heart. The urge to jump a canyon just because it’s there is nothing to be ashamed of. As for the heinous urge to behead a harmless schoolmarm—well, the yawning chasm between Us and Them has never looked deeper or wider. I don’t think Evel himself would have attempted it.

(UPDATE: Gillian Gibbons has been “pardoned.” We’re supposed to be grateful for this, I guess?) 

Last week, Britain saw the first conviction of a woman under new anti-terror laws. Samina Malik, a 23 year-old from west London who worked in a bookshop in Heathrow Airport, had a wealth of literature in her home on such topics as bomb-making and hand-to-hand combat, as well as weapons manuals and something called "The Mujaheddin Poisoner's Handbook". Perhaps most revealing was her poetry; under the nom de plume of "the Lyrical Terrorist", Malik wrote poems like "How to Behead" and "The Living Martyrs" which explored her fascination with Islamic extremism: 

I always sit alone to think and ponder how it would be to unite with the Muslim ummah and to go shoot rocket-launchers, help them load their ammunition, nurse the wounded, and what the atmosphere would be like...

The clincher was a handwritten note on the back of a shop receipt which read, "The desire within me increases every day to go for martyrdom." She was found guilty of possessing material likely to be useful in terrorism and will be sentenced next month.

Should she be on her way to jail? A lot of people aren't convinced. This case seems to straddle the blurred line where the harmless meets the dangerous; no one wants to see poets imprisoned for conjuring up violent imagery, but the extensive list of "how-to" terrorist manuals and bomb-making information found in her apartment surely vindicate the authorities' decision to act. For those, like me, whose commitment to free speech is near-absolute, cases like these present real difficulties. Not having seen all the evidence for myself, I can only assume that the jury's decision was correct and that our streets are a little safer, but our anti-terrorist legislation is so broadly phrased that it is hard to read about this case without feeling some misgivings.

Others are clearer in their view of the case. Inayat Bunglawala, the ubiquitous spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), was in no doubt that this would have a chilling effect on freedom of thought in this country. "It is to be hoped that this case may yet serve as a demonstration of just how badly-framed some of our anti-terror legislation actually is", he wrote earlier this week.  "In a truly free society, it should not be a crime to merely download and read such material."
 
Groups such as the MCB brandish the banner of ‘free speech' quite frequently these days. When the think-tank Policy Exchange published a report into some of the copious Saudi-funded hate literature to be found in Britain's mosques, up popped Bunglawala on cue to unfurl the standard of civil liberty on their behalf. You wouldn't shut down a bookstore that sold Mein Kampf or Lolita, went the argument, so why pick on Muslim titles that explain how Jews are like pigs?

Bunglawala's passion for free speech bears all the zeal of the born-again. It wasn't so long ago that he was calling for The Satanic Verses to be banned and demonstrating in favour of Khomeini's fatwa - youthful hot-headedness he now regrets. Even now, though, he shows regrettable lapses. As the pseudonymous English blogger Gracchii notes in a recent post, the MCB's commitment to free speech seems to fizzle out when considering recent changes in British law that ban "religious hatred" which they're all in favour of. You can write screeds and screeds about how you would like to cut my head off for not being a Muslim and they will defend you to the hilt; but dare to criticise a religion that can order the victim of a gang-rape to be given 200 lashes and 6 months in jail, and you are on shakier ground.

More troubling still is the trope that pops up again and again in the discourse of Bunglawala, the Muslim Council and similar bodies. "The MCB considers [the knighthood for Rushdie] yet another example of insensitivity to Muslim opinion that will only result in their further alienation." The extradition of a computer programmer who ran terrorist websites would contribute to "further alienation" among Muslim youths. Publishing the Danish cartoons will have the "unfortunate outcome... that extremists are best placed to benefit from the situation". In all these cases the subtext is clear, because since home-grown suicide bombers hit the London Underground, we all know what "alienation" leads to, don't we? Engage with us, the MCB are saying, because if you don't listen to us we can't be responsible for what happens. The fact that they, like so many other "community leaders", are utterly unrepresentative of their constituents, is conveniently ignored. Until recently the British government humoured these people. No more, I'm glad to say; and their pride has been suitably dented.

This week, two Spanish cartoonists were found guilty of offending the royal family for depicting the Crown Prince and his wife having sex; fined over $4000 each, the magazine in which the offending cartoon was published pulled from newsstands all over the country by the police. I don't see bloggers sporting banners in defence of the Spanish cartoons; no sign of them on Michelle Malkin at time of writing. This antediluvian Spanish law shows that freedom of speech is never 100% safe even in a modern Western democracy, but has constantly to be safeguarded and fought for. I have no argument with the suggestion that freedom of speech should apply consistently and to all; that's just obviously true.

But you'll forgive me if I take the commitment of Mr Bunglawala and his ilk to free speech with a hefty pinch of salt. The term means something different, I suspect, to the Muslim Council of Britain.

Turkey is steadily becoming one of the most dangerous, complicated, and bizarre players on the world’s Islamic stage. The Washington Post has a story about a mega-best-selling Turkish book series asserting that Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other politicians in the strongly Islamic Justice and Development Party (or AKP) are actually Zionist agents. And the books are more than a popular phenomenon. They're part of a curious political movement.

Callously putting aside the loss of life, and speaking from a pragmatic perspective, 9/11, was one of the worst, and most frustrating, events for those who agitate for positive change in the lives of average people across the Muslim world. The plan of its cold and hyper-rational masterminds was to create a reverberation of irrational reactions. They did not know what irrational things would happen, but they knew horrible things would. Such things occurred, in fact. One can sit and count each and every one of these reactions -- Bush's invasion of Iraq (which Bin Laden celebrated), the expansion of Russian dictatorship police state, the re-entrenchment of Muslim dictators, the demonization of Iran (which Zarqawi wanted), the list at the international stage is really endless. There were two other things which the 9/11 masterminds did not foresee but which have had terrible consequences for us who agitate for positive change in our lives and those of others.

First, the evisceration of our civil liberties. Second, the collapse of any meaningful use of language (failure to keep our isms straight).

I want to concern myself with the second.

One can go to any part of the West's newest obsession -- Islam -- and there find information that can be classified, roughly, into three types. The first is what I call news about anarchist violence. This is news about al-Qaeda, about Islamic Jihad, about the hundreds of other copycat groups and individuals, all of whom are intent on creating mini 9/11's, want to create disorder, have some money and notoriety, but have little or nil ability to lead a nation-state. The second is news about institutional Islamism, which is about groups like Ikhwan, Jamaat e Islami, Hamas, the AKP Party, the government of Iran, and any other Islamocentric group which has grassroots power, international recognition, and seeks to, or already has, access to the reigns of power of a state. The third is about news about general acts of Muslim "stupidity", which is news about an acid attack by a Muslim, about a mentally handicapped Muslim shooting someone down, about censorship, exclamations of blasphemy, about honor killings, female genital mutilation, or even Muslim bestiality.

In an act of collective guilt, everyone from the right-wing, to President Bush, to lay-people, to progressive Muslim organizations, have for the most part, collapsed all three of these types of news into one, and concluded, in an act of myopic monism, that everything is equivalent, all at once. Non-Muslim groups and individuals in the West, peddling all of this mish-mash as one, market themselves as "anti-jihad" or "anti-Islamism" or "anti-Islamofascist" or "anti-Islam" -- whatever it is that they think will lead to them acquiring the most number of followers, so on one page of their website they will discuss the recent averted terror attack, and on the next, complain about Muslims who complain about nudity. Muslim groups and individuals in the West, often taking on the term "reformist" or "progressive" or "apostate" or "contrarian" -- whatever will sell the most books or lead to a sponsorship with a major think-tank -- also peddle this random mish-mash of things, linking the history of their personal misery with the future of Muslim violence, or on one hand speaking up for Salman Rushdie's freedom to-do-this-and-that, while lambasting a Muslim woman's freedom to-dress-as-she-pleases.

Galvanized by the existence of such numerosity, a class of "intellectual" arises. They are men and women who are lucid enough to recognize that we have today a compendium of different things under one label. However, rather than pointing out how each one of these things are distinct from one another, their ability lies in finding ways to link all three types of information with each other -- a project for which they, in order to be intellectual, hit the books. They will take an anarchist, and attempt to lay bare his connection with a fringe element of an islamist party and then link the two elements together with the "incontrovertible tendencies" of Islam in the 20th century. Or, they will take a hoary crime, or attempt at censorship, and link it to some observation about Islam made by a historical Western personality. These intellectuals, running out of connections mostly because they all read the same books, then enter into a greater debate -- between one another -- as to who is accurate and who is secretly infected with the jihadist/islamist malaise and thereby perpetuating it. Then they fight to exclude such a person from their midst, or invent altogether new words -- "Horrorism!" -- in order to maintain their intellectual uniqueness. In other words, unlike the Nietzschean intellectual spoken of in The Gay Science, these intellectuals do not put up their hands to stop and question their era; rather, they bow their heads, pen in hand, and scribble all the ways in which the pre-dominant narrative of their era can be justified. They believe that such thinking is necessary because being popular is what makes an intellectual correct.

For those, Muslim or non-Muslim alike, who genuinely care to improve the lot of Muslims -- because Muslims are a sub-set of humanity -- the world after 9/11 is not a hospitable one. If these people, humanists on any side of the political divide, have any shot at accomplishing their goals, one of the first thing that must occur is an immediate cessation of conflating jihadism with islamism. The former is rational violence perpetrated to engender irrational reactions. The latter is a rational program perpetrated to acquire political power. To recognize such a distinction is not to be an apologist for either one of them. One can (as I do) oppose Bin Laden while simultaneously being supportive of separation of mosque and state. Jihadists, if they have a political philosophy, believe in Sunni-dominated totalitarian theocracies closed to women acquired via the bomb. Islamists, who do have a political philosophy, believe in Muslim-dominated democratic theocracies open to women acquired via the vote. They are both illiberal, and that is where the similarities end.

As for Muslim stupidity -- it is a subset of human stupidity. The same Europeans that almost wept at not being able to place cartoon bombs in Muhammad's turban, do not raise a peep when Spanish police raid newspapers blocking the publication of cartoons that depict their monarchs having sex. Human stupidity cannot be "reformed" or "resisted" or "counter-jihaded." Has not our own Darwin awards, which salutes the most absurd act of death, shown us this? The worst of stupidity can be criminalized, and the mildest of it can be laughed at. What should not be allowed to happen is for it to create a culture of prejudice and superiority which distracts from the real task at hand: creating conditions for maximizing human liberty.

Today, we are in dire need of going back to our philosophic roots. We are Aristotle's children, and he is relevant to us because he exceeded all others in creating distinctions (not conflating them). Wittgenstein, the greatest of the 20th century philosophers, showed to us not just that words matter, but that language itself is woven into the fabric of our lives. The discussion about Islam consists of independent atomic facts -- states of affairs -- out of which larger facts are built. It is true that these facts, articulated in propositions, books, media, polemics, are connected to the larger issue that we call Islam. However, we cannot meaningfully operate, analyze or discuss those issues which we do not know how to evaluate atomistically. A jihadist is not the same as an islamist; a conservative islamist is not the same as a liberal Muslim; Qutb gives tools to kill but if you ask Wadud he also gives tools to do away with patriarchy; some American actions directly increase the power of conservative islamists; a domestic terrorist is not necessarily motivated by the same intentions as a foreign terrorist; a secular solution is only better if it increases freedom; there can be a fundamentalist that is more peaceful than a self-styled liberal; an individual acting alone tells us nothing about the worldview of "the Muslim."

Words matter. They must be used effectively. The failure to use language creates a cacophony which is the equivalent of silence -- and the world today requires that we cease our blubbering and articulate ourselves better.

Granted the title is a bit academic, but it might have been chosen because How The Queer Cheered For the Fag Slaughtering Ayatollahs wouldn't have gone over with the authors' colleagues at Perdue. Afary and Anderson's study of French philosopher Michel Foucault's adoration for the Islamist elements of the Iranian Revolution, goes a long way toward demystifying the odd affinities between today's academic left and reactionary Islamism. Foucault is a colossal presence in the imagination of many liberals who today are confronted by Islamic radicalism, which should frighten anyone who reads this examination of a brief but damning period in Foucault's intellectual career. All of Foucault's writings on the Revolution are included and many are available for the first time in English.

Want to get an idea for why liberals, progressives, feminists, and leftists today are so often insufficiently revolted by a patently totalitarian movement? Read Afary on Foucault.

(see video interviews with the authors here.)

In answer to the eardrum-splitting, almost constant chorus of folks who ask, "Where are the Muslims who don't endorse violence, an authoritarian states etc., etc.," I offer up the example of one Ayatollah Seyyed Hossein Kazemeyni Borujerdi and pose a question as an answer. Where are the media outlets who will make airtime for an Iranian cleric who is on death row because of his claim that:

...real Islam is free of political ornaments[...]It is included in verses whose interpretation is different from that provided by [the authorities]. Its interpretation is from 1,428 years ago. It is about the rule of the Prophet (Muhammad) and how he lived; he was against repression and opposed discrimination. Our divine leaders took food from their mouths and the mouths of their children to give it to the poor. Today, unfortunately, despite the immense wealth of this country, people live in poverty.

It is especially noteworthy that Borujerdi claims that his is a traditional interpretation of Islam.

Plenty has been said about the reformation, analogous to Christianity's Protestant one, that Islam so desperately needs in order to catch up to the modern world. But if Borujerdi's interpretation is nearly 1,500 years old and the Islamic Revolution just coming up on the big 30, one has to wonder whether it makes sense to make a fuss about 'reforming' Islam. It sounds like the reformists are the problem.

Unfortunately in reporting a story like this, one finds oneself unable to find any reasonable excuse to juxtapose Ahmadinejad's mug with a mushroom explosion...

If you look at the mission statement for Namak Magazine--basically the Iranian-American print equivalent of Jewcy--you'll find this:

Namak is a non-political, non-religious publication. We stand against any ideology or social structure that splinters the Iranian community internally or separates us from other groups.

This seems to be a common feature of modern, post-revolutionary Iranian attitudes toward the political, both in Iran and abroad. It's easy to sympathize--looking at modern politics through an Iranian lens, one encounters an extremely robust, not to mention recent, history of ideological zeal and subsequent failure. Monarchy, consitutionalism, colonialism, nationalism, modernism, traditionalism, totalitarianism, theocracy, secularism, Marxism, Islamism, revolution, reformism--all in less than a century. Now, chalk it up to poor publicity on the organizers' part, but I was still sad that there wasn't a larger turnout of Iranians at today's vigil for Haleh Esfandiari at the U.N.

It is hard to remain unmoved by the scope of the massive demonstrations of 1979. Last night, I watched the documentary, Googoosh: Iran's Daughter, an audiovisual chronicle of the magnificent Persian pop star's life. In addition to the footage of Googoosh's life and career as an entertainer, there were some gripping images--seas upon seas of people of all ages standing up to the Shah's army. I've often recently wondered whether what I perceive to be a developing Iranian polity could be an antidote to the problem of 20th century ideological zeal. I haven't given up hope, but the problem seems to become one of mobilization.

Googoosh's songwriting partners note that they never knew what she thought about politics--people in Iran just didn't say, 'So, what do you think about X, Y, or Z?' In her songs, which were never intended to have political meaning, she often sang in a forlorn, longing tone of better days. Sometimes she sang about flirtation and the nomadic nature of the human heart. It's not impossible to say that while Khomeini was one voice and face of the revolution, she was its feminine visage and its songstress--the side, in other words, that had to be veiled from sight in order to create and maintain the illusion that it was a univocal Islamic Revolution. According to Islamic jurists under Khomeini, listening to the female voice is something akin to seeing an uncovered woman. It is dangerous in its ability to arouse desire. Music of this sort--the kind that encourages sensuality, flight, fancy, and escape from the slings of existence--is 'strictly forbidden by Islam.'

But this lack of politicization and mobilization is not only a problem for Iranians. I would like to have seen more faces there today in general. It goes without saying that any turnout is better than no turnout at all, but the freedom of these men and women matters to the emancipatory project of all humanity. Nobody anywhere can afford to be apolitical or postpolitical about this.

Googoosh was silenced for 20 years before moving to America during the somewhat liberal reforms of Kahatami. She's singing again (there's a concert July 7th in Toronto). While it's not enough to simply say 'let the music be the guide,' it also isn't naive to say that if the faces and voices of ideology have blunted too many hearts to action, then perhaps the spirit of the songstress so feared by the blackfrocks might give us some idea of what a call back into the streets might sound like.

The feminist critique says that it's wrong essentialize sexual or erotic desire in the feminine. Fine, fair enough. I'm not saying the sensuality of this music springs essentially from Googoosh's femininity; but you can hardly deny its presence or its power. Desire isn't inherently feminine--that's the misogynist stereotype that the mullahs insist upon. But it's always satisfying to see chains of bondage turned into instruments of freedom. Call it political aikido if you like.

I'd be lying if I said that seeing the Googoosh of Iran past--the Bowie-esque fashion chameleon, the chanteuse, the dancer, the acrobat, the actress--didn't have something to do with moving me to show solidarity with the victims of the regime that seeks to erase such vibrance and virtuosity. The silencing of her voice and Haleh's have much in common. Googoosh's songwriters spent time in Evin prison where Mrs. Esfandiari resides today. The goal--freedom to sing and speak--is reason enough to unite in favor of Haleh's release. But if reason isn't persuasive, listen to the music:

 

In its June 2007 issue, the monthly magazine Commentary revives the genre of gullible travels.“My Saudi Sojourn” is Joshua Muravchik’s account of his recent trip to Saudi Arabia and a servile love letter to the most benighted of all Sunni Arab regimes. “My Saudi Sojourn” might as well have been titled “Walter Duranty goes to Arabia,” after the New York Times journalist whose accounts of life in Stalin’s USSR downplayed the great miseries inflicted by the regime. Duranty spawned a journalistic genre that could be described as “propaganda tourism,” cheerful travelogues that littered American newspapers and magazines in the 1930s and painted a benign picture of Stalin’s ...

Democratiya's summer issue is out, and it's required reading. Here is Nick Cohen reviewing a new collection of Orwell's journalism:

When the Poles rose up on the orders of the exiled government in London to throw the Germans out and stop the Soviet Union taking the city [Orwell] protested 'against the mean and cowardly attitude' of the liberal press, which urged that they should be left to die.

What I am concerned with is the attitude of the British intelligentsia, who cannot raise between them one single voice to question what they believe to be Russian policy, no matter what turn it takes, and in this case have had the unheard-of meanness to hint that our bombers ought not to be sent to the aid of our comrades fighting in Warsaw. The enormous majority of left-wingers who swallow the policy put out by the News Chronicle, etc., know no more about Poland than I do. All they know is that the Russians object to the London Government and have set up a rival organization, and so far as they are concerned that settles the matter. If tomorrow Stalin were to drop the Committee of Liberation and recognize the London Government, the whole British intelligentsia would flock after him like a troop of parrots. Their attitude towards Russian foreign policy is not 'Is this policy right or wrong?' but 'This is Russian policy: how can we make it appear right?' And this attitude is defended, if at all, solely on grounds of power.

Today, you don't here a single voice raised in protest about what al Qaeda is doing to Iraq or against the Muslim Brotherhood anywhere in the world. If anything the duplicity is worse than during Stalinism. Then, leftish intellectuals could pretend to themselves that the Soviet Union was progressive and at some level shared their values. By contrast, Islamism makes no secret of its contempt for the Left and for liberalism or its appropriation of Nazi conspiracy theory. From the Iranian Revolution onwards, the first task of radical Islam has been to persecute Muslim socialists, liberals and freethinkers.

 

Does moderate Islam exist? To many Westerners, the answer is absolutely not; they view Islam as a religion of violent jihad, amputation of limbs, compulsory veiling of women, honor killings, and similar atrocities. To Muslims, even posing the question is vexing, because it demonstrates how little Westerners understand the faith of Muhammad. But who and where are the moderates, some Westerners would ask. The Muslim author Tariq Ramadan, born in Switzerland, has declared himself a moderate, but is he sincere? And what about the implicit claim of another author coming from the Muslim world, the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who left the religion entirely? She would argue that there is no moderate Islam, that the nightmare of extremism is ubiquitous. The question of moderate Islam, which impends on the future of humanity as a whole, lurks somewhere inside the cumbersome June 4 New ...

Paul Berman. So much for Islamism lite over "Enlightenment fundamentalism."

Ayaan Hirsi Ali interviewed by Reset:

You defined Mohammed a tyrant and a pervert. You are absolutely free to think and say anything you want, but maybe this kind of somewhat provocative language is useless, isn’t it? It could create walls and clashes, not favouring a dialogue. Your story is a terrible story and everybody should know that, but maybe this language could be an obstacle for moderate Muslims.

The prophet Mohammed married a six-year-old girl, had sex with her when she was nine, and there are millions of Muslim men today who follow in his footsteps. When I say he was a pervert, this is what I mean. Now, my opponents say “you will create walls if you call him this way”. What I say is that for these poor little girls who are 9, 10, 11 or 12, the wall already exists. In my views, provoking people to see what is happening behind this wall does not mean erecting walls, but trying and letting these walls tumble down. When Bin Laden, the Saudi Kingdom and Ahmadinejad want to establish theocracies today in the name of Islam, they are following the example of the prophet Mohammed. That is why I call him a tyrant. If we want to provoke people to think about this tyranny and how it comes about, it is good to bring Mohammed down to our level and say: “what he did was normal in the seventh century, but today we do not like it anymore, we do not find it normal, we do not like tyranny”.

Allan Bloom once recalled, in The Closing of the American Mind, how a simple question could yield encyclopedias of moral casuistry. Ask a contemporary American classroom if British civil servants in India were right to stop the practice of sati, whereby widows would throw themselves onto their dead husbands's funeral pyres, and you'd be met by yowls of enlightened protest: "But those civil servants shouldn't have even been there!" Yes, but what about intervening in a tribally coerced act of self-immolation? At some point, the colonial theory abandons you and you're forced to make a decision: allow a gruesome suicide to proceed, or try to prevent it from doing so...

I'm sure I'll get aggrieved comments just for linking to this interview, much less pulling that particular excerpt from it. Allow me then to ask: Is anything Hirsi Ali says factually untrue? Did the prophet Mohammed not marry a 9 year-old girl, and should 9 year-old girls continue to be married to older men -- in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, or anywhere?

The ice-rimmed rictus on Walt Disney's cryogenically frozen face is in the shape of a smile today.

Erdogan's Justice and Development Party is what you might call "Islamist Lite." Still, they play to the cheap seats for votes, and rumor has it the Kemalist doctrine of hyper-secularism is on the wane in Ankara. The only encouraging sign is the putsch against presidential candidate Abdullah Gul, who's been hit with popular indignation after his wife paraded around town and in front of cameras in a headscraf. The BBC:

The opposition accuses Mr Gul of having a hidden Islamist agenda and says that if he becomes president it will threaten Turkey's secular tradition.

Also, Cihan Tugal has a fairly long piece in New Left Review entitled "Nato's Islamists" which provides a cross-section of the ruling party:

The appeal of the AKP to liberals and intellectuals in 2002 rested primarily on its pro-democratic, pro-European stance. Yet on democratization, the party has never demonstrated more than a pro forma commitment. Erdoğan is well-known for his authoritarian tendencies, and as the can-do mayor of Istanbul between 1994 and 1998 he ruled with an iron fist. [27] At its founding congress, the akp leadership had pledged itself to a regime of internal party democracy, but initial moves in this direction were soon overturned. In 2003, the akp’s Board of Founders annulled internal elections to the Central Committee and invested the party president, Erdoğan, with sole authority to appoint or dismiss members of the Central Committee. These authoritarian moves had their counterparts in the relation of the party to the people. While Erdoğan’s government legislated a series of democratic reforms at the instigation of the eu, it has also disregarded the most basic norms of representivity and accountability with regard to its electorate—most blatantly, of course, over Iraq. Rather than taking popular grievances seriously, Erdoğan will publicly scold anybody who talks to him about hunger, unemployment or housing problems. At party rallies he has told the poor to pull themselves together and do something for themselves, instead of expecting the government to do it for them.

We may despise the methods employed by Al Qaeda and other takfiri Islamists, but we cannot be surprised that they fight us. From the day Napolean Bonaparte landed on Egyptian shores in 1798, the West has unceasingly occupied Muslim land, immiserated its peoples, emasculated its culture, and pilfered its resources. Is it any surprise that a revolutionary movement has emerged which seeks to liberate Muslims from the bungling brutality of the West? Because make no mistake about it: this is a liberation movement. And though we are repulsed by the reactionary aspects of their ideology, we would be fools to deny that Islamists are justified in seeking the liberation of their peoples from the West.

If the above codswallop still sounds at all reasonable to you, I draw your attention attention to yesterday's atrocity in Algiers.

The death toll from al-Qaida-claimed suicide bombings in Algeria rose Thursday to 33, the government said, and police rolled out in force in the shaken capital, establishing highway checkpoints to reinforce security. The group that claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s attacks, al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa, has carried out a series of recent bombings jeopardizing Algeria’s tentative peace. The country, a staunch U.S. ally in the war on terrorism, has been trying to turn the page on a 15-year insurgency that killed 200,000 people.

This is not just another massacre by an Al Qaeda satellite group. It may in fact be the most pathological expression of Islamist nihilism that we’ve seen in the 21st century.

The Algerian Civil War of the 1990s was not so much a war as a Kurtzian descent into the horrors of human bestiality. What began as a conflict between the military and Islamists devolved into a succession of increasingly surreal massacres in which the takfirists of The Armed Islamic Group extended takfir to an ever-larger portion of the Algerian population. Ultimately, anyone who did not support the GIA was proclaimed worthy of death, and entire villages were massacred in joyous all-night orgies in which women were raped or captured as sexual chattel, pregnant women disemboweled, children beheaded, and all the rest. The GIA proudly claimed responsibility and that the massacres were an “offering to God.” Unlike in today’s Iraq, there were not even confessional differences to justify the bloodshed.

The madness ended only when the GIA began consuming itself, with members proclaiming takfir on one another or defecting out of horror at the violence.

Al-Qaeda in Islamic North Africa—the group responsible for the recent bombing—is composed partly by remnants of the GIA. The group was moribund, and Al Qaida’s sponsorship is enabling its resurgence. If there is a purer expression of Islamism's loathing of the Muslim people, I can't imagine it. And if this isn’t the Kronstadt moment for sympathizers of Islamism, then their Kronstadt will never come.

Adam Krzeminski, the editor of the Polish magazine Polityka makes an eloquent but muddled case for splitting the difference between Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma's multiculturalism and what I prefer to call Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Presumption of Pure Reason. (It's much more savory to group the brave Somali with Spinoza than it is to pay heed to the meretricious term used by her detractors, "Enlightenment fundamentalist," which gives me kooties even to see it under inverted commas like that.)

Krzeminski is of the "a little from Column A, a little from Column B" mentality, but his bone of contention with Hirsi Ali's has to do with her comparison of Islamism and Communism. In a speech she delivered in Berlin in September of last year, she rightly described both isms as violent, totalitarian movements whose opponents are ridiculously labeled reactionaries by fellow travelers and feather-headed relativists. To Krezminski:

Even if one were to argue that communism - at least in the Russian-Orthodox variation, is an instrument of political theology, it would still be a gross oversimplification to compare it – this still-born theory – with a millennium old monotheistic religion. And whatever the differences between Stalinism and communism – even in the Soviet Union it was never a deeply internalised religion that was carried by the people. It was a social promise and a belief system that was imposed top down and with force. And it imploded by itself like a soap bubble after just 70 years. The reasons for this were manifold: the pressure from within – for which the dissidents and mass revolts like the Polish Solidarnosc, and the Hungarian, Czech, East German, Baltic, Ukrainian and all the other protest movements over the years deserve recognition – as well as the pressure from outside, the involvement in dialogue, the cooperation and finally through what Ulrike Ackermann so disparagingly refers to as "change through rapprochement".

The first thing to notice about this paragraph is that it suffers from a clumsiness of prose: to what does Krezminski refer when he writes, "even in the Soviet Union it was never a deeply internalised religion that was carried by the people" -- Stalinism or communism? In either case, the evidence is solidly against him.

The rise of the nomenklatura, or "New Class" of bureaucratic elite, and the instantiation of Marxist-Leninist epistemology in later generations who grew up without a memory of tsardom -- these aspects of Soviet life prove that ideology was a deeply internalized religion carried by the people.

After the Berlin Wall came down, misguided liberals were no less triumphalist than cold warriors. "Ah ha," they said. "So it was all bluster and brinkmanship, not ideology, since the reformists within the Kremlin always knew the Soviet experiment was operating on borrowed time." That there were reformists is not in dispute, but that ideology was not paramount is just plain wrong. Of course the plan was world revolution, right up to the very end, admitted Schevernadze and Gromyko, both foreign ministers who went on to enjoy rocky post-Soviet political careers. The socialist ideal was never for a minute discarded by those middle-ranking bureaucrats who'd had it drummed into their brains since childhood, much as a Catholic who becomes agnostic never fully forgets her catechism, or the guilt that goes along with it. It took the extraordinary shift in historical conditions to win -- or, at any rate, convince -- hearts and minds in Moscow.

Krezminski then goes on to say that, well, the real dissidents of Communism -- Koestler, Silone, Milosz -- all returned to their "European, Judeo-Christian-Enlightenment cultural roots," unlike Hirsi Ali, who has abandoned her Somali traditions altogether in favor of adopted Western ones. This is also a false dichotomy.

Koestler grew up during the "Golden Age" of Budapest, where he marched in Communist rallies as a boy, before turning to Zionism, then back to Communism, and finally ended up an apostate (there is no other adequate term for it) and a believer in crackpot paranormal theories (falling under no configuration of the Judeo-Christian-Enlightenment rubric I can think of). Koestler never returned to Hungary, so nor can it be said that he came full circle, unless one is ready to believe the Danube ran through Savile Row and Clubland London in the late fifties.

Milosz gave up his native Lithuania for Poland, where he became the unofficial poet laureate, whose verses reflected a Europe that would never fully recover from the ravages of the 20th century. (We can also include Milan Kundera in this pessimistic category.)

And in a way, Silone never completely abandoned his engagement with the forces of Progress and the Future because he later declared that the battle of human existence could only be fought between the Communists and the ex-Communists -- a far cry from humble mezzogiorno roots in the Abruzzo region of southern Italy, one has to admit.

So just because Hirsi Ali said goodbye to all that -- where "that" was more than just the self-aggrandizing hallucinations of a seventh-century epileptic and the monotheism he founded -- doesn't make her any less of a dissident in an equally wrought struggle for civilization. That a religion is a millennium old only means that trenchant criticism of it has been around longer. Hirsi Ali is doing nothing that Spinoza, Mill, even Marx haven't done before. And it should be remembered that Koestler and Silone edited a volume of ex- and anti-Communist essays entitled, The God That Failed, which might as well have been the working title for Infidel, too.

Adam Krzeminski: The view from the Vistula - signandsight

Disaffected Jews say the darndest things: Al Qaeda convert Adam GadahnSo you're the homeschooled child of Jewish hippies. You grew up on a goat farm in California, introverted but fiercely intelligent, into death metal and other people who are into death metal. Your life is a minus sign. You're looking for uplift. So what do you do? You join Al Qaeda, of course:

Adam Gadahn’s nom de guerre is Azzam al-Amriki (Azzam the American). He can fluently recite the Koran in classical Arabic, and, since the late nineteen-nineties, when he joined the jihad, his English has acquired a vaguely Middle Eastern accent. At times, he speaks in what might be called Jihadlish—a peculiar fusion of American vernacular and militant Islamist theory. Gadahn may be the first Al Qaeda operative to lace a religious threat with a reference to Monopoly. (“If you die as an unbeliever in battle against the Muslims, you’re going straight to hell, without passing Go.”) Or to adopt the bluster of a barroom pundit. (“Whoever takes over for Bush probably won’t have the guts to bring the troops home.”) Once, referring to Abu Jahal, an early enemy of Islam known as the Father of Ignorance, Gadahn said, “I can’t forget the day, when, as I was praying a prescribed prayer with one of the brothers in a shopping-center parking lot in suburban America, a man sped by in his sports-utility vehicle shouting from his open window, ‘Worship Jesus, your Lord.’ The gas guzzler, cell phone, and college diploma notwithstanding, one couldn’t help but be reminded of Abu Jahal in the seventh century, abusing the Prophet while he prayed.”

The day I stop by Kuwait’s High Institute ...