Author: issandr

Al Azm on Islamism

In an important new essay in the Boston Review, Time Out of Joint, the Syrian philisopher Sadik Al-Azm looks at some of the root motivations behind the nihilist Islamist movements exemplified by Al Qaeda and predicts that the current violence around the world is its death throes:

I predict this violence will be the prelude to the dissipation and final demise of militant Islamism in general. Like the armed factions in Europe who had given up on society, political parties, reform, proletarian revolution, and traditional communist organization in favor of violent action, militant Islamism has given up on contemporary Muslim society, its sociopolitical movements, the spontaneous religiosity of the masses, mainstream Islamic organizations, the attentism of the original and traditional Society of Muslim Brothers (from which they generally derive in the way the 1970s terrorists derived from European communism), in favor of violence. Both were contemptuous of politics and had complete disregard for the consequences of their actions.

That thesis is not new — it was expressed by French arabists and “Islamologists” Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel in the 1990s — but Azm’s essay adds to it in his eloquent essay the anxiety and urgency that comes from a Muslim intellectual writing about his own intellectual heritage and future. When he writes about Arabs and Muslims perceptions of their role in history and their attitude towards modernity, he writes we, not they. It is an important difference.

In the marrow of our bones, we still perceive ourselves as the subjects of history, not its objects, as its agents and not its victims. We have never acknowledged, let alone reconciled ourselves to, the marginality and passivity of our position in modern times. In fact, deep in our collective soul, we find it intolerable that our supposedly great nation must stand helplessly on the margins not only of modern history in general but even of our local and particular histories.

Read and re-read it all.

Sinai terror attacks

After a seven-year hiatus, terrorism is back in Egypt. After you read below the fold, do check out this radio transcript from ABC. A Jihadist group has claimed responsibilitz, but the Egyptian government is saying it could be related to the current fighting in Gaza.More later.

Blasts kill 30 on Egypt-Israeli border
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By Sarah el Deeb

Oct. 7, 2004 | Three explosions shook popular resorts on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on Thursday night as many Israelis vacationed at the close of a Jewish holiday. Officials said at least 30 people were killed and 114 wounded, and witnesses gave unconfirmed reports that all three explosions were caused by car bombs.

Continue reading Sinai terror attacks

Benjelloun and Khoury

Frankfurt International Book Fair

I barely have anytime left before I run to catch the plane, but I wanted to put this down now: Elias Khoury and Tahar Benjelloun — respectively some of Lebanon’s and Morocco’s most respected and best-selling writers — were just discussing Arab pulbishing. Benjelloun launched into a tirade against Syrian publishers especially, calling on Syria to ratify the relevant intellectual property rights international agreements and clamp down on pirate publishers.

“There is this Syrian publisher who loves my books, but in a rather perverse way,” said Benjelloun, who writes in French but is frequently translated into Arabic. “Not only does he steal my books, but he translates them badly and then censors all the sex and politics out of them.”

One example he gave was a character who picked up a newspaper, saw a picture of Saddam Hussein, and exclaims, “Not that bastard again!” In the Syrian Arabic version of that same book, the whole passage was taken out.

“If Syria can’t even respect intellectual rights than it will never respect human rights,” Benjelloun said. “It’s not a question of money, but a question of morality and respect.”

It was an interesting aside from a discussion forum that was still very centered on the information gathered in the Arab Human Development Report — both Khoury and Benjelloun were rather puzzled when they were asked who their readership was (Khoury just said, “I don’t know, I’m not a sociologist.”) But there was this idea that the German moderator was attached to that literature has a certain readership in terms of social class — the elite. I don’t think that’s really true, and the more important criteria may simply be youth and level of education, which doesn’t necessarily correlate with income levels and social class in countries with traditions of free higher education.

More to come on this later.

In Frankfurt

Frankfurt International Book Fair

Because of the peculiarities of air travel in the Middle East, which seems to take place mostly at night, I arrived this morning in Frankfurt from Casablanca at 6am and headed groggily to the book fair for a few hours until I take the plane to Cairo this afternoon. (There will be a long post on Morocco later, when I’ve had time to digest my ten pretty hectic days there.) I am now writing from the press center, where I have been busily looking into the blasts in Sinai mentioned below, and which I will most probably have to work on tonight.

My first impressions, walking around the international area of the fair where the booths for individual Arab countries and publishers are gathered (I haven’t been to the Arab League’s booth yet, which is apparently the main one), is that things are pretty well organized. Some of the booths, especially the ones for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are pretty kitsch — papier-mache renditions of Arabian forts and so on — but these tend also to be the largest (although, as far as literature is concerned, the least interesting. Prominently displayed are such books ‘Human rights and their enforcements in Saudi Arabia,” which turns out to be a rather turgid treatise on how Saudi Arabia recreates various conditions that supposedly existed around the time of the prophet. Syria’s stand, staid and boring in the tradition of that country’s ministry of information, is replete with biographies of the two Assads that served as presidents and books on the philosophy behind their thinking. Perhaps the strangest thing in the Syrian stand is a kind of prayer computer, basically a screen that one places at the head of the prayer mat and which highlights Suras from the Quran. It looks like it is made with computer technology from the mid-1980s, although the manufacturers say it “helps make devout.”

Much more interesting, obviously, are the stands by Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria and even Oman — although I haven’t seen all the Lebanese ones yet (they should be the best) or any Egyptian ones (the ones who produce the most books). There really is everything from cookbooks and technical books to fiction and history available, most often in Arabic but also in French and English. Often publishers will have the Arabic books they are selling next to their translations by other publishers, particularly for big names in Arab fiction like Naguib Mahfouz or Abdel Rahman Munif.

I’m going for another round now that more people are showing up, and will have another post before I head for the airport. In the meantime, I just read a nice article in the Times Literary Supplement on the relationship between Arabic and the Quran (and more). Here’s an excerpt from the middle of the article, but you should read the whole thing.

God chose Arabic. This makes Arabic particularly open to stagnation, mythologization, formalization, kitsch, and demagoguery. It is the fascination and danger of all verbal magic, a theme that has preoccupied thinkers such as Gershom Scholem, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus. Anyone who has witnessed a well-phrased, rousing public speech in an Arabic country has felt the effect of the language on the audience. A politician, theologian, or poet who speaks in classical Arabic, provided he is a good orator, is sure to captivate a wide audience. It is difficult to imagine how such a speech might sound in a different language, removed from the constant presence of a 1,400-year-old language with strong sacral overtones in society, its theology, literature and politics. Language operates here as a kind of time machine, effectively transporting all present back to a mythical epoch. Even television broadcasts of a speech by, say, Qaddafi, Yassir Arafat, or Saddam Hussein may have this effect. And how much more impressive were the great speeches by Gamal Abdal Nasser, whose success in leading an uprising in Egypt was due to his extraordinary rhetorical skill.

Since the full article is not on the TLS website (this is all they have), I’ll scan it and post it later today or tomorrow.

Frankfurt Book Fair

Frankfurt International Book Fair

The Frankfurt International Book Fair opened yesterday with “the Arab world” as its guest of honor. If all goes well, I’ll be attending the fair tomorrow morning as I fly from Casablanca to Cairo, via Frankfurt, and have about eight hours to linger. I’ll try to do some reporting on the fair — as much as I can in that short time-span — and post anything worthwhile, hopefully from the fair itself or otherwise later in the day.

In the meantime, here are a few articles culled from the internet on the opening and other pertinent issues:

  • The BBC writes about how Arab authors are “stealing the show” and the difficulties they encounter with censorship.
  • Al-Ahram Weekly reviews press coverage — especially German press — of the Arab role in the fair.
  • The Simon Wiesenthal Center is complaining that some books at the fair “incite hatred” and gives a list of the offending titles. However, while some of the books listed are clearly offensive and racist, others are simply anti-Israeli. For instance, a book about the Israeli destruction of Quneitra (in Syria) doesn’t seem that offensive, since that town was razed to the ground by Israel. That’s not really racism or anti-Semitism, so it’s a shame they include them and only discredits them.
  • IslamOnline has a special book fair file that already has several interesting articles, including:
  • In “Arab Publisher Speaks Out on the Frankfurt Book Fair” the deputy-director of the Arab Publisher’s Association, Mohammed Rashad, speaks out about the obstacles to publishing in the Arab World, reading trends in the Middle East and his preparations for the fair.

    • An interesting note from Rashad’s interview:

    “As an observer of the Arab market, I can tell you that the interests of the Arab reader have followed several trends in the course of my career. In the beginning of the ‘70s literature and modern poetry were the main interest of the Arab reader. Towards the end of the ‘70s, religious and classical religious writings came to the forefront, such as Qur’anic exegesis and Hadith. By the ‘80s books related to IT [information technology] topped all the lists. In the ‘90s literature had a strong comeback. Nowadays, surprisingly, classical and modern works on Islam and modern Islamic thought are topping the sales lists. We find a lack of religious thought and intellectual production when it comes to this field. Also, no one can ignore the strong interest in modern poetry.”

  • In “Dialogue With the President of the Frankfurt Book Fair,” Volker Neumann provides us with a behind-the-scenes impression of the organization of the fair, the negotiations with the guest of honor, and his hopes and expectations for the event.

  • In “Arabic Literature in Translation: A Survey,” Peter Ripken gives a historical overview of the translation of Arabic literature into Western European languages and sheds light on the causes for the lack of translations from Arabic available on the Western book markets today. 
  • In “Translations as Caricatures of the Arab World?” Samir Grees challenges the contention that translations from Arabic are chosen exclusively on the basis of Orientalist stereotypes of the Arab world and political sensationalism while expressing harsh criticism of the Arab League for its perceived lack of support for literary production.
  • In “Authors Without Books: Young Yemeni Literature Is Looking for Its Place,” Arab Literature expert Günther Orth uncovers the hidden pearls of a virtually unknown literature and describes the struggles its authors face in a land where the publishing tradition is only just being born.

    • Paranoid Saddam

    One interesting aspect of the recently released CIA report that, once again, made it clear that Iraq did not have WMDs is that we now know that even Saddam Hussein’s top lieutenants didn’t know that there were no WMDs at all. This radically changes the picture of Saddam as an out-of-touch leader manipulated by underlings who were too afraid to tell him the truth:

    Only Hussein Had Full Picture:

    For example, many in the U.S. intelligence community had believed that Hussein’s sycophantic generals kept him in the dark about the state of Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs — that is, that the dictator was misled by associates who told him what he wanted to hear.

    Far from being misinformed, the report says, Hussein was micromanaging Iraq’s weapons policy himself and kept even his most loyal aides from gaining a clear picture of what was going on — and, more important, not going on — with the program.

    “Saddam’s centrality to the regime’s political structure meant that he was the hub of Iraqi WMD policy and intent,” the report concluded.

    His paranoia and his fascination with science and technology “meant that control of WMD development and its deployment was never far from his touch,” it said.

    Palestine in formaldehyde

    Dov Weisglass, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s key advisor, went public today saying that his administration’s plan was to use the Gaza withdrawal to shelf the peace process and the creation of a Palestinian state. The headline of the Reuters story on this, Israel: Palestinian State Shelved with U.S. Blessing, is telling.

    Here is the Weisglass quote from Haaretz:

    “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” Weisglass, one of the initiators of the disengagement plan, said in an interview for the Friday Magazine.

    “And when you freeze that process,” Weisglass added, “you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.

    “Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

    “The disengagement is actually formaldehyde,” he said. “It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

    Remember that this is taking place in the midst of a large offensive by Israel into Gaza. An Arab attempt to get the UN to condemn this was, as usual, vetoed by the US because it was considered “lopsided and unbalanced” and “absolves terrorists in the Middle East.” All of which is another way of saying that the US once again puts its credibility on the line to damage Israel, especially when you could easily have separate resolutions condemning Israel’s offensive and the use of terror by Palestinian groups.

    I am also curious about the timing of this announcement in the middle of the last stretch of the US presidential election campaigns. The US has now asked for “clarifications” — which sounds like they might end up pulling out the old chestnut that Israel is “not helpful.” But it would be nice to hear strong condemnations from both presidential candidates, and indeed an attack from the Kerry campaign on Bush’s ineffectual Middle East peacemaking. Elections however make all this unlikely.

    It may be that this is really for domestic consumption, a throwaway phrase to placate the extreme Israeli right. But at this point it makes more sense to believe that Sharon, Weisglass and company are the Israeli extreme right — the difference being that while in power they have to try to appear more moderate. Which is why there can never be a peace process while Likud is in power — if Menachem Begin ignored the Palestinian parts of Camp David and Benyamin Netanyahu buried Oslo, Sharon will also kill the roadmap. That his top adviser is willing to say so publicly says a lot about their cynicism — and that they know they’ll get away with it.