Aniconic Self-Portrait

This is a 'word cloud' built from the vocabulary of my web-log, (the most frequently appearing words are printed in a larger font.) Thanks to my friend over at http://planetgrenada.blogspot.com for keeping me up to date on the happenings of the "cool kids" in the blogsphere ; )

An Iconic Peace

Muhammad on a camel, and Jesus on a donkey, greet the prophet Isaiah.

Here is an 'icon of peace,' drawn long before the beginning of the current 'cartoon war.' This remarkable image is taken from a 14th century MS of the Ilkhanate empire in Iran and Iraq. Clearly, that "medieval age" was a much more tolerant time than our current "enlightened era" - a time of real respect and honest dialogue among the three, great, Arbahamic faiths. God willing, we will move beyond 'cartoon wars' one day, and again start to draw pictures of religious co-existence.

The Cartoon War

f.y.i.
A new blog devoted exclusively to you know what and who (s.a.s.)

Face of Muhammed - Drawings of Muhammed

Hamas & Ibn Khaldun: Going for the Cylcle?

f.y.i. A fantastic article taken from an intelligent and well-written weblogger, I just discovered. Add this site to your bookmarks! www.ahjur.org/tabsir

I am not an expert on the Palestine issue, nor am I trained to think in the apocalyptic terms sometimes engaged by pundits and enraged politicians who forget that political science is more often an art or even pure fiction than a replicable analytical technique. But the overwhelming election victory of Hamas (which might equally be seen as the crushing defeat of Fatah) is too intriguing to pass up. Much of the speculation in the media is about tactics: Will Hamas give up support of violent acts against Israelis? Will Israel stubbornly refuse to negotiate with a group it would rather see fade into oblivion? Will the United States see this democratic experiment as a bridge or a barrier on the so-called road map to peace? In all this I cannot help but think about what the famous 14th century North African savant Ibn Khaldun would have said if he could be interviewed from the grave for the New Tunis Times. It might go something like this…
NTT: “It is an honor, Mr. Bin Khaldun, to meet a man who some Western scholars think was the Arab intellectual precursor of the sociologists Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, the economist Adam Smith and the Italian political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli.”
IK: “Actually, it is Ibn Khaldun, my friend. I am not yet ready to be cast into the Bin of discarded Islamic icons. And in my day and age we had no Misters and certainly nowhere near the number of mistresses to be imagined in Montesquieu’s Paris. I am only a humble scholar who has written a simple introduction to the study of history. If these other lesser lights you mention plagiarize what I wrote, it is none of my affair.”
NTT: “My apologies, Sir.”
IK: “Again, you seem not to know much about my world. I was neither sired nor ‘Sir-ed’ in Tunis, where my family comes from, or Cairo, where I taught for a spell.”
NTT: “Perhaps you have a view on the current election in Palestine, where an avowedly militant group called Hamas just won an impressive victory at the polls. What do you think will happen next?”
IK: “I do not claim to be expert on 21st century history, and I must admit my surprise that the world has lasted this long without an apocalyptic end to the misery humans bring upon themselves and the rest of the world God created. But I have heard that the problem stems from the powerful state of Israel once it occupied this holy land more than half a century ago. Some Israeli politicians, if not the majority, view Hamas as little more than a bunch of wild Bedouin nomads. For them nomads are rough, savage and uncultured, and their presence is always inimical to civilization; however, I believe that at its core the people who support Hamas are hardy, frugal, uncorrupt in morals, freedom-loving and self-reliant, and so make excellent fighters. In addition, they have a strong sense of ‘asabiya, which can be translated as ‘group cohesion’ or ‘social solidarity.’ This greatly enhances their appeal during a time of military occupation. Western-oriented urban centers like Tel Aviv, by contrast, are the seats of the crafts, the sciences, the arts and culture. Yet secular luxury corrupts many Israelis, and as a result they see opposition as a liability to the state, even women and children who throw rocks at tanks. Morality is completely relaxed and the arts of defending justice and of negotiating with the enemy are forgotten, so they are no match for voting extremists.”
NTT: “I am not quite sure I understand that last point. How will Hamas assume power, since the Israeli state is not about to be obliterated by rhetoric?”
IK: “If we think of Hamas as religious-driven nomads who conquer the minds of ordinary people, remember that their elected leaders establish a new political dynasty. At first the new rulers retain their Islamic virtues and solidarity, but soon they seek to concentrate all authority in their own hands. Increasingly they rule through a bureaucracy of clients, perhaps taking money from other conservative Islamist groups. As their former supporters lose their moral suasion there is an increasing use of the secular political process, and getting elected comes to be more important than proper ruling. Luxury corrupts ethical life, and the population of support decreases. Just look at what happened to Fatah. Rising expenditure demands higher taxes, which discourage production and eventually result in lower revenues.”
TNN: “Are you saying you support the economic policies of the Bush administration? As an Arab I would assume you revile American policies.”
IK: “Well Adam Smith took my idea of an invisible hand underlying all modes of production, with some hands perhaps less invisible than others. But the problem is not so much with trickle down economics as it is with trickle down politics, when elected officials skim off the people’s wealth and live in expensive villas; this is probably why Fatah was voted out of office. I really do not care what the Bush administration does as long as they just leave my part of the world alone. I wish they would invent an energy substitute for crude oil and let the Middle East get back to welcoming tourists and building shopping malls.”
TNN: “So what happens next in the process?”
IK: “The elected officials of Hamas or any newly emerging party and their clients become isolated from the groups that originally brought them to power. Such a process of decline is taken to last three generations, or about one hundred and twenty years. Religion is a major influence on the nature of such a model; when ‘asabiya is reinforced by religion its strength is multiplied, and great empires can be founded. This is what both Hamas and the Iranian ayatollahs are counting on. The theory is that religion can also reinforce the cohesion of an established state. Yet the endless cycle of flowering and decay shows no evolution or progress except for that from the primitive form of violence against civilians to a civilized parliament like the Knesset where words replace bullets. Although the damage may be as bad in the end.”
TNN: “So do you really think it will take three generations or one hundred and twenty years before the crisis between the Palestinians and Israel is resolved?”
IK: “Well some think that is how long it took Noah to build his ark. As a medieval rationalist, I would not say this, but consider the complications in the process of addressing deep-seated wrongs when all sides feel aggrieved. It can be noted that those people who, whether they inhabit the desert of Gaza or settled areas and cities in the West Bank, live a life of abundance and have all the good things to eat, die more quickly than others when a drought, famine or stringent government security comes upon them. This was the case, as I know well from seven centuries ago, with the Berbers of the Maghrib and the inhabitants of the city of Fez, and as we hear, of Cairo. It is not so with the Palestinian Arabs who inhabit waste regions and deserts, or with the inhabitants of regions where the glass house tomato grows and whose principal food is cheap imported spaghetti, or with the present day inhabitants of Ifriqiyah (Libya) whose principal income is from oil. When an Israeli missile strikes their houses, it does not kill as many of them as of the other group of people, and few, if any, die for any moral result. Those who die in such raids are victims of their previous habitual state of fighting back, not of the democratic hunger that now afflicts them for the first time. “
NTT: “But why does it take so long for change?”
IK: “Think of it this way. Prestige is an accident that affects human beings. It comes into being and decays inevitably. No human being exists who possesses an unbroken pedigree of nobility from Adam down to himself. Nobility originates in the state of being outside. That is, being outside of leadership and nobility and being in a base, humble station, devoid of prestige, as is the case with every created thing. But this reaches its end in a single political party within four successive generations. This is as follows: The builders of the party’s glory know what it costs them to do the work, and keep the qualities that created past glory and made it last. The candidates who come after had personal contact with these founders and thus learned those things from them. However, the future candidate is inferior to the earlier in this respect, inasmuch as a person who learns things through study is inferior to a person who knows them from practical application. The third generation must be content with imitation and negative attack ads on the media and, in particular, with reliance upon a very narrow view of tradition. These future party members are inferior to those of the second generation, inasmuch as a person who relies upon tradition is inferior to a person who exercises judgment. The fourth generation, then, is inferior to the preceding ones in every respect. Its members have lost the qualities that preserved the party platform of their prior glory. They imagine that the earlier principles were not built through application and effort. They think that it was something due to their specific view of religion from the very beginning by virtue of the mere fact of their descent, and not something that resulted from group effort and individual qualities. For they see the great respect in which the newly elected leader is held by the people, but eventually the future leader does not know how that respect originated and what the reason for it was. He, for I doubt Hamas will elect a woman as leader in the near future, imagines it is due to his party descent and nothing else. He keeps away from those in whose group feeling he shares, thinking that he is better than they. This is the way of all flesh.”
TNN: Were you the first to say “the way of all flesh.”
IK: “No, I read it in a Maureen Dowd op-ed piece last week. “
Luke Warmonger

"Watching Hamas"

!!! سنة جديدة سعادة

"May this be a happy and prosperous Islamic New Year for all the people of that land, so anomalously, called 'Holy.'"

f.y.i.



ELECTION DISPATCH
WATCHING HAMAS
by Ari Shavit (The New Yorker)
Issue of 2006-02-06 // Posted 2006-01-30

Shalom Harari is a former Israeli Military Intelligence officer who has been following the rise of Hamas—the Islamic Resistance Movement—for almost a quarter century. An awkward, voluble man of nearly sixty, Harari gained a measure of fame in intelligence circles when he began to tell his colleagues in internal reports that Hamas, founded in 1987, and initially a small outgrowth of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, would, with its platform of armed resistance, grassroots politics, and Islamic ideology, come to dominate Palestinian politics. Six years ago, while most of his colleagues were anticipating peace, Harari was rightly predicting a second intifada; that uprising led to the decline of Yasir Arafat’s creation and power base, the Fatah Party.
Last Thursday night, just hours after it was announced that Hamas had crushed Fatah in legislative elections––an event that caused some right-wing Israeli politicians to declare the birth of a terrorist “Hamastan”—Harari welcomed a visitor to his home, in the town of Yavne, near the Mediterranean. While most Israeli and Arab-language news channels were broadcasting scenes of Hamas supporters in the Gaza Strip waving green flags as they celebrated their stunning victory, Harari had tuned in to a seemingly tedious military ceremony on Egyptian state television. “Look at the wives of the generals,” he said. “Many of them are wearing traditional head scarves. This was not so ten years ago. And this tells you where we are heading. When the women of Egypt’s pro-Western military élite are dressed like that, you know that the Hamas victory is not about Palestine. It’s about the entire Middle East.”

Harari, who served as an intelligence officer in the West Bank and then as the adviser on Palestinian affairs to the Israeli Defense Ministry, is still closely connected to his former colleagues, and he said he had heard that, some weeks ago, the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, who was afraid of a Hamas rout at the polls, begged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to exert United States pressure and postpone the scheduled elections. Rice refused, Harari said, and told Abbas to go forward. (A State Department spokesman declined to confirm the details of their conversation.)
And yet Harari would like to believe that the American “mistake”––if that is what it was––was a blessing in disguise. “At least, now we know what we are faced with,” he said. “Now we can make a real diagnosis and understand what is truly the malaise.”

Harari said that he first took note of the Palestinian Islamists in the early nineteen-eighties, shortly after the Iranian revolution, when Islamists won student elections in the prestigious universities of the West Bank. A decade later, Islamists won elections in chambers of commerce in the occupied territories and, more recently, started to win in municipal elections. Now Hamas has taken control of the parliament, he said, and is sure to challenge Abbas for the Presidency.
But look around, Harari said: “In Jordan, too, wherever there are free elections––trade unions, student unions, professional guilds––the Islamists have the upper hand. If the Hashemite kings”––Hussein and Abdullah––“had not played all kinds of tricks, the Islamists would have had a large representation in parliament as well. And when Egypt held its American-inspired parliamentary elections recently, the number of seats won by the Muslim Brotherhood rose fivefold. Throughout the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood is the main power with grassroots support. The Islamists are less corrupt. They are the ones with integrity and compassion. They are of the people and they speak for the people. Today in the Arab world, the choice is clear between democratically elected Islamists and Western-leaning dictators.”

Rising heavily from the sofa in his living room, Harari held up a small prayer carpet he acquired in Gaza almost ten years ago. The rug had been woven by handicapped children in a philanthropic workshop run by Yasir Arafat’s brother, Fathi. “Look at it,” Harari said. “It has a map of the entire land—from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. But the land is all green. All Muslim. No place for Jews here, no mention of Israel. Acre, Jaffa, Nablus—no Tel Aviv. Yet this was woven in a Fatah institution. Back in the Oslo era, the Hamas terminology was already taking over Arafat’s movement.
“Now look at these campaign posters,” he went on, gesturing at his collection. “They are all from recent weeks. Notice the difference: while the Hamas ads are calm and tranquil, with no hint of violence, the Fatah ads are full of guns and grenades and jihad rhetoric. While Hamas projects religious dignity, Fatah goes back to its aggressive revolutionary ethos. There was no real talk of peace. The decades of work that Hamas did in mosques and schools and charity organizations transformed Palestinian society from within. What suddenly erupted today has been simmering beneath the surface for a generation. There was not one moderate option that represented the whole Palestinian people. Americans, Europeans, and moderate Israelis like me wanted to believe that Arafat and Abbas were the sole representatives of the Palestinian people, but they were not. Hamas claimed all along that it had the support of forty per cent of the Palestinians, and it was probably right. Among the fundamentalists, the idea that Islam is superior to other religions has become predominant. Long before it took over the Palestinian parliament, Hamas managed to turn what we thought to be a national conflict into a religious war.”

Harari, as a retired brigadier general, admits to being impressed by the resilience of the Hamas leadership in the face of Israeli attacks. The issue, of course, is whether this revolutionary movement, whose charter is devoted to the elimination of Israel, could develop into a ruling party interested in territorial compromise. On that Harari is doubtful. “It would take years before real negotiations could resume,” he said. “An over-all peace agreement is out of the question for a long time. ”
Yet the impact of the Hamas victory, he said, is not local but regional. “As we speak,” he said, “there are growing fears not only in Israel but in Jordan, Egypt, and even Syria. The Hamas victory is a Middle East earthquake. Its shock waves will be felt in every town between Casablanca and Baghdad.”