Thursday, November 5, 2020
Ben Hubbard on MBS (Saudi) - MBZ (UAE)
MBS was also little known in the wider Arab world, including among Saudi Arabia's closest neighbors. Like its fellow smaller monarchies in the Persian Gulf, the United Arab Emirates had long viewed Saudi Arabia warily as the region's giant, whose wealth, power, and population dwarfed its own. For years, the Emiratis had wanted to step out of the Saudi shadow and develop their own national standing, and their leaders privately looked down on their Saudi counterparts as elderly conservatives wedded to ossified ways. [...]
The de facto ruler of the Emirates was Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, a helicopter pilot and sharp tactician known by his own three-letter moniker, MBZ. He was tall, kept in shape, and maintained a modest demeanor that was uncommon among Gulf royals, sometimes rising during meetings to serve guests coffee or tea. MBZ had worked to give country international clout that outweighed its size. The Emirates had fewer citizens than Dallas, Texas, and a relatively small army. But he equipped it with billions of dollars' worth of American weapons and built special forces units that fought alongside American troops in Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere. While few Americans had heard of his country or its leader, he had poured huge sums into lobbying efforts in Washington to make sure that his views on the Middle East reached the centers of power.
[...] MBZ impressed his vision of the region on the inexperienced young Saudi [MBS], particularly his animosity toward Iran and the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood.
-Ben Hubbard, MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman (New York: Ti Duggan Books, 2020), pp. 37-8
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
'Ubayd Allah Sindhi's (1872-1944) 'socialist leaning' 'Qur'anic Revolution'
Brief background: "Born a Sikh in the Punjab, he had converted to Islam as a youth, spent some time with a Sufi master in Sindh and, as signified by the suffix 'Sindhi,' made it his adopted home. [39] He subsequently studied at Deoband, where the most important of his teachers was Mahmud Hasan (d. 1920), a revered professor hadith." (Zaman, p. 11).
For now, we should note that Sindhi rails often in his discourses against the dual oppression of the capitalists and the religious elite ("Brahmanism"), and he sees their alliance as being at the heart of much economic misery. [15] The capitalists are sometimes also referred to as the 'imperialists,' [16] which, of course, is in line with his solid anti-imperialist credentials. As for his criticism of the religious elite, it is not limited to the 'ulama. Scholars in other traditions are equally culpable for their 'intellectual capitalism,' by which he means not only their placing limits on people's access to religious knowledge or a concomitant desire to maintain their own privileged position through such knowledge but also their failure to address the economic concerns of ordinary people. Sindhi had no doubt that, properly understood, all religious traditions are deeply concerned with economic issues. And, on his return to India, he urged Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh scholars to devote themselves to demonstrating the accord between 'the spirit or philosophy of their religion and European economic thought,' [17] by which he evidently meant socialism.
[...] Another work comprises the Sindhi's commentary, after his return from exile, on select chapters of the Qur'an with a view to providing a model to fellow Muslims on how to understand the Islamic foundational text. [18] Social and economic concerns and indeed, a call for radical socioeconomic change in light of the Qur'an teachings -- a 'Qur'anic revolution' -- are at the heart of this latter work, and it is on this that I will primarily focus here.
Justice ('adl) is foremost among the norms Sindhi finds in the Qur'an. [19] In fact, the idea of justice is taken to be constitutive of taqwa itself, a central Qur'anic idea often translated as 'the fear of God.' [20] Establishing justice in society means, inter alia, removing inequalities and providing for the poor and the unprivileged. The rich will be questioned on the Day of Judgment for how they conducted themselves in the world. [21] At the time, people will experience the consequences of their actions: a miser who had seen a person starving but had done nothing to help him will undergo the latter's suffering on that day. [22] Yet such reckoning is obviously not to be deferred only to the hereafter. A government guided by Qur'anic norms is equally obligated to rein in the rich and mighty, and a central concern of such a government would be to serve the interests of the poor. [23] To this end, the government has the right to impose whatever taxes it sees as necessary beyond the zakat, which all Muslims of means are required to pay annually and which is one of five pillars of the faith (alongside the profession of belief, prayer, fasting, and Hajj). [24] Helping the poor, either individually or by way to a government guided by Qur'anic norms, is not, however, a matter of maintaining an army of beggars. Rather, as Sindhi envisions it, the poor ought to be provided with education and means of livelihood so that they, and all others, can become productive members of society. [25]
All this has a strong socialist ring to it, and Sindhi has, indeed, often been characterized as a socialist. [26] He would not have disdained the label, except in cautioning against the atheism with which socialism was often intertwined. His reading of the Qur'an and his understanding of the work of Wali Allah seemed to him to offer ways of combining an engagement with the socioeconomic uplift of the impoverished masses with ethical norms derived from religious, and it is this combination that he wanted to impart to his audiences. This was not just a strategic choice, driven by the conviction that a reformist program divorced from religion would not succeed in the Indian context. Underlying it was also his belief that the love of God offered the surest basis for the love of God's creatures. [27]
-Muhammad Qasim Zaman, "Socioeconomic Justice," in Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 225-7.
Monday, November 2, 2020
AHM on France and Muslims in his book "Travelling Home"
The French model, grounded in Enlightenment anticlericalism, claims a fierce exclusion of religious affiliation of any kind from its concept of belonging. This does not concern Islam alone, but was made clear more than a century ago in the Republic's response to the Syllabus of Errors: a law was passed preventing priests from mentioning the papal document from the pulpits. Thus was a process established whereby secularity could win important victories over freedom of speech.
[n10: Which has more recently surfaced in the form of censorship of Muslim literature, including, since 1994, the pamphlets of Ahmad Deedat.]
And Catholicism, though the victim of a deep anticlericalism, was at least seen as indigenous. In the republic's more recent travails with Islam, a empathy with Maronites, the dirty war in Algeria and a general official disdain for religion have made the exclusion of Muslimness in the name of Republican laicity particularly natural and emphatic, and Jim Wolfreys' book Republic of Islamophobia offers an impeccable and troubling study of this ideology.
[n11: Jim Wolfreys, Republic of Islamophobia: The Rise of Respectable Racism in France (London, 2018).]
Hence the constant susurration of French media rage against Muslim difference, and the broad-based consensus among liberals that women who wear the niqāb, or Parisian Muslims caught praying together in public places, should be detained by the police.
-Abdal Hakim Murad, "Can liberalism tolerate Islam?" in Traveling Home: Essays on Islam in Europe (Cambridge: The Quilliam Press, 2020), 22-23.
Saturday, October 31, 2020
Rokhaya Diallo in the Washington Post: "After another tragedy, France should be combating terrorism, not criminalizing Muslims" (Oct 30, 2020)
It is the responsibility of any government to address such atrocities and the context that allowed them to happen. But what has happened in France since Paty’s murder is different. Instead of working to bring the population together, the government has chosen to adopt reactionary language and direct its rhetoric toward criminalizing and stigmatizing France’s Muslim population.
A couple of days after the killing, Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister, proclaimed “a war against the enemies from within.” He then launched a series of police operations and raids against Muslim organizations and individuals who, in his words, “were not linked with the investigation but to whom we are clearly willing to send a message.” Darmanin also announced his intention to immediately disband several anti-Islamophobia organizations, labeling one of them an “enemy of the republic.” The minister then went further, saying he was “shocked” to see halal and kosher sections in supermarkets, because he apparently finds them divisive.
Setting a climate of suspicion in a moment of major tension is irresponsible. Using the national emotion to target political opponents is even worse.
Yet that is what happened to “Observatoire de la Laïcité” (Secularism Observatory) rapporteur Nicolas Cadène, who learned he might be removed from the position from the media. After repeatedly opposing Islamophobic policies, the observatory has been criticized by those who have repeatedly tried to single out Islam and Muslims. The office of Prime Minister Jean Castex seized the opportunity to declare that the institution “should evolve so that it can be possible in France to defend [secularism] without being branded as Islamophobic.” There is now momentum for the government to disqualify all those who are accused of being too soft or complacent.
This has also become prevalent in academic settings. The education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, has opposed what he termed “intellectual complicities with terrorism.” He said that so-called “Islamo-leftism . . . wreaks havoc in university” and in organizations such as UNEF, a prominent students’ union whose vice president is a Muslim woman. The union promptly responded in a statement that it was regrettable a person who was supposed to lead “the institution of knowledge” had “sunk into ignorance and hatred.”
Friday, October 30, 2020
Chris Hedges and Karl Polanyi on free market ideology
But our collapse is more than an economic and political collapse. It is a crisis of faith. The capitalist ideology of unlimited growth has failed. It did not take into account the massive depletion of the world's resources, from fossil fuels to clean water to fish stocks to soil erosion, as well as overpopulation, global warming, and climate change. It failed to understand that the huge, unregulated international flows of capital and assault on manufacturing would wreck the global financial system. An overvalued dollar (which could soon deflate); wild tech; stock and housing financial bubbles; unchecked greed; the decimation of our manufacturing sector; the empowerment of an oligarchic class; the corruption of our political elite; the impoverishment of workers; a bloated military and defense budget; and unrestrained credit binges are consequences of a failed ideology and conspire to bring us down. The financial crisis may soon become a currency crisis. This second shock will threaten our financial viability. We let the market rule. Now we are paying for it.
In his book The Great Transformation, written in 1944, Karl Polanyi laid out the devastating consequences - the depressions, wars, and totalitarianism - that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function." He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism - and a Mafia political system - which is a good description of our power elite.
Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University, wrote that a self-regulating market turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market's assumption that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market. He reminded us that a society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic worth beyond monetary value, ultimately commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always destroy the foundation for a continued prosperity.
Thursday, October 29, 2020
Murtaza Hussain: "Trump, the War President, Leaves a Trail of Civilians Dead in Yemen" (Oct 29, 2020)
As Trump now pushes for reelection, touting himself as an opponent of “endless wars,” it is worth reflecting on the fates of the civilians in al-Ghayil — and the many other small towns and villages, unknown to most Americans, destroyed during by the U.S. military on Trump’s watch. Rather than the opponent of the military-industrial complex he likes to portray himself as, from his perch in the White House, Trump has served as its pliant and willing enabler.
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/trump-yemen-war-civilian-deaths