islam for the politically incorrect Archives

When Muslims make merry at Christmas

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For Western Muslims, Christmas is just outside their doorsteps. For some, Christmas even skips merrily in from the cold and crosses the threshold into their homes.

Father Christmas arrives by camel.
Photo: ©Khaled Diab

Monday 6 January 2020

Here in Belgium, people do not traditionally set up their Christmas trees until after the chocolatey feast of Saint Nicholas or Sinterklaas, which mutated to form the American “Santa Claus” in the melting pot of New York, formerly known as New Amsterdam.

Not being one to stand on ceremony, my wife, who is Belgian, suggested we put out the Christmas decorations early this year to help ease the blues of our first full winter back in Europe after several years in Tunis and Jerusalem.

When the saintly gift-bearer, whose existence my 10-year-old son is beginning to doubt, arrived for what might be his final visit to our house, he must have been confused to find it all done up like a Christmas tree already. On deeper reflection, I am aware of the glaring contradiction between parents telling their kids never to accept anything from strangers and then pretending it’s okay for a mysterious old man to enter their homes in the dead of night to leave treats behind.

In our multicultural, irreligious household where we encourage our son to celebrate his dual European-Arab heritage, Christmas is his favorite festival, as it is my wife’s. With how secularised it has become in the West, it is more fun than the Islamic feasts we also mark, even though those also feature quite a number of secular delights.

When we lived in the Middle East, visits home for Christmas gave our son a warped view of Belgium, making it appear like a magical fairy tale land full of glittering lights and toys. Even for us as adults, these artificial Northern Hemisphere lights and the festive bustle on the streets help warm up the dark, cold winter’s nights. And it is dispiriting when they disappear shortly after the new year, plunging the second half of winter into unfiltered darkness.

As an atheistic adult, Christmas has become an integral part of my calendar. Typically, we spend Christmas Eve with my wife’s family; Christmas Day is often reserved for friends, not just Christian, but also Muslim and sometimes Jewish.

When I was a child, my Muslim family didn’t really celebrate Christmas, but it was all around, right outside our doorstep. I recall the thrill of touring central London with my parents to admire the beautiful lights.

Not wishing us to feel left out, my late mother allowed us to keep some Christmas traditions. We sent and received Christmas cards. Mum bought presents for our teachers and took us to Christmas fetes. We took part in the school Christmas play, and I sang in the school choir for a brief window before my voice broke. I still know by heart many Christmas carols and hymns.

Some years, Christmas even skipped merrily in from the cold outside and crossed the threshold into our home: We decorated the house, and mum attempted to make what were for us exotic Christmas dishes, albeit halal versions, with absolutely no booze in sight.

These days, with commentators declaring that Islam and Christianity are locked in a clash of civilizations, these anecdotes may seem strange or exceptional. They aren’t.

Although Christmas is not an Islamic festival, my mum believed in civility and saw it as a common courtesy to share people’s moments of joy and grief. Open-minded Muslim that she was, my mother saw no contradiction between celebrating the birth of Christ with our Christian neighbours and her own deeply held faith. After all, Jesus is an important figure in Islam — he is the most holy man next to Muhammad.

Of course, not all Muslims are as accepting of others as my mother was. The reverence with which Jesus is viewed in Islam makes the declarations by some Salafi imams — especially in hardline countries like Saudi Arabia — that Christmas is “haram” and pious Muslims must cold-shoulder their Christian neighbours and colleagues sound like petty, vindictive, intolerant sectarian humbug.

The main beef Muslim critics have is with the Christian conviction that Jesus is the “Son of God,” which they claim is tantamount to idol worship. But even if you disagree on the nature of Christ, there is no reason, beyond spite and insecurity, not to wish Christians a joyous Christmas.

And on closer inspection, the differences in the Islamic and Christian perception of Christ can, to the eyes of the sceptic, appear to be just another chapter in the centuries-long, hair-splitting tradition of Christology.

In fact, as I show in my book, Islam for the Politically Incorrect, the Quran’s conception of Christ would sound hauntingly familiar to a Christian, an observation that is bound to enrage these myopic clerics.

Not only was Jesus born a “boy most pure,” according to the Quran, he is also the only character in Islam’s sacred book who is described as the “Word” of God. The Quran even quotes God as claiming that “We blew into [Mary] of Our Spirit.” Here we have all three sides of the holy Trinity (the ‘Father’, the ‘Son’ and the ‘Holy Spirit’), not to mention Mother Mary, but they are perceived to intersect differently in the minds of Muslims.

This central importance of Jesus in both the Christian and Islamic traditions helps explain why the annual media controversies over the “War on Christmas” leave many Western Muslims miffed. For example, while I understand the urge for inclusiveness that motivated the mayor of Charleston, Amy Goodwin, to rechristen the Christmas Parade the “Winter Parade”, it was wholly unnecessary.

How inclusive a festival is depends on how it is conducted, not what it is called. When we lived in Tunis, my son’s school held a Christmas party even though the majority of the kids were Muslim, as was Father Christmas himself, and everybody seemed to enjoy it.

At the school before that, in Jerusalem, Santa’s arrival on camelback was greeted with the same level of thrill and enthusiasm by Christian, Muslim and Jewish children alike. In Jerusalem, we also enjoyed marking the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, which often overlaps with Christmas.

Nuns admiring the Christmas tree in Bethlehem.
Image: © Katleen Maes

Just down the road in Bethlehem, the town in which Jesus was reportedly born in a manger (of which a chunk supposedly survives), Christmas continues to be a big deal, especially on Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity. Although Bethlehem is still home to many Christians, there has been a long and steady decline of the Palestinian and Israeli Christian populations, which was around 10% a century ago and stands at less than 2% today.

Christmas lasts a very long time in the Holy Land. There, you get a month of Christmases: Western (25 December), Eastern and Orthodox (7 January) and Jerusalem Armenians (19 January). In a sort of quantum metaphysics, Western and Eastern Christmas are on the same day and they are not (7 January in the Gregorian calendar is 25 Decweber in the Julian calendar still used by Orthodox churches).

Christmas has retained much of its religious flavour for Middle Eastern Christians. For example, midnight Christmas mass at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is so popular, even amongst some Muslims, that tickets are acquired via a lottery.

Here in Belgium and in most of Western Europe, Christmas has become a far more secular affair, effectively morphing into a winter festival for the majority non-church-going population, which is what it originally was prior to the arrival of Christianity. Despite my aversion to the runaway consumerism of the season, it is this merry, jolly, secularised festival that suits my unbelieving heart the most.

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This article was first published by The Washington Post on 23 December 2019.

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Tags: Belgium, bethlehem, camel, christian, christianity, christmas, holy land, islam, islam for the politically incorrect, jerusalem, Jesus Christ, muhammad, multiculturalism, muslims, saint nicholas, santa claus, sinterklaas

The unlikely demonisation of Salman Rushdie

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By Khaled Diab

Salman Rushdie made a very unlikely target for the fury of conservative Muslims, which is why the opportunistic fatwa issued by a Khomeini in serious decline took the novelist and the world by surprise.

A burning ‘Satanic Verses’ in Bradford, UK. Photo: Asadour Guzelian

Thursday 21 February 2019

On 14 February 1989, Salman Rushdie may or may not have received a Valentine’s card from a secret admirer. If he did, I imagine he quickly forgot about it when Ruhollah Khomeini, the self-appointed Supreme Leader of the self-described Islamic Republic of Iran, issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to execute the British-Kashmiri novelist for alleged offences to Islam in his 1988 book, The Satanic Verses (for in-depth insight into the Rushdie controversy, listen to the informative new BBC Radio 4 series ‘Fatwa’).

Although fatwas are technically non-binding theological opinions, Khomeini’s edict had the force of law in the eyes of fanatical conservative Muslims – at the time, even Sunni fundamentalists who dreamed of creating a modern ‘Islamic state’ or reviving the ‘caliphate’ admired this revolutionary Shi’a cleric.

By turning what had been isolated local protests into global fury, the licence to kill issued by Khomeini had the immediate and terrifying effect of turning Salman Rushdie’s life upside down, forcing the writer to vanish into the thin air of police protection, only to suddenly reappear, like a genie from a police van, for snatched visits to family and friends, like that of fellow writer and friend Hanif Kureishi, or rocking up on the stage of U2 concerts, as though Rushdie had become a character in one of his own books of magical realism.

Despite the self-righteous outrage of Muslim conservatives, Salman Rushdie actually made a very unlikely target for their ire, especially the allegations that he was a Western stooge and an agent of imperialism. He had been, after all, not only a harsh critic of the Shah in Iran and but had also recently published a book condemning US involvement in Nicaragua. A Persian translation of Rushdie’s book Shame was available in Persian translation as was, initially, The Satanic Verses.

Salman Rushdie’s previous works, such as the sublime Midnight’s Children, were a sympathetic but critical reading of post-colonial reality, exploring issues of migration, identity and the tensions between and within ‘East’ and ‘West’.

Even the Satanic Verses, despite its allegorical irreverence, was not actually disrespectful of Muhammad, whom it portrayed quite sympathetically, I found, just sceptical about religion. The novel was not even about Islam, Rushdie insisted but about “migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay,” not to mention “a castigation of western materialism”.

The credibility and admiration Rushdie had previously enjoyed in British Asian circles did not shield him from the indignation of Muslim conservatives and the impressionable, marginalised youth they managed to brainwash on the back of this manufactured controversy, which took Rushdie, his publishers and friends by complete surprise. Some young British Muslims at the time had no idea even what a fatwa was, with one mistakenly thinking that Khomeini had called Rushdie a “fat twit”.

“I found it odd that people were reading aubergines and burning books,” confessed Hanif Kureishi, referring to the absurdity of fundamentalists intimating Quranic verses in the humble vegetable, which is delicious when roasted, while setting light to Rushdie’s novel, which is not. But as has been the case throughout history, book burnings rarely have anything to do with the book being burnt, which the burners had not read, and is often a deflection of other grievances and/or a proxy for other conflicts.

Although the Satanic Verses controversy seems almost inevitable in hindsight, it only came to pass due to political expediency and opportunism. Author, lecturer and broadcaster Kenan Malik outlines how it took months of incitement by Muslim religious radicals, first in India, then in Britain, before any semblance of an outraged reaction emerged. At the time, my teenage self had just moved back from the UK to Egypt, and I do not recall much interest in or anger towards Rushdie.

It even reportedly took two fanatical British Muslims to sway the Iranian regime to issue this fatwa, which appears to have been motivated far more by political expediency than religious fervour. It not only fed into the long-standing proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, but also helped Khomeini to shore up support and silence dissent following the disastrous, devastating and costly war with neighbouring Iraq, and the Supreme Leader’s unstable mental state. This was reflected in another, less famous 1988 Khomeini fatwa which led to the execution by “Death Committees” of 30,000 political prisoners in Iran.

The Rushdie affair also enabled a false narrative to emerge among Western and Islamic bigots that there is a cultural war of values between ‘Islam’ and the ‘West’ or ‘Christendom’. In reality, the true conflict is between the forces of secularism versus religion, the forces of intolerance versus tolerance, the forces of pluralism versus mono-culturalism, the forces of rationality versus irrationality, the forces of supremacy versus egalitarianism, and the forces of modernity versus perceived tradition.

In fact, as I have endeavoured to show in my journalism and in my latest book, Islam for the Politically Incorrect, Islamic societies have a centuries-old tradition of scepticism and outright unbelief, something which I discovered during my own journey towards atheism.

In fact, more irreverent and sacrilegious works of literature have been published in Arabic than The Satanic Verses. For example, The Iraqi poet, reformer and atheist Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (1863-1936) published, in 1931, Revolution in Hell, more than half a century before Rushdie’s novel. In this epic poem, which was inspired by a significant medieval work of scepticism, The Epistle of Forgiveness, humanity’s most daring and original thinkers have been condemned to eternal damnation as punishment for their courage, while the obedient and pro-establishment are rewarded with everlasting paradise, in a clear allegory of how Arab patriarchal dictatorships operate. The subversive inhabitants of hell storm heaven and claim it as their rightful abode.

Despite the rise in Islamic fundamentalism and fanaticism in recent decades, the non-believers and atheists of the Muslim world have been regrouping and have found a new level of assertiveness, often at great personal risk to their freedom and even lives. In secular Muslim countries, such as Albania and Tunisia, this is legal and tolerated. Even in Muslim countries where “apostasy” and “blasphemy” are outlawed, such as in the Gulf region, there are vibrant, albeit clandestine, groups of non-believers and sceptics.

Regardless of this relative progress, we still live in dangerous times for atheists and sceptics in many Muslim societies and even for those who have a different interpretation of Islam, both from conservative governments and from vigilantes and terrorists.

It is high time for conservative Muslim societies and fanatical Muslims to respect the freedom of belief, conscience and expression of others, both legally and socially, and to abandon their delusional self-appointed role as “defenders of the faith”. Not only is the insinuation that their religion needs their protection an insult to the almighty God they believe in, faith is an immensely personal and private matter that cannot and must not be imposed by force and fear.

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This article was first published by The New Arab on 14 February 2019.

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Tags: albania, apostasy, atheism, atheist, belief, book burning, books, britain, caliphate, children, christendom, death, demonisation, dictatorship, egypt, fatwa, fiction, fundamentalism, god, history, india, iran, iranian regime, islam, islam for the politically incorrect, islamic state, kashmir, khomeini, non-believer, religion, revolution, salman rushdie, satanic verses, saudi arabia, sunni, tunisia, uk, west

Steve Bannon is being amplified, not silenced

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By Khaled Diab

By providing Steve Bannon with an uncritical solo platform, the Oxford Union has failed in its mission as a forum of free and fair debate, succumbing instead to tabloid sensationalism.

Image: Oxford Union

In June of this year, I received an invitation via e-mail from the Oxford Union, to which I readily agreed, cherishing the idea of engaging with the promising young minds who are drawn to this renowned university.

However, I never heard back from them, which I considered rather unprofessional and impolite. But I kept the matter to myself until I discovered that one of the dates the Oxford Union had proposed to host me on had been given over to one of the high priests of the American far-right and what you might call the emerging Fascists International, Steve Bannon. This followed hot on the heels of an aborted invitation to far-right Alternative für Deutschland leader Alice Weidel, who pulled out after sustained protest.

This double whammy has prompted me to speak out.

As anyone who knows me or reads my work is aware, I am a passionate advocate of free speech, but this is not a free speech issue, since conservative, middle-aged, wealthy white men remain the most over-represented group in the public spaces of the Western world, no matter how much they protest to the contrary.

Moreover, Steve Bannon is not a silenced voice who has had his freedom of expression curbed or curtailed. Bannon has built a career saying what he wants, when he wants and has not paid any price for it, not even for his most hateful and untrue pronouncements. Quite the contrary, he has been handsomely rewarded.

Bannon carved out a prominent position for himself in the American far-right movement, which he helped navigate towards the mainstream during his stewardship of Breitbart, the website which created a toxic brand of “news” which erased the line between fact and fiction, propagating a plethora of conspiracy theories, about Muslims, Mexicans, immigrants, women, the gay community, the mainstream media, and the man they regarded as the demon-in-chief, Barack Obama.

During the US presidential campaign, Breitbart threw its fantasy-weaving expertise behind Donald Trump, spreading destructive conspiracy theories, including the infamous ‘Pizzagate’ myth, which helped pave the way for not only Trump to enter the White House and make it white again, but for Bannon to join him. Even now that Bannon has been unceremoniously ditched by Trump, he has no shortage of far-right and mainstream platforms hosting him, as he himself noted during his Oxford Union address.

Rather than hosting an already overexposed Bannon, the Oxford Union should have followed through with their invitation to me or any other progressive Arab or Muslim, given the very real sidelining or drowning out of our voices by extremists, both in the Middle East and in the West. This is important both to show that there is a big, wide world beyond extremism, and also to place extremism in its broader context.

To my mind, Steve Bannon no more represents the white Christian mainstream than salafist firebrands represent the mainstream of European Muslims, yet both are given public exposure way beyond the fringes for which they speak by the segments of the media which thrive on sensationalism and baiting audiences.

Instead of living up to its reputation as a forum for genuine debate, the Oxford Union has succumbed to this tabloid sensationalism. This was reflected in the OU’s decision to allow Bannon to speak alone, uninterrupted and unhindered until the final Q&A.

If the debating society was genuine in its stated aim of holding his views up to scrutiny, then it should have invited capable and knowledgeable speakers to argue against Bannon, as occurred when Nigel Farage was invited to discuss Britain’s membership of the EU, back in 2015. It would have also been handy to have an expert and impartial fact checker on hand to wade through the many deceptions Bannon delivered during his talk and in the past.

OU president Stephen Horvath proved woefully ill-equipped for the task, and only managed to ask a handful of meek, sometimes incoherent questions – a performance which, along with the chosen format, has led many fellow students to demand Horvath’s resignation.

Steve Bannon’s long speech was cleverly designed to appeal, like far-right rhetoric often attempts to do, to the economic anxieties of the young students in the audience. He railed against the “Davos” and “Brussels” elites who created what he described as “extinction-level events” – the rise of China, the trillions spent on wars in the Middle East and the 2007/8 financial crisis – which had turned the working class into angry “deplorables”. Bannon described Donald Trump as the symptom of these trends and not their cause.

This is disingenuous deception on so many levels, and Horvath did little to challenge it. As I have observed before, the rise of Trump and of the populist right is not a symptom of growing economic anxiety and inequality in itself, but a symptom of the narratives which blame, as Bannon does, minorities, the struggle for racial equality, migrants, Muslims, feminists and leftists, amongst others, for these challenges, and which whip up anxiety about diminishing privileges among the dominant groups in society.

Moreover, Bannon failed to explain or even mention how, if it is working-class anger that led to the rise of Trump, why it is that Trump voters were generally better-off than those who voted for Clinton, gaining about half the votes of people earning over $50,000, with many very wealthy people voting for Trump. The average Trump voter is, in fact, middle-class, white and Christian.

Bannon also failed to back up his claim that Donald Trump, who is himself a member of the economic elite that Bannon so rhetorically despises, has served the interests of the “deplorables”. In reality, Trump’s tax cuts and inflated military spending, classic Republican and neo-conservative policies, have served to enrich tycoons like him and rich corporations, first and foremost, followed by the 1%, while making life harder for the middle- and working-classes, not to mention for future generations.

Rejecting the ethno-nationalist label, likely in a bid to appeal to his multicultural audience, Bannon went on to claim he was an economic nationalist and that “economic nationalism doesn’t care about your colour, ethnicity, your religion, your gender, your sexual preference.” Despite his protestations, Bannon has this incredible knack for making friends and forging alliances with feverishly ethno-nationalist parties and fascists. Moreover, Breitbart became a hotbed of white nationalism during Bannon’s tenure.

Steve Bannon’s comments on religion rang equally hollow and disingenuous. He claimed that both he and Trump were not Islamophobes, because they had nothing against Muslims, their beef was with Islam – a typical far-right defence which I analyse in my book Islam for the Politically Incorrect.

As an atheist, I have no beef against people criticising Islam, but Bannon is not some impartial or balanced critic, as I explain in my book. He believes that the West is “at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism” that is set to “completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years,” Bannon told a conference hosted by a conservative Catholic organisation, held in the Vatican in 2014.

Bannon is also convinced that there exists an age-old cosmic clash between Islam and Christendom, and that secularism has hobbled the West’s ability to face this supposedly existential threat, leading him to wax nostalgic about recreating a past of noble crusaders in which “our forefathers kept their stance, and I think they did the right thing. I think they kept [Islam] out of the world, whether it was at Vienna, or Tours, or other places.”

As this brief exposé shows, providing a prestigious platform to a conspiracy theorist without robustly challenging the fictions he has weaved – that we are embroiled in a world war that does not exist, and that the West is losing the battle because it is no longer Christendom – is reckless and irresponsible, especially in light of the dangerous rise in violent far-right extremism.

This is not only because these claims are demonstrably untrue but also because, like jihadist ideology, Bannon’s apocalyptic vision divides the world into two groups of enemies, the near enemy, i.e. the strength-sapping kryptonite of secularism (aka liberals, leftists, feminists, ethnic minorities, LGBT activists, environmentalists, etc.) and the far enemy, mostly Islam.

In this uncompromising vision, the only people who are right are the self-righteous of the American and European far-right, and to hell with the rest of us.

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This article was first published by The New Arab on 28 November 2018.

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Tags: arab, atheist, barack obama, britain, brussels, catholic, china, christendom, conspiracy theories, crusade, Donald Trump, equality, ethnic minorities, eu, europe, extremism, financial crisis, free speech, freedom of expression, gender, immigrant, inequality, islam, islam for the politically incorrect, jihad, middle east, muslims, narratives, nationalism, neo-con, nigel farage, Oxford Union, poverty, secularism, Steve Bannon, uk, usa, white house, white nationalism

In search of the lost city of Londonistan

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By Khaled Diab

Our intrepid and fearless reporter visited the fabled capital of the European Caliphate, Londonistan. What he discovered was shockingly, surprisingly, confoundingly, almost frighteningly… ordinary.

Headless or headscarfed, Londoners like to do their own thing.
Photo: ©Khaled Diab

Sunday 9 September 2018

“Other tourists may remember London for its spectacular sights and history, but I remember it for Islam,” wrote columnist Andy Ngo in the Wall Street Journal after a recent trip to the British capital, which seems to have coincided with my own visit during which I experienced a very different city.

“I wanted to cut past the polemics and experience London’s Muslim communities for myself,” he claimed. Despite this commendable sentiment, Ngo immediately proceeded to launch a polemical diatribe about the capital’s “failed multiculturalism”, in which he does not quote a single London Muslim nor does he appear to have had any actual conversations with these terrifying individuals, as if they have not yet evolved the capacity to speak or he has not discovered the capability to listen.

Instead, he depends on the mood music of imagery, spending most of the column describing the dress code of conservative Muslims on their way to Friday prayers, as if their choice of clothes defines who they are, what they think of others, how they treat their fellow citizens or how they relate to their country.

But as I know from experience, judging a Muslim (or anyone) solely by how (s)he dresses can be highly deceptive. Although extremists undoubtedly exist, if Ngo and others so fearful of the other took the time to spend time with ordinary Muslims, they may be surprised by what they learn.

Take the Iraqi woman whom I happened to chat to on a London bus after I almost landed on her lap when the driver braked too hard. Dressed in a baggy black dress, cloak and headscarf, she was the fabric far-right horror is fashioned from but, in reality, she was cut from a different cloth to their nightmares.

Despite her conservative attire, she was a harsh critic of the sectarianism and religious identity politics that had overrun her native land, despised ISIS and looked back with nostalgia to Iraq’s secular past – though her admiration for the Arab dictators of yesteryear and her poo-pooing of today’s young Arabs as ignorant and apathetic riled me. Moreover, she was a proud Londoner of 30 years and her enthusiasm for the city had not been dimmed by the UK’s role in the disastrous and illegal invasion of her homeland.

At a certain level, I understand how the unknown other can be frightening, especially if there are some extremists in their midst. For instance, as a child in London in the 1980s, I feared skinheads, initially unaware that in addition to the violent and racist fringe who sometimes hurled racial abuse at us or who picked fights with me as a teen, there were leftist or apolitical skinheads – some are trying to reclaim the movement – who loved reggae and ska and hung out with fellow black working class Londoners, many of whom were also skinheads. In the London of today, there are many men with shaved heads (often because they are balding) and sporting elaborate tattoos who have absolutely nothing to do with what used to be known as skinhead culture when I was a kid.

Either through ignorance or malice, Ngo notes that near the mosque in Tower Hamlets he saw a sign which read “Alcohol restricted zone”. This leaves any reader unaware of British law and customs with the impression that, through ‘creeping Sharia’, the local Muslim community had managed to ban alcohol. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, as reflected by the enormous number of pubs and off-licences in the area.

In its battle against what it defines as ‘anti-social behaviour’, the UK government has reserved the right to restrict the consumption of alcohol in certain public spaces, such as parks, including in Tower Hamlets and over 600 other places across England and Wales, while the ban on consuming alcohol on the London underground was introduced by that well-known firebrand Islamist Boris Johnson.

This view of alcohol as a social ill or evil has nothing to do with Islam or multiculturalism and stems from Protestant Puritanism. This is reflected in the 19th-century temperance movement. In the United States, where this form of zealotry was far more successful, temperance eventually led to prohibition. Today, alcohol is still banned in hundreds of local counties, representing an area that constitutes an estimated 10% of the land mass of the United States.

In today’s America drinking on the streets or in public spaces is prohibited almost everywhere, as I was surprised to discover on my first visit to the country, which makes Ngo’s surprise at the sign he encountered in London, which is relatively rare, appear faux and contrived.

Moreover, the Muslim attitudes to alcohol and drinking are not as straightforward as many believe, as I point out in a chapter dedicated to the theme in my book, Islam for the Politically Incorrect. Many, many Muslims openly drink, both in the diaspora and in Muslim-majority countries where it is legal, and many Muslims who do not drink tolerate and accept the right of others to consume alcohol.

This diversity of attitudes is reflected in Arab- and Muslim-run establishments. Take the famous Little Arabia on and around Edgware Road, which is home to numerous off-licences and pubs. There, many Middle Eastern eateries, especially the cheaper, faster ones, serve nothing stronger than fruit juice, but some, especially the more upmarket ones, serve wine, beer and spirits from their countries of origin. In fact, for certain types of liberal Arabs, eating mezzas without washing them down with arak would be considered sacrilegious.

While a disproportionate amount of Western media attention is directed at the relatively small number of radical Islamists, missing from the picture is the fact that London is probably the main capital of Middle Eastern secular, progressive and leftist culture outside the Middle East. The city has been drawing a rich and diverse tapestry of Arab and Persian writers, artists, opposition figures, dissidents, exiles and refugees for generations – a few of whom I met during my latest visit.

One ageing Arab intellectual who has lived in London for decades pointed out to me, for instance, a stretch of territory in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea which had been a mini Iran in the 1970s and whose inhabitants found themselves stranded after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Most Iranians in the area moved to the United States or other parts of the UK.

One of the most unintentionally hilarious moments in Andy Ngo’s column is his observation of how, outside the mosque in Tower Hamlets, Muslims and non-Muslims “avoided eye contact with the other”.

As anyone who has lived in or spent time in London will tell you, making eye contact is considered one of the gravest social sins (I exaggerate only slightly), and those who engage in it could elicit silent contempt, a hostile, “Oi, what are you staring at?”, or occasionally even stronger reactions.

This is partly because Londoners guard their private and personal space jealously. The upside of this oft-unfriendly attitude is that Londoners are also generally meticulous respecters of other people’s private and personal space, and their right to do what they wish within its actual or imagined confines.

That is why the streets of London often appear to the outsider like an archipelago of random subcultures, each existing in parallel and each studiously ignoring the other, whether that is the colourful circuses of colour on the buses, tubes, along the embankment of the Thames, or at the city’s huge array of pop-up festivals and carnivals. Nobody even bats an eyelid when, say, a woman dressed in a black coat and hijab shakes hands with a headless street performer dressed in a dark suit.

Despite the growing anti-Muslim sentiment and general xenophobia in the UK, the London of today appears, to my eyes as a relative outsider now, to still be a more open and tolerant place than the city in which I grew up. That is not to say that there is no tension or hatred in the city, especially as inequality sores and socio-economic welfare tumbles. Nevertheless, many of the city’s inhabitants take London’s multicultural kaleidoscope in their stride and seem to thrive on it, especially those who grew up since large-scale immigration began.

I hope London remains London, maintains its unique spirit, and ignores rightwing fear-mongers.

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This article was first published by The New Arab on 31 August 2018.

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Bernard Lewis and the non-existent clash of civilisations

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By Khaled Diab

Bernard Lewis was the orientalist scholar of choice for American neo-conservatives. His dangerous ‘clash of civilisations’ theory was not only wrong but caused enormous damage in the Middle East.

Tuesday 29 May 2018

Bernard Lewis, the British-American historian and probably the most influential orientalist thinker of his generation, was born as the Ottoman empire was tottering on its last legs. He died, just shy of his 102nd birthday, as the post-Ottoman Middle Eastern order is nearing complete collapse.

Although some of Lewis’s early academic work was groundbreaking, such as his research into medieval Islamic guilds and the insights he gleaned from the Ottoman archives, his work rapidly descended into politicised polemics, which proved extremely destructive to the Middle East.

“For the past several years Lewis has been engaged in preaching scholarship and practising politics,” Edward Said, the author of the groundbreaking study Orientalism, wrote in one of his regular heated exchanges with Lewis, back in 1982. “It is of course quite natural for scholars to have political views and even to impart those views to their students and colleagues in an honest manner. Lewis is guilty of no such balance or discipline.”

Lewis was the orientalist of choice for America’s neo-conservative establishment and “his wisdom is sought daily by policymakers, diplomats, fellow academics, and the news media,” in the words of former US Vice President Dick Cheney, and Lewis is credited, in parallel with Samuel Huntington, with providing the intellectual framework for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

One of Lewis’s most damaging theories was that of the “clash of civilisations”. Although the term is most commonly associated with Huntington, Bernard Lewis used it earlier, and somewhat differently. While Huntington focused on perceived conflicts along the fault lines between half a dozen or so civilisations, Bernard Lewis’s theory focused on the alleged centuries-old clash between Islam and the West (formerly known as Christendom).

“It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them,” Lewis wrote in 1990, in what has proved to be one of the most influential essays of recent decades. “This is no less than a clash of civilisations – the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judaeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.”

Considering that two influential public intellectuals alleged that we are in the throes of a clash of civilisations, is there any evidence to back up their theory?

Yes, there is… but only if you are ideologically inclined – like neo-cons, Christian and Islamic fundamentalists, and modern-day jihadis – to believe in such a clash, and pick and choose the evidence to support your thesis, while ignoring inconvenient facts and realities.

In fact and in reality, though the term is relatively new, the notion that Christendom and Islam are age-old and irreconcilable foes has an ancient pedigree. Examples include the historical notions of jihads and crusades, not to mention the idea of ‘civilisation versus barbarism’ espoused by dominant powers and influential voices on both sides throughout the centuries.

But as I examine in a chapter dedicated to this crucial question in my new book, Islam for the Politically Incorrect, this clash exists mainly in the fevered imagination of the fanatic or the skilled political leader, but does not stand up to sustained political or historical scrutiny.

At this point, I should point out that conflicts are extremely complex issues, which are usually poorly understood even by those involved in them, that cannot be reduced to any single root cause. That said, religious identity and culture, in my analysis, have played a remarkably minor role in the interactions between Islam (the Middle East) and Christendom (the West), both today and historically.

This is underlined, in my view, by what I call the clash within civilisations (not to mention the clashes within individual societies), the conflicts which have plagued both sides and often posed a greater existential threat than the external enemy. This is exemplified by the two world wars and the current wildfire tearing through the Middle East.

It is also exemplified by the oft surreal cross-civilisational alliances that emerge. If civilisations truly clash over values, then the largely decades-old cosy relationship between the regressive Gulf monarchies and Britain then the United States should not exist, yet what I call the oiligarchy shows no sign of losing its potency, even under the stewardship of the Islamophobic Donald Trump.

And these alliances are scarcely new. Protestant England had a long-lasting alliance with the Ottomans against Catholic Spain. Caliph Harun al-Rashid and the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne were involved in a robust, multi-generational coalition against their mutual foes, the Byzantines and Umayyads. Going even further back, the conquest of Iberia by Muslim forces would not have occurred without the encouragement and aid of the very Christian Julian of Septem (Ceuta).

Over and beyond all this, there is what I call the mash of civilisations, through which Islam and Christendom have so influenced one another, and been influenced by the same precursors, including ancient Greek, Egyptian and Mesopotamian influences, that it is impossible to separate them into two distinct civilisations.

The conflicts we are witnessing today are not so much a clash between civilisations, as a crash of civilisation. By this, I do not mean the collapse of civilisation and the end of technologically advanced human society, but rather the more mundane and periodic crumbling of the dominant political, economic and social orders, as they become unsustainable, imploding and exploding under the weight of their contradictions.

It is far easier to blame monolithic metaphysical forces for our problems than to examine the actual socio-economic and geopolitical faultlines at play, because that would require changes few are willing or courageous enough to make. But continuing to ignore the painful realities in favour of comforting illusions and delusions will lead to serious misdiagnosis of the situation, and the prescribed medication, rather than offering a cure will threaten the very survival of the patient.

—

This article first appeared in the New Arab on 23 May 2018.

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Egyptian atheists: Caught between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

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By Khaled Diab

Atheists in Egypt have been enjoying greater public acceptance, but their increased visibility has also resulted in controversy, shrill panic and a growing tide of prosecutions.

Screen shot from one of Sherif Gaber’s YouTube videos.

Thursday 24 May 2018

For those who do not believe in divine judgement, a worldly reckoning can sometimes await them. This is the case for the controversial atheist and daring YouTuber Sherif Gaber who is caught in a sort of secular purgatory.

The prominent Egyptian human rights lawyer and activist Gamal Eid informed me that his organisation, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), had managed, on Monday 7 May, to help secure Gaber’s release from Cairo airport, where he had been unlawfully detained since the previous Wednesday because no official arrest warrant had been issued for him.

After his official release, Gaber vanished. He tweeted that, after four days “in hell”, he was “free”, but he failed to give details about his situation, leading to fears that he has been disappeared and that the security services had somehow taken over his Twitter account.

Even now that Gaber is presumed to be free, he is not actually free. In addition to being out on bail from an earlier trial, a new case has been brought against him. The young freethinker originally entered the public eye as a student at Suez Canal University following a smear campaign in 2013 by faculty members who did not approve of his views supporting homosexuality and criticising religion. As is often the case during such incidents, the case was as much, if not more, about questioning worldly authority than about doubting divine authority.

Following his sentencing on blasphemy charges in 2015, Gaber was released on bail pending a retrial. He went underground but courageously refused to be silenced. He dedicated himself to producing YouTube videos, some of which employ biting satire, the latest of which features two credulous missionaries trying to persuade a sceptic to convert to their imaginary religion, which bears a remarkable resemblance to Islam.

These videos have won him many fans amongst Egyptian and Arab non-believers and sceptics, but they have also provoked the ire of Islamists and conservatives. This came to a head late last month when a lawyer representing the ultra-conservative salafist Nour party brought a suit accusing Gaber of contempt of religion. This, along with threats he had been receiving, spooked Gaber and finally led him reluctantly to abandon his admirable commitment to stay in Egypt in spite of the risks, which was founded on the conviction that promoting freedom of thought “would have a more powerful effect to do it here, where we’re born and raised”.

“I suspect that he has been banned or will be banned from travelling abroad,” notes Gamal Eid, “but he will not know until he actually tries to travel.”

Gaber’s case underlines what I call Egypt’s Jekyll-and-Hyde attitude towards atheism. Since the revolution which engulfed the country in 2011, atheists, both young and old, have (re-)emerged from the shadows and taken on a more assertive public profile.

Atheists not only possess a strong presence on social media but have also appeared regularly on television to explain their thinking and to demand equal rights. There, they have often had to struggle against hostile interviewers, enormous prejudice and immense ignorance of what atheism actually is and means.

At its best, this greater openness and presence has led to a greater public acceptance of and tolerance towards the a-religious in society, even amongst some conservative Muslims. My personal experience has been a largely positive one – but this is liable to change at any moment. I have been writing about atheism and being an atheist for well over a decade now, I won a prestigious award for an essay I wrote on Arab atheists and the longest chapter in my new book, Islam for the Politically Incorrect, is dedicated to the topic.

In my book, I challenge the simplistic and ignorant views of both Muslim and Western bigots regarding the status of unbelievers and the rich history of atheism and scepticism in the Islamic context. Contrary to conservative myth, there is nothing new about atheists and sceptics in the Islamic tradition.

In fact, there have been plenty of them, especially during the so-called Golden Age of medieval Islam and in modern times. This ancient tradition reveals itself in how Muslim atheists draw inspiration from their own history, not just western tradition. An example of this is Sherif Gaber’s video, ‘Muslim Meets God‘. In the video, a young man stands at the gate to heaven but all his superstitions about the pious acts and pronouncements required to enter this rational version of paradise prove untrue and unfounded.

To my eyes, Gaber appears to have drawn inspiration from one of the ‘spiritual’ forefathers of Arab atheists, Abu al-Ala’ al-Ma’arri (973-1057), who penned The Epistle of Forgiveness, in which a bigoted sheikh is sent on a fantastical journey to paradise and hell. In this version of the aferlife, heaven is populated by pagan and irreverent poets and philosophers. Centuries later, al-Ma’ari’s Epistle influenced numerous secular Arab thinkers, including Iraqi poet, reformer and atheist Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (1863-1936) who published, in 1931, Revolution in
Hell, in which freethinkers condemned to hell storm paradise and claim it as their rightful abode.

At its worst, the more visible public profile of atheists in Egypt has resulted in shrill panic towards the atheism “tsunami”, mob rule, moral denunciation of atheists as “Satan worshippers” or mentally deranged, a government-sanctioned national plan to combat atheism spearheaded by Al Azhar, the foremost institute of Sunni orthodoxy, Islamist law suits and a regular stream of prosecutions, even though Egypt does not technically ban atheism.

This societal polarisation is reflected in Egypt’s confused legal framework. For example, Article 64 of the current constitution states that “freedom of belief is absolute”. However, Egypt’s penal code contains a number of clauses which effectively outlaw ‘blasphemy’. The vaguest of these is Article 98(f), which was originally passed in 1981 to protect religious minorities, but has been, in recent years, weaponised by Islamists and the state to target Christians, secular critics and atheists.

This ambiguity has left non-believers in a precarious situation, at mercy to the whims of individuals in Egypt’s labyrinthine and powerful security apparatuses, prosecutors’ offices and judiciary. This explains how it is possible that the worst I have so far encountered, aside from occasional online vitriol, is once, during an interrogation, to have been questioned about my religious convictions. The intelligence officer interviewing me expressed fascination and curiosity about the difference between agnosticism and atheism, while seemingly far more concerned about my negative opinions of President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi. His insistence that he was “really enjoying our conversation” served more to unsettle than to reassure me.

Simultaneously, some other atheists, from Sherif Gaber to Alber Saber, have been prosecuted or persecuted, pursued by lawyers and prosecutors or pursued by vigilantes, tried in the courts or tried by the media, tortured in detention or tormented by the public, imprisoned in a jail cell or condemned to solitary societal confinement, not to mention exiled within or outside Egypt.

The future for atheists in Egypt is uncertain. The Sisi regime, which intensely dislikes all forms of dissent, may have won accolades in the West for its reformist claims but, in reality, it is juggling a dual image both as the guarantor of freedom of belief and the moral protector of Egypt’s Islamic identity.

When the Muslim Brotherhood was deemed Public Enemy Number One, it was useful for the regime to flaunt its secular credentials. But a key ally in this battle were the even more conservative salafists, and now they expect payback. This tension is playing itself out in Egypt’s largely fig-leaf parliament, where there have been motions both to repeal Egypt’s blasphemy laws and, more recently, to outlaw atheism.

As it heads into the unknown, I hope Egypt will follow the lead of Muslim-majority countries like Albania, where freedom of belief is truly absolute, rather than Iran or Saudi Arabia, where atheism and secularism are defined as forms of “terrorism” and atheists are routinely jailed and even executed.

—-

This is the extended version of an article which first appeared in The New Arab on 17 May 2018.

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Alt-jihad – Part II: Delusions of grandeur and persecution

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By Khaled Diab

In the second in a series of articles exploring the disturbing parallels between radical Islamic and White/Christian extremism, Khaled Diab examines the far-right’s dual sense of superiority and inferiority, as well as its persecution complex.

Source: https://lorddreadnought.livejournal.com/69990.html

Tuesday 17 April 2018

In the previous piece in this series on the disturbing parallels between radical Islamic and White/Christian extremism, I examined the emerging phenomenon of far-right suicide attackers and far-right political violence in general. In this, the second article in the series, I explore a number of other parallels, namely the bizarre blend of supremacist convictions combined with a sense of inferiority, an overpowering mentality of victimhood, a persecution complex centred around a rogues’ parade of imagined enemies, as well as a related belief in outlandish conspiracy theories.

Inferiority-superiority complex

Extremist Islamist and jihadist discourse is dominated simultaneously by a dual inferiority-supremacy narrative. On the one hand, they view Islam as innately superior to other religions and political philosophies, lament Islam’s loss of global dominance and dream of the restoration of its hegemony. On the other hand, they are convinced that Muslims everywhere are oppressed and victims. Even in situations where conservative Muslims are the dominant political force and wield enormous political clout, Islamists often believe they are oppressed, their beliefs are under attack and their way of life is threatened with extinction.

A similar narrative has emerged in white and Christian nationalist circles, though, given the continuing might of the West, superiority outweighs inferiority when compared with Islamist discourse. This sense of entitlement was best summed up by Richard Spencer, the spiritual leader of the alt-right movement in America. “To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer and a conqueror. We build; we produce; we go upward,” Spencer told the audience at an alt-right conference in Washington, DC. “America was until this past generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”

Nevertheless, unlike the cocky white supremacy of the 19th century, when the West directly ruled most of the planet and required an ideology to justify its global dominance, instead of the white man’s burden of yore, many whites, especially men, now feel they are regarded as the burden. In fact, these far-right movements, as well as some segments of more mainstream conservatism, to a lesser degree, have appropriated the language of oppression and subjugation more common among the formerly enslaved and segregated African-Americans, or subject populations who lived under colonial rule.

At one level, this shift in rhetoric is opportunistic and cynical, with the aim of turning the tables on the truly marginalised minorities living in the West and on those who have suffered under the boot of western hegemony by suggesting that the real victims of racism and imperialism are whites, and especially the Christian right, who supposedly suffer under the multiple tyrannies of political correctness, liberalism, immigration (which is regarded as a sort of invasion by stealth) and Islam.

However, it would be a mistake to view these attitudes as merely rhetorical devices. Many on the far-right absolutely believe, their sense of supremacy and privilege notwithstanding, that they belong to an oppressed, repressed and persecuted group. At times, this can be a reflection of their sense of personal isolation. “I didn’t have many friends at school, I wanted to be a member of a group of people that had an aim,” admitted Kevin Wilshaw, who was a well-known organiser for the UK’s National Front in the 1980s and later joined the British National Party, before renouncing his former life and coming out as gay and of Jewish heritage. “Even though you end up being a group of people that through their own extreme views are cut off from society, you do have a sense of comradeship in that you’re a member of a group that’s being attacked by other people.” This sense of camaraderie, as well as a desire to stand out and be noticed, appears to have been a spur for Andrew Anglin’s transformation from a vegan anti-racist into the American extreme right’s most outspoken and outrageous troll, through his creation of the rabidly racist website The Daily Stormer.

This sense of alienation and the desperate desire to bond this produces is also something that afflicts many who fall into the embrace of radical and jihadist Islamism. “For most jihadis, the first steps on their journeys to Syria were rarely taken for political or religious reasons,” observes Kenan Malik, the Indian-Britisher writer and intellectual. “The journeys were, rather, a search for something a lot less definable: for identity, for meaning, for belongingness, for respect.”

Paranoid confusions

This sense of living in a world which deprives them of their perceived God-given right to dominate society and to rule the world translates into an increasingly outspoken and irrational victimhood mentality. “No one mourns the great crimes committed against us. For us, it is conquer or die,” Spencer lamented in the speech mentioned above, echoing the jihadist extremists the Christian right so despises. “We are not meant to live in shame and weakness and disgrace.”

This sense of being embattled has led to the paranoid conviction that the modern-day white conservative is surrounded by foes, both near enemies and far ones, to borrow from the jihadist lexicon. The far horizon of Enemistan is dominated by Muslims, who are closing in so rapidly and decisively that the very survival of Western civilisation and Christendom is at stake. At home, the alt-right fears migrants and other minorities, including a resurgence of classic Judeophobia, leftists, liberals, journalists and media professionals, experts, academics, feminists and the LGBT community.

This paranoid sense of being surrounded and besieged by enemies on every front has led to the proliferation of outlandish conspiracy theories. In societies whose superior technologies have for centuries visited mass slaughter upon weaker populations across the planet, there is now talk of a “white genocide” – a paranoid theory that there is a conspiracy to wipe out the white race. What is most infuriating about the white genocide myth is that many who subscribe to it deny the historical reality of actual genocides, such as the Holocaust or extermination campaigns against native populations.

The purported white genocide is not just confined to Europe and America, it is also allegedly taking place in Africa. The alt-right blogger Laura Southern has even produced a ‘documentary’ entitled Farmland which claims to highlight the plight of supposedly persecuted whites in South Africa. Needless to say, no such extermination programme is occurring in the country where the legacy of Apartheid still lives on in stark racial inequalities, unless by ‘genocide’ she means the relative erosion of white privilege.

The army of Islam

In Europe, the end goal of mass immigration, according to far-right conspiracy theorists, is not only ‘white genocide’ but also a stealthy conquest of the West, its complete Islamisation and subjugation and its conversion into ‘Eurabia’, the mythical European Umma. And Eurabia is apparently making major inroads in America too. The far-right myth that there are “no-go zones” in Europe where the police do not dare enter and Islamic law prevails has made it across the Atlantic, and has been spread by both Fox News and the NRA, amongst others. A similar narrative of a crusade/war against Islam is a common refrain amongst Islamists. However, this notion amongst both conservative Muslims and Christians that we are in the throes of a monumental clash of civilisations does not hold up to scrutiny, as I reveal in my book Islam for the Politically Incorrect.

How far this dastardly Muslim conquest has advanced is a matter of some disagreement, however. The most pessimistic on the far-right believe the war is already over and the West has lost, others believe we are witnessing the beginning of the end, while some, like the founder of France’s Front National (FN), are convinced that it is the “the beginning of the beginning” of the Islamic subjugation of Europe. “It’s an episode in the war that is being waged against us by Islamism,” he claimed. “The blindness and deafness of our leaders, for years, is in part responsible for these kinds of attacks.”

The most recent variation on this is the conspiracy theory that the refugees who have been entering Europe are not desperate civilians fleeing war, but part of an invading army bent on the destruction of western civilisation. This supposed phenomenon has been called “jihad by emigration” – a term coined by the creator of the far-right website Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer, not to be confused with the Richard Spencer mentioned earlier.

In its self-righteous panic, the right has become more panicky and shrill, triggering the kind of terror usually expressed by the defenceless towards an army of ruthless conquerors. Bedraggled, desperate and unarmed, the stream of refugees flowing into Europe can only be referred to as an army in the loosest, most figurative sense of the word, yet, this army without soldiers or arms is somehow mounting an invasion.

“They’re not refugees. This is an invasion,” said Laszlo Kiss-Rigo, a bishop in southern Hungary, a country which has become a far-right hotbed in recent years and found itself on a major transit route, until it built a wall to keep the refugees out. “It’s an invasion that threatens our prosperity, our security, our culture and identity,” echoed Dutch far-right firebrand Geert Wilders, who once infamously called for the banning of the Quran. A related myth is the notion that Muslim asylum seekers are obsessed with an uncontrollable urge to violate and rape western women – they are not refugees but “rapefugees”.

Away from the high-security fortress of far-right perception and in the real world of hard facts, the influx of refugees into the European Union from 2012 to the peak of 2015/16 represented under half a percent of the EU’s population. Since then, thanks to government reactions to knee-jerk xenophobia or to the xenophobia of politicians, the numbers have tailed off significantly, according to Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency. Moreover, and contrary to the ‘sponger’ image of refugees, an analysis by the Brookings Institute revealed that the inflow of refugees actually has a net positive effect on host economies – and the OECD agrees – which raises the perplexing question, if migrants are out to destroy the West, why are they making it richer?

More confoundingly still, if the aim of Muslims in Europe and America is to destroy Christendom and wipe out the infidel, either with actual bombs or with demographic time-bombs, it appears inconceivable that any Muslim fanatic worth his salt would head the other way. Yet this is exactly what they are believed to be doing, with overstated and exaggerated hordes of European Muslims heading to Syria and Iraq to heed the call of jihad, so sensationally covered that you would be forgiven if you had the impression that Europe was being depopulated of its Muslim population.

Master puppeteers

Despite the fixation on Islam, it would be a mistake to think that Muslims have replaced the Jews in extreme right discourse – their presence appears to be a complementary one. A special place remains reserved for Jews in far-right narratives and conspiracy theories. For decades following the Holocaust, these narratives had become marginalised or had gone underground (such as the transnational Malm Movement), often only mentioned in hints and suggestions. But with the rise of the far-right, they have enjoyed a comeback in recent years in a number of countries, from Hungary to the United States.

Many Judeophobic conspiracy theories are recycled or adapted traditional anti-Semitic canards revolving around how Jews represent some kind of homogeneous cabal which runs the world clandestinely by controlling the financial sector and the media. This includes the renewed vogue the discredited hoax known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the fantasy that the Rothschild family controls the world’s central banks and causes war by financing both sides of every conflict enjoy in the growing far-right movement. More recent variations on this theme include the troubling mainstreaming in conservative circles of the narrative, which is especially popular in Hungary, that the tycoon and philanthropist George Soros is behind all kinds of sinister conspiracies to destroy Europe in order to be able better to rule it. Another is the conspiracy theory that a shadowy Zionist Occupation Government (‘Zionist’ here refers to Jew, not political Zionism) controls governments in the United States and Europe.

Some have even attempted to forge unified conspiracy theories of everything, in which various disparate and contradictory conspiracist ideas are forcibly mixed into a potently toxic cocktail. An example of this is how the mythical Zionist Occupation Government is responsible for mass migration in order to dilute or exterminate the white race so as to facilitate its satanic quest for global dominance. This blends anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, white genocidal and anti-leftist/liberal conspiracy theories into one incoherent whole.

Toxic far-right anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have drifted not only to segments of the far-left but have found their way into Arab, Islamic and Islamist narratives, which historically discriminated much less than Christianity against the Jews, with Muslim bigots traditionally regarding Jews with condescension rather than suspicion and fear. This changed dramatically with the advent of modern Zionism, the influence of fascism and the creation of Israel, and is often fuelled by a desperate need to scapegoat weakness and failure by depicting the ‘enemy’ as super-humanely powerful and evil.

The hatred, contempt and fear of Jews shared by Christian and Muslim extremists has occasionally resulted in some unlikely and troubling alliances between neo-Nazi groups and Islamists, such as has occurred in some parts of Germany, both of which “ascribe extraordinary political power to Israel and the Jews, and their goal is to fight this power,” in the words of Heinz Fromm, the then president of the German domestic intelligence agency.

Turkey’s Islamist president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has even suggested that the Kurdish referendum on independence was a devilish Jewish conspiracy, one unconvincingly masterminded by Bernard-Henri Lévy, once memorably described as the “Donald Trump of French philosophy”. Of course, this is not the first time that Erdoğan has ascribed superpowers to BHL, as he often referred to in France: he once hinted that the French ‘philosopher’ was behind the ouster of Egypt’s Mohammed Morsi. Islamists often portray Arab regimes with whom they disagree as being American and Jewish stooges. Some members of the outlawed and oppressed Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt subscribe to a conspiracy theory that dictator Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has a Jewish mother. Some conservative Muslims and Islamists are convinced that ISIS is a creation of western and Zionist imperialism, as are some secular Arabs. Interestingly, numerous white supremacists are also convinced of a similar conspiracy theory, even alleging that ISIS’s caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is actually a Mossad agent.

Mainstreaming falsehood

These far-right conspiracy theories do not exist in a vacuum. They are fed by more mainstream conservative falsehoods, which then feedback to the mainstream, pulling it ever further into the la-la zone. This is apparent in everything from the decades of eurosceptic myths that led the UK to leap off the Brexit cliff to the anti-immigrant, pseudo-fascistic rhetoric of large segments of Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire in Italy. Some mainstream conservatives find the twilight zone so alluring that they take the express train to the extreme because the mainstream’s gradual drift to the former fringe was not moving nearly fast enough. An example of this is Gavin McInnes who abandoned his creation, Vice, to embrace his inner white supremacist, misogynist and racist.

Even though the negative stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs has a very long pedigree, and has for generations been a staple of Hollywood myth-making, toxic mainstream conservative demonisation took off in earnest in the wake of the horrors of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. Since then, America and Europe’s Muslim minorities have been inextricably linked in conservative perceptions with terrorism and treason.

The same applies to other minorities and marginalised groups, from Jews to Eastern European migrants to asylum seekers. The rightwing tabloid media in a number of countries has been vilifying them for years while claiming that it the imagined bogeyman of political correctness that was enjoying the upper hand, rather than the reality, that rightwing bigotry has been the dominant voice for generations.

—

Read part I

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The truth about Islamic reformations

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By Khaled Diab

Islam needs a reformation for Muslim societies to develop and prosper, is one of those rare convictions shared by both Islamophiles and Islamophobes. Tunisia has done just that: radically reformed its brand of Islam and established a vibrant democracy to boot, yet prosperity eludes it. Why?

Thursday 18 January 2018

Seven years after the downfall of Tunisia’s long-time dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisians have been out on the streets once again, in one of the most sustained waves of protest since the 2010/11 revolution.

Paraphrasing the calls demanding the removal of the president in January 2011, the demonstrators of January 2018 have been chanting: “The people want to topple the budget.”

The 2018 budget fuelling public anger led to spikes in value-added tax and social security contributions and a planned slashing of the budget deficit demanded by the IMF, which will cause Tunisia’s poor continued pain. In a bid to counter public anger, the government of President Beji Caid Essebsi unveiled plans to reform medical care, housing and increase aid to the poor.

But the upheavals in Tunisia should, by right, not be happening, according to the received wisdom. Public intellectuals and media celebrities in the West, as well as many Muslim reformers, have been informing us for many years that Islam desperately needs a reformation. This would enable Muslims to shake off benighted Islamic dogma and embrace democracy, heralding an era of freedom and prosperity.

For example, more than a dozen years ago, Thomas Friedman, the guru of hollow, superficial punditry, urged Muslims to embark on a Lutheranesque Reformation to create “an Islam different from the lifeless, anti-modern, anti-Western fundamentalism being imposed in Iran and propagated by the Saudi Wahhabi clerics” – never mind that Martin Luther was a fundamentalist zealot and his reformation plunged Europe into generations of war and conflict.

Friedman also believed that America could expedite this reform process towards an Islamic enlightenment by bombing Iraq and resurrecting it as a beacon of freedom, free markets and democracy – and we all saw how well that worked out.

Although American ordnance and weapons, unsurprisingly, set Iraq back generations, some countries have found their own way towards democracy and a reformed Islam without the need for trillion-dollar American wars.

Tunisia has, over the past seven years, built up a vibrant and functioning democracy, which has not only avoided the nightmare counter-revolutions and wars which have consumed other countries in the region whose people dared to dream of a better tomorrow, but it also guarantees an impressive range of fundamental freedoms for Tunisian citizens.

Moreover, Tunisia boasts more female representatives than the United States: almost a third of seats in Tunisia’s parliament is held by women, compared with under a fifth in the American Congress. In addition, Tunisia possesses an essential plank of social democracy which has been almost completely dismantled in America: a vibrant trade unions movement.

As for reinventing Islam, Tunisia has been doing that for the past century and a half, which has led to a distinctly Tunisian brand of the religion. In the 19th century, numerous Tunisian intellectuals and activists sought ways to reconcile their faith with modernity and science. In the 1950s, the government led by liberation leader Habib Bourguiba secularised the country and introduced a radical reformist personal status law which equalised the relationship between men and women and banned polygamy.

Fears that reforms would be slowed or reversed by the revolution have proved unfounded. Rather than Islamise society, Tunisian society has secularised the country’s main Islamic party Ennahdha, which has gone from an overtly Islamist platform to reinvent itself as a party of ‘Muslim democrats’.

In recent months, Tunisia has rolled out an impressive package of reforms which will have profound implications on the local brand of Islam, and perhaps Islam in other parts of the Muslim world.

Tunisia’s parliament pushed through landmark legislation to outlaw all forms of violence against women, from street harassment to domestic violence, as well as the scrapping of the controversial practice of allowing a rapist to escape punishment by marrying his victim.

In addition, the government has removed the bureaucratic hurdle that prevented Muslim women from marrying outside their religion. Most ambitiously of all, Tunisia is pursuing legislation that will grant women equal inheritance rights to men, which has provoked the ire of the conservative Muslim establishment elsewhere, including Sunni Islam’s leading institution, Al Azhar.

Despite this impressive political, social, cultural and religious progress, Tunisia’s economic fortunes have not kept pace, the treasure at the end of Friedman’s freedom rainbow has failed to materialise. The economy still grows, but more sluggishly than before, while inflation and unemployment remain high.

So how come Tunisia has not been able to cash in on its reforms?

In my new book, Islam for the Politically Incorrect, I offer an explanation for this apparent paradox. At one level, this is because reformations do not lead to socio-economic development but are, instead, the product of it.

In addition, religious, social and political reforms are what you might call the software of development, and Tunisia has given itself a major upgrade in these areas. However, the software is useless without the appropriate hardware. What use is having the operating system for a supercomputer when you only possess a punch-card mainframe to run it on?

And the economic hardware requirements today are exponentially higher than they were when Europe had its Reformation, Counter-Reformation and Enlightenment. Whereas back then, when Christendom was pirating the latest software from Islamic culture and competing to smash Islam’s monopoly on global trade, the hardware requirements, in terms of resources and infrastructure, were relatively modest, today that is no longer the case.

As a small illustration, the OECD group of industrialised states spent, in 2009, $874 billion on research and development. To put that in context, the gross domestic product of Egypt, the most populous Arab country, was $336 billion in 2016, while Tunisia’s is a mere $42 billion, less than half Google’s annual revenue.

And that is just annual spending on R&D. That does not include the huge amounts the West and other advanced economies invest in education, not to mention the generations-long construction of legacy intellectual and technological capital.

Gaining Tunisia and the wider region, not to mention other poorer countries, access to the phenomenal levels of necessary resources will require both a pooling of regional wealth as well as radical policies to address global interstate inequalities. In the absence of enlightened mechanisms for wealth and knowledge sharing and redistribution, we are likely to see the burgeoning of regional and global conflicts that may make the current upheavals seem minor in comparison.

Of course, whether or not democratisation and enlightenment lead to prosperity, they are noble goals to pursue in their own right for the sake of freedom, fairness, justice, knowledge and human dignity. However, if they do not deliver on the economic bottomline, these advances are fragile and can quickly be shattered by popular discontent and populist authoritarian forces. If human enlightenment is to survive, let alone thrive, we need global solutions, not local illusions.

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Tags: africa, arab, christendom, culture, democracy, democratisation, development, economy, egypt, employment, equality, freedom, fundamentalism, gender, google, harassment, inflation, iraq, islam, islam for the politically incorrect, islamist, marriage, media, muslim world, muslims, oecd, reform, religion, revolution, science, society, sunni, tunisia, unemployment, united states, women, zine el abidine ben ali

Islam for Donald Trump and the politically incorrect

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Mr Trump, if you really want to know “what the hell is going on” with Islam, I invite you and all the other bigots out there to join me on a mind-expanding journey through Islam(s), passing through the main thoroughfares and back alleys of history, society, culture, politics, theology and, above all, people.

Friday 15 December 2017

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Dear Donald Trump,

Dear bigots of the world,

You are a world authority on Christianity. I know because you said so yourself… and, what with the deluge of fake news and biased media, we must trust only you and your flood of tweets. I wonder what Pope Francis made of your claim that “nobody reads the Bible more than me” when you met him at the Vatican? The pontiff has not pontificated on the subject, so we are likely never to know.

At the time, those haters at Catholic Online mocked you. Calling you a “presidential hopeless”, they pilloried your religious claims, including your slip of the tongue referencing Two Corinthians, rather than Second Corinthians. Second, two, they are all the same number, right? Catholic Online predicted: “Americans will wake up and understand that Donald Trump is not the man he claims to be and cannot be trusted to follow through with any of his promises.”

Not all Christians are so sceptical. Some even believe you to be the “Trump of God” foretold in 1 Thessalonians 4:16 and the “last trump” prophesied in 1 Corinthians 15:52 (that is First Corinthians, not One, but who’s counting), both of which are sure signs of the second coming. Some spoil sport experts on the Apocalypse claim that this only works in English, and the King James Bible to be specific, and that the original Greek refers to “trumpet”. Trump, trumpet – what’s the difference, right?

As a sign of your humility – a trait you have always done your utmost to hide – you have admitted that your pontifical knowledge of Christianity does not extend to Islam. “Donald J Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” you said during your presidential campaign, referring to yourself humbly in the third person, “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

The reason for this ignorance is simple and so obvious that Donald Trump has identified it without any prior knowledge of Islam or Muslims and has said it so many times that it barely merits repeating. The great enemy of the American people is political correctness. “We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people,” you said after a terrorist attack carried out by Muslim extremists. “If we don’t get smart it will only get worse.”

And to ensure that it does not get worse, Donald Trump has been getting smart. Despite your early blanket condemnation of Islam and all Muslims, you have decided that some Muslims are actually fine, like the Saudis. “This is not a battle between different faiths, different sects, or different civilisations,” you said, sounding remarkably like Obama, during your visit to Saudi Arabia, the first foreign country you visited as president. “This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life, and decent people of all religions who seek to protect it.” During your entire speech, you did not mention “radical Islamic terrorism” once, even though you chided Hillary Clinton for allegedly refusing to use the term, an accurate alternative fact which those pesky fact checkers contest.

Why didn’t you use it? Because you have discovered the truth. Crooked Clinton was lying, again. When she said that radical Islamic terrorism were not “magic words”, she was obfuscating and dissimulating. Those words are possessed of a black magic so potent that he or she who utters them can unleash forces so potent that they would make America quake again. Not being patriots, Obama and Clinton did not want you to know this secret. Luckily, you found out in the nick of time and averted an apocalypse.

But allow me to break the truth to you and shatter the post-truth, Mr President. You are being led astray, or are wandering off, as is your wont, in the wrong direction. Neither your former position regarding Islam nor your current position regarding Arab despots and dictators are right.

I know you will likely dismiss me as part of the politically correct, tree-hugging, climate change-believing, moral-relativist brigade. But rest assured, I abhor political correctness. I say what I mean and mean what I say. I describe what I see and see what I describe, without airbrushing out inconvenient truths or pasting in half-truths. I am not a partisan and owe no allegiance to anyone or anything, except my conscience. I find bigots who claim they are “politically incorrect” are more incorrect than anything else.

I am politically incorrect in the purest sense of the word. I don’t mince my words to curry favour with any political current or in-group, or to scapegoat anyone, and I call out bullshit where and when I encounter it. I find the worldviews of bigots of all stripes, whether non-Muslim or Muslim, objectionable, dubious and dangerous.

So, Mr Trump, if you really want to know “what the hell is going on,” I invite you and all the other bigots out there to join me on a mind-expanding journey through Islam(s), an odyssey through time and space, passing through the main thoroughfares and back alleys of history, society, culture, politics, theology and, above all, people. Islam is not just scripture. It is far more than Muhammad and the Quran. It is the lived and diverse experiences of hundreds of millions of people, past, present and future. Allow me to introduce you to this human kaleidoscope.

‘Islam for the Politically Incorrect is divided into easy-to-navigate thematic chapters. This means that the book can be read from cover to cover, or you can jump straight to the theme that interests you, bouncing around from chapter to chapter. Here is a quick rundown of the content.

Chapter 1 – A world of Islams

When people ask, ‘What is Islam?’, the only honest answer is: “It’s complicated.” There is no one thing you can point to and say clearly, “This is Islam.” Islam varies dramatically from place to place, country to country, group to group, person to person, and even from one era to another. This chapter introduces this complexity, but does so without being complicated.

Chapter 2 – Muslim women: Femininity, feminism and fantasy

One thing Muslim and western conservatives have in common is their expressed desire to ‘liberate’ women. In reality, each in their own way, they objectify Muslim women, use them as political footballs or weaponise them for their culture wars. For all the attention Muslim women receive, there is precious little mainstream understanding of their situation. This chapter presents Muslim women in their dizzying diversity on their own terms.

Chapter 3 – Muslim men: Emancipating the average Mo

Muslim men are ‘reel bad’. In Western pop culture, they are predominantly portrayed as two-dimensional villains. In conservative Muslim circles, open-minded, modern men are either ignored or pilloried. The upshot of this is that liberal and progressive Muslim men are systematically airbrushed out of the picture. This not only ignores an important component of reality, it also robs other Muslim men seeking to break out of traditional gender roles of role models and support. This chapter sheds light on an underappreciated side of Muslim men and, in so doing, seeks to empower the average Mo to embrace gender equality.

Chapter 4 – Sexy Islam

Sex, it is said, sells. But when it comes to the contemporary image of Islam, sex repels. To say that Islam lacks sex appeal would be an understatement of massive proportions. In this chapter, we take a peak behind the shroud of taboo and piety to explore the sexual reality and identity of Muslims in all its rich variety. Along the way, we expose remarkable similarities and a long, if submerged, history of sexual openness and eroticism.

Chapter 5 – Alcohol and Islam: Fermenting rebellion?

Both Muslims and non-Muslims alike view Islam as a teetotalling religion. In the popular mind, Muslims who drink either do not exist, are not ‘real’ Muslims or are intoxicated by western lifestyles or ‘vices’. However, despite Islam’s apparent theological prohibition, a significant minority of Muslims have always drunk and Islam possesses a number of distinct drinking cultures. In fact, alcohol has a long history in Islamic societies, literature, art and even science. This chapter toasts this ancient tradition.

Chapter 6 – Jesus v Muhammad: Of prophets and messiahs

Given the rivalry between Islam and Christianity, controversy and debate surround their two founders. This chapter explores not just the differences but also the surprising similarities between Muhammad and Jesus. It also examines how Muslims view Jesus and how Christians view Muhammad, the difference between being a messiah and a prophet, and what makes a ‘false’ or ‘true’ prophet.

Chapter 7 – Clash, mash or crash of civilisations?

In these troubled times, too many people believe that we are in the throes of a monumental clash of civilisations. But is this actually the case? Philosophy, science, culture, realpolitik and even fashion and coffee reveal that there is a massively underappreciated mash of civilisations, not to mention an under-reported clash within civilisations.

Chapter 8 – Rationalising Islam: Muslim sceptics, heretics, apostates and atheists

With the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie and Saudi Arabia’s classification of atheists as ‘terrorists’, contemporary Islam projects an image of piety and unbelief. The reality is a significant minority of ‘Muslims’ (at least) are sceptics, agnostics or outright atheists. In the most conservative Muslim societies, this can put their freedom, livelihoods or lives at risk. In others, rejection of Islam is quietly tolerated, while in some, it is accepted as a valid right. This chapter explores sceptics and atheists in the Islamic context, from the dawn of Islam to the present day.

Chapter 9 – Memo to a jihadist

This open letter is addressed to those drawn by the jihadist calling. It highlights the myths, untruths and half-truths upon which jihadists build their appeal, and the ugly truth of modern so-called jihadism.

Chapter 10 – Memo to the alt-right

This open letter tackles the dangerous myths and conspiracy theories popular in alt-right circles, and presents a more realistic and nuanced picture.

Chapter 11 – Reforming Islam or reforming Muslims?

There is currently a lot of debate about the need for an Islamic Reformation. This chapter analyses whether Islam needs reform, what kind of reform it requires, whether it has already been reformed, what would happen if it does reform, and whether theological or socioeconomic reform should come first?

The ABC of Islam

This handy glossary explains some confusing or controversial terms related to Islam. Among other things, it explains why ‘Allah’ is the wrong word to use, how ‘Allahu Akbar’ means a lot more than many people know, and how the caliphate ain’t what you think it is.

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Tags: agnostic, alcohol, allah, atheist, belief, caliphate, christianity, clash of civilisations, conspiracy theories, culture, Donald Trump, fatwa, feminism, freedom, gender roles, hillary clinton, islam, islam for the politically incorrect, jihad, jihadists, literature, mash of civilisations, men, minority, muhammad, muslims, philosophy, prohibition, prophets, quran, religion, salman rushdie, saudi arabia, terror, terrorism, united states, women

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