Mahmoud Zahar — a founder of Hamas, and one of its most militant hardliners — has called for an Islamic state in the Gaza Strip. After the Hamas takeover of the territory last week, he’s also threatened Fatah with more violence in the West Bank.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: After heavy fighting, Hamas won control over the Gaza Strip last Saturday. But it’s not clear what your party now intends to do. The assumption in the Western world is that Hamas wants to establish an Islamic state in Gaza. Is this true?

Zahar: Of course. We want to do that, but with full support of the people. At the moment we can’t establish an Islamic state because we Palestinians have no state. As long as we don’t have a state, we will try to form an Islamic society.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How would a Hamas-led Islamic state look?

Zahar: There would be no difference from how it looks today, because our customs and traditions in Gaza are already Islamic. Marriage, divorce, daily business — everything is Islamic. As soon as we have a state, then everyone will have their freedom. Christians will remain Christians, parties could be secular or even Communist.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: If an Islamic state is the ideal, why are there not more of them?

Zahar: If there were free and fair elections throughout the Arab world, Islamic forms of government would win everywhere. Islam is against the corruption, weakening, and materialism which have destroyed societies in Europe and America. Families are broken (in the West); there are AIDS and drugs. We don’t have such things here.

SPIEGEL ONLINE:  What will Hamas’ future relationship to Israel be?

Zahar: We are ready to speak with everyone about everything. Of course we have to speak with the Israelis, de facto, for example over trade. We also have to speak with them about cross-border issues, like the movement of severely ill patients and protection from bird flu and how we can avoid environmental catastrophes. We won’t discuss politics, because the Israelis have no political agenda with us. The political agenda of Condoleezza Rice and Ehud Olmert with President Mahmoud Abbas consists of trading kisses every two weeks — but with empty hands. We will only talk about essential things.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: At the moment there are no attacks on Israel by Hamas’ military wing. Is this a new doctrine?

Zahar: Yes, at the moment we have to deal with two enemies at the same time. Also, the Israelis have halted their aggression. That’s a direct result of our attacks on Sderot (in Israel) — the Israelis have suffered too much. Thousands of citizens had to leave (Sderot), and the Israeli government had to pay for their hotels. Factories and offices in Sderot also had to close.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has called this a good moment to push forward with the peace process. Will Gaza and Hamas definitely stay out of any such talks?

MAHMOUD ZAHAR

Mahmoud Zahar, a doctor by profession, is one of the founders of Hamas, the Palestinians’ Islamist party. Israel considers him a hardliner and tried to kill him with a rocket assault on his house in 2003. Zahar’s oldest son died in the attack. He is a sworn enemy of his rival party, Fatah, and he took over Hamas’ leadership after Israel killed his predecessor, Abd al- Aziz al- Rantissi.

During the Palestinians’ 2006 parliamentary election, Zahar said Hamas “would never recognize or negotiate with Israel.” Israel’s existence, he said, was “illegal.” After Hamas’ victory election he functioned as foreign minister in the Hamas- dominated cabinet, but was recalled in March 2007 after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, pressure from neighboring countries, formed a “unity government” with a power- sharing agreement between Fatah and Hamas.

Zahar: What kind of peace process is it? There will only be lots of chit-chat. Meanwhile the occupation will continue, and the Israelis will remain here to destroy our lives.SPIEGEL ONLINE: In the West there is a fear that the Gaza Strip may become a playground for international terrorism. Is this danger real?

Zahar: Our people can’t distinguish between resistance and terrorism. We’re fighting for the liberation of our land from an occupation. When people in Europe had to fight the Nazis, they were honored, later, as freedom fighters. No one would have called Charles de Gaulle a terrorist.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: There has been talk in Israel about turning off electricity, water, and gas in Gaza. Could the people in Gaza starve?

Zahar: In that case Israel would have to open its borders. People wouldn’t starve to death before violently storming the borders. Israel also loses $2 million in business income for every day the border stays closed.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The international community plans to release all the aid money it has withheld from Palestinians for over a year to the Fatah government in the West Bank. Will the West Bank become a kind of luxury-Palestine, while the Gaza Strip starves?

Zahar: Fatah in the West Bank will receive money, and they will have to pass it on to Gaza. If it doesn’t, it will lose Gaza forever. We would also have to search for alternatives. We have a very good image among people throughout the Arab world. If we want, we can get $5 million per month in donations from Egypt. We have also received money from foreign countries in the past — $82 million from Kuwait, $50 million from Libya. I personally once brought $20 million from Iran to the Gaza Strip in a suitcase. No, actually twice — the second time it was $22 million.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What will improve for people in Gaza now that Hamas is in control?

Zahar: The good thing is that we can now collect information about our enemies and informants from foreign powers. We will look for Israel’s spies.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Last week there were street battles in the West Bank between Fatah and Hamas militias. Fatah maintained the upper hand. How will Hamas loyalists defend themselves in the event of any new fighting?

Zahar: Let me ask you: How have we defended ourselves so far against the Israeli occupation?SPIEGEL ONLINE: With bombs and attacks?

Zahar: Exactly. But you said that, not me.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The split between Hamas and Fatah has never been wider. Are you still in contact with one another?

Zahar: Yes, we speak to each other. But we’re looking for the true Fatah so its members can take part in our new organization and plans for the future. The true, pure Fatah is the real loser (in this conflict) because its party in the West Bank is collaborating with Israel. In Gaza we have beaten those elements that collaborate with Israel. We have beaten everyone who represented an obstacle — the ones who wanted to keep us from defending ourselves.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The militant wings of Fatah and Hamas have been fully armed over the last few months. Are these weapons still in circulation?

Zahar: There are naturally very many weapons around now. Two years ago, one bullet in Gaza cost around €3.50 — now it would cost 35 cents. The American aid money has been translated into weapons. Thank you, America!

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Isn’t such a large number of weapons in the hands of militias — some controllable, some not — a huge security risk? What would happen if splinter groups started to shoot at each other?

Zahar: So far we haven’t confiscated any weapons. If there are problems with splinter groups, we will disarm them and take the weapons for ourselves.

Interview conducted by Ulrike Putz

By ALAN COWELL

Britain’s largest labor union urged “concerted and sustained pressure upon Israel,” including “an economic, cultural, academic and sporting boycott,” to force its withdrawal from Palestinian areas. The union, called Unison and grouping 1.3 million public service employees, also called on the British government to oppose the sale of arms to Israel. The calls were made in a motion approved at Unison’s annual conference in Brighton demanding the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with its capital in Jerusalem The resolution followed similar calls for pressure on

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,490160,00.html

Until late last month, when Salman Rushdie added his name to those of a few other like-minded souls and signed a statement attacking Muslims for having been outraged by a set of Danish cartoons depicting their prophet with satirical ridicule, something seemed amiss in that whole global uproar, writes Hamid Dabashi*

“After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism”, Salman Rushdie and his colleagues have declared, “the world now faces a new global threat: Islamism.” How so, and by what authority? One looks in vain in the list of the statement’s twelve signatories allied with Rushdie for someone with the remotest sense of demonstrable knowledge about this goblin of their perturbed imagination that they keep calling “Islam” — and yet they do declare and designate this “Islam” as a global threat, next and akin to “fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism”. The world is now at the mercy of such proclamations — and Rushdie’s name does carry, what Kent detected and declared in Lear and called, “authority”. By what authority, how, when, what, and “who gave thee this authority” to declare such things — no one dares to ask.

“We, writers, journalists, intellectuals”, announce Salman Rushdie and his associates, “call for resistance to religious totalitarianism.” They can of course call for whatever they wish — but we are also entitled to ask “writers, journalists, intellectuals” of what particular and combined learning and erudition, knowledge and audacity, about the ghostly apparition that has disturbed their slumber. And why should the world attend and heed such proclamations? Is this thing they call “Islam” the faith of millions of people around the globe, or the bugbear of a band of neocon artists? It’s hard to tell.

The case of the Danish cartoon row, in the furious rapidity of world events already an old issue, might be considered as perhaps the best example of how a boisterous banality now governs the principal mode producing public knowledge and thus perceiving Islam and its contemporary historical whereabouts. The row has a history, and the domain of its import implicates Europe in its entirety. It is not just the Danish paper Jyllands- Posten that initially commissioned and published these cartoons. Editors of newspapers and magazines throughout Europe, in print and on the Internet, jubilantly joined their Danish counterparts in massively distributing these cartoons and thus registering their European solidarity in the matter. One such incident after another adds fury and momentum to the way an increasingly globalised audience, Muslim and non-Muslim, conceives and disposes of “Islam”.

Selected scenes from scattered Muslim reactions to the publication of these cartoons, pictorially staged and carefully choreographed by the leading European press to sustain their historical record of showing Muslims in the worst possible angle ever seen through a camera have been systematically characterised as yet another sign of a fundamental discrepancy between (this the most enduring binary opposition manufactured by Orientalists in the course of their prolonged services to colonial modernity) “Islam and the West”: clean-shaven, civilised white men properly attired in business suits posited against poor, enraged, and furious Muslims.

That some Muslims around the world are outraged and multitudes of them have gone out on a rampage is yet another example of how they misread the domestic affairs of Europeans and Americans and take them for a global assault on themselves. The primary and principal target of these cartoons, with the denigration of Muslims they entail, is in fact labour immigrants of Muslim descent suffering the racism of their host country in one shade, shape, and form or another. A similar misreading was exactly the case when Samuel Huntington issued his own proclamation a few years ago, positing Muslims and Islam as the principal threat to what he still insists on calling, “Western Civilization.” On that occasion too, Muslims around the world took Huntington’s prognostication to heart and thought he was talking to them, while he, along with a band of like-minded neocon artists like Francis Fukuyama and Alan Bloom, was in fact deeply troubled by massive demographic changes within the United States. By proposing that “Islam” posited a civilisational threat to “the West,” Huntington and Co sought to silence massive bodies of old and new, Arab and Muslim, immigrants to the United States demanding a pride of place in terms domestic to their cultural heritage and moral authority.

That the immediate target of the Danish cartoonists was not a remote abstraction called “Islam”, but an immediate leviathan appearing in the shape of immigrant communities of Muslim background in their own midst there is no doubt. What remains a puzzle is why leading European opinion-makers, led by a group of yuppie racist journalists, continue to be in a dire need of reminding themselves that they are God’s gift to humanity and that Jews and Muslims, the flipped sides of the same coin, or by extension Africans, Asians, or Latin Americans, have no place among them. It is here, and in the immediate vicinity of that question, that lapsed Muslims like Salman Rushdie become handy.

The leading European press (but by no means all) is now having an all-out orgy with its journalistic ethnic cleansing — and the bravura cannot be entirely explained by the fact that certain kinds of Europeans, carrying their Christianity up their sleeves or else brandishing their “Laïcité” like a saber of unmerciful certainty, do not wish to see any Jews or Muslims, Africans, Asians, or Latinos, among them. With some bizarre sense of irony, the colonial history of Europe, having plundered the globe many times over, has now brought millions of Muslims from Asia and Africa home to roost — and it would seem that some white Christian Europeans are frightened out of their wits. Oriana Fallaci is now chief among European soothsayers demanding the ethnic cleansing of her Europe. Between Fallaci and Berlusconi, the legacy of Mussolini’s fascism is no history — and Rushdie’s “Islam” no substitution.

In the midst of this row — militant Muslims and racist Europeans at each other’s throat – one cannot but wonder, with a modicum of reason, what is behind the quarrel. What we are dealing with here is the intersection of medieval signs and modern sensitivities, both brought to bear on a brutalised malignancy that resembles two belligerent and silly school children going at each other. To put things in perspective, one can of course begin with the inhibition of figurative representation in Islamic doctrinal disposition — a fact very much compromised by the range of Persian, Indian and Turkish miniature paintings, and by the effervescence of figurative royal paintings in the 18th and 19th centuries throughout much of the Muslim world.

Against the doctrinal inhibition of figurative painting, such paintings do in fact abound in Islamic art. This inhibition assumes a particularly curious turn when it comes to the figural representation of Prophet Muhammad that it might be quite instructive to know at this point. When the late Syrian filmmaker Moustapha Akkad, tragically killed in the course of a suicidal violence in Amman late last year, made a feature film on the career of Prophet Muhammad, The Message (1976), he opted, out of respect for Muslim sensitivity, not to show the face or figure of the Prophet and simply suggested his presence.

The evident presence of this doctrinal inhibition does not mean that pious Muslims the world over do not look for and produce pictorial representations of their holy men, including their Prophet. The Shias, in particular, have absolutely no qualms whatsoever having the images of Prophet Muhammad and their Imams depicted — painted on a canvas or woven into a decorative carpet — and sold in the markets of Najaf, Mashhad, Qom, or Beirut. Pious and believing Muslims buy these pictures and hang them proudly and reverentially in their homes or in public without any hesitation.

The question then is why when a Danish newspaper depicts Prophet Muhammad in a ludicrous manner, or previously when a Pakistani author goes on a fictive rampage denigrating the sacrosanct moments of a people’s history, some Muslims, particularly those suffering the terror of tyrannical rulers at home or else the indignities of labour migration abroad, are outraged. Career opportunist novelists or talent-less cartoonists, trying to make up for their lack of creative talent with scandalous marketing ruses, are of course entirely, unconditionally, and ipso facto entitled to make any fool out of themselves, for such acts of juvenile superciliousness are entirely within their civil and human rights, and no one is even in a position to grant or deny them such inalienable rights. But whence the anger, and whereby the fury?

This obviously is a clear case of the context and not just the text — when you have a representation of a prophet with headgear that looks like a bomb and a nose straight out of the old European racist apothecary boxes, and lay him out thick against the background of a systematic record of white supremacist, masculinist, and European racism against Jews and Muslims, then you have a different story on your hand.

The current anti-Muslim plague, running loose throughout Europe and the United States, banks on the white Christian repertoire of anti- Semitism that has now shifted its focal attention away from the Jews and re-directed itself towards Muslims. Under the guise of the freedom of expression, and positing their racist prejudices in colourful colonial Enlightenment shades, prominent European opinion-makers, as fully evident in their leading newspapers and magazines, are letting loose their racist bigotry in ways unprecedented since the horrid records of European pogroms that ultimately led to the Jewish Holocaust, as is exemplified in the Prophet Muhammed cartoon row or the front covers of The Economist and most other right-wing papers and magazines up in arms against “gypsies” swamping “their lands”, loudly declaring that “9 out of 10 asylum seekers are conmen,” and that they ought to be “kicked out”.

With a combination of mental laziness and a jaundiced visual imagination, these European newspapers are in fact regurgitating the selfsame anti-Jewish insignia definitive to their history and applying them to Muslims all over again. Contorted faces, prominent noses, frightful dispositions, angry demeanours, and grotesque postures have been and continue to be definitive to the way old-fashioned European racism sees Jews and Muslims alike. The self-inflicted surgical bodily mutilation of middle class Muslims — ranging from plastic surgery of the most grotesque sorts to removal of bodily hair to colouring their hair blonde and wearing colorful contact lenses — is the mirror image of the very same aesthetic hegemony of white Europeans.

What we are witnessing over the cartoons that the Danish Jyllands-Posten has commissioned and published, however, is not limited to a mere recycling of European anti-Semitism. There is a contemporary anxiety that feeds that pathological knee jerk. Placing headgear in the form of a bomb (a ticking bomb as Alan Dershowitz and Michael Ignatieff would say in the United States) on the head of Prophet Muhammad is the functional equivalent of placing a sign of a German concentration camp (the phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei,” for example), or a sign of the massacre of Native Americans, or a reference to the My Lai massacre of 1968 in Vietnam, or a picture of Lynndie England in Abu Ghraib, over the head of Christ in a Crucifix. It is a matter of combining medieval icons and modern barbarities, fusing the two in order to implicate the sacrosanct icons of a people in their entirety in those acts of barbarity. Using the figure of Prophet Muhammad with a suggestion of terrorism, as it is defined by the US and its European allies (while they are systematically going around the world and torturing, maiming and murdering people on the assumption that they might be Dershowitz-Ignatieff ticking bombs), effectively implicates some 1.5 billion people of Muslim background around the world in such acts of degenerate violence — itself the continued reverberation of an entire history of European (and now American) colonial plundering of the globe.

Marking this event, two diametrically opposed reactions to the cartoon row now mirror and complement each other: first is the inexcusable anti-Semitic response of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, either denying the Jewish Holocaust, and thus belittling the unending suffering it has caused Jewish people the world over, or else encouraging anti-Semitic tirades in his homeland; and second a band of neocon artists, led by the functional equivalent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Salman Rushdie, branding a figment of their own turgid imagination “Islamism” and calling it “totalitarianism.” While in Iran, the legitimate and absolutely necessary criticism of the apartheid state of Israel has now degenerated into anti-Semitism, in Europe and the United States, a band of equally ignoramus career opportunists are denouncing what they call “Islamism”, a pathologically nervous hiding, and thus all the more revealing, of their own collective hatred of a people and their received notions of sanctity.

Initially published in Charlie Hebdo, a French weekly and one of the European papers to reprint the caricatures, the Rushdie and Co declaration warns that “after having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global threat: Islamism.” Thus in the esteemed estimation of these signatories, the imminent threat to humanity is not the environmental catastrophe posed by the gargantuan waste and abuse of natural resources by the US and the entire industrial calamity it represents; not the manifestations of obscene wealth, on the one hand, and unfathomable poverty, on the other, in the heart of Europe and the United States (remember hurricane Katrina); not the fact that according to the UN some 870 million people go to sleep hungry every night around the globe while the military budget of the United States between the year 2000 and 2008 is estimated at 32 and eleven zeroes in front of that figure; not the unconscionable destitution of innocent people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, all created and conditioned by the globalised capitalism over which presides the US and Western Europe; not the prevalent racism, sexism, and a whole gamut of transcultural manifestations of endemic patriarchy, economic inequality, social injustice, and gender apartheid; not the systematic eradication of civil liberties in the heartlands of their cherished “West”; not the widespread network of torture chambers in Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base, Guantànamo Bay, and a whole subterranean labyrinth of CIA-run dungeons in Europe — no, none of these frightful facts, in the opinion of Salman Rushdie and his comrades, poses any threat to the globe, when compared to a handful of pitiful, scattered, and pathetic Muslim reactions, all out of fear, frustration, and despair, to the Danish caricature of their prophet.

This has of course been a long season of migration to the lucrative right, and not just sanity but sheer literacy has lost to self-promotion, conducted on the broken backs of poverty- stricken people. For while the varied forms of totalitarianism, fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism (all vintage European inventions) were state-sponsored ideologies that wreaked havoc first and foremost on citizens caught in the snare of their lunacy, what they call “Islamism” (out of sheer historical illiteracy of what has happened in and to Islam over the last 200 years) is a US-sponsored propaganda gadget manufactured to generate and sustain an illusory enemy to justify warmongering and global domination.

A band of supercilious journalists publish a number of cartoons in Denmark and scores of Muslims are killed while protesting in the US-occupied Afghanistan, its neighbouring Pakistan, a client-state of the selfsame US, and then in other parts of the Muslim world. Where, and at what level of a rudimentary political literacy, does Islamic “totalitarianism” enter this scene? The only country in the world that carries the epithet of an “Islamic Republic” — mirroring in its religious disposition the Jewish State, the US Christian Empire that supports it, and the Hindu Fundamentalism that aspires to its apartheid racism — is Iran, where the theocratic tyranny of a band of useless medieval jurists is systematically and valiantly contested by its own citizens. Whence and where did Islam become a “totalitarian” state apparatus like fascism, Stalinism, and Nazism? There is not a single so-called “Muslim country” the inhabitants of which are not actively engaging and challenging the most sacrosanct principles of their faith. Just in their modern history, and over the last two hundred years, Muslims themselves have turned their collective faith upside down questioning the most definitive aspects of their faith. In facing and opposing the unfathomable barbarity of European colonialism, Muslims have left not a single stone unturned in their own religious doctrines and dogmas — they did not and have no need to wait for a band of illiterate opportunists to tell them what is wrong with their faith and what they need to do. Nothing of that noble and continued history — of a people launched against themselves — is now a matter of global public knowledge, and yet the premise of everything said and conceived of Islam is precisely what illiterate prognosticators like Salman Rushdie and Co have deigned to tell their European and American clientele.

The overwhelming majority of Muslims the world over swallow their pride, turn their face from this ghastly European racism and go about their daily lives. Small bands of militant Muslims, angered by insults they think targeted against people they hold holy, go on a rampage and scores of them are beaten and even killed by the police in their respective countries. The very same press that started this horrid row takes pictures of these mobs and juxtaposes them against clean-shaven white European statesmen in their business suits and soft-spoken newspeak — thus triggering the hurried reaction of these “writers, journalists, intellectuals”, as they call themselves, self- promoting career opportunists as they are. Where did “totalitarianism” come into play? “Totalitarianism”, let it be remembered, is a state ideology, presiding over a massive military machinery, the way Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini did — all of them European, all of them white, all of them male, and yes, all of them Christian by birth and breeding.

To the everlasting shame of not just the signatories of this logically flawed and categorically racist document, signed and sealed by Salman Rushdie, but of every European who has remained silent or compliant in the course of the cartoon row, the principal target of this horrid act of racism remains not a stilted abstraction called “Islam”, nor indeed millions of Muslims living outside the European racist imaginary. The principal target of these cartoons was (and is) an Afghan woman teacher in Denmark, a Pakistani child on her way to school in Norway, an Algerian busboy hiding from the police in France, a Moroccan street sweeper on his way to work in Italy, an Iranian cab driver negotiating his way in a city in Holland, a Turkish illegal immigrant scared to open her mouth in Germany, an Egyptian student fearing for her future in Spain, a Syrian restaurant-owner wondering if he will have a customer somewhere in Sweden, and then millions of others like them suffering the indignities of desperate labour migrations into Europe and weathering the monumental manifestations of European racism on a daily and regular basis. Now enter Salman Rushdie and Co, putting their ignoble names to a document that seals their approval of global injustice and racism towards 1.5 billion people, imagining themselves the beneficiaries of a European Enlightenment that in its very philosophical inception denied them and their homelands and cultures entry even into the category of “human” and considered their entire pedigree beneath contempt.

Today signs of a horrid collective racism are becoming evident in post-war European cities and towns dangerously and conveniently forgetting the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust — when white European racist Christians sought systematically to eradicate an entire people on the single premise that they were Jews. Leading European newspapers have reprinted the cartoons of Prophet Muhammad not out of a ludicrous sign of solidarity with their yuppie and illiterate Danish colleagues, but to frighten millions of European Muslims into submission, shame, fear, and intimidation. Millions of Muslim children across Europe now go to school frightened, ashamed, feeling a false sense of guilt, and thus petrified out of their collective consciousness. What these newspapers are effectively doing is to make it impossible for Muslims to oppose violence and barbarity of all sorts, particularly those done in their name, in any way other than denouncing their collective faith, dying their hair blonde, bleaching their faces white, and thus metamorphosing into a walking denigration of themselves. Those children are the principal targets of every ghastly newspaper in Europe that reprinted those cartoons — to make sure that they are bullied in their schools and neighbourhoods, discriminated against in their future job markets, growing up ashamed of their culture and character, and obedient to a globalised and whitewashed Eurocentricity with which the classical European anti-Semitism now wishes to mark its history.

“Islam and globanalisation”, or giving European and American space to Muslim names to denounce their own Islamic phantasms, is a new phase in the social manufacturing of domination — using nominal Muslims against Islamic abstractions. This — pitting lapsed Muslims against Islamic sensibilities — is ultimately an exercise in futility. The fate of the globe, Europe included, is written elsewhere, somewhere between the lines of massive labour migration, on one side, and the global reconfiguration of the capital that systematically seeks to abuse it, on the other. The culture war this has occasioned in the meantime is a murderous nightmare for many, a lucrative pastime for some, a headache for others, and yet at the end an entirely negligible footnote to history.

* The writer is the Hagop Kevorkian professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (Second Edition, Transactions, 2006), and Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future (Verso, 2001), the founder of “Dreams of a Nation: A Palestinian Film Project”, and the editor of Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (Verso, 2006). His forthcoming book, Iran: A People Interrupted , is scheduled for publication this year by the New Press.

Related link:
BBC: Writers issue cartoon row warning

by Eric Westervelt

Morning Edition, March 2, 2007 · Islamic fundamentalists are suspected of murdering three women thought to be prostitutes in the Gaza Strip. The deaths follow the bombing and torching of businesses and public places that radicals believe to be un-Islamic.

Police say 30-year-old Ibtefam Abu Genar’s body was found first. She was one of three women murdered Tuesday night in different parts of northern Gaza.

In conservative Gaza, it’s not uncommon for women accused of alleged immoral behavior to be killed by a family member — a so-called “honor” killing. But these killings are different, according to investigator Abu al Abed. In his long career, he said, he’s never seen three women murdered in one night, let alone three assassinated gangland style.

“They were killed in the same way: a bullet in the head and bullet in the chest,” Abed said. “So this indicates that this is not an honor crime, or a family crime; this is organized crime. There’s a group behind it.”

No group has claimed responsibility. It’s just another in a five-month-long series of unsolved, violent crimes in Gaza targeting people suspected of “immoral” or decadent behavior.

The attacks started in October 2006, and they’ve stretched from north to south, hitting a wide range of businesses in the seaside Palestinian territory. Modern music stores, DVD outlets, restaurants and cultural centers have all been hit. In December, a Rafah cafeteria that allowed card playing was torched.

Rami, who didn’t want his full name used, owns a DVD store in the south-central Gaza city of Khan Younis. He said that at first, he laughed off an anonymous cell phone call threatening to attack his small business for selling allegedly racy movies, including Western titles. Then another call came.

“It was a very serious voice, and he told me that if I don’t shut down my store right away, that they will blow it up and they’ll burn it,” Rami said.

Rami closed his shop for a few weeks, turned to local militant factions for protection and put up pictures of Islamic heroes. He took down his posters for Hollywood blockbusters.

Internet entrepreneur Ahmed al Rafa-tee was not lucky enough to get a warning. One morning, the 24-year-old arrived at the Internet cafe he owned to find that his business had been blown up.

A statement from Suf al Haq Islamiya, or “The Swords of Islamic Righteousness,” claimed responsibility for the attack. The group said they were “implementing the rule of God” and called shops like Rafa-tee’s “dirty, corrupted” businesses that make youth “slaves of the devil mind,” an apparent reference to online games and porn.

“They think these Internet shops are wasting the time of the youth, keeping them away from praying, from liberating Palestine, from Jihad,” Rafa-tee said.

Rafa-tee calls the Swords group irrational. He says he had Internet filtering software in his now-destroyed cafe to block out porn sites.

Seemingly innocuous public cultural centers — some of the few places where kids of the opposite sex can mingle — have also been attacked.

Early Wednesday morning, someone bombed a public cultural center in Gaza City where boys and girls 14 and under learn traditional Palestinian folk dances, arts and crafts and sports. No one was seriously injured in the bombing. No group has claimed responsibility.

Nabil Barzock, the center’s deputy director, is disgusted by the damage done to his building.

“There are some people which are radical, and they do not accept the mixing between boys and girls, and they are sending us a message trying to stop our activities,” Barzock said. “But I say we will keep on teaching, training and protecting our traditions.”

This is not the first time Gaza’s Islamic fundamentalists have gone on vigilante sprees targeting alleged “immorality.”

In 2000, Hamas supporters torched the remaining two stores that sold alcohol in Gaza. And on New Year’s Eve in 2004, unknown fundamentalists bombed and destroyed the United Nations Club. It was the last place in Gaza known to serve alcohol.

No one knows who’s carrying out the current round of attacks. But since October, the obscure Swords of Islamic Righteousness has claimed credit for blowing up more than 50 businesses it sees as morally corrupted.

But a careful check of Interior Ministry police crime records from October thru February for all of Gaza shows that police attribute only nine bombings to the Swords group. The records show another 18 violent attacks across Gaza in that period targeting businesses for alleged immorality.

So it appears that the Swords group boasts of far more attacks than it has actually carried out. And that’s likely key to its strategy. The group’s anonymous violence has only heightened its mystery and stature, with a chilling effect on Gaza’s close-knit society.

Naila Ayesh runs a Women’s center in Gaza City. She says these murky attacks have now made many women — including many secular women — more scared to walk the streets without a male relative, or without covering up.

“In Gaza, you can see few numbers of women who are not covering their heads,” Ayesh said. “It doesn’t mean that most of the women who cover their heads, they are [religious]. But some of them, really, they’re afraid to go outside the homes without covering.”

Gaza security officials are investigating the possibility that these vigilante moralists have the tacit, or even explicit, backing of Hamas.

Investigator Abu al Abed didn’t want his full name used to protect his safety. The security forces are dominated by men like Abed, men who are loyal to Hamas rival Fatah.

Abed said analysis of explosive residue links Hamas’ underground paramilitary wing — the Izzadine al Qassam brigades — and its more official police force to the wave of attacks.

“Our primary investigation shows that the Swords of Islamic Righteousness includes members of Hamas’ Executive Force, and they’re supported directly by the Qassam groups,” Abed said.

Some in Hamas, investigators say, are working by proxy to do what they can’t do openly now that they’re leading the government: trying to impose an Islamist social agenda across Gaza.

Hamas supporters dismiss those allegations. The spokesman for Hamas’s Executive Force, Islam Sharwan, called the charges that Hamas is behind the Swords of Righteousness ridiculous.

“This is totally incorrect information. Hamas has nothing to do with this group,” Sharwan said. “And we’re investigating these attacks to protect the Palestinian people. If a member of a faction has done this, they’ll be exposed and arrested.”

Meantime, at week’s end the bodies of the three women — the alleged prostitutes — were retrieved quietly from the Gaza City hospital morgue. One male relative from each family came, the mortician says, and silently took the body away.

(Because of intense interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, NPR makes available free transcripts of its coverage. View the free transcript of this story.)

The United States is immersed more deeply than ever in the Muslim world’s sectarian divide. A five-part series explores the split between Shia and Sunnis, from its origins shortly after the death of Muhammed in the seventh century to the modern-day upheaval in Iraq.

In this Series

The Partisans of Ali: A Series Overview

February 12, 2007 · In a five-part series, we look at the origins of the Sunni-Shia split in Islam, the religious and historical differences, how Iran became Shiite, and how conflicts involving Shiism have made an impact beyond the Middle East.

Export of Iran’s Revolution Spawns Violence

February 14, 2007 · Iran’s Shiite revolutionaries encountered resistance from the Arab states led by Sunnis, Islam’s majority branch, when they tried to export ideology. This resistance spawned unforeseen conflicts throughout the Middle East. Web Extra: Series Overview, Bios, Timeline

Shia Rise Amid Century of Mideast Turmoil

February 13, 2007 · The Shia are a minority among Islam’s 1.3 billion people. For centuries, they have been considered the downtrodden of the Islamic world. But as turmoil gripped the Middle East in the past 100 years, their prospects have changed dramatically.

The Origins of the Shia-Sunni Split

February 12, 2007 · The division in Islam between the Shia minority and the Sunni majority seems to be deepening, not just in Iran and Iraq, but across the Middle East. The split occurred soon after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, nearly 1,400 years ago.

Key Individuals in the Shia-Sunni Divide

February 12, 2007 · Read short biographies of some of the major figures in our series about the split between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

The Partisans of Ali: A Chronology

February 12, 2007 · The division of Islam into Sunni and Shia branches goes far back in Muslim history to the aftermath of the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Read a chronology.

Morning Edition, February 12, 2007 · It’s not known precisely how many of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are Shia. The Shia are a minority, comprising between 10 percent and 15 percent of the Muslim population — certainly fewer than 200 million, all told.

The Shia are concentrated in Iran, southern Iraq and southern Lebanon. But there are significant Shiite communities in Saudi Arabia and Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India as well.

Although the origins of the Sunni-Shia split were violent, over the centuries Shia and Sunnis lived peacefully together for long periods of time.

But that appears to be giving way to a new period of spreading conflict in the Middle East between Shia and Sunni.

“There is definitely an emerging struggle between Sunni and Shia to define not only the pattern of local politics, but also the relationship between the Islamic world and the West,” says Daniel Brumberg of Georgetown University, author of Reinventing Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran.

That struggle is most violent and dangerous now in Iraq, but it is a struggle that could spread to many Arab nations in the Middle East and to Iran, which is Persian.

One other factor about the Shia bears mentioning. “Shiites constitute 80 percent of the native population of the oil-rich Persian Gulf region,” notes Yitzhak Nakash, author of The Shi’is of Iraq.

Shia predominate where there is oil in Iran, in Iraq and in the oil-rich areas of eastern Saudi Arabia as well.

The Partisans of Ali

The original split between Sunnis and Shia occurred soon after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, in the year 632.

“There was a dispute in the community of Muslims in present-day Saudi Arabia over the question of succession,” says Augustus Norton, author of Hezbollah: A Short History. “That is to say, who is the rightful successor to the Prophet?”

Most of the Prophet Muhammad’s followers wanted the community of Muslims to determine who would succeed him. A smaller group thought that someone from his family should take up his mantle. They favored Ali, who was married to Muhammad’s daughter, Fatimah.

“Shia believed that leadership should stay within the family of the Prophet,” notes Gregory Gause, professor of Middle East politics at the University of Vermont. “And thus they were the partisans of Ali, his cousin and son-in-law. Sunnis believed that leadership should fall to the person who was deemed by the elite of the community to be best able to lead the community. And it was fundamentally that political division that began the Sunni-Shia split.”

The Sunnis prevailed and chose a successor to be the first caliph.

Eventually, Ali was chosen as the fourth caliph, but not before violent conflict broke out. Two of the earliest caliphs were murdered. War erupted when Ali became caliph, and he too was killed in fighting in the year 661 near the town of Kufa, now in present-day Iraq.

The violence and war split the small community of Muslims into two branches that would never reunite.

The war continued with Ali’s son, Hussein, leading the Shia. “Hussein rejected the rule of the caliph at the time,” says Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival. “He stood up to the caliph’s very large army on the battlefield. He and 72 members of his family and companions fought against a very large Arab army of the caliph. They were all massacred.”

Hussein was decapitated and his head was carried in tribute to the Sunni caliph in Damascus. His body was left on the battlefield at Karbala. Later it was buried there.

It is the symbolism of Hussein’s death that holds so much spiritual power for Shia.

“An innocent spiritual figure is in many ways martyred by a far more powerful, unjust force,” Nasr says. “He becomes the crystallizing force around which a faith takes form and takes inspiration.”

The Twelfth Imam

The Shia called their leaders imam, Ali being the first, Hussein the third. They commemorate Hussein’s death every year in a public ritual of self-flagellation and mourning known as Ashura.

The significance of the imams is one of the fundamental differences that separate the two branches of Islam. The imams have taken on a spiritual significance that no clerics in Sunni Islam enjoy.

“Some of the Sunnis believe that some of the Shia are actually attributing almost divine qualities to the imams, and this is a great sin,” Gause says, “because it is associating human beings with the divinity. And if there is one thing that’s central to Islamic teaching, it is the oneness of God.”

This difference is especially powerful when it comes to the story of the Twelfth Imam, known as the Hidden Imam.

“In the 10th century,” says Vali Nasr, “the 12th Shiite Imam went into occultation. Shiites believe God took him into hiding, and he will come back at the end of time. He is known as the Mahdi or the messiah. So in many ways the Shiites, much like Jews or Christians, are looking for the coming of the Messiah.”

Those who believe in the Hidden Imam are known as Twelver Shia. They comprise the majority of Shia in the world today.

“Twelver Shiism is itself a kind of messianic faith,” Brumberg says. It is based “on a creed that the full word and meaning of the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad’s message will only be made manifest, or real and just, upon the return of the Twelfth Imam, this messianic figure.”

Political Power Fuels Religious Split

Over the next centuries, Islam clashed with the European Crusaders, with the Mongol conquerors from Central Asia, and was spread further by the Ottoman Turks.

By the year 1500, Persia was a seat of Sunni Islamic learning, but all that was about to change with the arrival of Azeri conquerors. They established the Safavid dynasty in Persia — modern-day Iran — and made it Shiite.

“That dynasty actually came out of what’s now eastern Turkey,” says Gregory Gause. “They were a Turkic dynasty, one of the leftovers of the Mongol invasions that had disrupted the Middle East for a couple of centuries. The Safavid dynasty made it its political project to convert Iran into a Shia country.”

Shiism gradually became the glue that held Persia together and distinguished it from the Ottoman Empire to its west, which was Sunni, and the Mughal Muslims to the east in India, also Sunni.

This was the geography of Shiite Islam, and it would prevail into the 20th century.

There were periods of conflict and periods of peace. But the split remained and would, in the second half of the 20th century, turn out to be one of the most important factors in the upheavals that have ravaged the Middle East.

“Why has there been such a long and protracted disagreement and tension between these two sects?” asks Ray Takeyh, author of Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic. “It has to do with political power.”

In the 20th century, that meant a complex political dynamic involving Sunni and Shia, Arabs and Persians, colonizers and colonized, oil, and the involvement of the superpowers.

Islamic Finance – a Wikipedia article
This is a very good starting point with excellent external links

Islamic Finance.de
A good general resource on Islamic Finance with access to the German newsletter of Islamic Finance

Islamic Mortgages
An interesting article documenting a recent trend in the U.K. towards Islamic Mortgages with an interesting pop-up highligting the various cash flows emerging from the traditional mortgage and the Islamic Mortgage

Islamic Financing: Basics and Overview
A PowerPoint presentation by Luma Zetani

Islamic Finance etcetera
A selection of various articles provided by Nubank covering various issues as they relate to Islamic Finance

Video recordings of September’s teach-in regarding the War in Lebanon are now available on Google Video. Because of bandwidth limitations, we cannot offer the original high-quality video and audio recordings to the general public on this host; however, if you would like to download either the video or the consolidated audio, please send your request to info@btiaw.org and we will respond with more information promptly.  

Part I – Introduction, Saba Mahmood, Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Part II – Charles Hirschkind, Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Part III – Judith Butler, Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley

Part IV – Zeina Zaatari, Program Officer for the Middle East and North Africa, The Global Fund for Women

Part V – Beshara Doumani, Professor of History, UC Berkeley

Part VI – Question and Answer Session

Late last August, at a reunion of Korean War veterans in San Antonio, Texas, Dick Cheney tried to assuage concerns that a unilateral, pre-emptive war against Iraq might “cause even greater troubles in that part of the world.” He cited a well-known Arab authority: “As for the reaction of the Arab street, the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation in Basra and Baghdad, the streets are sure to erupt in joy.” As the bombs fell over Baghdad, just before American troops began to encounter fierce Iraqi resistance, Ajami could scarcely conceal his glee. “We are now coming into acquisition of Iraq,” he announced on CBS News the morning of March 22. “It’s an amazing performance.”

If Hollywood ever makes a film about Gulf War II, a supporting role should be reserved for Ajami, the director of Middle East Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. His is a classic American success story. Born in 1945 to Shiite parents in the remote southern Lebanese village of Arnoun and now a proud naturalized American, Ajami has become the most politically influential Arab intellectual of his generation in the United States. Condoleezza Rice often summons him to the White House for advice, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a friend and former colleague, has paid tribute to him in several recent speeches on Iraq. Although he has produced little scholarly work of value, Ajami is a regular guest on CBS News, Charlie Rose and the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, and a frequent contributor to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. His ideas are also widely recycled by acolytes like Thomas Friedman and Judith Miller of the Times.

Ajami’s unique role in American political life has been to unpack the unfathomable mysteries of the Arab and Muslim world and to help sell America’s wars in the region. A diminutive, balding man with a dramatic beard, stylish clothes and a charming, almost flirtatious manner, he has played his part brilliantly. On television, he radiates above-the-frayness, speaking with the wry, jaded authority that men in power admire, especially in men who have risen from humble roots. Unlike the other Arabs, he appears to have no ax to grind. He is one of us; he is the good Arab.

Ajami’s admirers paint him as a courageous gadfly who has risen above the tribal hatreds of the Arabs, a Middle Eastern Spinoza whose honesty has earned him the scorn of his brethren. Commentary editor-at-large Norman Podhoretz, one of his many right-wing American Jewish fans, writes that Ajami “has been virtually alone in telling the truth about the attitude toward Israel of the people from whom he stems.” The people from whom Ajami “stems” are, of course, the Arabs, and Ajami’s ethnicity is not incidental to his celebrity. It lends him an air of authority not enjoyed by non-Arab polemicists like Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes.

But Ajami is no gadfly. He is, in fact, entirely a creature of the American establishment. His once-luminous writing, increasingly a blend of Naipaulean clichés about Muslim pathologies and Churchillian rhetoric about the burdens of empire, is saturated with hostility toward Sunni Arabs in general (save for pro-Western Gulf Arabs, toward whom he is notably indulgent), and to Palestinians in particular. He invites comparison with Henry Kissinger, another émigré intellectual to achieve extraordinary prominence as a champion of American empire. Like Kissinger, Ajami has a suave television demeanor, a gravitas-lending accent, an instinctive solicitude for the imperatives of power and a cool disdain for the weak. And just as Kissinger cozied up to Nelson Rockefeller and Nixon, so has Ajami attached himself to such powerful patrons as Laurence Tisch, former chairman of CBS; Mort Zuckerman, the owner of US News & World Report; Martin Peretz, a co-owner of The New Republic; and Leslie Gelb, head of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Despite his training in political science, Ajami often sounds like a pop psychologist in his writing about the Arab world or, as he variously calls it, “the world of Araby,” “that Arab world” and “those Arab lands.” According to Ajami, that world is “gripped in a poisonous rage” and “wedded to a worldview of victimology,” bad habits reinforced by its leaders, “megalomaniacs who never tell their people what can and cannot be had in the world of nations.” There is, to be sure, a grain of truth in Ajami’s grim assessment. Progressive Arab thinkers from Sadeq al-Azm to Adonis have issued equally bleak indictments of Arab political culture, lambasting the dearth of self-criticism and the constant search for external scapegoats. Unlike these writers, however, Ajami has little sympathy for the people of the region, unless they happen to live within the borders of “rogue states” like Iraq, in which case they must be “liberated” by American force. The corrupt regimes that rule the Arab world, he has suggested, are more or less faithful reflections of the “Arab psyche”: “Despots always work with a culture’s yearnings…. After all, a hadith, a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, maintains ‘You will get the rulers you deserve.’” His own taste in regimes runs to monarchies like Kuwait. The Jews of Israel, it seems, are not just the only people in the region who enjoy the fruits of democracy; they are the only ones who deserve them.

Once upon a time, Ajami was an articulate and judicious critic both of Arab society and of the West, a defender of Palestinian rights and an advocate of decent government in the Arab world. Though he remains a shrewd guide to the hypocrisies of Arab leaders, his views on foreign policy now scarcely diverge from those of pro-Israel hawks in the Bush Administration. “Since the Gulf War, Fouad has taken leave of his analytic perspective to play to his elite constituency,” said Augustus Richard Norton, a Middle East scholar at Boston University. “It’s very unfortunate because he could have made an astonishingly important contribution.”

Seeking to understand the causes of Ajami’s transformation, I spoke to more than two dozen of his friends and acquaintances over the past several months. (Ajami did not return my phone calls or e-mails.) These men and women depicted a man at once ambitious and insecure, torn between his irascible intellectual independence and his even stronger desire to belong to something larger than himself. On the one hand, he is an intellectual dandy who, as Sayres Rudy, a former student, puts it, “doesn’t like groups and thinks people who join them are mediocre.” On the other, as a Shiite among Sunnis, and as an émigré in America, he has always felt the outsider’s anxiety to please, and has adjusted his convictions to fit his surroundings. As a young man eager to assimilate into the urbane Sunni world of Muslim Beirut, he embraced pan-Arabism. Received with open arms by the American Jewish establishment in New York and Washington, he became an ardent Zionist. An informal adviser to both Bush administrations, he is now a cheerleader for the American empire.

The man from Arnoun appears to be living the American dream. He has a prestigious job and the ear of the President. Yet the price of power has been higher in his case than in Kissinger’s. Kissinger, after all, is a figure of renown among the self-appointed leaders of “the people from whom he stems” and a frequent speaker at Jewish charity galas, whereas Ajami is a man almost entirely deserted by his people, a pariah at what should be his hour of triumph. In Arnoun, a family friend told me, “Fouad is a black sheep because of his staunch support for the Israelis.” Although he frequently travels to Tel Aviv and the Persian Gulf, he almost never goes to Lebanon. In becoming an American, he has become, as he himself has confessed, “a stranger in the Arab world.”

Up From Lebanon

This is an immigrant’s tale.

It begins in Arnoun, a rocky hamlet in the south of Lebanon where Fouad al-Ajami was born on September 19, 1945. A prosperous tobacco-growing Shiite family, the Ajamis had come to Arnoun from Iran in the 1850s. (Their name, Arabic for “Persian,” gave away their origins.)

When Ajami was 4, he moved with his family to Beirut, settling in the largely Armenian northeastern quarter, a neighborhood thick with orange orchards, pine trees and strawberry fields. As members of the rural Shiite minority, the country’s “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” the Ajamis stood apart from the city’s dominant groups, the Sunni Muslims and the Maronite Christians. “We were strangers to Beirut,” he has written. “We wanted to pass undetected in the modern world of Beirut, to partake of its ways.” For the young “Shia assimilé,” as he has described himself, “anything Persian, anything Shia, was anathema…. speaking Persianized Arabic was a threat to something unresolved in my identity.” He tried desperately, but with little success, to pass among his Sunni peers. In the predominantly Sunni schools he attended, “Fouad was taunted for being a Shiite, and for being short,” one friend told me. “That left him with a lasting sense of bitterness toward the Sunnis.”

In the 1950s, Arab nationalism appeared to hold out the promise of transcending the schisms between Sunnis and Shiites, and the confessional divisions separating Muslims and Christians. Like his classmates, Ajami fell under the spell of Arab nationalism’s charismatic spokesman, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. At the same time, he was falling under the spell of American culture, which offered relief from the “ancestral prohibitions and phobias” of his “cramped land.” Watching John Wayne films, he “picked up American slang and a romance for the distant power casting its shadow across us.” On July 15, 1958, the day after the bloody overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy by nationalist army officers, Ajami’s two loves had their first of many clashes, when President Eisenhower sent the US Marines to Beirut to contain the spread of radical Arab nationalism. In their initial confrontation, Ajami chose Egypt’s leader, defying his parents and hopping on a Damascus-bound bus for one of Nasser’s mass rallies.

Ajami arrived in the United States in the fall of 1963, just before he turned 18. He did his graduate work at the University of Washington, where he wrote his dissertation on international relations and world government. At the University of Washington, Ajami gravitated toward progressive Arab circles. Like his Arab peers, he was shaken by the humiliating defeat of the Arab countries in the 1967 war with Israel, and he was heartened by the emergence of the PLO. While steering clear of radicalism, he often expressed horror at Israel’s brutal reprisal attacks against southern Lebanese villages in response to PLO raids.

In 1973 Ajami joined Princeton’s political science department, commuting to work from his apartment in New York. He made a name for himself there as a vocal supporter of Palestinian self-determination. One friend remembers him as “a fairly typical advocate of Third World positions.” Yet he was also acutely aware of the failings of Third World states, which he unsparingly diagnosed in “The Fate of Nonalignment,” a brilliant 1980/81 essay in Foreign Affairs. In 1980, when Johns Hopkins offered him a position as director of Middle East Studies at SAIS, a Washington-based graduate program, he took it.

Ajami’s Predicament

A year after arriving at SAIS, Ajami published his first and still best book, The Arab Predicament. An anatomy of the intellectual and political crisis that swept the Arab world following its defeat by Israel in the 1967 war, it is one of the most probing and subtle books ever written in English on the region. Ranging gracefully across political theory, literature and poetry, Ajami draws an elegant, often moving portrait of Arab intellectuals in their anguished efforts to put together a world that had come apart at the seams. The book did not offer a bold or original argument; like Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers, it provided an interpretive survey–respectful even when critical–of other people’s ideas. It was the book of a man who had grown disillusioned with Nasser, whose millenarian dream of restoring the “Arab nation” had run up against the hard fact that the “divisions of the Arab world were real, not contrived points on a map or a colonial trick.” But pan-Arabism was not the only temptation to which the intellectuals had succumbed. There was radical socialism, and the Guevarist fantasies of the Palestinian revolution. There was Islamic fundamentalism, with its romance of authenticity and its embittered rejection of the West. And then there was the search for Western patronage, the way of Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, who forgot his own world and ended up being devoured by it.

Ajami’s ambivalent chapter on Sadat makes for especially fascinating reading today. He praised Sadat for breaking with Nasserism and making peace with Israel, and perhaps saw something of himself in the “self-defined peasant from the dusty small village” who had “traveled far beyond the bounds of his world.” But he also saw in Sadat’s story the tragic parable of a man who had become more comfortable with Western admirers than with his own people. When Sadat spoke nostalgically of his village–as Ajami now speaks of Arnoun–he was pandering to the West. Arabs, a people of the cities, would not be “taken in by the myth of the village.” Sadat’s “American connection,” Ajami suggested, gave him “a sense of psychological mobility,” lifting some of the burdens imposed by his cramped world. And as his dependence on his American patrons deepened, “he became indifferent to the sensibilities of his own world.”

Sadat was one example of the trap of seeking the West’s approval, and losing touch with one’s roots; V.S. Naipaul was another. Naipaul, Ajami suggested in an incisive 1981 New York Times review of Among the Believers, exemplified the “dilemma of a gifted author led by his obsessive feelings regarding the people he is writing about to a difficult intellectual and moral bind.” Third World exiles like Naipaul, Ajami wrote, “have a tendency to…look at their own countries and similar ones with a critical eye,” yet “these same men usually approach the civilization of the West with awe and leave it unexamined.” Ajami preferred the humane, nonjudgmental work of Polish travel writer Ryszard Kapucinski: “His eye for human folly is as sharp as V.S. Naipaul. His sympathy and sorrow, however, are far deeper.”

The Arab Predicament was infused with sympathy and sorrow, but these qualities were ignored by the book’s Arab critics in the West, who–displaying the ideological rigidity that is an unfortunate hallmark of exile politics–accused him of papering over the injustices of imperialism and “blaming the victim.” To an extent, this was a fair criticism. Ajami paid little attention to imperialism, and even less to Israel’s provocative role in the region. What is more, his argument that “the wounds that mattered were self-inflicted” endeared him to those who wanted to distract attention from Palestine. Doors flew open. On the recommendation of Bernard Lewis, the distinguished British Orientalist at Princeton and a strong supporter of Israel, Ajami became the first Arab to win the MacArthur “genius” prize in 1982, and in 1983 he became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. The New Republic began to publish lengthy essays by Ajami, models of the form that offer a tantalizing glimpse of the career he might have had in a less polarized intellectual climate. Pro-Israel intellectual circles groomed him as a rival to Edward Said, holding up his book as a corrective to Orientalism, Said’s classic study of how the West imagined the East in the age of empire.

In fact, Ajami shared some of Said’s anger about the Middle East. The Israelis, he wrote in an eloquent New York Times op-ed after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, “came with a great delusion: that if you could pound men and women hard enough, if you could bring them to their knees, you could make peace with them.” He urged the United States to withdraw from Lebanon in 1984, and he advised it to open talks with the Iranian government. Throughout the 1980s, Ajami maintained a critical attitude toward America’s interventions in the Middle East, stressing the limits of America’s ability to influence or shape a “tormented world” it scarcely understood. “Our arguments dovetailed,” says Said. “There was an unspoken assumption that we shared the same kind of politics.”

But just below the surface there were profound differences of opinion. Hisham Milhem, a Lebanese journalist who knows both men well, explained their differences to me by contrasting their views on Joseph Conrad. “Edward and Fouad are both crazy about Conrad, but they see in him very different things. Edward sees the critic of empire, especially in Heart of Darkness. Fouad, on the other hand, admires the Polish exile in Western Europe who made a conscious break with the old country.”

Yet the old world had as much of a grip on Ajami as it did on Said. In southern Lebanon, Palestinian guerrillas had set up a state within a state. They often behaved thuggishly toward the Shiites, alienating their natural allies and recklessly exposing them to Israel’s merciless reprisals. By the time Israeli tanks rolled into Lebanon in 1982, relations between the two communities had so deteriorated that some Shiites greeted the invaders with rice and flowers. Like many Shiites, Ajami was fed up with the Palestinians, whose revolution had brought ruin to Lebanon. Arnoun itself had not been unscathed: A nearby Crusader castle, the majestic Beaufort, was now the scene of intense fighting.

In late May 1985, Ajami–now identifying himself as a Shiite from southern Lebanon–sparred with Said on the MacNeil Lehrer Report over the war between the PLO and Shiite Amal militia, then raging in Beirut’s refugee camps. A few months later, they came to verbal blows again, when Ajami was invited to speak at a Harvard conference on Islam and Muslim politics organized by Israeli-American academic Nadav Safran. After the Harvard Crimson revealed that the conference had been partly funded by the CIA, Ajami, at the urging of Said and the late Pakistani writer Eqbal Ahmad, joined a wave of speakers who were withdrawing from the conference. But Ajami, who was a protégé and friend of Safran, immediately regretted his decision. He wrote a blistering letter to Said and Ahmad a few weeks later, accusing them of “bringing the conflicts of the Middle East to this country” while “I have tried to go beyond them…. Therefore, my friends, this is the parting of ways. I hope never to encounter you again, and we must cease communication. Yours sincerely, Fouad Ajami.”

The Tribal Turn

By now, the “Shia assimilé” had fervently embraced his Shiite identity. Like Sadat, he began to rhapsodize about his “dusty village” in wistful tones. The Vanished Imam, his 1986 encomium to Musa al-Sadr, the Iranian cleric who led the Amal militia before mysteriously disappearing on a 1978 visit to Libya, offers important clues into Ajami’s thinking of the time. A work of lyrical nationalist mythology, The Vanished Imam also provides a thinly veiled political memoir, recounting Ajami’s disillusionment with Palestinians, Arabs and the left, and his conversion to old-fashioned tribal politics.

The marginalized Shiites had found a home in Amal, and a spiritual leader in Sadr, a “big man” who is explicitly compared to Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and credited with a far larger role than he actually played in Shiite politics. Writing of Sadr, Ajami might have been describing himself. Sadr is an Ajam–a Persian–with “an outsider’s eagerness to please.” He is “suspicious of grand schemes,” blessed with “a strong sense of pragmatism, of things that can and cannot be,” thanks to which virtue he “came to be seen as an enemy of everything ‘progressive.’” “Tired of the polemics,” he alone is courageous enough to stand up to the Palestinians, warning them not to “seek a ‘substitute homeland,’ watan badil, in Lebanon.” Unlike the Palestinians, Ajami tells us repeatedly, the Shiites are realists, not dreamers; reformers, not revolutionaries. Throughout the book, a stark dichotomy is also drawn between Shiite and Arab nationalism, although, as one of his Shiite critics pointed out in a caustic review in the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, “allegiance to Arab nationalist ideals…was paramount” in Sadr’s circles. The Shiites of Ajami’s imagination seem fundamentally different from other Arabs: a community that shares America’s aversion to the Palestinians, a “model minority” worthy of the West’s sympathy.

The Shiite critic of the Palestinians cut an especially attractive profile in the eyes of the American media. Most American viewers of CBS News, which made him a high-paid consultant in 1985, had no idea that he was almost completely out of step with the community for which he claimed to speak. By the time The Vanished Imam appeared, the Shiites, under the leadership of a new group, Hezbollah, had launched a battle to liberate Lebanon from Israeli control. Israeli soldiers were now greeted with grenades and explosives, rather than rice and flowers, and Arnoun became a hotbed of Hezbollah support. Yet Ajami displayed little enthusiasm for this Shiite struggle. He was also oddly silent about the behavior of the Israelis, who, from the 1982 invasion onward, had killed far more Shiites than either Arafat (“the Flying Dutchman of the Palestinian movement”) or Hafez al-Assad (Syria’s “cruel enforcer”). The Shiites, he suggested, were “beneficiaries of Israel’s Lebanon war.”

In the Promised Land

By the mid-1980s, the Middle Eastern country closest to Ajami’s heart was not Lebanon but Israel. He returned from his trips to the Jewish state boasting of traveling to the occupied territories under the guard of the Israel Defense Forces and of being received at the home of Teddy Kollek, then Jerusalem’s mayor. The Israelis earned his admiration because they had something the Palestinians notably lacked: power. They were also tough-minded realists, who understood “what can and cannot be had in the world of nations.” The Palestinians, by contrast, were romantics who imagined themselves to be “exempt from the historical laws of gravity.”

In 1986, Ajami had praised Musa al-Sadr as a realist for telling the Palestinians to fight Israel in the occupied territories, rather than in Lebanon. But when the Palestinians did exactly that, in the first intifada of 1987-93, it no longer seemed realistic to Ajami, who then advised them to swallow the bitter pill of defeat and pay for their bad choices. While Israeli troops shot down children armed only with stones, Ajami told the Palestinians they should give up on the idea of a sovereign state (“a phantom”), even in the West Bank and Gaza. When the PLO announced its support for a two-state solution at a 1988 conference in Algiers, Ajami called the declaration “hollow,” its concessions to Israel inadequate. On the eve of the Madrid talks in the fall of 1991 he wrote, “It is far too late to introduce a new nation between Israel and Jordan.” Nor should the American government embark on the “fool’s errand” of pressuring Israel to make peace. Under Ajami’s direction, the Middle East program of SAIS became a bastion of pro-Israel opinion. An increasing number of Israeli and pro-Israel academics, many of them New Republic contributors, were invited as guest lecturers. “Rabbi Ajami,” as many people around SAIS referred to him, was also receiving significant support from a Jewish family foundation in Baltimore, which picked up the tab for the trips his students took to the Middle East every summer. Back in Lebanon, Ajami’s growing reputation as an apologist for Israel reportedly placed considerable strains on family members in Arnoun.

‘The Saudi Way’

Ajami also developed close ties during the 1980s to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which made him–as he often and proudly pointed out–the only Arab who traveled both to the Persian Gulf countries and to Israel. In 1985 he became an external examiner in the political science department at Kuwait University; he said “the place seemed vibrant and open to me.” His major patrons, however, were Saudi. He has traveled to Riyadh many times to raise money for his program, sometimes taking along friends like Martin Peretz; he has also vacationed in Prince Bandar’s home in Aspen. Saudi hospitality–and Saudi Arabia’s lavish support for SAIS–bred gratitude. At one meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations, Ajami told a group that, as one participant recalls, “the Saudi system was a lot stronger than we thought, that it was a system worth defending, and that it had nothing to apologize for.” Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, he faithfully echoed the Saudi line. “Rage against the West does not come naturally to the gulf Arabs,” he wrote in 1990. “No great tales of betrayal are told by the Arabs of the desert. These are Palestinian, Lebanese and North African tales.”

This may explain why Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 aroused greater outrage in Ajami than any act of aggression in the recent history of the Middle East. Neither Israel’s invasion of Lebanon nor the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre had caused him comparable consternation. Nor, for that matter, had Saddam’s slaughter of the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. This is understandable, of course; we all react more emotionally when the victims are friends. But we don’t all become publicists for war, as Ajami did that fateful summer, consummating his conversion to Pax Americana. What was remarkable was not only his fervent advocacy; it was his cavalier disregard for truth, his lurid rhetoric and his religious embrace of American power. In Foreign Affairs, Ajami, who knew better, described Iraq, the cradle of Mesopotamian civilization, a major publisher of Arabic literature and a center of the plastic arts, as “a brittle land…with little claim to culture and books and grand ideas.” It was, in other words, a wasteland, led by a man who “conjures up Adolf Hitler.”

Months before the war began, the Shiite from Arnoun, now writing as an American, in the royal “we,” declared that US troops “will have to stay in the Gulf and on a much larger scale,” since “we have tangible interests in that land. We stand sentry there in blazing clear daylight.” After the Gulf War, Ajami’s cachet soared. In the early 1990s Harvard offered him a chair (“he turned it down because we expected him to be around and to work very hard,” a professor told me), and the Council on Foreign Relations added him to its prestigious board of advisers last year. “The Gulf War was the crucible of change,” says Augustus Richard Norton. “This immigrant from Arnoun, this man nobody had heard of from a place no one had heard of, had reached the peak of power. This was a true immigrant success story, one of those moments that make an immigrant grateful for America. And I think it implanted a deep sense of patriotism that wasn’t present before.”

And, as Ajami once wrote of Sadat, “outside approval gave him the courage to defy” the Arabs, especially when it came to Israel. On June 3, 1992, hardly a year after Gulf War I, Ajami spoke at a pro-Israel fundraiser. Kissinger, the keynote speaker, described Arabs as congenital liars. Ajami chimed in, expressing his doubts that democracy would ever work in the Arab world, and recounting a visit to a Bedouin village where he “insisted on only one thing: that I be spared the ceremony of eating with a Bedouin.”

Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Ajami has been a consistent critic of the peace process–from the right. He sang the praises of each of Israel’s leaders, from the Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, with his “filial devotion [to] the land he had agreed to relinquish,” to Labor leader Ehud Barak, “an exemplary soldier.” The Palestinians, he wrote, should be grateful to such men for “rescuing” them from defeat, and to Zionism for generously offering them “the possibility of their own national political revival.” (True to form, the Palestinians showed “no gratitude.”) A year before the destruction of Jenin, he proclaimed that “Israel is existentially through with the siege that had defined its history.” Ajami’s Likudnik conversion was sealed by telling revisions of arguments he had made earlier in his career. Where he had once argued that the 1982 invasion of Lebanon aimed to “undermine those in the Arab world who want some form of compromise,” he now called it a response to “the challenge of Palestinian terror.”

Did Ajami really believe all this? In a stray but revealing comment on Sadat in The New Republic, he left room for doubt. Sadat, he said, was “a son of the soil, who had the fellah’s ability to look into the soul of powerful outsiders, to divine how he could get around them even as he gave them what they desired.” Writing on politics, the man from Arnoun gave them what they desired. Writing on literature and poetry, he gave expression to the aesthete, the soulful elegist, even, at times, to the Arab. In his 1998 book, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, one senses, for the first time in years, Ajami’s sympathy for the world he left behind, although there is something furtive, something ghostly about his affection, as if he were writing about a lover he has taught himself to spurn. On rare occasions, Ajami revealed this side of himself to his students, whisking them into his office. Once the door was firmly shut, he would recite the poetry of Nizar Qabbani and Adonis in Arabic, caressing each and every line. As he read, Sayres Rudy told me, “I could swear his heart was breaking.”

Ajami’s Solitude

September 11 exposed a major intelligence failure on Ajami’s part. With his obsessive focus on the menace of Saddam and the treachery of Arafat, he had missed the big story. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers hailed from what he had repeatedly called the “benign political order” of Saudi Arabia; the “Saudi way” he had praised had come undone. Yet the few criticisms that Ajami directed at his patrons in the weeks and months after September 11 were curiously muted, particularly in contrast to the rage of most American commentators. Ajami’s venues in the American media, however, were willing to forgive his softness toward the Saudis. America was going to war with Muslims, and a trusted native informant was needed.

Other forces were working in Ajami’s favor. For George W. Bush and the hawks in his entourage, Afghanistan was merely a prelude to the war they really wanted to fight–the war against Saddam that Ajami had been spoiling for since the end of Gulf War I. As a publicist for Gulf War II, Ajami has abandoned his longstanding emphasis on the limits of American influence in that “tormented region.” The war is being sold as the first step in an American plan to effect democratic regime change across the region, and Ajami has stayed on message. We now find him writing in Foreign Affairs that “the driving motivation of a new American endeavor in Iraq and in neighboring Arab lands should be modernizing the Arab world.” The opinion of the Arab street, where Iraq is recruiting thousands of new jihadists, is of no concern to him. “We have to live with this anti-Americanism,” he sighed recently on CBS. “It’s the congenital condition of the Arab world, and we have to discount a good deal of it as we press on with the task of liberating the Iraqis.”

In fairness, Ajami has not completely discarded his wariness about American intervention. For there remains one country where American pressure will come to naught, and that is Israel, where it would “be hubris” to ask anything more of the Israelis, victims of “Arafat’s war.” To those who suggest that the Iraq campaign is doomed without an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, he says, “We can’t hold our war hostage to Arafat’s campaign of terror.”

Fortunately, George W. Bush understands this. Ajami has commended Bush for staking out the “high moral ground” and for “putting Iran on notice” in his Axis of Evil speech. Above all, the President should not allow himself to be deterred by multilateralists like Secretary of State Colin Powell, “an unhappy, reluctant soldier, at heart a pessimist about American power.” Unilateralism, Ajami says, is nothing to be ashamed of. It may make us hated in the “hostile landscape” of the Arab world, but, as he recently explained on the NewsHour, “it’s the fate of a great power to stand sentry in that kind of a world.”

It is no accident that the “sentry’s solitude” has become the idée fixe of Ajami’s writing in recent years. For it is a theme that resonates powerfully in his own life. Like the empire he serves, Ajami is more influential, and more isolated, than he has ever been. In recent years he has felt a need to defend this choice in heroic terms. “All a man can betray is his conscience,” he solemnly writes in The Dream Palace of the Arabs, citing a passage from Conrad. “The solitude Conrad chose is loathed by politicized men and women.”

It is a breathtakingly disingenuous remark. Ajami may be “a stranger in the Arab world,” but he can hardly claim to be a stranger to its politics. That is why he is quoted, and courted, by Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. What Ajami abhors in “politicized men and women” is conviction itself. A leftist in the 1970s, a Shiite nationalist in the 1980s, an apologist for the Saudis in the 1990s, a critic-turned-lover of Israel, a skeptic-turned-enthusiast of American empire, he has observed no consistent principle in his career other than deference to power. His vaunted intellectual independence is a clever fiction. The only thing that makes him worth reading is his prose style, and even that has suffered of late. As Ajami observed of Naipaul more than twenty years ago, “he has become more and more predictable, too, with serious cost to his great gift as a writer,” blinded by the “assumption that only men who live in remote, dark places are ‘denied a clear vision of the world.’” Like Naipaul, Ajami has forgotten that “darkness is not only there but here as well.”