Re: [Futurework] The Umma and fear of modernity

[Ray Evans Harrell]

Karen, Judeo-Christianity could break this wide open if they came at it from a place of confession and a serious asking for forgiveness for the bad things that the West has brought to the Middle East.    When your own allies begin to bilk you for helping then you had better believe that there is something else going on.     If Judeo-Christians wish for Islam to avoid its Manual then they had better be willing to do the same thing first and come up with more than a dirty police station where horrors took place.      Stopping history is almost impossible.   Bush used alcohol to try to stop his father's history with him.   We did the same when it came to being overwhelmed but we did not have the money to pull out of it.   If you like Iraq and rich folks taking advantage  I would suggest that the list take a ride out through Pine Ridge Reservation and see the lock down that those people have been confined to since 1883 when the Teospaye cooperatives were disbanded with the religion and the lies about the culture became the official dogma that allowed both Washington, the neighbors and the missionaries to justify the nightmare that has been a part of the people's lives until the occupation of Alcatraz.   The list could read the book called Ohiyesa about the first Sioux MD who tried to help his people during the massacre at Wounded Knee and the kinds of "neighbors" he had to endure for his entire life.   They could also note that today the government has burned the hemp crop of the Lakotas for three years in a row even though it is not Marijuana but is related.   They have threatened to put the farmers in jail but to date the white hemp growers of Kentucky have shamed them out of it.   The prime directive of the society is the Batesonian Double Bind.   In jury duty I was asked whether I had relatives who were police at which point I said yes.   I was also asked whether I had friends or relatives who were incarcerated.   At that point I also said yes and on the one hand the defense didn't want someone related to the police and the prosecution didn't want anyone who might sympathize or know what was awaiting a young person in prison.    Given that screen I understood how one of our community's prominant families suffered the jailing of two sons who protected their mother from a gang of thugs and killed one of them.   Minding the Indian rule of no verbal confrontation, unlike the Black community, they simply went to jail and will be there for many years to come.   No Indians on the jury.    Indians know both police and prisoners.   My Council Chairman is a retired incarceration officer.    Harry quoted the description of the police station in a fanatic soceity.    Perhaps it would be good for him to look at the sterility of the environment where people are incarcerated for years.    How about Abner Louima?    The impulse that justifies torture is the same impulse that justifies punishment without healing.   If it were up to me, I would choose to go quickly in a terrible place over going slowly in an American prison.   I certainly wouldn't allow the society to put me there.    In the 1970s 1/3 of the prison population of the state of Minnesota was Native American.    Our peoples constituted a very small portion of the population but we had 1/3 of the convicted and incarcerated.    Today, America's sole political prisoner is Leonard Peltier an American Indian who was railroaded into jail on a charge the FBI couldn't prove and lied about.    No matter how many books are written, no one can get this man out of jail.   We convict people who are schizophrenic, people who are retarded and we also execute them.   Both Democrats, (Clinton in Arkansas) and Republicans (Bush in Texas).    That jail may be news to Harry, but it is not news to me.    Meat hooks aren't news to me either.     It is terrible.   It should be handled but it must be handled by the people whose culture it is.     Why?    Because when another group comes in they always make a bigger mess.    How much longer will we be fighting the Civil War?    Who would have had the nerve to stop the industrialists in the North from encouraging the cheap slave labor of the South.   Instead they just stuck it to the local guys from outside.   How about Civil Rights.    They could have gone down South and had meetings with the Bull Connors and other law enforcement folks and said,    "I'm sorry folks but this is killing us abroad in the cold war with the Soviet Union.    You have to clean this up.   Khrushchev and the Commies will bury us and you will have no lives whatsoever and your children will speak Russian unless you find your way to live together and give up segregation voluntarily as good Christians."      Instead, they sent the Army and the FBI South.    Hypocritical Northerners both Christian and Jewish took vacations down South and beat up the locals for a while.    The landlords who spent their time in the South came home to the Bronx to find that the Blacks in the Bronx were holding them to the same standards as they demanded of White Southerners.   That was the beginning of the breakup of the United Civil Rights Coalition in the North that is still being fought today and last week in the affirmative action case before the Supreme Court.    Yet their congregations in the North today are still de facto segregated by economics and both groups have people who have now joined with the old Southern reactionary groups to preach theory over practice and have practically resegregated the country along economic lines.    Don't get me wrong.   Most of these congregations are happy to welcome a Black professional or famous Artist into their congregation.   The cultural segregation is economic.     There is nothing funnier than a political party that preaches equality and has no blacks in Congress.   That put an incompetent one in the Supreme Court and now parades a quota in their Executive while protesting quotas.    Do the Math.   Keyes is interesting.   He went to Yale, is a good debater and is a lone voice.   My light skin has gotten me into many doors that darker skin would have been barred from.   I have heard the stories and have endured their wrath when they realized their mistake.     At one point I had a fundraiser that was egalitarian and invited anyone who gave ten cents to the opera to meet us at Lincoln Center in the Rose Building for a performance and reception.    When the wealthy folks got to the door and saw the "riffraff" (their word) they were out in a flash.    "Not their culture."     The "riffraff" happened to be Italian.   Such segregation is the point of opera anyway right?    Not to a Cherokee Indian from the reservation.   Opera saved my life.      As for Iraq, what is so great about the children of the coal fields of Wales?    What about the lives of the coal miners who spent their short lives scratching out coal for pennies in Nova Scotia?    Or the children of William Blake's London?    If China had invaded and "corrected" the English at that time, what would you remember?   The children or the Chinese?    You would have made heroes out of the little Chimney Sweeps who swam the Thames and died putting tar torches against their boats.     The Chinese would have pointed out that it wasn't the rich kids swimming in the filthy raw sewage. Instead of mutual respect opening up the Orient we did it with guns.   How long did it take for us to have a decent relationship with Japan after the Admiral sailed into Tokyo Bay?   1950?      I'm just fed up with oversimplifications and anecdotal proof of the villainy of the other side.    Those children didn't ask to be killed by American bombs.    If we were not there we would not have been the ones killing them either.   If they want to fix their society then they should.    If they want help then we should be wise enough to help them in the long run and not in short term violent fixes.      It is time to give up our theories about life and consider the serious pursuit of wisdom and government as a way of making the lives of people more enriched, fulfilled and healthier in mind, body and spirit.   It is time to fix our out of date religious manuals and respect the past without repeating its errors.    It is time for us to absorb the genius of Sigmund Freud and his understandings of human motivation and stop acting like neurotic narcissistic fools who can solve the worlds problems when our lives are a mess at home.    "Let those who are without sin cast the first stone."      Cousin REH     ----- Original Message ----- From: Karen Watters Cole To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2003 11:08 PM Subject: [Futurework] The Umma and fear of modernity I recently saw another article that referred to the Islamic teachings on failure and defeat; turning back to the pure and old ways, not embracing progressive or new ways, as we in the West have assumed they would after being �liberated� by being defeated in battle.    No, this is not the same as defeated Germany or defeated Japan.  Our invasion of Iraq is vindicating proof to hardline Islamic fundamentalists that the prophecies about the Apocalypse are being fulfilled.    There is more good reading in the current issue of Foreign Policy online.  Check it out.  - KWC The American Mongols To win the war against terrorism, the United States must overcome the burden of history By Husain Haqqani in Foreign Policy, March � April 2003 @ http://www.foreignpolicy.com An invading army is marching toward Baghdad�again. The last time infidels conquered the City of Peace was in 1258, when the Mongol horde, led by Genghis Khan�s grandson Hulegu, defeated the Arab Abbasid caliphate that had ruled for more than five centuries. And if the ripple effects of that episode through Islam�s history are any guide, the latest invasion of Iraq will unleash a new cycle of hatred�unless the United States can find ways to bolster the credibility of moderate Islamic thinkers. Saddam Hussein, who has led Iraq�s Baathist socialist regime for nearly 25 years, is no caliph. The U.S. military has come as self-declared liberators, not as conquerors. Yet the U.S. invasion of Iraq resonates strongly with fundamentalist Muslims because they see Saddam�s downfall�and the broader humiliation of the Arab world at the hands of the latter-day Mongols�as righteous punishment. Since the 13th century, Islamic theologians have argued that military defeat at the hands of unbelievers results when Muslims embrace pluralism and worldly knowledge. The story is drilled into Muslim children from Morocco to Indonesia: nearly 2 million people put to the sword; the caliph trampled to death; and the destruction of the great library, the House of Wisdom. The Ottoman Empire fell in 1918 for the same reason Muslims lost Baghdad in 1258: The rulers and their people had gone soft, approaching religion with tolerance and accommodation rather than viewing civilization as divided between Islam and infidels The U.S.-led invasion of secular Iraq is the ultimate vindication of this worldview, the capstone of a series of modern Muslim defeats that began with the first Gulf War and continued through the next decade with the Serbs� ethnic cleansing campaigns against Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the repression of Islamist groups in Algeria and Egypt, Russia�s brutal military campaign against Chechen separatists, and the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Islamists see these cataclysmic events as opportunities to purify Muslim souls and to prepare for an ideological battle with the West. Fundamentalists believe they have every reason to anticipate victory in this battle, because the story of the Mongol conquest of Baghdad didn�t end in 1258. The Egyptian Mamluks were able to halt the tide of Mongol victories in the Battle of Ayn Jalut in Palestine two years later. In less than a century, the Mongol conquerors themselves converted to Islam, and Islamic power resurged in Turkey and India after being dislodged from the Arabian heartland. The lesson, according to Islamists, is that even the defeat of Muslims has a place in God�s scheme for Islam�s eventual supremacy in the world. In addition to the historical narrative, Muslim fundamentalists also have prophecies about the apocalypse attributed to the Prophet Mohammed to buttress their cause. These signs are described in hadith, the sayings of Mohammed passed down through oral tradition before being recorded at least 100 years after his death. One hadith that has currently captured the attention of fundamentalists is �The hour [of the world�s end] shall not occur until the Euphrates will disclose a mountain of gold over which people will fight.� The �mountain of gold� could be a metaphor for a valuable natural resource such as oil, and �the Euphrates� may refer to Iraq, where the river flows. Just as some Christian fundamentalists saw the creation of the state of Israel as fulfillment of biblical prophecy heralding the Day of Judgment, so too will some Muslim fundamentalists interpret the U.S. occupation of Iraq as setting the stage for the final battle between good, led by Mahdi (the rightly guided), and evil, represented by Dajjal (the deceiver). Armed with prophecy and history, Islamist movements see the humiliation of fellow believers as an opportunity for mobilizing and recruiting dedicated followers. Muslims have often resorted to asymmetric warfare in the aftermath of military defeat. Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and his Fatah movement captured the imagination of young Palestinians only after Arabs lost the Six-Day War and East Jerusalem in 1967. Islamic militancy in Kashmir can be traced to India�s military victory over Pakistan in the 1971 Bangladesh war. Revenge, rather than willingness to compromise or submit to the victors, is the traditional response of theologically inclined Muslims to the defeat of Muslim armies. And for the Islamists, this battle has no front line and is not limited to a few years, or even decades. They think in terms of conflict spread over generations. A call for jihad against British rule in India, for example, resulted in an underground movement that lasted from 1830 to the 1870s, with remnants periodically surfacing well into the 20th century. This fundamentalist interpretation of Islam has failed to penetrate the thinking of most Muslims, especially in recent times. But religious hard-liners can drive the political agenda in Muslim countries, just as Christian and Jewish fundamentalists have become a force to reckon with in secular nations such as the United States. And with over 1 billion Muslims around the globe, the swelling of the fundamentalist ranks poses serious problems for the West. If only 1 percent of the world�s Muslims accept uncompromising theology, and 10 percent of that 1 percent decide to commit themselves to a radical agenda, the recruitment pool for al Qaeda comes to 1 million. Suspicions about Western intentions date back to the British, who came as friends during World War I and ended up colonizing and dividing Arab lands. Thus, the Americans face the difficult task of overcoming Muslim mistrust. The United States must avoid any impulse to act as an imperial power, dictating its superior ways to �less civilized� peoples. It should be prepared to accept Islamic pride and Arab nationalism as factors in the region�s politics, instead of backing narrowly based elites to do its bidding. Patient engagement, rather than the flaunting of military and financial power, should characterize this new phase of U.S. intervention in the heart of the Islamic world. If U.S. President George W. Bush�s promises of democracy in Iraq and a Palestinian state are not kept and if the United States fails to demand reforms in countries ruled by authoritarian allies, the umma (community of believers) would have new reasons to distrust and hate. The dream of helping Muslims overcome their fear of modernity will then remain unfulfilled. And the world will continue to confront new jihads. Husain Haqqani is a Pakistani columnist and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Foreign Policy magazine is published by The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC.