THE
ROVING EYE The birth of Islamic
modernity By Pepe Escobar
To follow Pepe's articles on the Great
Arab Revolt, please click here.
Ten years ago, on the road in AfPak before
and after 9/11, the volume of choice in my
backpack was a French edition of Gilles Kepel’s
Jihad. Night after night, in many a mud
brick house and amid endless cups of green tea, I
slowly came to embrace its key thesis: that
political Islam was in fact going down, not up.
On one side, we had outfits like al-Qaeda,
self-designated vanguards bent on waking the
Muslim masses from their slumber to unleash a
global Islamic revolution; they were in fact
Muslim versions of the Italian Brigate Rosse and
the German Rote Armee Fraktion.
On the
other side, we had Islamists like the ones from
the Turkish
Justice and Development
Party, ready to immerse themselves into
Western-style parliamentary democracy, betting on
the sovereignty of the people, not Allah’s.
At the height of the "war on terror" -
with those B-52s bombing Tora Bora without knowing
that Osama bin Laden had already escaped to
Pakistan - the tendency in the West was to lump
most, if not all Muslims as deranged jihadis.
I agreed with Kepel that "clash of
civilizations" was nothing more than a silly,
shoddily researched concept instrumentalized by
the neo-conservatives to legitimize their
"crusade". But that needed some corroboration from
history.
Ten years later, one may finally
say that Kepel’s analysis was spot on. Hardcore
Islamism, al-Qaeda-style, is a Muslim box-office
disaster. For all its myriad declinations - in
Iraq, in the Maghreb, in the Arabian Peninsula -
al-Qaeda is no more than a desperate sect,
destined to the dustbin of history as much as
those Western-backed dictators a la toppled
Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and
Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak who used to
be the pillars of the Western struggle against
radical Islam.
Kepel today directs the
program of studies on the Mediterranean and the
Middle East at the legendary Political Sciences
school in Paris. In an article for Italian daily
La Repubblica, he seals for good the victory of
Islam as democracy over Islam as "revolutionary"
vanguard. The money quote:
"Today the Arab peoples have emerged
from that dilemma - squeezed between Ben Ali or
bin Laden. They have now re-entered a universal
history that has seen the fall of dictatorships
in Latin America, the communist regimes in
Eastern Europe, and also the military regimes in
non-Arab Muslim countries such as Indonesia and
Turkey."
The local meets the
universal And this is the crucial point;
Arab peoples are now starting to build their own,
hesitant, modernity. Kepel wonders why the first
revolution happened in Tunisia, and he finds out
that its key slogan was in French: "Ben Ali,
degage". ("Ben Ali, go away.") The slogan was
faithfully adopted - ipsis litteris - by
the Egyptians, in a country where very few people
speak French. They adopted this revolutionary call
because they heard it on al-Jazeera. This allows
Kepel to conclude that these current revolutions
are rooted as much in local culture as in
universal aspirations.
And yes, although
the symptoms are the same - unemployment, poverty,
corruption, total absence of freedom - these are
diverse revolutions, and fought by the powers that
be with diverse strategies. Some add fuel to the
fire of confessional or tribal trouble, others bet
on their large pockets or immunization to Western
interference.
The problem is that the
diversity of methods employed by tyrants to smash
these revolutions is being misread by
hagiographers of empire - so they can better
legitimize the aura of selected repressive "good
guys". Thus we have Pentagon-linked Robert D
Kaplan trying to con public opinion into believing
there are enlightened despots (the al-Khalifa
dynasty in Bahrain, both King Abdullahs, in Saudi
Arabia and Jordan) as opposed to unredeemable evil
dictators (Muammar Gaddafi).
As if the
Shi'ite majority in Bahrain needed the Sunni
al-Khalifas to foster the formation of a middle
class - the essential pre-condition to the
establishment of democracy. The al-Khalifas never
gave a damn about fostering a middle class, as
only a small Sunni oligarchy profits from their
autocratic "business-friendly" system.
And
if the reasoning to defend selected tyrants is
that some countries have no institutional base for
a transition towards democracy, then tribal Libya
led by "evil" Gaddafi is in the same package as
the Gulf sheikhdoms led by "acceptable" kings and
emirs.
Take it to the bridge As
much as Western modernity is in crisis, this does
not mean the world is being assailed by a modern
religious war. The belief that Islam and the West
are antipodes is the stuff of Fox News-style
morons. The world is witnessing a
re-Christianization of Europe as much as a
re-Evangelization of the US. This proves that
modernity and religion are compatible - in the
West as well as the Middle East.
They may
be coming from different cultural latitudes - the
West from the decline of modernity, the Middle
East from the decline of religious fundamentalism,
just to converge at the same place; a bridge of
dialogue between East and West.
So
essentially what Kepel is trying to prove is that
Europe and the Arab world have no alternative
other than to try to build a hybrid civilization -
not only in terms of movement of capital, goods
and services but as in solid investments in
culture and education - from the North Sea to the
Persian Gulf, with the Mediterranean as a hub.
This implies Fortress Europe re-examining its
place in the world, and a Mediterranean dialogue
not conditioned by the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization.
It’s a long and treacherous
road - with some many Gaddafis and al-Khalifas and
Abdullahs that must be chased away. The Arab world
has been traumatized for too long - almost a
century since colonial powers Britain and France
betrayed the Arab nation and carved up its land.
The real test of the West's self-appointed
"civilizing mission" is now; to welcome, and to
help, with all its heart, the Arab world to the
realm of modernity.
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