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To be (guilty) or not to be (guilty), is the question. There is one argument, call it The Law of Symmetry: if I am to feel a sense of pride for something I had nothing to do with, but simply because a famous achiever shares an identity with me, shouldn’t I feel a sense of shame when an infamous loser shares the same identity with me? Collective credit, collective blame and those of us who are not big fans of collectivism don’t find this appealing. There is another argument, the flip side of Personal Responsibility (advocated by conservatives and neo-libs like Tony Blair.) The principle of personal responsibility holds that all of us are individually responsible for our action—and we cannot blame our parents, teachers, religion or the stale Twinkie we ate for our behavior. Put another way, we are not responsible—and thus should not feel guilty—for the crimes of others. I was having this discussion with a friend and he pointed out that action also includes inaction and he gave an example that hit home. Several years ago, Ambassador Hibret Berhe was giving a talk and after listening to one speaker after another tell her that she and her colleagues were responsible for making Isaias Afwerki the dictator that he is, she responded, you too, share in this blame, by your inaction. The Slow Yield To Bullies We yielded to the secular and religious fundmantalists and, not surprisingly, for the same reasons: deference, who am I to question such an obviously learned expert, what have I done anyway, and who am I, a lowly person, a know-nothing. Revolutionaries and radicals' first assault is on the intellectuals and the relatively well-educated--and in Eritrea, the most self-flagellating and the ones with the lowest self-esteem are our educated class. And the results, in the secular and religious world, have been disastrous. So now, we watch as four idiots impact the lives of tens of thousands of peaceful, law-abiding people: people who fled torture containers and were in the process of opening a new chapter of their life--the same opportunity we were fortunate enought to get--will now have their status re-considered, and the generosity of the host nations re-evaluated. One of the most appealing aspects of Islam, which has no religious hierarchy, was that one can have a direct link to God without any intermediaries or translators. Simple. Now, there has been so much effort at mystifying it that the lay person feels completely intimidated to attempt to understand God’s Word on his own, much less to offer an opinion or a differing argument lest he transgress. This is, in organizational management, the slow yield to bullies, an environment where the loud, the arrogant and the ardent rise over the soft-spoken and reasonable. And the liberals and moderates…an example, in the 1980s, I had a guy tell me with total conviction and emotion that the Afghan mujahdeen sprayed holy dust on Soviet tanks, which “melted them like liquid.” To argue that this was stupid was, to him, to argue that God is not Omnipotent. I smiled, I laughed, I yielded, I resigned. But not all of us. I have two friends for whom I have an immense respect, now more than ever, who spent a lonely decade, not giving an inch. One while fighting the religious fundamentalists, the other standing up to the secular fundamentalists and the apologists of tyranny. However outnumbered, however they tried to out shout them, however much they tried to outrank and out-quote verses and chapters, they held firm and they never yielded. It mattered not a bit to them whether their antagonists dressed, spoke and gestured with total authority. It helped that one was a graduate of Al Azhar University, and the other is a former Tegadaly secure in his patriotism. I think both have earned the right to skip the guilt party and head on to the I-told-you-so convention. Suicidal Tendencies
Rushing in to establish causality to shocking effects is ill-advised. One of the most common, for example, is the “marijuana is a gateway to hard drugs” argument, which goes something like this: Since: An overwhelming majority of cocaine users, one research established, used to smoke marijuana, then Conclusion: if we can stop the use of marijuana, we will curtail the use of cocaine. Sounds logical, except that it is not: as a smart-alec logician showed us, using an absurdity: Since: 100% of the cocaine users had milk as children, most likely breastfed, then Conclusion: if we can stop mothers from breastfeeding their children, we will eliminate the use of cocaine. The point being that the first proposition doesn’t tell us what percentage of marijuana users go on to try harder drugs; it only tells us what percentage of hard drug users used to smoke or drink milk. Another famous logical fallacy that I quite remember which I had a passing interest in, happened in the 1980s. Using the power vested in them by their marriage certificates (nepotism), some busybodies (then Senator Al Gore’s wife and others) formed a group which was trying to censor (“we are not calling for censorship!”, they protested) heavy metal music and its "message of sex and drugs." There were a couple of kids who had listened to Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne and actually committed suicide. The two kids who killed themselves, argued their lawyer in a lawsuit filed in Reno, NV, had listened to music by Judas Priest which, if you slow it down and play it background, you can hear “Do It! Do It” which, to them, was a clear instruction to suicide. Of course. The “answer to life is death,” one of the kids wrote. This time, the proposition was: Since a couple of kids committed suicide after listening to heavy metal music then; Conclusion: heavy metal music has a corrosive influence and must be regulated. But tens of millions of people had listened to the same artists and grown up to be responsible adults. Is it possible that the problem was with the kids and not with the music? I was a huge heavy metal fan and, not being remotely suicidal, I marveled at their ability to establish causality so casually. Then I cranked up Motorhead’s “Killed By Death” and forgot them. Irony Alert: one of the senator’s wife was later addicted to drugs—the respectable kind, the ones that come with a prescription. Now, the latest proposition is: Since all of the suicide bombers are "conservative" Muslims then Conclusion: there is something very wrong with conservative Islam And how about the tens of millions of those who are conservative--"wahabi", "Selefi", etc--but have no suicidal tendencies at all and were as apalled as anyone? The point is that the issue of suicide and suicide bombers--while it should be unequicoably, unconditionally, at all times, all seasons and for all alleged reasons be condemned and defeated--is a complex one and the easy answers are not always the right answers. Armies of psychologists and analysts are revising their earlier assessment (“these are medieval people opposed to modernity and trying to take us back to the Stone Age,”) to (“the profile of the suicide bomber—above average education, above average income, multi-lingual and post-modern defies the earlier assessment.”) The wahabi bogeyman is the latest—remember when, in the 1980s, the Shia were the radical Muslims?—who will be replaced by another—as the profile is updated. The suicide bombers manual is not the Koran, but the do-it-yourself pages of the Internet; and my guess is that the biographies they have read are not of Salahadin but of Carlos the Jackal. Instead of asking, “what is it about Islam that attracts suicidal lunatics?” let’s try asking “what is it about suicidal people that attracts them to Islam?”—I think one gets completely different conclusion, from the ones already presented. Suicidal tendencies may be common but the people who act on them are not: it goes against basic human programming. Even the experts don’t even know why, for example, Helsinki, Finland has the highest suicide rates in Europe but I don’t think anybody would seriously argue that “something must be done about the weather there, dammitt!”
Modernizers & Absolutists A holy man had his holy book defiled and came out shouting “Come out!...Come at these enemy dogs who reject the things of God. That tyrant has thrown my book of holy law to the ground! Did you not see what happened? Why remain polite and servile toward this over-proud dog…?” After an ambush and a massacre, a true believer writes his boss: “The prudence, fortitude, military discipline, labors…will cause joy to the faithful and terror to the infidels….It will be to the glory of God, because they have conquered and brought to our holy…Faith so vast a number of heathens…” If I were to tell you that the above passage is from a Zarqawi communiqué intercept by American intelligence in 2004, you wouldn’t be surprised. But you would be wrong. It is actually from a letter written shortly after November 16, 1532: when the Spanish Francisco Pizarro and his army of 168 soldiers defeated the Inca Emperor Atahuallpa and his army of 80,000 in Cajamarca, Peru. To the authors of the passage cited above, Hernando and Pedro Pizarro, the cause of the lopsided victory was crystal clear: God was on their side; after all they were Roman Catholics in the service of the greatest European leader of the time, Spain’s King Charles I. How else can one explain taking on your enemy, in his own territory, vastly outnumbered (almost 500 to 1) and register such a rout: not a single casualty on your side and you get to take the Emperor prisoner of war and, after asking for the whole nation’s GDP in ransom, kill him anyway? To the author of another book, Jared Diamond, writing in 2004, the explanations are far different and you only have to read the name of his book (Guns, Germs, And Steel) to get a hint of a more elaborate explanation: “military technology based on guns, steel weapons and horses; infectious diseases endemic in Eurasia; European maritime technology; the centralized political organization of European states; and writing” which translated to better intelligence. In Western Christianity, Jared Diamond and Hernando and Pedro Pizarro are centuries removed and can only meet via a time machine. But in Islamdom, they live in the same block. Which is to say, we haven’t had our renaissance yet, happy as we are to claim the 7th – 16th century as our renaissance period. Fragments of Answers And why is that? More: why do the absolutists seem to have the upper hand? I have theories, fragments of suggestions but not a coherent answer other than a concept: The Slow Yield To Bullies: (1) Bad Timing: As Bernard Lewis has observed, it was the bad fortune of most Muslim nations—and almost all of Africa, for that matter—that they secured their nation-statehood at the peak of one of the West’s worst exports: Marxism-Leninism. These leftists and collectivists employed the power of the State to crush the individual and his faith, to create the nirvana of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” (There is a lot of snickering about the seven virgins in heaven, but the dream of Marxism-Lenninsm was infinitely more fantastic.) It is not only the Muslim nations that haven’t been recovered from these paralyzing disease—most of Africa has the same narrow-minded control freaks (this time wearing Western suits) stifling growth. (2) Exile & Brain Drain: When the West was having its renaissance, there was no place to go to escape the forces of control—except America. But now, the modern and secular Muslim has many “natural habitats” to run to—so why put up with waging the good fight, if you can go to places where the fight has already been won? Which one is easier for the modernizer: to live in a Muslim country and teach a course called “Islam and Evolutionary Theory” for the first time—and probably get killed for it--or to live in the West where he can afford to have the debate for the second time, now re-named “intelligent design”? Or, to drive the point home, to write an “Alnahda” column from the freedom guaranteed by America or somewhere where he could be beheaded for even suggesting what is in these pages? (3) Damn Oil: In the normal hierarchy of nations, the four most important Muslim nations that would have, for good or bad, influenced the rest would probably have been Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. But oil has made Saudi Arabia—a nation that, culturally, is (one of) the least qualified to assume a leadership position—the most influential. Rome, which has one of Christendom's holiest sites and had years of experience running an empire, was never the most influential center of Western civilization. But Saudi Arabia is for Islam. This is, to my understanding, what my friend Saleh Gadi was saying in “Between Mirghania & Wahibia”: the Saudis are having an undue and disproportionate influence on Islam simply because they are obscenely rich. (There are more Ethiopian Muslims than there are Saudis.) It is enough to make one an “alternative fuel” advocate. Incidentally, to those of you who think that Gadi’s response is an “overreaction” to the terror of London, I can vouch that he has been saying the same thing he wrote for, oh, 20 years. (4) The Rising Tide of Conservatism: In Christianity, the churches that are growing the fastest are the ones that espouse conservative doctrine: the liberal ones are losing membership fast. Whether this is due to disillusion with secular fundamentalism---a ceaseless assault on traditional values—or whether it is just the swing of the pendulum, time will tell, but it is shared by Muslims. Many voting blocs take credit (or are blamed) for George Bush’s 2000 election--and one of these voting blocs were the Muslim Americans who were attracted to his conservative message (particularly the now largely dead proposal to give parents a voucher to take out their children from public schools that teach values unacceptable to parents.) My point is that the same disillusion with post-modernism may be at work in Islam: I know many close relatives who have voluntarily, of their own volition, turned their backs against the liberal Islam they were raised in and embraced a conservative version. And they are quite happy with their choice. Some of them even have a sense of humor: I was telling one who used to have one of the largest music collections but doesn’t listen to music anymore: “I am not sure I can trust anyone who doesn’t like music.” His response: “Watch it, James Garner!” [Years ago, when America’s Beef Council was alarmed at the rate with which Americans were giving up beef in favor of chicken, they hired the actor James Garner (“Rockford Files”) to tell us beef was “Real Food For Real People” and that he doesn’t trust people who don’t eat beef. Within weeks, he had a heart attack that required quintuple bypass surgery. I think he is on a chicken diet now.] (5) Israel: Since there isn’t a single Arab democracy, it was always hard to figure out whether the so-called “Arab street” sentiments against Israel were real or a distraction created by their inept governments to focus their anger elsewhere. Well now there are polls, scientific ones, which show that it is real. And, in this regard, the lions of secular arabs—Nasser, Arafat, Assad—were a huge embarrassment to the Arabs—and by extension, Muslim’s—psyche, bringing in nothing but humiliation. The only Arab institutions that resulted in Israel withdrawal from lands it occupied were Sadat and Hezbollah. The Sadat model is respected in the West, and the Hezbollah approach is respected in Arab land. The above are just fragments, and they are far, far from even approaching the subject which is why, I think, this struggle will take decades if not centuries. And, in this struggle, what is non-negotiable is democracy. Call it popular participation, people’s government, or a just and fair system. Name it using local standards, but measure it using objective standards: free and fair choices exercised at regular intervals. The fear is that Islamists don’t quite have a stellar record of democracy—as they subscribe to the view of One Man, One Vote, One Time. "We will use your democracy to get in, but then, once in, we will close the doors and seal the windows." But since, with notable exceptions, the so-called secular Muslim democracies (and all of sub-Saharan Africa, Christian, Muslim or animists), subscribe to the same theology, what exactly is the risk? There is no problem in democracy that more democracy cannot solve, as someone put it. The Role of the West The West, which did contribute to the creation of the artificial states and the tyrannies that rule over them, has certain responsibilities in leveling the playing field so that the forces of modernism will have a fighting chance in winning the hearts and minds of their compatriots. One, the burden of global democratization, a heavy load, must be shared by the established democracies of Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia. If you don’t like calling it the “Bush Doctrine”, call it the Neo-Marshall Plan, hell, you can call it Liberacion de la monde, just share the burden. Because, as the Economist noted, it seems that even the true believers in the Bush administration are already tuning in the stability-in-lieu-of-democracy siren calls that tempted previous ones. Second, in this struggle, it is going to be hard to fight tanks with sticks. This is not a call for an arms race: quite the opposite. Instead of using the previous failed approaches—of arming different factions—the West should disarm the rotten governments it has heavily armed. How? None of them make weapons and all the west has to do is to stop maintenance and providing new orders. This will require essentially killing one of the West’s most profitable industries—the arms manufacturers—but, at one time, the slave trade was also considered an irreplaceable component of the national economy. Third, the Wilsonian idea of a league made up of sovereign states over whom other states had no say in their “internal affairs” is outdated in a global world. The UN will have to be more than a debating society and have actual standards of governance where failure of observation results in immediate and predictable results: eviction from the global economy. That is what happened to Austria when it chose to elect a neo-nazi in the 1990s: yes, said Europe, it is your “internal affair” to elect whomever you wish, but it is also our “internal affair” to enforce our standard when we sanction you. The Austrians had a new government within months. Bringing It Back Home The Islamist groups in Eritrea have always argued that their motivation and foundation was entirely driven by internal events that have nothing to do with global Islamism or its radical offshoots—and for evidence, they have brought human rights violation cases and resistance against them that precede the existence of the global events. And the Eritrean government has always argued that they were entirely the creation of global events—Turabi and Bin Laden—as part of the effort to destabilize Eritrea. And to make their case, they have brought in the proximity of Bin Laden’s Sudanese base of the 1990s. Right after the publicizing of the London scare and the revelation that at least two of the four were Eritrean/Ethiopians, I am certain that the governments of Eritrea and Ethiopia were working overtime to establish some kind of link between these two individuals and their Islamist opposition groups. Both Eritrea and Ethiopia have been trying to get first seating in the front row of the Anti-Terrorism gravy train. Conversely, I am sure the Islamist groups were nervously checking to see if these monsters were in any way linked to them. In the previous issue of AlNahda (July 8, 2005), I had written: As long as the faith-focused organizations remain focused only on empowering people who share their faith, they will continue to arouse anxiety and fear in others. But I am convinced that, eventually, a religious bloc will emerge—one that embraces traditional and conservative Eritreans of all faiths who, unlike our elite, take their faith and traditions seriously enough to base their life on them. And when they do, they will be forceful agents of change who will provide the people what they lack most—a fountain of strength to battle evil and a moral basis for it. But that will take time, just as it took time for the secular organizations to form working coalitions. Well, that time has now gotten significantly shorter. Reform is coming; the only question is whether it is voluntary or mandatory. To Be Continued
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