Senile Orientalism
UN sanctions on Iran, it seems, cannot be easily justified, let alone justifying war against it. The international community is about to incriminate a country for the possibility of being able to produce nuclear arms in the future- at least not earlier than a decade according to CIA reports- at a time when Israel already possesses no less than 200-300 nuclear heads and its administration has finally confessed to possessing themp! That same UN was incapable of even blaming Israel for the killing of four UN observers in Lebanon not to speak of imposing on the Hebrew state to apply any of its 60 unapplied resolutions!
A difficult task indeed. Who better than an eminent orientalist to save us from this lurch? The man who has been called ‘Bush’s historian’? Bernard Lewis requires a fair amount of orientalist gymnastics this time to no great avail. Bernard Lewis, “August 22. Does Iran Have Something in Store?”, Wall Street Journal, 8 August 2006
The radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons, says he, is the ‘apocalyptic vision’ of Iran’s present rulers.
Rather than continue about Ahmadi Najad and the Iranian leadership, Lewis jumps directly to ‘terrorists claiming to work in the name of Islam’ who ‘have no compunction in slaughtering numbers of fellow Muslims’; the assumption being that while non-Muslims will be punished in Hell, Muslim victims of Muslim killers will be sent straight to Heaven. “Allah will know his own” is everything the ageing orientalist has for proof.
Nowhere in his paper does Lewis provide proof that Muslims believe that this apocalyptic vision includes killing Muslims. True Sayyid Qutb had legitimised the killing by Muslims of Muslims in case of apothesy but that went contrary to the Coranic ban. Further, Qutb was Sunni and the Shiite Iranian clergy have no obligation to follow him.
Where is the incrimination of the Iranian leaders? School textbooks, says Lewis, tell Iranian youths to be ready for a final struggle with the evil enemy. This might well be the case but it does not explain Muslims killing Muslims?
Second proof concerns the apocalyptic part. While Lewis reminds that all monotheistic religions harbour certain beliefs for the ending of time- Gog ang Magog, anti-Christ, Armageddon (which involves killing at least half of the world’s Jews!) and the Shiite return of the Hidden Imam- Lewis construes that the date of 22 August fixed by Ahmadi Najad might be the awaited end of time as it corresponds to the Night of Qadr in which the Prophet Muhammad flew to heaven and back on the famous winged horse al-Burraq. We waited for that August 22, nothing happened. But Lewis seems to gloss over the fact that millions of Americans believe in the second coming of Christ and that involves the reconversion of part of the Jews and the rest will be killed!
Herein lies a nasty amalgam: between an apocalyptic vision, shared by all religions, a sacrificial wish in the name of religion (martyrs go to Heaven). Jihad- whose meaning stretches from the performance of good deeds to fighting for religion is not a pillar of the Islamic faith and the indiscriminate killing of ‘one’s own’ in the belief that God will recognise ‘his ‘own’. Even Dame Albright (yesterday on NPR) rejects the idea of calling ‘terrorists’ Jihadists though she has no qualms about the need to kill them!)
“Allah will know his own”. Where does the saying come from? The use of God’s Arabic gives the impression that the phrase comes from the Qur’an, the Hadith or some Muslim holy text. None of that. The matter of the fact is that our learned scholar has ‘borrowed’ the phrase from the Catholic lexicon of the Inquisition and the Crusades. After the end of the Oriental Crusades against the Arabs and Muslims (1095-1270), the Crusaders started looking for apostates inside the European home. In the year 1209, Pope Innocente III decided to launch a Crusade against the Cathaers, an heterodox Christian sect, in Southern France. Between 1209-1229, some 300.000 crusaders invaded France from all the European countries and perpetrated collective massacres against the people of the region the most notable of which was against the. During the fighting, the crusaders received the order to kill all the inhabitants of Beziers, one of the sect’s strongholds. Some 20,000 of them perished. It was reported that in July 1209, one of the leaders of the campaign, Arnaud Amoury, when asked by his soldiers how to differentiate between the besieged inhabitants of Beziers and the apostate Cathares, replied: ‘Kill them all. God will recognise his own!’ Isn’t there a great amount of intellectual dishonesty in taking a quote from the tradition of one religion and attributing it to another, especially by a scholar so pointilious when it comes to affairs religious?
Khomeini’s quote: the ‘world-devourers’; in the US you have a President who is not only convinced that he receives messages from God, but is also close to the believers in Armageddon.
ii) as a direct Iranian attack on the US is not very likely there is an easier case in point being that the Iranians would prefer to strike against Israel and not mind killing fellow Muslim Arabs in Israel
As usual the culturalism does not save the orientalist.
What a self-defeating text! The Apocalyptic ‘end of time’ did not come on August 22 nor does the Apocalyptic vision of the Iranian leadership necessitate any such war. Deterrence of the Cold War type does not apply. Better rely on those Muslims, Iranians and Arabs who do not believe in the terminal struggle to save their countries.
Lewis has already made his points. First, Iran does not have the right to develop nuclear capacity, whereas Israel has. No millerianism in Israel. Believe it or not. Second, let Muslims kill each other: they excel in it! And are well rewarded! Isnt that one of the options in the strategy espoused by dame Condoles Rice in her fight to rally Muslim moderates (and Israeli extremists) against Muslim extremists!
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‘The question people are asking is ‘why they hate us?’ That’s the wrong question. In a sense, they’ve been hating us for centuries, and it’s very natural that they should. You have this millennial rivalry between two world religions, and now, from their point of view, the wrong one seems to be winning.’
(…) “More generally, you cannot be rich, strong, successful and loved, particularly by those who are not rich, not strong and not successful. So the hatred is something almost axiomatic, The question which we should be asking is ‘why do they neither fear nor respect us?’” (Bernard Lewis, on C-SPAN shortly after September 11, cited in Peter Waldmann, Staff Reporter of the Wall Street Journal, ‘A Historian’s Take on Islam Steers US in Terrorism Fight’.