On Makdisi, al-Azmeh and other learned fools.

People from the East who settle in the West and do well as Academics may be forgiven for a type of myopia which magnifies the importance of what happens in the Western academy and it supposed effect on Western policy which in turn is believed to have a decisive effect on how events unfurl back in the East.

I myself have frequently commented on the West's penchant for promoting Iyengars and crytpo-Iyengars, like Raghuram Rajan and Abhijit Bannerjee and anyone else who is not a fat fuck like me- and the manner in which this has led to genocide against Iyers not just in India but also in Hampstead- which is why my relatives in those places discourage me from visiting them.

However, in the case of the Middle East, in recent years, there does seem to be some justification for the view that Western Academics have the power to shape events.

Ussama Makdisi, a Professor at Rice, writes-

... the brute reality of Western interventionism and imperialism in the region not only exacerbates “internal” problems, but creates new conditions and contexts that define the very nature of what is internal. Thus, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared confidently in 2006, amidst Israel’s devastating U.S.-backed assault on Lebanon, that the world was observing the “birth pangs of a New Middle East.”

The Western intervention in the region was a response to the 9/11 terrorist attack upon it. Was it 'Imperialistic'? Well, Iraq does have a lot of oil so that view is plausible. But why mention Israel's assault on Lebanon? That was a fight against Hezbollah and its Iranian backers. It did not represent 'imperialistic' aggression against Lebanon. Rice was saying that Israel shouldn't stop till Hezbollah changed its policy of launching cross border attacks. Rice was saying that a new Middle East, free of terrorist outfits running amok, must be created. The other sort produces only ruin and refugees.

The aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, moreover, witnessed not only the destruction of what remained of the secular Baathist Iraqi central state;

Saddam's tyranny is what the author means. The Iraqi people loved that gangster. Those mean Americans deprived them of his tender care.

it also created a new Iraqi Governing Council along explicitly sectarian lines. This fateful decision to divide Iraqi government along “Sunni,” “Shiite,” and “Kurd,” or to invent a “Sunni triangle,” was not predetermined objectively by the diversity of Iraqi society.

How so? Did Kurds, with a different language, not exist? Did not most Shiahs feel disaffected? Was it really the case that some Sunnis did not think it a virtuous and Godly thing to blow up ordinary Shiahs? Did the US impose these divisions on Iraq? If so, why didn't it impose different divisions of a sort familiar to Americans? Why not divide Iraq into East Coast vs West Coast rappers? Or baseball vs football fans? More usefully, why not divide them into nerds vs jocks?

It was principally a U.S. imperial interpretation of this diversity.

So the 'interpretation' was based on something objective. No doubt, the interpretation was wrong because the Americans involved were as stupid as shit. But then, Makdisi is American.

The “sectarian” Middle East does not simply exist; it is imagined to exist, and then it is produced.

It takes a lot of resources to produce something which only exists in the imagination. Furthermore, the Laws of Physics prevent some things which can be imagined quite easily from being produced at all.
It is certainly possible to point the finger at the people who 'produced' sectarianism in the region. But those people weren't of Western descent- unless they had converted.

It does not emerge latently. Yet the strong association of the term “sectarianism” with the Middle East repeatedly suggests that the region is more negatively religious than the “secular” West.

Currently, there are few places in the West where a Protestant would be admired for killing Catholics or vice versa. In India, currently, there is very little Sunni-Shiah violence. Some parts of the MENA have gone backwards in this respect. Why? 'Secular' Modernizers were corrupt and despotic. The Left was wholly useless. Provincial or lower Middle class professionals- Doctors, Engineers etc- as well as the 'bazaari' merchant class, found the traditional Religious teachers to be more congenial. Unlike in India, Democracy and an independent Judiciary had not taken root. This was not simply because British rule had been briefer or absent. Israel has retained a British style Democracy and Judiciary.

I am tempted to say that the strategic importance of the region and the vast sums of petro-dollars floating about distorted the trajectory of countries whose people are second to none in practical ability, abstract intellect and sound family and community and business values.

This is an ideological assumption woven into how the Arab and Muslim worlds are generally depicted as having fundamentally religious landscapes—even the term “Muslim world” highlights the allegedly religious nature of this region, as opposed to the geographic designation of the “West.”

The problem with saying 'Western Christendom' is that countries like England have lower Church than Mosque attendance.  On the other hand we do speak of 'the Bible Belt'.

Not only does this assumption gloss over how religious the West is, but it also pretends that what is occurring in the Middle East reflects an unbroken arc of sectarian sentiment that connects the medieval to the modern.

Makdisi is correct in saying that historicism is silly. However, Makdisi is himself deploying a historicist argument. He says that Western Imperialists have been fucking over his ancestral region for two centuries by imposing their 'assumptions' on that land and somehow, perhaps by rubbing a magic lamp, turning it into reality.

Modern politics, in short, is transformed into little more than a re-enactment of a medieval drama between Sunni and Shi’i, rather than being a geopolitical struggle in which Western states are deeply implicated.

Maqdisi's politics consists off banging on about how the West has always been evil and intent on infecting his region with its 'sectarian' assumptions. But for the West, Saddam would still be presiding over a wonderful Secular, Socialist, Republic in which religion and ethnicity would be of as little account as it is in the faculty lounge of an elite Liberal Arts College.

I am for this reason in sympathy with Aziz al-Azmeh’s criticism of the “over-Islamization of Islam.” 

The guy was a British Academic who was completely oblivious of the Islamization occurring on his own doorstep. He recently wrote-
'The Rushdie affair deployed blasphemy as a standard emblem in political mobilisation, and, by an objective Machiavellism or by a wonderful serendipity, blasphemy became subsequently a standard motif and emblem in the mobilisation of particular bodies of publics by specific authorities that constituted themselves as religious, socio-political and cultural.
In other words, either Rushdie had deliberately deployed blasphemy for a political purpose or had done so inadvertently because he was an utter cretin. After all, he had previously accepted an award from the Iranians. He must have known that regime would not have taken kindly to his lampooning their Supreme Leader.

 These not only mobilisation, but wholesale re-socialisation as well -- deployed the relation between blasphemy and a wider body of claims, and of special pleading, for claims to historico-social singularity, communal separation, reparation for injury, and a temper that expects and flourishes on moral injury, and indeed invites it with a certain determination through a closed circuit of visible tokens of self-stigmatisation: manners of coiffure and couture, a standard set of facial expressions, irrepressible clamour, exhibitionistic piety, proudly-declared fanaticism, an almost autistic degree of incommunicative introversion proudly declared by exorbitant special pleading. 

The problem here is that the Liberal-Left glories in precisely the same sort of thing. So does every other variety of shithead. However when it comes to standing up against genuine atrocities- e.g. the refusal of Ireland to accept that it belongs solely to the Iyers- and since all Iyers are crypto-Iyengars with the exception of me- its deeply racist decision to be ruled by that Maharasthrian Varadkar- who doesn't even pretend to be South Indian- is a manifest injustice which the so called Liberal intelligentsia must join in protesting.

Professor al-Azmeh, a patrician like Rushdie, may be forgiven for looking down on British Muslims of more plebeian origin but why does he think that his own identity is equally a fabrication of an even more impotent rage? The following passage is revealing-

It is almost as if some were self-consciously and quite deliberately playing the stark contrast of H. G. Wells’ dark and subterranean Morlocks seeking to devour the white Eloi, softened and further whitened by civilisation and captivity to the ends of civilisation. In describing street protests, Rushdie evoked Bellow’s ‘event glamour’, and spoke of ‘faces performing anger for the cameras’ (Rushdie, 129) – ‘happily angry faces, rejoicing in their anger, believing their identity to be born of their rage’ 

Rushdie, at the time, was claiming to be a Muslim. Thankfully, he could give up the pretense and become what he had always wanted to be- viz. an American celebrity author. Al Azmeh is stuck performing the role of the Secular Arab circa 1968.
Makdisi, a younger man, may escape that fate. He might find a new shtick- protesting the secret machinations of the Lizard People from Planet X, for example.

This fixation with the study of Islam, the Muslim, the Muslim woman, and Islamic piety has ignored and relegated as historiographically and analytically unimportant secular Arabs, or Muslim Arabs who do not necessarily flaunt their piety in ways that conform to Western stereotypes.

This may be true but what is unarguable is that whenever we hear a particular Professor is an expert on some distant part of the Globe we automatically discount anything she has to say. This is because only very stupid people study that shite at Uni. Smart people do STEM subjects or just make money.