All Music now unbearable for being just about to bring
a Dear John letter from that tarrying Son
Seduced by every arboreal tryst's latent Erlking
Coz Daddy's no fun & Money everything.
Thursday, 24 October 2019
Wednesday, 23 October 2019
Werner Menski, Pyare Shivpuri & why SOAS is crap for Law
Werner Menski is an emeritius Law Professor at SOAS- in other words an utter cretin. Consider the following-
Why does Menski- a 'son-in-law of Baroda'- say Hindutva is a 'dirty and polluting word'? Was Vajpayee a smelly homeless dude? Did Bush or Blair recoil from him? Did Navaz Sharif refuse to shake his hand? Was he or was he not the Prime Minister of India?
There is only one answer to this. Menski ability to think and to write English has been affected by that of his more mentally retarded students. He is concerned now only with outdoing their imbecility though he is a 'grandchild of the Nazis' and thus must have originally written in a stodgy Teutonic style.
Why won't this Professor read over his own work before sending it to the printer? Is he an eighteen year old in a hurry to turn in his assignment so as to go to the disco or mount his scooter to deliver pizza?
'Dependency on Gurus' is a feature of this cretin's acolytes- supposing he has any. Anyone whose word is taken for law is a Guru provided there is no compulsion to do so. It is foolish to think that using a Sanskrit word means that what one is saying is specially true of Hindus. If one were to say 'dependency on Quatschköpfe is a feature of Teutonic pedantry' there is a suggestio falsi, that non Teutonic pedants aren't equally dependent on blathershites of one description or another.
Readers of this blog may imagine that I'm attacking Menski because he is against the BJP. This is not the case. I am merely marveling at SOAS's ability to turn even this German pedant's brains to shit. Consider another paper of his which juxtaposes Shah Bano & Narendra Modi. He writes-Both Shah Bano and Narendra Modi are used globally as iconic symbols to misrepresent and hide significant Indian legal developments.
What is he getting at? The Shah Bano case showed the Gandhi dynasty at its vote-bank cultivating worst. Modi represents the Developmental aspect of BJP meritocracy.
Menski, with a fatuity worthy of the College whose faculty he adorns writes-
The Indian state, like the British state or the American state, does not need 'exoneration' from providing for a divorced woman's maintenance if her husband can't be compelled to do so simply because it would be ludicrous to make the tax payer take up the burden. It is a separate matter that a State may, if it has the fiscal wherewithal, provide a Social Security safety net. However, this would apply equally to those who had never been married.
Legislation may be top-down and 'state-centric'. However, Courts interpret Legislation according to Constitutional principles such that Hohfeldian rights of a private nature correspond to obligations, again of a private nature, under a vinculum juris or bond of law. But these may not be enforceable. It is not the case that any deficit in performance must be made good by the State. The fact is, the Court can sanction State officials in a manner that is private to them but it lacks any similar sanction against the State itself.
Menski writes elsewhere about his SOAS's asinine 'pop paradigm' approach-
Consider Gandhi v Patel (2002) which Menski, writing for an Indian audience, pretends was a case of racist British judges holding a Hindu wedding performed properly by a Brahman priest to be 'no marriage at all'. The fact is that the Judge relied on the Priest's testimony that what occurred was a deliberate 'non-marriage' of a perfectly legal type. Indeed, in Tamil Nadu, we have the same concept such that 'temple marriage' can be a non-marriage for some purposes by mutual consent. Just as in the British case, if a dispute arises, what matters is whether the couple cohabited with the reputation of being husband and wife. In which case, though the marriage itself may be void or a nullity, a judicial remedy is available. In other words, there is a 'self-controlled ordering' such that all manner of consensual, non contested, relationships can constitute a contestable vinculum juris dependent on circumstances.
The cretins at SOAS- peopled by kids too lazy or stupid to go to the LSE or University College or even Kings- have a 'pop' paradigm. Thankfully, their motor skills aren't good enough for them to have a break-dancing 'rap' paradigm. Anyway, these guys are stuck in an early Seventies time-warp and probably haven't heard of hip-hop.
Come to think of it, Shivpuri was a Brahman. Perhaps he shared the following view of Menski who must have been completing his Doctorate in Hindu Law in London around the time Shivpuri was doing his MA in Law at SOAS.
Why is this cretin pretending we don't all need to be 'dynamically alert' while we are awake? Does he really think the Vedic Rishis were utterly stupid?
Menski thinks Vedic pop culture was jumping around probably with a boombox because the fucker is German and probably thinks Abba is like totally hard core dude.
It is quite true that Uncertainty diminishes when 'buck-stopped' juristic decisions are formed. But doubt does not disappear thereby because the future fitness landscape is unknown. Yuddhishtra does not gain omniscience. As Krishna tells him in the episode where he gets Arjuna to inflict 'social death' on his elder brother, as a substitute for killing him, Dharma is difficult to understand precisely for this reason. No one knows what is or isn't 'apadh dharma'.
But even the stupidest, most drunken Hindu- and, as an Iyer, I surely qualify for this title both on the grounds of heredity and habitus- knows all this. That's why we find the Mahabharata engrossing. It is the 'fifth Veda' specifically intended for fools, drunkards and social outcastes.
Removal of doubt re dharma never occurs by any form. There is reduced uncertainty about the Schelling focal solution to a coordination game involving notions of dharma, but- at the same time- one can hedge on discoordination games. The General Equilibrium is 'anything goes'.
Menski, the cretin, thinks doubt is resolved by 'any form' of decision procedure-
Stupid Hindus like me understand all this. This German dude- well, he may be British, like me, now, but, like me, he was born in Germany- has all sorts of fancy shmancy degrees but he understands shit about either the Law or Hinduism. Why? The fucker got stuck in the SOAS swamp of stupidity. Also, he didn't watch enough Ally McBeal. Was she hot or was she not? Even decades later, I can't make up my mind. Dharma is like that only. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo!
Notes
True meaning of Aiyayo is explicated in Chinese in the video below-
In desperate efforts to make sense of an allegedly glorious and certainly idealised past, encapsulated now in that dirty and polluting word hindutva (‘Hinduness’), reflecting efforts to make sense of one’s own roots in today’s often highly nationalistic contexts, many Indians and their more or less scholarly and highly politicised spokespersons simply like to believe today in certain myths.Where are these Indians? I have never met any and I knew quite a few who, being too stupid to go to decent schools, ended up at the toilet at which Menski taught. The one legal luminary, of Indian origin, it produced was Pyare Shivpuri- who was doing an MA in Law there when he was arrested for drug smuggling. The case of Regina vs Shivpuri was a landmark judgment proving that studying law at SOAS rots your brains. It causes you to forget the one legal principle every knuckle dragging Neanderthal has always known- viz. when arrested keep shtum. Demand a lawyer. Say, 'no comment' and 'allegedly' till you are blue in the face. Shivpuri didn't do any such thing, instead he sang like a canary and thus went to jail for trafficking in drugs even though he wasn't actually carrying any drugs.
Why does Menski- a 'son-in-law of Baroda'- say Hindutva is a 'dirty and polluting word'? Was Vajpayee a smelly homeless dude? Did Bush or Blair recoil from him? Did Navaz Sharif refuse to shake his hand? Was he or was he not the Prime Minister of India?
There is only one answer to this. Menski ability to think and to write English has been affected by that of his more mentally retarded students. He is concerned now only with outdoing their imbecility though he is a 'grandchild of the Nazis' and thus must have originally written in a stodgy Teutonic style.
That is of course much easier than textual excavation work. Hence many Hindus today assume that their law just fell from heaven one day into the lap of humanity, basically that this ‘law’ came from one big God at some point, as happened to other fortunate and/or chosen people, one believes.'Chosen people'! Oh dear! The apple doesn't fall from the Nazi tree!
This early law was then remembered by some special holy men with long hair and funny clothes, often now depicted in films and other media in various shades of orange colours.This idiot may think he is satirizing the Hindu haters but what he is actually doing is ascribing this mishegos to the 'many Hindus today' who, according to him, 'assume that their law just fell from heaven one day'.
Why won't this Professor read over his own work before sending it to the printer? Is he an eighteen year old in a hurry to turn in his assignment so as to go to the disco or mount his scooter to deliver pizza?
Such simple and convenient images serve to reflect the broadly familiar transition from somewhat divinely revealed knowledge or Truth (śruti) to humanly remembered knowledge or truth (smriti). The main trouble (or beauty, depending on the reader’s position) remains, however, that this entire process of genesis and reconstruction must be characterised as marked by deep internal pluralities.Why must it? It could be rendered univocal by harmonious construction. Indeed, this is the Hindu approach.
For Hindus as a whole there is neither one God in whom everyone has to believe nor one special human that received this Truth and passed it on to others.So what? Having one God or one Prophet hasn't prevented Islam from having 'deep internal pluralities' has it?
In typical positivist lemming mentality, however, partly induced by colonial interventions, it is taught – most prominently by today’s telegurus and many others - that such ancient rules and their interpretations by special people (who tend to be men, of course) just need to be followed now by Hindu believers.Which 'telegurus'? None at all. Positivism or 'law as command' does not necessarily involve a unitary conception of the State. No British positivist denied that Scottish law was different from English law.
Most Hindus are thus denying themselves the agency to think for themselves and to be creative makers of rules for their own lives.Most Hindus are human beings. They have to think for themselves even if that thought is to outsource the remainder. One has to make one's own rules though those rules may consist of finding out and following rules made by some other body. This is simple delegation.
Mental dependency on gurus has become a common form of Hindu positivist infection and is glocally manifested all over the globe.A positivist infection would involve a command of an external type having a cancerous hypertrophy. No such command arises in choosing a Guru or indeed preferring not to have one.
'Dependency on Gurus' is a feature of this cretin's acolytes- supposing he has any. Anyone whose word is taken for law is a Guru provided there is no compulsion to do so. It is foolish to think that using a Sanskrit word means that what one is saying is specially true of Hindus. If one were to say 'dependency on Quatschköpfe is a feature of Teutonic pedantry' there is a suggestio falsi, that non Teutonic pedants aren't equally dependent on blathershites of one description or another.
Dharma has become a symbol of obedience rather than a key to dynamic self-definition and creative self-realisation.No it hasn't. Slavishness and sycophancy have this property. Willingness to violate dharma so as to please the Master is what symbolizes obedience. This 'grandchild of Nazis'- as he describes himself- knows this well enough.
Brahmins still claim to be in charge of everything.How fucking ignorant is this cretinous Quatschköpf?
Positivised crowds of Indians and many foreign scholars let them get away with such assertions.Where and when did any Brahman make any such claim? Does this cretin not understand that no two Brahmans agree on everything, and there is nothing all Brahmans agree on? It would be impossible for the class as a whole to be in charge of everything because they don't have a collective choice mechanism and, in any case, lack sufficient coercive or prescriptive power.
Among the latter, of course, those who argue against ‘tradition’ or ‘religion’ of any form find such images rather useful to simply uphold the dodgy construction of ancient threatening monsters with tentacles that reach deep into present times.'dodgy'? What's next? Will Menski declare his 'kite theory' the dog's bollocks? How fucking Cockneyfied has this Quatschköpf become? Hopefully, Brexit will restore him to his original stodgy vocabulary before his idiolect begins to incorporate emojis or rhyming slang.
Readers of this blog may imagine that I'm attacking Menski because he is against the BJP. This is not the case. I am merely marveling at SOAS's ability to turn even this German pedant's brains to shit. Consider another paper of his which juxtaposes Shah Bano & Narendra Modi. He writes-Both Shah Bano and Narendra Modi are used globally as iconic symbols to misrepresent and hide significant Indian legal developments.
What is he getting at? The Shah Bano case showed the Gandhi dynasty at its vote-bank cultivating worst. Modi represents the Developmental aspect of BJP meritocracy.
Menski, with a fatuity worthy of the College whose faculty he adorns writes-
Indian lawyers – and ultimately we all - should actually know that the heroic Shah Bano was not let down by the Indian state.She sued and got maintenance. But Congress Muslims- like M.J Akbar, now with the BJP- worked with Rajiv Gandhi to pass a law annulling the Court's verdict. Shah Bano was let down by the Congress Raj- not by the Judiciary.
She won her case and then became a catalyst, an immensely useful tool, for the postmodern Indian state to engineer a radical social welfare system that cleverly exonerates the Indian state itself from direct responsibility for whole classes of destitute Indians.This is sheer nonsense. The Bench has clarified that Rajiv Gandhi's law was unconstitutional. A woman does not lose her right to maintenance just because of her Religion.
The Indian state, like the British state or the American state, does not need 'exoneration' from providing for a divorced woman's maintenance if her husband can't be compelled to do so simply because it would be ludicrous to make the tax payer take up the burden. It is a separate matter that a State may, if it has the fiscal wherewithal, provide a Social Security safety net. However, this would apply equally to those who had never been married.
This, as far too few people realize, speaks loudly and clearly about the nature of the post-colonial Indian state as a highly sophisticated legal system with an ancient pedigree. The new balance between private and public ordering in relation to post-divorce maintenance for all Indian ex-wives today, and now maybe even former members of a person’s household, was achieved by shifting crucial social welfare burdens back to the realm of the family, and thus the interconnected collective primordial sphere, rather than privileging the enlightened autonomous individual as a citizen. India, this confirms, is clearly not America or Europe.This guy lives in England. Does he really not know that if the Sultan of Multan or the Sheikh of Gimmeabreak divorces his wife and, because of sovereign immunity, can't be forced to pay millions in maintenance by a British Court, then the British taxpayer won't have to take up the burden. The ex-wife may however be eligible for Job Seeker's allowance or some such handout. India is like America or Europe in this respect. The State never assumes any responsibility to discharge purely private obligations. If your hubby won't give you a rim job, you can't get the Govt. to pay a prostitute to do it for him.
India’s highly sophisticated strategy of combining more state involvement (‘Verstaatlichung’) in some respects with less state involvement (‘Entstaatlichung’) in others, reflects and in turn reconstructs an ancient Indian skill of legal management that remains severely underrated and badly understood.What ancient Indian skill is this idiot blathering about? If wifey refused to give hubby a golden shower in the Gupta Age, did the Maharani turn up to piss on the petitioner?
For, at the core of Indian laws lies the principle of self-controlled ordering, not top-down state-centric regulation.That is the core of all legal systems. Those subject to the Law are, by definition, those capable of internalizing it and showing an appropriate standard of care in its application vis a vis third parties.
Legislation may be top-down and 'state-centric'. However, Courts interpret Legislation according to Constitutional principles such that Hohfeldian rights of a private nature correspond to obligations, again of a private nature, under a vinculum juris or bond of law. But these may not be enforceable. It is not the case that any deficit in performance must be made good by the State. The fact is, the Court can sanction State officials in a manner that is private to them but it lacks any similar sanction against the State itself.
Menski writes elsewhere about his SOAS's asinine 'pop paradigm' approach-
My published work (Menski, 2001, 2003; 2006) suggests throughout that, for early Hindu law as much as in modern Hindu family law and even in India’s constitutional law regulation today, the internalised expectation of self-controlled ordering among Hindus and today’s Indian citizens generally is a central ingredient of the phenomena we call ‘law’.One can change the word Hindu to 'English' or 'Russian' with equal truth value. Why? These are geographical terms which however have a juristic acceptation with some degree of latitude such that protocol bound, buck stopped, intensionality can arise.
Consider Gandhi v Patel (2002) which Menski, writing for an Indian audience, pretends was a case of racist British judges holding a Hindu wedding performed properly by a Brahman priest to be 'no marriage at all'. The fact is that the Judge relied on the Priest's testimony that what occurred was a deliberate 'non-marriage' of a perfectly legal type. Indeed, in Tamil Nadu, we have the same concept such that 'temple marriage' can be a non-marriage for some purposes by mutual consent. Just as in the British case, if a dispute arises, what matters is whether the couple cohabited with the reputation of being husband and wife. In which case, though the marriage itself may be void or a nullity, a judicial remedy is available. In other words, there is a 'self-controlled ordering' such that all manner of consensual, non contested, relationships can constitute a contestable vinculum juris dependent on circumstances.
Whether this is a matter of religion or more of secular characteristics is actually not an either/or issue; there will always be elements of ‘religion’ and of ‘secular’ law in this pluralist bundle of interlinkages.This is sheer nonsense. A 'pluralist bundle of inter-linkages' either yields a multi-dimensional juristic decision space- in which case there is path dependence or 'agenda control'- or it does not, in which case Law is univocal. Now, it is true there may be jurisdiction hopping such that in practice path dependence obtains in a particular case. However, no jurisdiction says that it itself suffers this infirmity. On the contrary, it points to its protocol bound, 'buck stopping' ability. If it did not do so it would be subject to concurrency livelock or deadlock. It would be highly gameable. Rational agents would not contract under its jurisdiction.
The cretins at SOAS- peopled by kids too lazy or stupid to go to the LSE or University College or even Kings- have a 'pop' paradigm. Thankfully, their motor skills aren't good enough for them to have a break-dancing 'rap' paradigm. Anyway, these guys are stuck in an early Seventies time-warp and probably haven't heard of hip-hop.
In our new ‘pop’ paradigm at SOAS, both ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ elements are always part of this internally plural structure of law.No wonder Shivpuri got done for not smuggling drugs! Still, at least one SOAS law student's name has found a prominent place in the annals of British law- not as a judge, or barrister, it is true, but as the stupidest criminal ever.
Come to think of it, Shivpuri was a Brahman. Perhaps he shared the following view of Menski who must have been completing his Doctorate in Hindu Law in London around the time Shivpuri was doing his MA in Law at SOAS.
The Vedic expectation of dynamic alertness on the part of those ‘who know’, thus stereotypically essentially the Brahmins (and those that managed to act or think like them) in every moment of their existence, was supposed to stimulate and influence various patterns of ritual activity and socio-legal behaviour.The auditor of a ritual, as the Brahman as designated by ritual, should be 'dynamically alert'. But so should the Ritvik & Udgatr & Ardhvaryu as well as the jajman. Otherwise their dhotis might catch fire or they may nod off and topple into the sacrificial flame. But everybody, during their waking life, should be 'dynamically alert'. Otherwise a snake might bite you or a tiger might pounce on you and eat you. Furthermore, if you smell a SOAS Professor in the vicinity, you should immediately run away.
Why is this cretin pretending we don't all need to be 'dynamically alert' while we are awake? Does he really think the Vedic Rishis were utterly stupid?
It is surely a religious phenomenon,Fuck off! Suppose you attend an atheist's rally. You still have to be 'dynamically alert' so as to shout 'Boo to Religion!' at the same time as everybody else. Furthermore, you should be aware that relaxing your sphincter and kakking your pants will draw adverse comment from other participants unless you explain tht you are shitting yourself, not because of a lack of alertness, but because you are protesting against the Papal sodomization of the sacred monkeys in the Vatican caves. Anyway, how come it's cool when Dawkins does it? Get with the program and let's all have a great big shit in to protest whatever.
but at the very same time it is also practical and secular; both these aspects are interconnected and both have legal implications. The Vedic ‘pop’ culture thus constantly jumps out of the analyst’s box, confounds restrictive analysis and would deeply irritate positivist efforts to rein it in.You can irritate a positivist- Menski does it by talking shite- but you can't irritate efforts any more than you can sexually harass hopes or give despairs an inferiority complex by displaying your massive genitals.
Menski thinks Vedic pop culture was jumping around probably with a boombox because the fucker is German and probably thinks Abba is like totally hard core dude.
As we shall see below, this elusive evasion and dynamic boundary crossing occurs primarily in Vedic law because rita and satya co-exist from the start as two interconnected forms of Truth.Nonsense! Rta could be said to be related to Riti, and Sat to both Truth and Being but neither is a hypostasis which co-exists or is consubstantial with anything else. Hinduism has plenty of Menons but no Hypokiemenon. Our ontology wasn't fucked in the ass from the get go because we had no Socrates to talk a pederast out of writing a paean to a Lysis's ancestors. Thus our onto-theology is singularly crisis free.
This linguistically marked internal plurality of the most basic point of the entire structure then also impacts critically on how we deal with law and legal analysis in all other later respects.No it doesn't. Don't be silly. The Law is an aspect of Oikonomia. It is defeasible precisely because Akrebia defeats the ends of Equity by its too great precision or generality. Aristotle fucking discussed this you big German dummkoff!
Thus, for example, methods of informal dispute settlement, encapsulated eventually in the technical term vyavahāra, comprise any form of removal of doubt about dharma (Menski, 2007).Rubbish! Vyavahara still has, as all protocol bound juristic reasoning must have, an extensional/intensional distinction resolvable only by a 'buck stopped' demarcation between what is law and what is fact. Jurisdiction hopping means that competitive 'buck stopping' converges on incentive compatible mechanisms which 'internalize externalities' in the manner investigated by the 'Law & Econ' school. This is the true source of defeasibility. Doubt must always exist because the fitness landscape is uncertain. The 'Dharma-Raja' in the Nalophkhyanam must learn Statistical Game Theory to overcome his 'vishada'. This is sophisticated stuff far beyond the ken of SOAS type cretins. On the other hand anybody of ordinary intelligence who has had the misfortune to work for a living at some point in her life understands all this perfectly well- though few can articulate this 'unthought known' in academic jargon. The fact I can do so does not mean I am smart. It suggests I was too stupid to be a Mathematician but not stupid or evil enough to devote myself to the sub-Humanities or the anti-Social Sciences.
It is quite true that Uncertainty diminishes when 'buck-stopped' juristic decisions are formed. But doubt does not disappear thereby because the future fitness landscape is unknown. Yuddhishtra does not gain omniscience. As Krishna tells him in the episode where he gets Arjuna to inflict 'social death' on his elder brother, as a substitute for killing him, Dharma is difficult to understand precisely for this reason. No one knows what is or isn't 'apadh dharma'.
But even the stupidest, most drunken Hindu- and, as an Iyer, I surely qualify for this title both on the grounds of heredity and habitus- knows all this. That's why we find the Mahabharata engrossing. It is the 'fifth Veda' specifically intended for fools, drunkards and social outcastes.
Removal of doubt re dharma never occurs by any form. There is reduced uncertainty about the Schelling focal solution to a coordination game involving notions of dharma, but- at the same time- one can hedge on discoordination games. The General Equilibrium is 'anything goes'.
Menski, the cretin, thinks doubt is resolved by 'any form' of decision procedure-
Any form, that means, from a mental process in one’s mind to a formal court hearing and probably even armed warfare.This is crazy shit. No Christian or Jew's doubt that Hitler was an evil cunt could have been resolved by his winning the War. Still, for prudential reasons, everybody would say he was a fine chap. That's because there was less uncertainty about what would happen to people who expressed a different view.
Because this broad and internally plural term was generally but misleadingly translated as ‘dispute settlement’, even more narrowly as ‘judicial proceedings’ (Lariviere, 1989), we have simply become blindfolded by our own proclaimed expertise and have miserably failed to understand Vedic ‘pop’ culture.Why? Because these cunts don't understand contemporary culture and mores. They have no frame of reference. As for Vedic pop- that's the Sama Veda, dude. I'm ancestrally an udgatr. Lord Krishna says among Vedas, he is the Sama and among the Upanishads, he is the Chandogya. But that's only coz he is an Agent, not a Principal, in the Bhagvad Gita. By contrast, the Vyadha is a Principal, not an Agent, just like Yuddhishtra, which is why he has to hear the Vyadha Gita to be cured of Vishada.
Stupid Hindus like me understand all this. This German dude- well, he may be British, like me, now, but, like me, he was born in Germany- has all sorts of fancy shmancy degrees but he understands shit about either the Law or Hinduism. Why? The fucker got stuck in the SOAS swamp of stupidity. Also, he didn't watch enough Ally McBeal. Was she hot or was she not? Even decades later, I can't make up my mind. Dharma is like that only. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo!
Notes
True meaning of Aiyayo is explicated in Chinese in the video below-
Tuesday, 22 October 2019
Hamid Dabashi on Salman Rushdie
Hamid Dabashi is an Iranian origin Professor of Comp. Lit. He has a theory that the real Rushdie died because of the Ayatollah's fatwa and that an impostor penned the rest of his tripe. The more conventional view is that Rushdie gained global prominence from the fatwa and thus rose from being a Martin Amis- i.e. a clever provincial- to becoming a Saul Bellow- a literary giant. He doesn't have to bother with exposing the vileness of the East's tin-pot dictators or dynasties- they do a far better job themselves- and can simply revel in his own celebrity as a Great Hyphenated American novelist whose unreadable shite is accepted at his own valuation of it.
Compare Rushdie's productivity to that of S.P Somtow- who is now better known as a composer- or to Vikram Seth or Timothy Mo. All were Public School educated Oxbridge men whose beginnings were promising. Mo now self publishes. Seth appears to have been blocked for a number of years. A similar fate might have overtaken Rushdie but for the fatwa. He is a fortunate man whose enemies enabled him to prosper and find peace while pursuing his vocation.
On the other hand, something did die- though this was not glaringly obvious to all till recently- when the Iranians failed to kill Rushdie. It was the notion that political Islam could fuck up aught but its own shitty little intellectual spite slum and vast political ghetto of gormless corruption, criminality and gadarening incompetence. It would be unfair to say that the Iranian 'liberal intelligentsia' died because of the fatwa. They were already brain dead with their food tube linked up to their anus.
Dabashi writes-
By contrast he was little known in India. Most South Asian 'literary aficionados' made it a point not to read South Asian 'literary novels' because they were utterly shite. On the other hand, they did read Collins & Lapierre's 'Freedom at Midnight' because White journalists know how to write in a racy manner. Still there were some who liked 'Midnight's children' because of the vivid, albeit vulgar and gossipy, way it evokes the the Mumbai of the Fifties and early Sixties- things like the Prem Ahuja case which still inspires Bollywood films- and approved its 'compare and contrast' approach to India and Pakistan- Rushdie was unusual in having been a teenager in Karachi- with India coming out ahead. However, even Rushdie's admirers thought he was a light-weight. Naipaul, on the other hand, was taken seriously. He had a journalist's instincts though, unlike Ved Mehta, he didn't understand New Delhi.
Rushdie's third novel 'Shame', set in Pakistan, was not liked by Indians who, for some reason, had a soft spot for Bhutto and a sneaking regard for Zia who looked like the movie star Shatrughan Sinha. However an unauthorized translation was published in Iran where it was well received. It was given a prize by a Government Ministry. Thus Rushdie was considered an 'approved' author and 'Satanic Verses' was freely imported into Iran, but not India, prior to the fatwa.
From the Iranian point of view, killing Rushdie would be popular in India and Pakistan because Rushdie had insulted the Gandhi dynasty, the Bhuttos as well as the dictator Zia. Iran's traditional paranoia about Great Britain would also be served by striking against their poodle.
By contrast, Dabashi thinks the fatwa was about internal Iranian politics.
It is probably unwise to put too fine a point on the precise chronology of events. The truth was bound to come out one way or another. The Montazeri faction had kidnapped and beaten up the Syrian Charge d'affairs and so the Syrians were certain to leak the story when it suited them. Rafsanjani now sought to put in his own people to liaise with Hezbollah and the Syrians. Still, on paper, Montazeri remained Khomeini's heir apparent.
Rafsanjani had fooled the Americans into thinking he was a 'moderate' and that they should ship Iran the arms it needed in return for help with the hostages. But the go-between was a crook who inflated the price tag while Montazeri's people were determined to keep their Hizbollah contacts to themselves. McFarlane made a farcical trip to Teheran, in May 1986, with a Bible personally inscribed by Ronald Reagan. Rafsanjani revealed this comic details in November 1986- when the story broke in Lebanon. By then, Hashemi had been arrested for treason and was being tortured. He confessed a few months later. At this time, Montazeri found it convenient to repackage himself as a 'liberal', resiling from the business of exporting terror. It is this narrative which some progressive Iranians latched on to but it bears little relation to the facts.
With hindsight, it is Rafsanjani who emerges as the smoothest operator. He is believed to have accumulated a billion dollar fortune while retaining an albeit fluctuating political influence to his dying day.
I suppose one could say that Montazeri's criticism of the Rushdie fatwa, which was reported by the BBC (an organization whose Persian desk was blamed by Shah loyalists for Khomeini's rise to power) sealed his fate. The Imam denounced and sacked him. His successor wisely showed forbearance, preferring to trample his rival's turban in the dust rather than make a martyr of him.
It is not the case that senior clerics examine books before giving an opinion- which is all a fatwa is- reaffirming the applicability of Islamic punishments. But this opinion is conditional on the facts presented.
It didn't help that those who might want to challenge this narrative in the West had themselves run away from Muslim countries. Rushdie embraced his new American identity. Professors like Dabashi were more conflicted- but wholly ineffectual.
Dabashi now shifts all the blame from crazy nutjobs like Mehdi Hashemi to poor old Rushdie-
Rushdie could not lead people like Hitchens or Harris because they felt intellectually superior to him. He was supposed to have the inside track on the mysterious Orient- the fucker used to dress up in a kurta pajama when at Cambridge- but clearly was merely a prancing ninny of a parvenu type.
Saladin Chamcha represents the Indian cultural cringe to Upper Class Britain. Had Rushdie become that sort of sycophant he would have written Naipaulian or Niradh Chaudhri type shite. He did nothing of the sort. He stuck to his guns and settled in New York as a bona fide literary celebrity churning out Great Hyphenated American Novels of startling banality.
Rushdie and Mishra are doing what they want to do and getting paid for it. They may have zero political impact but then they did not greatly care for the countries that bred them. In Rushdie case- that was England; in Mishra's- it was India. Fair play to both. They supply a globalized market for semi-literate shite and as such obeyed an invisible hand.
Compare Rushdie's productivity to that of S.P Somtow- who is now better known as a composer- or to Vikram Seth or Timothy Mo. All were Public School educated Oxbridge men whose beginnings were promising. Mo now self publishes. Seth appears to have been blocked for a number of years. A similar fate might have overtaken Rushdie but for the fatwa. He is a fortunate man whose enemies enabled him to prosper and find peace while pursuing his vocation.
On the other hand, something did die- though this was not glaringly obvious to all till recently- when the Iranians failed to kill Rushdie. It was the notion that political Islam could fuck up aught but its own shitty little intellectual spite slum and vast political ghetto of gormless corruption, criminality and gadarening incompetence. It would be unfair to say that the Iranian 'liberal intelligentsia' died because of the fatwa. They were already brain dead with their food tube linked up to their anus.
Dabashi writes-
Thirty years ago, on Valentine's Day, February 14, 1989, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, then the supreme leader of Iran, issued a religious decree, a fatwa, condemning the British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie to death.Up until that fateful decree, the name Salman Rushdie was known only to a community of South Asian literary aficionados admiring a gifted Mumbai-born novelist whose piercing prose and wicked sense of humour had given the world such literary gems as Midnight's Children (1981) and Shame (1983).This is nonsense. Rushdie was well known in England precisely because he was posh, relatively hip and well connected in literary London and, once he gave up Science Fiction, could appeal to a 'Raj nostalgia' kindled by the same socio-economic conditions which were fueling Thatcherism.
By contrast he was little known in India. Most South Asian 'literary aficionados' made it a point not to read South Asian 'literary novels' because they were utterly shite. On the other hand, they did read Collins & Lapierre's 'Freedom at Midnight' because White journalists know how to write in a racy manner. Still there were some who liked 'Midnight's children' because of the vivid, albeit vulgar and gossipy, way it evokes the the Mumbai of the Fifties and early Sixties- things like the Prem Ahuja case which still inspires Bollywood films- and approved its 'compare and contrast' approach to India and Pakistan- Rushdie was unusual in having been a teenager in Karachi- with India coming out ahead. However, even Rushdie's admirers thought he was a light-weight. Naipaul, on the other hand, was taken seriously. He had a journalist's instincts though, unlike Ved Mehta, he didn't understand New Delhi.
Rushdie's third novel 'Shame', set in Pakistan, was not liked by Indians who, for some reason, had a soft spot for Bhutto and a sneaking regard for Zia who looked like the movie star Shatrughan Sinha. However an unauthorized translation was published in Iran where it was well received. It was given a prize by a Government Ministry. Thus Rushdie was considered an 'approved' author and 'Satanic Verses' was freely imported into Iran, but not India, prior to the fatwa.
What had triggered the Ayatollah's ire, and indeed the fury of many other Muslims, particularly in Pakistan, was Rushdie's novel called Satanic Verses which had just come out.The fatwa came out about 6 months after the book was published. India had banned the import of the book and various other countries had followed suit. Only Iran had given a state sponsored prize to the wretched fellow. Thus they upped the ante by putting a price on his head.
The book was written and published in English. The ayatollah did not read English. He was reacting to the reaction of others who had not read the novel either. It was all a comedy of terrors.If the Indians and the South Africans had banned the book, how could Iran do less? They and they alone had given the man a Government award. Furthermore, Rushdie had come across as an arrogant fool in his attempt at getting the Indians to withdraw the ban. The fact is it was a Sikh, Khushwant Singh, who had said the book could not be printed in India. A Hindu official banned the import of the book. Rushdie did not challenge this decision in a court of law. More importantly, he did not play the Kashmir card- i.e. accuse Syed Shahabudin- a former Indian diplomat- of being a Nationalist who was trying to muzzle Rushdie's speaking up on the Kashmir issue by painting him as a kaffir.
From the Iranian point of view, killing Rushdie would be popular in India and Pakistan because Rushdie had insulted the Gandhi dynasty, the Bhuttos as well as the dictator Zia. Iran's traditional paranoia about Great Britain would also be served by striking against their poodle.
By contrast, Dabashi thinks the fatwa was about internal Iranian politics.
It was just a novel In the events that unfolded 30 years ago, timing played a key role. Satanic Verses was first published in the United Kingdom late in September 1988, around a month after Ayatollah Khomeini had begrudgingly agreed to the end of the calamitous Iran-Iraq War.The ending of the war, though a disappointment to the maximal project of exporting Revolution, strengthened the Iranian regime. Basiji and Pasardan militants were now available for internal repression. Had Khomeini been in better health, this might have been the time when he took direct control. At this time, Montazeri- his official successor- was the 'Trotsky' intent on exporting Revolution, while Rafsanjani (who had been marketed to the Americans as the 'moderate') was the Stalin focused on not Socialism in one Country but its equivalent Islamic imbecility.
At that time, his rule was shaken from the discovery of a scheme in which Iran was receiving arms shipments from the United States - or "the Great Satan" as the ayatollah was publicly calling it - in exchange for its help in securing the release of American hostages held by his client outfit, Hezbollah.These revelations- which harmed the Reagan administration- began to leak out in the fall of 1986. It is plausible to say the thing was aimed at Rafasanjani, though it actually damaged Montazeri and his relative who was the leaker. The background was this. Montazeri's people had more leverage over the Hizbollah kidnappers holding American hostages and didn't want to give it up. Moreover, Rafsanjani could be embarrassed because the McFarlane deal involved a SAVAK double agent, turned arms dealer, as well as the Israelis who had been supplying Iran with arms all along. Montazeri probably learned of the deal from the ex-SAVAK arms dealer- thus Montazeri's hands became as soiled as Rafsanjani's. On the other hand, Rafsanjani could appeal to a war weary people as doing a pragmatic deal necessary to defend the country from Saddam's greatly superior air force. The chronology of events suggests that the 'pragmatic faction' had moved against the militant Montazeri faction- imprisoning its foremost member- and that the leak re. the McFarlane visit was their misguided attempt at retaliation. However, Rafsanjani was able to get on top of it and spin things his way. Montazeri's henchman was charged with treason and tortured. Eventually his public confession would sink Montazeri's chances of inheriting Khomeini's mantle. One reason for this was that Khomeini's own son, Ahmad, knew about the McFarlane visit and was unhappy with Montazeri's henchman for leaking the matter.
It is probably unwise to put too fine a point on the precise chronology of events. The truth was bound to come out one way or another. The Montazeri faction had kidnapped and beaten up the Syrian Charge d'affairs and so the Syrians were certain to leak the story when it suited them. Rafsanjani now sought to put in his own people to liaise with Hezbollah and the Syrians. Still, on paper, Montazeri remained Khomeini's heir apparent.
Between "the Iran-Contra Affair" in 1986, as it was more notoriously known in the US, and the end of Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), Khomeini was politically outmanoeuvred and in desperate need of subterfuge for his next moves.Khomeini's position was unassailable precisely because everything was delegated. His health was poor. He was the Lenin whose stamp upon the regime would persist no matter whether a Trotsky or a Stalin succeeded him. What was unclear was Montazeri's true position. A Leader may deliberately designate a successor more unpalatable than himself. Was it plausible that the Imam would let a non Sayyad be Supreme Leader? As a matter of fact, thanks to Rafsanjani, the succession went to Khameni, a Sayyad like Khomeini himself. Meanwhile, the guy who leaked the Iran-Contra deal was tortured and had publicly confessed on TV that he had been sexually seduced by SAVAK and Satan and so on, to do unspeakable things. His close connection with Montazeri was emphasized. He was executed in Sept. 1987
The mass execution of political prisoners in 1986 by his direct order,This started in July 1988, not 1986. How can we trust this Professor's pronouncements on his own home country if he gets such elementary facts wrong?
the sustained course of university purges since the commencement of the revolution, and the engineering of Hezbollah in Lebanon since the Israeli invasion of 1982 were necessary but not sufficient for him.There was no subterfuge about the purging of the Universities. Helping Lebanese Shias- for which Mohtashemi must get much credit- was a sound policy which continues to this day. It is unclear what internal enemy the author thinks Khomeini had to fear at this time. The truth is the Regime was settling scores and dealing with unfinished business. The War was over and the Imam's battle hardened basijis were available to secure total control over the country. It is true that the MeK had launched a suicidal attack with just 7000 troops in July '88, but this just confirmed Khomeini's unassailability. I suppose it was a good time to free up prison space. There was no longer any need to keep prisoners as a possible bargaining chip, or a means to split an opposition coalition.
He wanted to guarantee the perpetuity of the theocracy he had established and he had a reason to worry about its future.Khomeini did guarantee precisely this. What reason had he to worry about the future?
Mehdi Hashemi, the Iranian liaison who helped expose the Iran-Contra Affair in 1986, was a close ally to Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, an heir apparent to Ayatollah Khomeini, who had incensed him with his opposition to the mass execution of political prisoners and who was about to be demoted for his disobedience.Hashemi was much more than a 'liaison'. The guy was a nutter smuggling arms into Saudi Arabia and beating Syrian diplomats and getting up to all sorts of crazy shit. He had been the leader of Montazeri's armed following and now proved to be that worthy's Achilles heel. It was said that 'dog did not eat dog' in the Ayatollah's Iran- i.e. the clerics did not kill each other- but Hashemi was so crazy, he was defrocked and executed for some sort of Satanic deviation.
Rafsanjani had fooled the Americans into thinking he was a 'moderate' and that they should ship Iran the arms it needed in return for help with the hostages. But the go-between was a crook who inflated the price tag while Montazeri's people were determined to keep their Hizbollah contacts to themselves. McFarlane made a farcical trip to Teheran, in May 1986, with a Bible personally inscribed by Ronald Reagan. Rafsanjani revealed this comic details in November 1986- when the story broke in Lebanon. By then, Hashemi had been arrested for treason and was being tortured. He confessed a few months later. At this time, Montazeri found it convenient to repackage himself as a 'liberal', resiling from the business of exporting terror. It is this narrative which some progressive Iranians latched on to but it bears little relation to the facts.
So in February 1989, the Iranian supreme leader was very much preoccupied with guaranteeing the continuation of the Islamic Republic he had established.Khomeini was 86 years old, in poor health, and not directly involved in most things. His son, Ahmad, was his chief of staff. He had become incensed with Montazeri over the latter's support for Mehdi Hashemi.
With hindsight, it is Rafsanjani who emerges as the smoothest operator. He is believed to have accumulated a billion dollar fortune while retaining an albeit fluctuating political influence to his dying day.
He needed to order a redrafting of the constitution in a way to allow his devoted follower Ali Khamenei (the current supreme leader of Iran), who had nowhere near the qualifications of Montazeri, to succeed him.Montazeri's days were numbered. He was linked to active treason at a time when 'the War of the Cities' was at its worst. The Hashemi confession had damaged him beyond repair. The returning Basijis would in any case be in no mood to tolerate the re-emergence of 'liberal' politicians.
I suppose one could say that Montazeri's criticism of the Rushdie fatwa, which was reported by the BBC (an organization whose Persian desk was blamed by Shah loyalists for Khomeini's rise to power) sealed his fate. The Imam denounced and sacked him. His successor wisely showed forbearance, preferring to trample his rival's turban in the dust rather than make a martyr of him.
He needed yet another smokescreen, just like the American Hostage Crisis of 1979-1981, which had allowed him to consolidate power by wiping out his political rivals.Why would Khomeini need 'smoke screens'? Reagan might. He could be impeached or tried in a Court of Law. But not Khomeini. He had fanatical basijis at his command in 1989 and no internal or external enemy. By contrast, in 1980 he was menaced by Saddam as well as the Left.
Rushdie's Satanic Verses showed up at an opportune time. It had come out of nowhere and the ayatollah would take it somewhere else.What actually happened was that Khomeini was asked about the book by some visitors. This was in the context of anti Rushdie riots in neighboring Pakistan. Since Khomeini's family was associated with India- his own poetic name being 'the Indian'- he uttered the usual sort of fatwa which the Iranian State picked up and ran with. It was a smart move. Had the Iranians actually managed to kill Rushdie, it would have been a big foreign policy win. In particular it would have had a positive effect on Pakistan where the Dictator Zia, who had sponsored some anti Shiah violence, had been killed in a suspicious air crash a few months previously. This meant the Bhutto dynasty- which, for some reason, was considered 'tafzili' or half Shiah- had come back to, if not the reality, then the semblance of power.
It is not the case that senior clerics examine books before giving an opinion- which is all a fatwa is- reaffirming the applicability of Islamic punishments. But this opinion is conditional on the facts presented.
At issue were certain passages in the novel some Muslims had found blasphemous. In November 1988, the book was banned in Pakistan, where demonstrations had broken out. Rallies within expat South Asian communities in the UK also took place. An international bandwagon was emerging and Khomeini readily jumped on it.Khomeini was a very old, very distinguished jurist. He did not 'jump on bandwagons'. People came to him. In this case, the Iranian State decided that Khomeini's opinion was binding because, they asserted, the conditions for its application had been met. Rafsanjani, around this time, was telling the Palestinians to kill Brits and Americans coz killing Israelis was difficult and those fuckers retaliate big time. Rushdie was a Brit who could have had Pakistani, but not Indian, dual nationality. The Tory Government of the UK wasn't keen on Rushdie but they had to protect him from an evil foreign government. The Pakistanis, on the other hand, would have been happiest if one of their own won the Iranian prize (which however would only pay out a smaller amount if a non Iranian did the deed).
On Valentine's Day 1989, he issued a fatwa (a legal opinion or decree handed down by an Islamic religious authority) ordering the execution of Salman Rushdie. The misfortunate (sic) author went into hiding. There was a global outcry against Khomeini's illiberal book review.But, in South Asia, there was little support for Rushdie even from the Left. In the UK, there was a reaction against Rushdie who came across as an arrogant creep. His Jewish wife left him. It took some time for the Americans to warm to him and there was a period when it was the deeply boring Europeans who alone were fussing over him. Then, it turned out, American women found him sexy- something no one saw coming. His YA novel- 'Haroun & the Ocean of Stories'- wasn't wholly terrible and had a certain poignancy. The stage was set for him to move to America and to reinvent himself as what he had always wanted to be- a Great, albeit Hyphenated, American Novelist.
As the mostly Western indignation grew louder, the Ayatollah quickly pushed through the formation of a constitutional assembly to revise the constitution of his Islamic Republic and prepare Khamenei to succeed him.Nobody gave a toss about 'Western indignation'. The Iranian clerics had prevailed and some would get very rich over the succeeding years.
He knew he did not have much time left. In many significant ways, the "Salman Rushdie Affair" marked the start of the rise of Islamophobia in the US and Europe, affecting millions of Muslim communities and particularly, the refugees forced to flee their homelands.Muslims killing innocent people in the West caused fear and hatred of Muslims. A number of women from fanatical Muslim countries wrote books about how fucking horrible Muslim men are. That too had an effect. Then you get crazy Egyptians trying to blow up the twin Towers and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Al Qaeeda and so forth. Art Malik goes from playing James Bond's friend, in 1987, to Arnie Schwarznegger's foe in 1994. He was more impressive in the latter role. Hollywood, like Rushdie's 'Fury', proved prescient. The Muslims were the new bad guys and they just kept getting better in that role till finally, with ISIS, they became the ultimate hostis humani generis.
It didn't help that those who might want to challenge this narrative in the West had themselves run away from Muslim countries. Rushdie embraced his new American identity. Professors like Dabashi were more conflicted- but wholly ineffectual.
Dabashi now shifts all the blame from crazy nutjobs like Mehdi Hashemi to poor old Rushdie-
Rushdie himself became a key culprit in fomenting that hatred against Islam and Muslims.How? He killed nobody. Anyway, he apostatized. Saying 'Veils suck' doesn't carry much of a sting if the guy himself is clearly a double bagger. Had he, like me, retained the obligatory paper bag over his head, his wives might not have left him so frequently.
As Ayatollah Khomeini led the militant Muslim fanatics, Rushdie did the same with Islamophobe liberal imperialists like Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, with Muslim communities inadvertently getting caught in between.'Liberal imperialists'? Is this guy serious? Nobody wants to rule Muslim lands. Why? It's coz suicide bombers are very effective. Fear is a good thing if it makes occupying forces shit themselves and scream loudly to be allowed to go home.
Rushdie could not lead people like Hitchens or Harris because they felt intellectually superior to him. He was supposed to have the inside track on the mysterious Orient- the fucker used to dress up in a kurta pajama when at Cambridge- but clearly was merely a prancing ninny of a parvenu type.
The venom Khomeini unleashed onto Rushdie, Rushdie directed at masses of millions of Muslims living dangerously exposed around the globe.Nonsense! In Moor's last Sigh, he attacked the anti-Muslim Shiv Sena thus rehabilitating himself with the Indians- a process completed by his Kashmir book- Shalimar the Clown. True, both are shite but then all South Asian literature is shite. What mattered is that Rushdie was stressing his Mumbaiker, middle class, roots. He married a glamorous South Indian origin Hindu celebrity TV chef just as Naipaul married an aristocratic Pakistani.
Running away from Khomeini's edict, the author rushed back into his own novel and become one of its characters. He nudged Salahuddin Chamchawala out of the book and took his place.Dabashi may have run away from Iran- he certainly doesn't seem to have returned to be conscripted into the Army to keep Saddam's hordes at bay- but Rushdie was hiding, not running. He didn't settle in America till a decade after the fatwa. But he was already a meme. The 'Sall Bass' episode of Seinfeld dates to 1993.
Saladin Chamcha represents the Indian cultural cringe to Upper Class Britain. Had Rushdie become that sort of sycophant he would have written Naipaulian or Niradh Chaudhri type shite. He did nothing of the sort. He stuck to his guns and settled in New York as a bona fide literary celebrity churning out Great Hyphenated American Novels of startling banality.
The death of a novel
Critical theorists as diverse as Jose Ortega y Gasset, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes have written on the idea of the death of a novel as a genre.But they were as stupid as shit. The creations of J.K Rowling and George R.R Martin will live when Barthes is long forgotten.
The heydays of the genre in 18th and 19th century Europe are certainly nowhere to be seen or read any more.This guy's English isn't very good. I doubt people will stop reading Moll Flanders or Tom Jones or Scott or Austen so long as the English language is spoken.
But the European literary theorists could not have imagined the ingenious ways in which postcolonial novelists like Chinua Achebe, Assia Djebar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Arundhati Roy, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jamaica Kincaid, or Salman Rushdie would reinvent the genre.It is foolish to compare people like Achebe or Marquez or Ngugi, who had a political impact on their own people, with Rushdie and Roy who are Anglophile gadflies simply.
Rushdie's earlier books, Midnight Children and Shame, dealing with the banalities of the postcolonial state, were a delightful read.They were deeply silly but better written because Rushdie was closer to his material emotionally.
And for those of us who were lucky enough to read it before the storm began (sometime between September 1988 and February 1989), Satanic Verses too proved to be a remarkable novel.It was dreadful. Rushdie didn't have enough material for it. His method of pastiche turned to pure pantomime. This was the prancing ninny applying for not just aesthetic but also intellectual affirmative action.
It was a masterpiece dealing with the postcolonial immigrant communities moving into the metropole of their tormentors.Fuck off! London is great for South Asians. Paris may not be for 'colored' immigrants. In London, people own their own houses which appreciate greatly in value which means one can always return home and live it up like a Sahib. But why would one want to return? Everything is here. Your kid can go to her Bharatnatyam or Kathak class while you gorge on authentic biryani or masala dosa or whatever. It is true that one's English suffers because you get used to speaking Urdu or Punjabi or Tamil but the same thing can happen even in New Delhi or Islamabad if you aren't careful. On the other hand, one does sometimes have some unpleasant racialist encounters with White Supremacists from Ludhiana.
But the day after the ayatollah's fatwa, no one could possibly read it as a novel any more.Why not? Nobody gives a toss about Iran- not even Iranians who have any sense.
The Islamophobes had a field day with it, as did their kindred souls and devoted brethren among the militant Islamists.Both types of nutter are seldom encountered by readers of pretentious middle brow shite.
Satanic Verses was the first casualty of the Salman Rushdie affair and the last novel that Salman Rushdie would write - no matter how many more he published. After February 1989, it ceased to be read on its own merits or maladies. It became an allegory, an icon, a dead certainty - non-Muslims used it to explain or to camouflage their anti-Muslim hatred, and Muslims - to denounce "the West" and its plots against the Muslim world.There remained no room in between where any sane human being could sit down and read Satanic Verses for what it was worth, form an opinion one way or another, and move on with his or her life.The novel did reveal that Rushdie was a silly man- a prancing ninny- but this scarcely mattered. He was providing mere entertainment.
The world demanded a political position on a literary work of art, which had just been "assassinated". Satanic Verses stopped being a novel and became a manifesto. And like his work, Rushdie, too, met the same fate. He continued to write and publish one book after another, but not a single word of fiction he wrote after that fateful fatwa could possibly be read without the prism of "the Salman Rushdie affair".Not in India or Britain. People understood that he'd fucked up by going after bigger game than his peashooter could put down. But once he fell back to earth and concentrated on lampooning people like Bal Thackeray, he was rehabilitated.
This was not just the now proverbial "death of the author", but the death of his fiction too, the art of his ventriloquism, where, when, and how he could be heard speaking in tongues. But the world moves and so does the manner in which a genre responds to the changing realities of life. When Rushdie ceased to be read as a novelist, all it took was for Aravind Adiga to come to the fore with his exquisite and powerful The White Tiger (2008) for us to realise what we lost in once a glorious novelist that lived in Rushdie we have gained in a younger, more potent, more grounded, novelist of piercing power.Nobody now reads Adiga. He has sunk without a trace. Why not mention Chetan Bhagat instead?
While Rushdie had begun on the colonial sites of India and Pakistan and moved to the immigrant mayhem of Europe, Adiga would take us back to the pandemonium of the predatory capital now globalised between India and China, made indistinguishable from the amorphous vacuity of the metropole itself.Oh dear! This cretin thinks Adiga was a Leftist!
Who now cares to follow the adventures of Salman Rushdie or what he continues to write? Perhaps only the rare chroniclers of our dreams and despairs like Pankaj Mishra and his saintly patience have the capacity to care what the author of that lost novel Satanic Verses has to say to a world that has moved on from his momentary perils and infinite promises.Pankaj Mishra chronicles this elderly fool's 'dreams and despairs'. No wonder Iran became, and will remain, a theocracy!
Rushdie and Mishra are doing what they want to do and getting paid for it. They may have zero political impact but then they did not greatly care for the countries that bred them. In Rushdie case- that was England; in Mishra's- it was India. Fair play to both. They supply a globalized market for semi-literate shite and as such obeyed an invisible hand.
Sunday, 20 October 2019
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-
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.
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.
'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.
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.
Meghnad Desai on why he isn't useless
Lord Meghnad Desai writes-
Indian politicians cared so little about the Western Press that Morarji Desai regaled Dan Rather with tales of his own urine drinking. He knew that if the Americans laughed at him then the Indian press would rally to his support. Indian politicians gain if they are presented as monsters by the West. The Indian expat's nationalist instincts kick in. Modi has benefited financially by Western hostility. Wealthy NRI's switched support to his party. This phenomenon is not confined to India. Erdogan gained support from the large Turkish community in Germany when the German press painted him in diabolical colors.
The best example of a politician antagonizing the foreign press is Krishna Menon. He parleyed Western hostility into a seat in the Cabinet before his own stupidity and incompetence brought him down.
The most intriguing question of modern Indian history of the last 75 years is why did Indira Gandhi call an election in March 1977?This is not an intriguing question at all. The answer is obvious. Indira was her Party's biggest vote catcher. Her son's coterie wasn't popular. Whether she won or lost the election was irrelevant because Indira, quite rightly, believed the Opposition was utterly useless. So, whether she returned as Prime Minister or returned as Congress's only hope of recapturing power, it was only she who would win= even if her party lost. This would increase her power and, paradoxically, also turn her party into an officially dynastic vehicle. But it would be a Hindu, not Moghul, type of dynastic party. Sonny boy wouldn't be able to bump of his parent to take the throne. He'd have to be a 'samskari' good little boy till Mummy finally popped her clogs or got assassinated by a genuine enemy rather than as a result of a plot by Sanjay's chums.
She did not have to. The Opposition was in jail. While some underground activity was going on, Indira Gandhi was in complete control of the government, the Army and the judiciary. Her son and chosen successor Sanjay was telling her to not bother about an election. The president was in her pocket. She was constitutionally within her power to rule for as long as she liked.But she thought her won power relative to Sanjay's gang would increase because she would either win the election or else become her son's only chance to get back power. As a matter of fact, Sanjay and Maneka did play a role in Indira's return to power. However, for Sanjay, it was a chastening experience. He understood that you have to be nice to people as you rise to the top because you will meet the same people once you begin your descent. If you shoved your boot in their face when ascending, they would do the same when you were descending.
This was just a story. Indira did not care about the New Statesman. Few, even in England did.
But she called an election. Her secret services told her she would win. They were wrong. Of the many stories about her decision was one which said she could not stand the international criticism which was appearing in New Statesman.
Foreign leaders such as Labour Party leader Michael Foot sentimentally backed her, but there was unease abroad.Her own husband had called her a Fascist for dismissing the Communist administration in Kerala. The foreign press had attacked Nehru's annexation of Goa. Indira had the lowest possible opinion of 'useful idiots' in the Press.
Indira Gandhi wanted to ensure that she could prove to the British that she was democratically popular.She didn't give a flying fuck about the Brits. What she wanted was more power within India and winning an election was the way to bring that about.
That the people should not care about the politicians in jail as they were just troublemakers. She was Mother India.'Mother India' was the title of Katherine Mayo's book. Indira was not such a fool as to want to be seen as the Mother of hundreds of millions of half starved Indians.
What moved her is a fundamental fact about Indian politics, whichever party is in power. The fact is that India and its politicians exist in a goldfish bowl where they are acutely aware of the Western gaze.This is sheer nonsense. Indian politicians only care about the Indian press- even expat Indian journals. Thus, the Indian High Commission in London spent a lot of time subsidizing the Gujerati and Punjabi and one Bengali owned English newsletter. The Press Counsellor would, from time to time, dine with British journalists but their job was to discourage interest. I recall my Dad meeting a British writer who wanted to do a biography of Indira Gandhi. Since his previous book was on Catherine the Great, Dad did his best to paint Indira as a deeply boring person- not a man-eating despot- and so, thankfully, the book was never written.
Indian politicians cared so little about the Western Press that Morarji Desai regaled Dan Rather with tales of his own urine drinking. He knew that if the Americans laughed at him then the Indian press would rally to his support. Indian politicians gain if they are presented as monsters by the West. The Indian expat's nationalist instincts kick in. Modi has benefited financially by Western hostility. Wealthy NRI's switched support to his party. This phenomenon is not confined to India. Erdogan gained support from the large Turkish community in Germany when the German press painted him in diabolical colors.
The best example of a politician antagonizing the foreign press is Krishna Menon. He parleyed Western hostility into a seat in the Cabinet before his own stupidity and incompetence brought him down.
The press of Asian countries or Latin American countries does not matter. In a way nor does German or Italian press. It is foreign English-language press and, to some extent, BBC Radio and TV. Politicians are sensitive souls. Whatever nonchalance they pretend to, a disapproval from a foreign Western source hurts.Very true! Modiji weeps every time the Guardian publishes an article by Pankaj Mishra. He drunk dials Desai and babbles brokenly to him in Gujarati.
Historically, Indians have never looked Eastwards.Which is why there are no words of Sanskrit origin in Malay or Vietnamese or Khmer. There are no Buddhists in China or Korea or Japan because Indians never looked Eastward.
They do not think they are Asians.But many Asian countries draw inspiration from Indian religion and culture.
Sir William Jones discovered in the late Eighteenth century (while he was the judge for East India Company’s Law Courts) that Sanskrit had affinity with Greek and Latin and called them an Indo-European family of languages.So what? In ancient India, there were some savants who believed all languages to be related.
It worked like magic and ever since Indians have thought of themselves as European.Fuck off! Desai may think of himself as having a complexion of peaches and cream. But nobody else does.
Indian leaders went Westwards to study — Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, Sardar Patel, B R Ambedkar, or even to preach as Vivekananda did.They did so at a time when everybody went Westward to study coz the West was way ahead in Science and Technology.
Rabindranath Tagore is the sole leader who went as readily to Japan and China as to the West.Ras Behari Bose settled in Japan a year before Tagore, en route to America, stopped there.
A recent example of this sensitivity to Western opinion came when the British Labour Party passed a resolution on Kashmir.This pissed off Indian origin British people who complained vociferously. We now make an equation between anti-semitism and anti-Indian sentiment. Suella Braverman and Priti Patel are our heroes. My local Labor Council leader goes out of his way to tell people with Hindu names that he has sacked an anti-semite on his staff. People like Desai, on the other hand, are wholly useless.
It was critical of the Modi government. It could hardly be surprising, but the reaction in India was furious.There was no reaction in India. Nobody gives a fart about the British Labor party.
How dare the Labour Party criticise the Indian government? But then the Kashmir issue has been discussed in most years at the party’s annual conference. The Labour Party has many members of the South Asian diaspora as its members. When I was active at the conference, I recall there were always resolutions sent by local parties to the conference. They were sent by parties with members who had migrated from Mirpur (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir), Pakistan, India taking diametrically opposite stands. These resolutions would be composited into one common resolution which would be debated by the conference. Nothing much happened to these resolutions, whether passed or not.When these cretin decided to go after the Jews, on the other hand, the Party got a kicking. Hindus now ally with Jews and increasingly vote Tory or Lib Dem. Labour is welcome to cuddle with the crazies.
All these years no one has paid any attention to Labour Party resolutions. The reaction reflects much more Indian sensitivity than any practical consequence of the resolution. Why are people so sensitive?They are not sensitive at all. Perhaps some people are telling Desai that he is a useless and senile fellow. It seems he is a thin skinned fellow. So he writes this silly article pretending that Indians are hypersensitive because they all believe they are actually Europeans and use toilet paper to wipe their bums, not water as God intended.
Saturday, 19 October 2019
Is Ussama Makdisi stupider than Sanjay Subhramamanyam?
Update- following Makdisi's post a twitter campaign has been started- sadly, by just me -coz this Makdisi fucker is a Professor at Rice- i.e a campus which was grabbed from indigenous people by White colonialists- and fucking lives in a house on similarly grabbed land. Yet this cunt pretends that the tender care other White Great Powers took of his amcestors' White Ass was actually morally equivalent to what happened to non Whites- or people seen as non-White, like the Jews or Iyers (who are being systematically genocided by Iyengars). Fuck you Makdisi! You are shit- like every other Makdisi, Said or Sirhan Sirhan America has promoted. How dare you challenge Indian Professors for the title of most imbecilic creature on the planet?
Indian historians are no longer the indisputably stupidest on the planet. They have competition from Ussama Makdisi- a Professor at Rice. Can he write a single sentence which isn't egregiously false or utterly foolish? Let us examine an essay of his in Aeon magazine to find out.
Why does the author speak of 'notionally age-old sectarian hatreds'? These hatreds are all too real and continue to operate in an increasingly virulent form to this very day. This is not the fault of the Brits or the French but, rather, is the fault of Arab politicians and clerics.
The Somalis chose to accept Italy as the mandatory power after the Second World War precisely because they could see that Mandates worked as advertised. Still, they made the wrong choice. The Brits were offering Greater Somalia but the Somalis distrusted them.
British 'indirect rule' required traditional Kings or Chieftains who had at least some grass-roots support. This is what was lacking in Syria for the Hashemites. However, in Iraq, King Feisal was able to arrive at a modus vivendi with various tribal leaders and local magnates so Iraq became independent in 1931.
Not content with pretending that the Ottoman Caliphate was 'interconnected', our Professor now says something more startling yet-
To be clear, Palestinians only recently gained an identity as 'Arab'. But the distinction between 'Muslim' and 'Jew' goes back 1500 years. Furthermore, 'quawmiyya'- pan-Arab nationalism- as opposed to 'wataniya' patriotism- has always had a Religious tinge. The Muslims are the purer Arabs and non-Muslims have a subordinate position.
We can see why having a Mandatory power could fast-track a country to full effective sovereignty by comparing Saudi Arabia with Syria or Iraq. The latter had superior administrative and military capacity till very recently. It took a long time for Saudi Arabia to become self-assertive in the same way and it is by no means certain that it will succeed.
Anyway, the Ottomans established themselves by relentless aggression and fell because their military capacity declined for purely internal reasons.
By contrast, the Austrians did a deal with the Hungarians and gained a new lease of life. However, absorbing more Southern Slavs proved a bad idea. The Hapsburgs lost their throne because of their taste for the flesh of Europe's sick man.
Anyway, the Damascus massacres were the outcome of a Christian vs Druze battle.
Why is this cretin pretending that there was a United Nations and International Court of Justice way back then? Is he truly as utterly ignorant of History as a Professor at JNU? No. But he thinks Aeon readers are. Fair play to him. In the age of Trump, he is our Thucydides.
Of course if there ever had been a genuine Ottoman 'wataniyya' identity, these problems would never have arisen. In other words, this Professor has been writing bollocks.
Even if the Brits said it was a treaty, by their own laws, it could be no such thing. The price paid by the Hashemites for insisting the thing was a treaty was that they lost their own ancestral seat because the Brits withdrew their support. Thus the Hashemites changed tune and kept Jordan and Iraq as British clients.
We now come to the crux of this author's delusion. Judging by his surname, he may be a Protestant Christian with Palestinian or Lebanese roots. Like every other atavistic ancestor worshiper he harks back to a just-so story about how the Holy Land ought to have been his people's- with American help.
The real tragedy of the region is that fuckers like this fuckwit blame Whitey for all their troubles, yet are White themselves. I mean, the thing is cool when I do it coz I also put a bone through my nose and wear a grass skirt, but this guy is like totally White Bread and Ivy League.
On the other hand, Israel isn't shit at all. Why? It wasn't something nurtured into existence by the Brits or the French or anybody else. Its justice system does owe something to the Brits and in this matter it is like Cyprus. But everything else is indigenous. Zionism emerged at the same time, or a little later, than the Arab Nadha. But it wasn't vacuous shite. Initially, it featured kibbutzes not just kibitzing. Now it is a knowledge economy, with the Army being the biggest tech incubator. Meanwhile Professors like this cretin are, very unfairly, trying to compete with Indian savants for the title or most ignorant historian ever.
I suggest to him that he read the works of Sanjay Subhramanyam or Ramachandra Guha and pray to be reborn as an Iyer in his next life. Then and only then will he attain his aim.
Indian historians are no longer the indisputably stupidest on the planet. They have competition from Ussama Makdisi- a Professor at Rice. Can he write a single sentence which isn't egregiously false or utterly foolish? Let us examine an essay of his in Aeon magazine to find out.
The Arab East was among the last regions in the world to be colonised by Western powers.Nonsense! It was among the first to be colonized- the Crusader Kingdoms lasted from 1099 to 1291. The Portuguese occupied Muscat from 1507 to 1650. However, unlike Algeria or Libya, the Levant was not colonized by European nation states.
It was also the first to be colonised in the name of self-determination.Rubbish! A League of Nations mandate was not a colony. Some Europeans did settle in Egypt and had to flee from Nasser, but none settled in the Levant save one or two eccentrics.
An iconic photograph from September 1920 of the French colonial general Henri Gouraud dressed in a splendid white uniform and flanked by two ‘native’ religious figures captures this moment.What moment? A moment of colonization? Nothing of sort occurred. Gouraud commanded the Fourth Army and liberated Strasbourg. To call his a 'colonial general' is as silly as calling Wellington a 'sepoy general'. The suggestio falsi here is that France was hoodwinking the League of Nations and planned to do to Syria what it had done to Algeria ninety years previously.
Seated to one side is the Patriarch of the Maronite Church, an Eastern Christian Catholic sect.This is true. But why refer to the guy as 'native' in inverted commas? He was a native of the place. It would have been peculiar if he were from Norway or Ecuador.
On the other side is the Sunni Muslim Mufti of Beirut.Equally true- but how is this sinister? Gouraud represented the Mandatory power. The two clergymen represented the indigenous religions. They were not assenting to French conquest or colonialism. Rather they were accepting French help to become fully sovereign members of the League on an equal footing with France.
Gouraud’s proclamation of the state of Greater Lebanon, or Grand Liban, which was carved out of the lands of the defeated Ottoman empire, served as the occasion.The Ottomans had been defeated, in part, by Arabs. The suggestio falsi here is that the victors were carving up spoils of war.
With Britain’s blessing, France had occupied Syria two months earlier and overthrown the short-lived, constitutional Arab Kingdom of Syria.It was the League of Nations which conferred the mandate for Syria and Lebanon on the French. King Feisal agreed to depend solely on the French and it is possible that the Arab Kingdom could have survived a little longer on this basis. However, his hot headed Defence Minister attacked the French with a tiny force. Thus Feisal was chucked out of Syria, though the Brits found him a throne in Iraq while his brother got Jordan- which crown the Hashemites retain to this day. The father was less lucky, losing Hejaz to the Ibn Saud because he had antagonized the Brits. He assumed the title of Caliph but nobody took any notice of him. His own son lost patience with him and so the old man was an exile in Cyprus till he had a stroke and was able to return to Jordan to die. The real story about the 'constitutional' Kingdom of Syria is that it was a mirage. It had no local support. The Hashemites were outsiders. In Jordan and Iraq, they were able to survive by accepting British help. Indeed, Jordon which remained a British Mandate longest, had the best Army in the Arab League. In Syria, Feisal could have survived by depending on the French. What was impossible for the Hashemites was to sustain themselves on any throne anywhere, even their native Mecca, without Great Power help.
The pretext offered for this late colonialism was one that continues to be used today.Really? Is the United Nations handing out Mandates to the great powers?
The alleged object of France in the Orient was not to aggrandise itself, but to lead its inhabitants, particularly its diverse and significant minority populations of Lebanon, towards freedom and independence.Which is precisely what happened. This is no allegation. It is a precise statement of fact.
France separated the Christian-dominated state of Lebanon from the rest of geographic Syria, which itself was parcelled out along sectarian Alawi, Druze and Sunni polities under overarching French dominion.In other words, France respected the principle of self-determination. It may not have had the British flair for doing things cheaply- France had 30,000 in Syria while Britain had only a few hundred in Iraq- but what it was doing was not colonialism but Nation building. The fact is Sunnis don't seem to like Alawis- which is why Syria is such a mess. Lebanon has been a mess for even longer because even the Maronites don't get along with each other. The Shias were an underclass who have now asserted themselves. Out of all the successor states to the League of Nations Mandates, Israel alone is in good shape.
This late colonialism was allegedly meant to liberate the peoples of the Arab world from the tyranny of the Ottoman Muslim ‘Turk’ and from the depredations of notionally age-old sectarian hatreds.Why is 'Turk' in inverted commas? The Ottomans were Turks and the Young Turks spoke Turkish and were Pan-Turanian nationalists. They had alienated the Arabs which is why many Arabs supported the Allies. However, the Arabs were in no position to rule themselves. They needed help. Even Ibn Saud took a British subsidy and did a deal with the Americans.
Why does the author speak of 'notionally age-old sectarian hatreds'? These hatreds are all too real and continue to operate in an increasingly virulent form to this very day. This is not the fault of the Brits or the French but, rather, is the fault of Arab politicians and clerics.
Thus General Gouraud appeared in the photograph not as a vanquisher of supposedly barbarous native tribes; he was neither a modern Hernán Cortés toppling the Aztec Montezuma nor a French reincarnation of Andrew Jackson destroying the Seminoles of Florida.Nor was he a can-can dancer. Why saw what he was not in order to suggest that he was indeed that very thing?
The French colonial general who had served in Niger, Chad and Morocco was portrayed as an indispensable peacemaker and benevolent arbiter between what the Europeans claimed to be the antagonistic communities of the Orient.This French general's exploits in Africa pale into insignificance compared to his leading the Fourth Army against the Germans. The 'inhabitants of the Orient' were and are deeply antagonistic to each other. If this were not the case, the place would be easy to rule.
The colonisation of the Arab East had come after that of the Americas, South and Southeastern Asia, and Africa.Muscat is Arab and in the East. It came under Portuguese control at the start of the Sixteenth Century. The Brits had Aden from 1839 to 1967 while the U.A.E became independent in 1971 after about a century and a half of British paramountcy.
This last great spurt of colonial conquest ostensibly repudiated the brutal and rapacious rule of the kind that King Leopold of Belgium had visited upon the Congo in the late-19th century.Because it was not colonial conquest at all. France received a Mandate which it discharged in a reasonable manner.
Instead, after the First World War, Europeans ruled through euphemism: a so-called ‘mandate’ system dominated by ‘advanced’ powers was established by the new British-and-French-dominated League of Nations to aid less-able nations.Nonsense! Europeans ruled their colonies one way. They ruled mandates somewhat differently. Thus there was never any question of permanent White settlement in the Tanganyika mandate, whereas at one time the Brits did think of keeping Kenya, which had become a Crown Colony at around the same time.
The new Lebanese and Syrian states blessed by the League were ‘provisionally’ independent, yet subject to mandatory European tutelage.Yes, unlike African mandates, these were 'Class A mandates' being fast tracked to full independence- which is precisely what happened.
The Somalis chose to accept Italy as the mandatory power after the Second World War precisely because they could see that Mandates worked as advertised. Still, they made the wrong choice. The Brits were offering Greater Somalia but the Somalis distrusted them.
Drawing on the British experience of ‘indirect’ rule in Africa, the victorious powers cultivated a native facade to obscure the coloniser’s hand.Rubbish! The Mandatory power sought to magnify, not obscure, its military power. It was not cultivating a facade because, once the Americans turned isolationist, there was nothing stopping them from dropping any pretense in this regard. Had the Americans stayed in, then it is possible that France would have lost its Syria mandate because of local opposition to it as reported by the King-Crane commission.
British 'indirect rule' required traditional Kings or Chieftains who had at least some grass-roots support. This is what was lacking in Syria for the Hashemites. However, in Iraq, King Feisal was able to arrive at a modus vivendi with various tribal leaders and local magnates so Iraq became independent in 1931.
Perhaps most importantly, this late colonialism claimed to respect the new ideals of the US president Woodrow Wilson, the presumptive father of so-called ‘self-determination’ of peoples around the world.French and British Mandates did become independent. Unlike German concessions in China which Japan seized and never had any intention of leaving, the European mandatory powers played by the book. However, they found the thing an expensive pain in the ass. Indeed, the whole world has now come to look upon this region as massive headache.
Throughout modern history, the weight of Western colonialism in the name of freedom and religious liberty has distorted the nature of the Middle East.But not so much as those lovely guys have distorted the fuck out of each other with any weapon they can lay their hands on.
It has transformed the political geography of the region by creating a series of small and dependent Middle Eastern states and emirates where once stood a large interconnected Ottoman sultanate.Which was loathed by all even more than they loathed each other. The Ottomans neglected their Arab provinces and their paramountcy was merely nominal along the coast and wholly notional among the scattered oases of the peninsula. The Young Turks were nationalists- indeed there were Jews among their number- and this alienated the Muslim Arabs.
Not content with pretending that the Ottoman Caliphate was 'interconnected', our Professor now says something more startling yet-
It introduced a new – and still unresolved – conflict between ‘Arab’ and ‘Jew’ in Palestine just when a new Arab identity that included Muslim, Christian and Jewish Arabs appeared most promising.This is utterly mad! Political Islam- as opposed to hereditary Islamic potentates- has proved time and time again to be utterly lethal not just to non Muslims but also to the wrong sort of Muslims.
To be clear, Palestinians only recently gained an identity as 'Arab'. But the distinction between 'Muslim' and 'Jew' goes back 1500 years. Furthermore, 'quawmiyya'- pan-Arab nationalism- as opposed to 'wataniya' patriotism- has always had a Religious tinge. The Muslims are the purer Arabs and non-Muslims have a subordinate position.
This late – last – Western colonialism has obscured the fact that the shift from Ottoman imperial rule to post-Ottoman Arab national rule was neither natural nor inevitable.Why not? Were the Arabs incapable of throwing out occupiers? If so, why? Do they have some genetic defect or is their culture inferior in some way? If they could conquer the Persians and the Byzantines fifteen hundred years ago, why could they not overthrow corrupt and incompetent Turks or Franks or anyone else?
European colonialism abruptly interrupted and reshaped a vital anti-sectarian Arab cultural and political path that had begun to take shape during the last century of Ottoman rule.Nonsense! The Arabs had risen up by themselves but still had a way to go in terms of forming stable governments. Thus, they were good candidates to be 'Class A' Mandates and did become independent within a couple of decades unlike the UAE which became independent almost thirty years after Syria.
We can see why having a Mandatory power could fast-track a country to full effective sovereignty by comparing Saudi Arabia with Syria or Iraq. The latter had superior administrative and military capacity till very recently. It took a long time for Saudi Arabia to become self-assertive in the same way and it is by no means certain that it will succeed.
Despite European colonialism, the ecumenical ideal, and the dream of creating sovereign societies greater than the sum of their communal or sectarian parts, survived well into the 20th-century Arab world.Survived? These ideas arose in the 1860's and found European sponsors- like W.S Blunt- but there was a hidden agenda to this. Ottoman reform was being castigated as 'un-Islamic'. 'The sick man of Europe' was supposed to turn into a European puppet- like the Nizam of Hyderabad. Meanwhile, the Italians had helped themselves to Libya, which they, like the French in Algeria, regarded as a permanent colony to be settled by their own people. Italy also had its eye on Albania. After the War, Clemanceau and Lloyd George tried to give Smyrna and the littoral to the Greeks, confining the Turks to the Anatolian plateau but, under Ataturk, this plan was defeated. By contrast, Syria and Iraq and Lebanon were never meant to become the permanent property of any European power.
The ‘sick man of Europe’ – the condescending European sobriquet for the sultanate – was not, in fact, in terminal decline at all in the early 20th century.So how come it kept getting thrashed by everybody?
Contrary to hoary stories of Turkish rapacity and decline, or romanticised glorifications of Ottoman rule, the truth is that the final Ottoman century saw a new age of coexistence at the same time as it also ushered in competing ethnoreligious nationalisms, war and oppression in the shadow of Western domination.Nonsense! That century of military defeats culminated in the Armenian genocide- a marvelous example of 'coexistence', which is why the Syrian Kurds now prefer Assad to Erdogan.
The violent part of the story is well-known; the far richer ecumenical one, barely at all.Because, though it is a fantasy, it does not feature a super cool Genie who grants wishes or even a flying carpet.
Along with almost every other non-Western polity in the 19th century, the Ottoman empire retreated in the face of relentless European aggression.But it was itself European and treated its Arab portions worse than the Brits treated the Indians.
Anyway, the Ottomans established themselves by relentless aggression and fell because their military capacity declined for purely internal reasons.
The empire grappled with how to maintain sovereignty and accommodate itself to 19th-century ideas of equal citizenship.Its attempts at reform failed and it came under debt-slavery. What kept its carcass together was the mutual rivalries and jealousies of the predators.
It was hobbled by the rise of separatist Balkan nationalist movements that enjoyed support from different European powers.But it was Egypt's victories over it, not Greece's liberation, which made its decline inevitable. If the Caliph could not hold Muslims together, what hope did he have of resisting the warlike Christian nations of the Balkans?
The Ottomans were at war in virtually every decade of the 19th century.This was also true in the seventeenth century. But now they were losing what they had previously gained.
If the Ottomans fretted about how to preserve the territorial integrity of their once-great empire, they also invested in reforming and refashioning it in almost every way, from its military and politics to its architecture and society.They did this on borrowed money and thus ended up with less effective sovereignty, not more.
The empire had long discriminated between Muslim and non-Muslim in the name of defending the faith and honour of Islam.That was its strong point. Once it ceased to do so- at least formally- its doom was certain.
It also discriminated against heterodox Muslims.By killing them.
Over centuries, it had built an imperial system that enshrined Ottoman Muslim primacy over all other groups.Which is why it was hated by everybody who was not an Ottoman Turk.
In the 19th century, Ottoman sultans fitfully refashioned their empire as a ‘civilised’ and ecumenical Muslim sultanate that professed equality of all subjects irrespective of their religious affiliation.But nobody was taken in by this fantasy.
Muslim, Christian and Jewish subjects adopted the red fez as a sign of their shared modern Ottomanism.Does the author not get that the fact that if everybody abandons the turban or whatever headgear is normative in their religion then this is evidence that there is no 'equality' or 'liberty' whatsoever? This is a dangerous, hypocritical, despotism in terminal decline.
During the Tanzimat era (1839-1876), the Ottoman empire officially espoused a policy of nondiscrimination between Muslim and non-Muslim.What happened next? Did the Turks not go back to their bad old ways when it came to Armenians or Assyrians or any other type of Christian they could lay their hands on?
The idea of equality between Muslim and non-Muslim in the empire acquired the force of social sanction and law with the promulgation of the Ottoman constitution of 1876, which declared the equality of all Ottoman citizens.This led to a backlash against unarmed Christians by furious Muslims, some of whom were refugees from areas lost to the enemy. Thus non-Muslims did not welcome the Tanzimat reforms. However, 'Abdul the Damned' turned out to be an even more vicious foe.
The Ottomans failed to reform their economy and to win the loyalty of nationalities over whom they ruled. That is why they could not resist predators. In the end, they were so useless that they were overthrown by Turkish patriots.
No matter how much the Ottomans secularised their empire, Britain, France, Austria and Russia demanded more concessions.
By contrast, the Austrians did a deal with the Hungarians and gained a new lease of life. However, absorbing more Southern Slavs proved a bad idea. The Hapsburgs lost their throne because of their taste for the flesh of Europe's sick man.
Each European power claimed to protect one or another native Christian or other minority community, each coveted a part of the Ottoman domains, and each jealously sought to negate their rivals’ influence in the Orient.The French and Russians did so. But the English and Germans stood aloof.
This diplomatic wrangle was referred to at the time as the ‘Eastern Question’. The breaking up of the ideological and legal privileging of Muslims over non-Muslims in the empire was not without controversy, especially because European powers consistently intervened in the empire along sectarian lines.What the Professor means is that irate Muslims would kill any unarmed Christians in the vicinity.
The Ottomans, for example, abolished the medieval jizya tax on non-Muslims but pledged to Europe in 1856 to respect the ‘privileges and spiritual immunities’ of the Christian churches;Because of the Crimean War.
while they exempted non-Muslims from military service in return for a tax, they conscripted Muslim subjects to fight in seemingly endless wars; they opened Ottoman markets to an influx of European goods and tolerated Western missionary proselytisation of the empire’s non-Muslims.Which is why life for non-Muslims got so much worse thanks to Tanzimat.
In July 1860, an anti-Christian riot erupted in Damascus.Tragic. But our Professor can turn even tragedy into comedy-
Despite the edicts promulgating nondiscrimination, a Muslim mob rampaged through the city, pillaging churches and terrorising the city’s Christian inhabitants. Newspapers in London and Paris and missionary societies condemned what they saw as ‘Mohammedan’ fanaticism.As opposed to what? Islamic moderation?
The French emperor Napoleon III sent a French army to the Orient, allegedly to aid the sultan to restore order in his Arab provinces.That same French Emperor had, with British help, stopped the Russian Tzar from gobbling up a large part of the Turkish Empire. He alleged he was doing this because he was the protector of the Catholics, against the Orthodox, in Jerusalem- but this was just the old Franco-Turkish alliance against, not the Hapsburgs this time, but the Rooskies.
Anyway, the Damascus massacres were the outcome of a Christian vs Druze battle.
European powers set up a commission of inquiry to investigate the massacres of 1860.Which they needed to do coz back then nobody knew a Druze from a dromedary.
Their humanitarian motives, however, were conditional and political.The motives of politicians are always political. Statesman don't do things unconditionally.
No corresponding commission, after all, was formed to investigate the US oppression and persecution of people of African descent or its extermination of Native Americans, the decades of French colonial terror in Algeria, or the British suppression of the anticolonial uprising in India in 1857.But the US or the French or the Brits had the power to fuck up anyone who fucked with them. The Ottomans were weak and had been saved from the Rooskis by the Brits and the French just a couple of years previously.
Despite being singled out by Western observers as a peculiarly non-Western and even Muslim problem, the massacres of 1860 reflected a global struggle to reconcile equality, diversity and sovereignty that manifested across the world in very different contexts.I suppose what the Professor means is that the Christian peasant who started the revolt was opposed to both the Druze as well the Maronite elite. Thus, he could be considered a forerunner of the Communist Revolutionary- if Communists demand that Shiah Muslims convert to Christianity. The Druze proved better fighters and prevailed. However many innocent Christians in other cities- like Damascus were massacred. France's intervention has been described as the first humanitarian initiative of a type familiar to us today. They restored peace and left within a year.
So while the Ottomans were facing a genuine crisis about how to reform and maintain their grip over a heterogeneous multiethnic, multilinguistic and multireligious population, halfway across the world, the US was simultaneously fighting the deadliest war in the 19th-century Western world over slavery, racism and citizenship.The US was very strong militarily and economically. The Ottoman Empire was a walking corpse. France did intervene in Mexico, taking advantage of the Civil War, but they soon ran away before the Americans could kick their heads in. Thus, it was the Prussians who got to rid them of their 'Second Empire'.
The Damascus riot occurred just after the last illegal cargo of enslaved and brutalised Africans was unloaded from the schooner Clotilda on the Alabama coast.So what? What is the connection between these two events? The last caravan of brutalised African slaves entering the heart of the Ottoman Empire did so some some 50 years later. Prior to 1908 you could buy yourself a black slave in Constantinople. In nominally Turkish territory, the slave trade did not cease till much later. However, by 1970, slavery had been abolished in almost all Arab countries.
The anti-Christian riots of 1860 in Damascus were terrible, but they reflected only one aspect of the contemporary Ottoman empire.A reflection which must have been of great consolation to those who were slaughtered.
Far less noted than the episodes of violence sensationalised in Europe was a noticeable and widespread accommodation, if not an active embrace, by many Ottoman subjects of secularisation and modernisation.Actually, this was noticed. Why? These modernized Turks visited Europe. If they hadn't created a favorable impression the Caliphate wouldn't have been able to borrow the money it needed to keep up a semblance of life.
The empire constituted a vital laboratory for modern coexistence between Muslim and non-Muslim that had no parallel anywhere else in the world.Says a historian of Arab descent who, obviously, does not know that Queen Victoria had more Muslim subjects than the Caliph.
Nowhere was this coexistence more evident than in the cities of the Arab Mashriq. From Cairo to Beirut to Baghdad, Arabs of all faiths shared a common language and showed little inclination to separate politically from the Ottoman empire.Cairo had already separated itself. If the Brits hadn't forced the Egyptians to hand back Beirut, it too would have separated itself. Baghdad was a shithole under the Ottomans. Kurdish Jews, however, were doing well there because they were useful to the Administration.
After the events of 1860, the Protestant Christian convert Butrus al-Bustani opened a ‘national’ school in Beirut.He had helped the Ottomans regain control of Syria from the Egyptians. Furthermore, he was aligned against the Maronite elites. Finally, he was close to the Americans whose missionaries had medical and technical skills greatly in demand.
At a time when American missionaries in the Levant still rejected the idea of genuinely secular education, al-Bustani’s school was both antisectarian and respectful of religious difference.American missionaries were missionaries- d'uh! This guy was doing something political which won him favor with the authorities. But once Tanzimat was over, he closed his school and died a few years later.
During an era when Africans and Asians were enduring gross racial subordination in European empires,as well as in Arab and Turkish lands
when Jews were being subjected to pogroms in Russiaand Muslim lands
, and when white Americans were embracing racial segregation across the US South,while Muslims enslaved blacks and also some White Christians
excluding Asians from US citizenshipjust as Saudi Arabia excludes Asians from Saudi citizenship
, and herding the surviving Native Americans into pitiable reservations,as opposed to massacring Armenians and Assyrians and so forth
the Ottoman empire encouraged – or did not stand in the way of – the opening of new inclusive ‘national’ schools, municipalities, journals, newspapers and theatres.Except when it changed its mind and guys like Al Bustani quickly abandoned any such activity.
A new army was built in the name of national unity and sovereignty.But it was still shit till the Germans got involved.
All these reforms were made more urgent by successive Ottoman military defeats against Russia and in the Balkans, and Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II’s resistance to constitutional change.Yup, Abdul the damned sure was a peach.
In 1908, the Young Turk Revolution deposed the sultan and promised a new constitutional period of Ottoman liberty and fraternity among the various Turkish, Armenian, Albanian, Jewish and Arab elements of the Ottoman empire – not simply the absence of discrimination.Hilarious! These are the guys who massacred the Armenians! When an Armenian killed Talat Pasha in Berlin, a German court acquitted him even though Turkey had been their ally.
Most of the secularising national reforms were far more enthusiastically pronounced than practised.They were eye-wash- a P.R exercise designed to keep the loans rolling in.
They were implemented unevenly and piecemeal across the empire.Coz the empire was a walking corpse.
Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the events of 1860, many Arab Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Mashriq believed they were participating in an ecumenical ‘renaissance’ or nahda that could be expressed in different Ottoman, Arab, religious, secular, political and cultural terms.Nonsense! This is a highly tendentious availability cascade. Why not simply say that many European Jews and Slavs believed they were participating in an ecumenical 'nada' under Hitler's benign Third Reich? After all, cowards, cretins and collaborators can always be found. Diplomats in Assad's Syria would be encouraged to meet Jews and Christians and Communists who wept with emotion as they extolled the wondrous nature of the Ba'athist Republic.
They understood collectively that they were heading into a potentially brighter, and certainly more scientific, and more ‘civilised’ future.They could only have understood this if their understanding was congenitally defective. 'Preference falsification'- to use a term invented by a Turkish economist- better describes this sort of gobshiterry.
To be sure, from Egypt to Iraq, this nahda was dominated by urban and educated men who believed that they spoke for their respective ‘nations’.Till those 'nations' kicked them in the goolies.
It was a renaissance in the making, not an accomplished goal or even a unitary social or political project.Very true! It produced great scientists like...urm...Einstein? and great artists like...Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. In Film, it produced Charlie Chaplin and Eisenstein. In Music, it produced Stravinsky and Shostokovich. Truly, the Nahda produced nada.
The nahda luminaries did not necessarily agree on the precise contours of their shared Ottoman nation any more than Americans then – or now – agree on what constitutes ideal or representative Americans.Our professor has hit the nail on the head! Just as Americans can't agree as to whether Hawaii is or is not part of the United States, so too did nada luminaries disagree over whether or not their heads were up their own or each others' arses.
The balance between the ecumenism of Ottoman reforms and the harsh imperative to maintain effective sovereignty was delicate.The Ottomans did not maintain effective sovereignty over Arab lands. True, the Brits made the Egyptians hand back Syria and Palestine, but Ottoman control over these places wasn't effective at all. As for the Tanzimat, the last Caliph who believed in it was barking mad and had to be deposed after a few weeks.
The ‘Eastern Question’ politicised the future of non-Muslim communities – eventually called ‘minorities’ – because they became simultaneously objects of European solicitude and pretexts for political and military aggression against the Ottomans.Non-Muslim communities in Muslim majority areas get short shrift. Such 'minorities' decline and finally disappear. Nobody, prior to 1918 needed any pretext for robbing a corpse or annexing territory that was weakly defended. True, 'Balance of Power' considerations were a constraint. But 'pretexts' couldn't enable one to evade it.
Why is this cretin pretending that there was a United Nations and International Court of Justice way back then? Is he truly as utterly ignorant of History as a Professor at JNU? No. But he thinks Aeon readers are. Fair play to him. In the age of Trump, he is our Thucydides.
The emergence of ethnoreligious nationalisms in the Balkans exacerbated the problem when Christian Greek, Serbian, Macedonian and Bulgarian nationalists appealed to Russian, Austrian or British support seeking to break away from Ottoman control.This sentiment was always there coz nobody likes being fucked over by rapacious conquerors who are shit at running a country.
Ottoman leaders, in turn, regarded the Turkish-speaking Muslim population as the essential core of their empire.OMG! Prof said something which is true! How the fuck did such a miracle happen! The answer of course is, 'even Homer nods'.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, Armenian revolutionaries sought to emulate Balkan Christian nationalists.Yes. The Congress of Berlin was the turning point. However, it was the Tanzimat era Armenian schools which prepared the ground. The Tzarist portion of Armenia gave material support. Thus, the Turks rightly feared an existential threat- though, it turned out, the Smyrna Greeks were equally dangerous.
Of course if there ever had been a genuine Ottoman 'wataniyya' identity, these problems would never have arisen. In other words, this Professor has been writing bollocks.
They appealed for European support to achieve autonomy; the Ottoman state responded with persecution.Persecution? We are speaking of genocide.
Ottoman modernity in the shadow of Western colonialism could be both powerfully ecumenical and uncompromisingly violent.The West had modernity but this modernity was stunted by the shadow of Ottoman colonialism. The destruction of Ottoman power turned out to be a good thing for Turkish modernity just as much as it was a good thing for the modernization of all the other territories they misruled.
It promised both a multiethnic and multireligious sovereign future and a xenophobic world without minorities.No it didn't. It was a walking corpse. I may point out that two opposite promises can't be simultaneously believed. If a guy says 'I will rob and kill you' as well as 'I'll keep you safe', nobody in their right mind would say that he has promised to do two mutually exclusive things.
In the Balkans and Anatolia, the imperative of sovereignty clearly trumped the commitment to ecumenism, while in the Arab Mashriq ecumenical Ottomanism flourished more easily.Then why did Egypt go its own way and, later on, why did the Arabs revolt? The answer is that there was no 'ecumenical Ottomanism'. There was a wholly ineffective government propped up by European powers.
In the Balkans, Christians often became implacably opposed to Muslims (and other Christians) amid clashing ethnoreligious nationalisms, while in the Mashriq the Arab Christians and Muslims and Jews more easily made common cause.Against the Turks. But, once the Turks were out of the picture, their own conflicts could play out unimpeded by Great Power intervention. This, at any rate, is the continuing story of the Levant- more especially since the 'Arab Spring' which, no doubt, the author thinks was highly 'ecumenical'.
One key difference was the absence of separatist nationalisms in the Mashriq.Because under Ottoman rule, the place had so run to seed that social conflicts were of a tribal nature.
Although Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, in the rest of the Mashriq Ottoman rule remained viable.Which is why Palestine and Lebanon and Syria saw easily defeated the British and French armies. Ottoman rule was not viable in these areas coz the inhabitants could not defend these territories not because of lack of blood-lust but because they only wanted to kill each other as part of a tribal vendetta.
The shared Arabic language helped Arab Christians and Jews play important roles in the Arabic press, theatre, professional and women’s associations and municipalities.But the Arab press, theater, professional and women's associations and municipalities could gain little purchase till Ottoman misrule was swept away.
The leading Egyptian daily Al-Ahram, for example, was founded by a Syrian Christian émigré.So, this guy had to run away from Ottoman misrule to come under the protection of Britain, before he could contribute to the Arab press.
Nor was it out of place that the Jewish journalist Esther Moyal would advocate for an ecumenical ‘Eastern Arab’ identity.She did so when her family relocated from Cairo to Jaffa where it made sense to publish something called 'Voice of the Ottomanites' so as to get a bit of Government advertising and subscriptions but she soon packed it in and settled in France.
The gradual alienation and decimation of the Armenian Christian community of Anatolia unfolded at the same time when Arab Christians and Jews coexisted with their Muslim brethren in cities such as Beirut, Haifa, Aleppo, Baghdad, as well as in British-occupied Cairo and Alexandria.In other words, that particular genocide was a Turkish and Kurdish affair. In cities which could be shelled by European warships, Christians were safe.
The Ottoman era ended with the calamity of the First World War.Which it joined of its own free will.
Wartime Ottoman Turkish rulers callously turned their back on the ecumenical spirit of Ottomanism at the same time as they embraced its darker statist side.When had the embraced that spirit? Never. How could they turn their backs, that too in a callous manner, when they had never seen it or approached it or even heard about it?
In the name of national survival, these Ottomans commenced genocidal policies against Armenians.No. They just hunted them down and killed them- often relying on Kurdish irregulars to do the dirty work.
They also hanged those they considered Arab traitors in Beirut and Damascus.And were sometimes killed by others Arabs who weren't traitors to the Arab cause.
While a famine ravaged Mount Lebanon, Ottoman forces retreated before a British military invasion of Palestine. Jerusalem fell in December 1917.Unlike the disastrous campaign in Iraq, mismanaged by the Indian Army, the Palestine invasion was a British Army operation which received some not wholly inconsequential support from Takritis and Hashemites and so forth. Interestingly, Indian Muslim soldiers in Iraq often defected or were not trusted whereas the British Army had superb Islamic propagandists- including an ex ICS Indian Muslim- who depicted the Young Turks, with some truth, as un-Islamic.
Almost a year later, the empire surrendered ignominiously.The Caliph thus became available to become a British puppet. The Ottoman legacy was to be a British pension.
When the victorious Allied statesmen of Britain, France and the US assembled in Paris in 1919 to decide the future of the defeated Ottoman empire, they intervened in an empire that had been substantially transformed over the preceding century.It had been dismembered and none regretted its passing.
The victors of the First World War ignored the ecumenical heritage of the late Ottoman empire.Because it had never existed.
Instead, they sensationalised the empire’s obvious defects and were determined to divide it up. In 1919, President Wilson blessed the partition of the Ottoman empire.As he had that of the Hapsburg, the German and the Tzarist Empire. What was he supposed to do? Wail and gnash his teeth and rend his clothing?
The Greek invasion of Izmir set off a bloody war that led eventually to the victory of a new Turkey under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk. This new Turkey secularised itself dramatically but was also draconian in its rejection of its own ecumenical Ottoman heritage.Because no such thing had ever existed.
In 1923, Turkey concluded an agreement with Greece to forcibly evict – ‘exchange’ was the euphemism used – more than a million Greeks from the new Turkey. In turn, Greece evicted hundreds of thousands of Greek-speaking Muslims. The new Turkish republic then suppressed dissenting Kurds.So what? These sorts of population exchanges were going on across the length and breadth of Europe. The Palestinians, in the shape of Grand Mufti Husseini, cuddled up with Hitler and hoped for the complete annihilation of the Jewish people. Hitler lost. Thus- just like Germans in Sudetenland or East Prussia- the Palestinians lost territory. It may have been hard cheese for them- but that's why losing wars aint fun.
The Allies, in the meantime, decided the future of the Arab Mashriq.How could they do so? They hadn't been able to decide the future of Russia or Turkey or anywhere at all where the people were sufficiently cohesive to fight back. What made the Levant different? The answer is that though it had a few windbags who prattled 'ecumenical' shite, it was so under-developed that it was just a patchwork of tribes and warring clans. Even after the end of the French or British mandates, the Area took a long time finding its feet before spectacularly falling over them again and again.
As early as 1915, Britain had pledged to support expansive Arab Hashemite ambitions to rule an independent Arab kingdom across much of the Arab East in return for their revolt against Ottoman rule. A year later in 1916, Britain and France then secretly agreed to divide the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire between them in the Sykes-Picot Agreement. And in 1917, prompted by Zionist lobbying, the British government pledged to support the creation of a Jewish ‘national home’ in Palestine that was overwhelmingly Arab in its demographic, social and linguistic composition.We have seen the Sykes-Picot treaty and the Balfour declaration. Where is the agreement with the Hashemites? All we have is an exchange of letters between a High Commissioner and a non sovereign party who had fielded a couple of thousand fighters as against a British million.
Even if the Brits said it was a treaty, by their own laws, it could be no such thing. The price paid by the Hashemites for insisting the thing was a treaty was that they lost their own ancestral seat because the Brits withdrew their support. Thus the Hashemites changed tune and kept Jordan and Iraq as British clients.
To add insult to injury, at the Paris peace conference in 1919, Britain and France blocked native Arab and Egyptian nationalists from presenting their cases for independence directly.But what would have been the result of their 'presenting their case'? Would anyone have helped them defeat and throw out these two Great Powers? No. Of course not. Why pretend that the Peace Conference was not the Justice of the Victors? Who was listening to those who had been defeated or those who had been subjugated and atomized long ago?
They permitted, however, the Hashemite Emir Faisal, son of Sharif Hussein, to plead with the Allies to fulfil their wartime pledges to his father.This was a concession to T.E Lawrence- the war hero traipsing around in Arab robes- just as the Cairo Conference, where his pals got their thrones was a sop to a master of English prose. However it was St. John Philby who had made the better bet sucking up to Ibn Saud.
They also allowed European Zionists to present their vision for colonising Palestine and transforming it into a Jewish state led by settlers from eastern and central Europe.Because the Jews were important.
We now come to the crux of this author's delusion. Judging by his surname, he may be a Protestant Christian with Palestinian or Lebanese roots. Like every other atavistic ancestor worshiper he harks back to a just-so story about how the Holy Land ought to have been his people's- with American help.
And they heard from Howard Bliss, the son of an American missionary and the president of the Syrian Protestant College (today, the American University of Beirut). Bliss was allowed to speak on behalf of the inhabitants of Syria. While paternalistic to the Syrians, he was sensitive to the political mood in the former provinces of the Ottoman empire and recommended an impartial fact-finding inquiry be dispatched to the Middle East to document the political aspirations of its inhabitants by self-determination. The French were horrified by the idea of an impartial commission, and the British embarrassed, because neither had any intention of granting independence to the Arabs. Wilson himself, however, was the key interlocutor between the old and new forms of colonialism. He was deeply sympathetic to the American missionary enterprise. He also endorsed the idea of a commission.i.e. the culture only people like this guy's grand-daddies represented by reason of being Protestant and pro-American.
‘In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants’
The resulting American Section of the 1919 Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey was known simply as the King-Crane Commission after the two Americans who led it: Henry King, the president of Oberlin College in Ohio, and the philanthropist Charles Crane. Unlike the 1860 international commission that was established in the Ottoman empire, this one actually polled people in the region – and the commission collected numerous telegrams, petitions and letters from the inhabitants of the erstwhile Ottoman provinces and held hundreds of meetings with them. Neither King nor Crane were anticolonial in any revolutionary sense, but they also both genuinely believed that it was important to record accurately the wishes of the indigenous peoples of the region. They appeared to take Wilson’s commitment to self-determination as self-evident.
After a gruelling tour through Palestine, Lebanon and Syria in July 1919, King and Crane reached several bold conclusions regarding the Arab East. They recognised that most of the inhabitants of the region spoke a common language and shared a rich ecumenical culture.
They admitted that the political desire of most of the native population was overwhelmingly for independence. They recommended strongly that a single Syrian state that included Palestine and Lebanon be created under an American mandate (and failing that, a British one), with robust protection for minorities.Which could only happen if the entire region were ruled by people named Makdisi who might, at any moment, write Saidian shite about Orientalism on the slightest provocation.
Most importantly, they said that if the Wilsonian principle of self-determination was to be taken seriously, and the voice of the native Arab majority was to be heard, the project of colonial Zionism in Palestine had to be curtailed. ‘Decisions, requiring armies to carry out, are sometimes necessary,’ they wrote, ‘but they are surely not gratuitously to be taken in the interests of a serious injustice. For the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a “right” to Palestine, based on an occupation of 2,000 years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.’And yet, the Zionist State has established that right more securely than its eastern neighbors. Jordan had to call in Pakistani pilots to fly Saudi planes to drop American bombs on Palestinian refugee camps, whereas Israel, at its very formation, could hold its own against all comers.
The commissioners submitted their final report to President Wilson in August 1919, but their recommendations were ignored. Their predictions about Palestine, however, proved prophetic.The Zionists didn't get any help to establish their state. America only started supporting them after they fucked over all their enemies. Crane & King weren't prophets. The Holy Land developed in a manner diametrically opposite to their 'findings'.
The US repudiated any emancipatory anticolonial interpretation of self-determination, for Wilson himself never believed in the idea that all peoples were equal or immediately deserving sovereignty. Britain and France proceeded to partition the region as if the King-Crane commission had never been sent. The British foreign minister Arthur Balfour was, at least, candid on this point. The inhabitants of Syria, he said, ‘may freely choose, but it is Hobson’s choice after all’. France was going to rule Syria and Lebanon. And Britain was going to open Palestine to colonial Zionism. ‘For in Palestine,’ Balfour wrote in August 1919, ‘we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American [King-Crane] Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are.’We all know better than this cretin. Syria and Egypt and Iraq were supposed to join together in a United Arab Republic- indeed, Syria and Egypt did have a short lived union while one between the two Ba'athist countries had been agreed in the late Seventies. What happened to that type of initiative? The answer is, it was just idle talk and inflated rhetoric- shite of the sort that Edward Said or this cretin indulge in.
No matter how intently the last colonialism of the world sold itself as a purveyor of self-determination, its Western proponents knew better.
The real tragedy of the region is that fuckers like this fuckwit blame Whitey for all their troubles, yet are White themselves. I mean, the thing is cool when I do it coz I also put a bone through my nose and wear a grass skirt, but this guy is like totally White Bread and Ivy League.
The real tragedy, however, lay not in deceit but in the divisions that this deceit exacerbated and engendered. Colonial Europe claimed to arbitrate age-old religious difference in the Middle East. In reality, it encouraged sectarian politics. The consequences of this last colonialism reverberate until today.Only because, according to this writer, Turkish colonialism ended thus causing the spirit of Ottoman ecumenicism to evaporate. Britain and France may have created modern nation states in Jordan- which is still stable under a Hashemite King- Iraq which turned to shit under 'ecumenical' Ba'athists thanks to Saddam- Syria, which turned to shit under even more secular Ba'athists thanks to the Arab Spring- and Lebanon which survives but has a garbage crisis like you wouldn't believe.
On the other hand, Israel isn't shit at all. Why? It wasn't something nurtured into existence by the Brits or the French or anybody else. Its justice system does owe something to the Brits and in this matter it is like Cyprus. But everything else is indigenous. Zionism emerged at the same time, or a little later, than the Arab Nadha. But it wasn't vacuous shite. Initially, it featured kibbutzes not just kibitzing. Now it is a knowledge economy, with the Army being the biggest tech incubator. Meanwhile Professors like this cretin are, very unfairly, trying to compete with Indian savants for the title or most ignorant historian ever.
I suggest to him that he read the works of Sanjay Subhramanyam or Ramachandra Guha and pray to be reborn as an Iyer in his next life. Then and only then will he attain his aim.
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