Jobs for ISIL

Marie Harf's statement on ISIL was definitely taken out of context and dragged through the mud by her opponents. Ms. Harf was absolutely correct in saying that combating terrorism in the long run can't be managed solely through war. She didn't say war against ISIL was unwarranted, in fact she was explicit in saying in the short term it was necessary. She only pointed out, very accurately that in the long term more fundamental measures must be taken to eradicate the sources of terrorism.

However, that's where her being right stops. Her explanation of the deeper sources of terrorism is symptomatic of a neo-liberal American delusion every bit as misguided and potentially as devastating as the American neocon illusion that America can bomb and kill Arabs into being Scandanavians. 

Harf's thesis is not novel, in fact it's a trite and banal conclusion of most American think tanks. She theorizes that poverty, lack of participation, and bad governance are the sources of terrorism in the Arab world. But as one is always bound to ask, why is it the that only Muslims in the Middle East are prone to terrorism? Why don't Christians, Yazidis, Druze, or atheists from the Mideast resort to terrorism?

The answer is because this thesis is wrong and extremely convenient. It's convenient on two fronts. Primarily, at least to Americans, it's very convenient because it allows them to completely discount the caustic and inflammatory role that Israel has played in turning the region's struggles progressively from wars of independence into religious wars. It also allows an oversimplification of Iran's role in stoking sectarian and ethnic tensions in the region. Additionally, it absolves America's disastrous recent interventions from any responsibility. 

But this is all well and good. It is part of America's traditional delusional worldview. It allows Americans to "liberate" a country by decapitating all its statehood apparatus, killing its people, creating a chaos and vacuum, attracting all the terrorists in the world to that country; and then ten years later make an Oscar nominated movie about how killing the people in that country to liberate them psychologically scarred American rednecks.

This isn't unusual, the world is used to it. What is unusual about Harf's trite argument though is that it absolves Arab Muslims in the Middle East from ideological responsibility for ISIL. This, combined with western media's refusal to realize that Muslims are the primary victims of ISIL and Boko Haram and the like, paints a very false picture of the conflict that will only delay its resolution.

The conflict is not about economics or democracy or NGOs and the right to protest. This conflict is a Muslim civil war about a critical ideological bottle neck created by the insistence of the majority of Muslims that there is something like "real Islam" instead of multiple possible definitions. This is primarily a Muslim conflict. The main perpetrators are Muslims, Arab conspiracy theories not withstanding. The main victims are Muslims, Fox News assurance that ISIL is out to kill Christians and Jews notwithstanding. ISIL is out to subjugate non-Muslims yes, but its stated mission is not to subjugate but to kill Shiia, Sufis, apolotical Salafists, secular Muslims, leftist Muslims, and the list of all different kinds of Muslims they want to kill for apostasy goes on an on.

And why does ISIL find recruits and money? Because Arab Muslims provide a perfect ideological incubator for them. No, the majority of Muslims don't support ISIL, in fact the majority of Muslims are targets for ISIL. Ask a random group of Muslims what should be done with ISIL and the absolute majority will have very gory things to say. Westerners may not "hear mainstream Muslims condemning terrorism" loud enough, but maybe that's because mainstream Muslims are too busy not getting bombed by terrorist groups, invariably supported by Western governments at some point as a moderate opposition de joure, to give a fuck what Bill O'Reilly thinks.

However, ask a random group of Muslims how many forms of Islam they find acceptable. The answer will invariably be that there is only one true Islam, the definition of which is always elusive. Ask a random group of Muslims what should be done with apostates, the answer will invariably be death. Ask them if head taxes on non-Muslims are moral, the answer will be yes. Prove them a bit about equality of genders and full citizenship to all and freedom of faith and you will always be faced with very medieval responses.

Then how do they think ISIL is wrong? The answer is most Muslims don't really believe what they claim to believe. At least they have serious problems with many of these issues. But decades of Saudi and later Qatari petromoney cementing the demented Wahabi idea that one has to believe in a monolithic literalist medieval view of Islam to be Muslim, have ingrained a sense of dread in all Muslims in the region. Most Muslims believe that it is acceptable to pretend to believe that a literalist interpretation of Shariia will lead to a utopia, even if you never in reality want to see it happen. You can concoct complex messianic ideas about when Shariia can be implemented, you can demand impossible preconditions, you can try ludicrous comparisons with modern atrocities to make medieval holy atrocities more palatable. But you can't discuss the fundamental ideas. You can't ask why we can't just adopt a government system like that of Korea or Brazil or Sweden if we think they are so awesome. No, you have to lie and say the Japanese are successful because they fanatically held on to their culture; ignoring the Meiji era, and the large scale conscious westernization that even China went through.

What does that make Muslim societies? Hypocritical and constantly guilt ridden about the simplest most common facets of human civilization. And what does that mean for terrorists? It means that even though the absolute overwhelming majority of Muslims are not only against terrorism, but also its primary victims; there will always be a small minority that will join or finance ISIL or Boko Haram.

So now what? What should the U.S. Do? Now the Mideast will fight its own ideological war, and the west should not try to influence it. Because they can't, and they shouldn't. The west will always try to fit Muslims into molds similar to western Christian history. Which is why everyone's talking about Islam's need for a Protestant reformation. Which is symptomatic of deep ignorance about Sunni Islam. Sunni Islam has already had its Protestant reformation and it resulted in a chaotic non-hierarchical but Puritan form of Islam that naturally precipitated the current bloodshed. Which is why it's much easier to talk to Shiites who more resemble the a Catholic Church.

No, America shouldn't try to help in the intellectual war that must be fought in the long run. This war must and will be fought by the main victims of ISIL: Muslims. However, the U.S. Must participate in military action in the short and medium terms. Generally speaking American intervention in the region has catastrophic results. But in this case the U.S. has a moral obligation to interfere. Because it created ISIL. Yes, the Muslim ideological loggerheads is the source and solution of terrorist groups. But terrorism in the form of a group that controls enormous tracts of land and declares a caliphate requires a military and political vacuum of epic proportions. There is no doubt in my mind that without the disastrous American invasion of Iraq the degree and nature of the current conflict in the region would've been very different. To be even more blunt, yes it would've been much better if Saddam Hussein was still in power instead of Bush style democracy. 

Which is why the U.S. has to bomb ISIL. And also why bombing will not radically solve the problem, nor will the U.S. 

Egyptians on Charlie Hebdo: hmm

When the Boston marathon bombings happened, I noticed a significant change in the reaction of people on Egypt compared to 9/11. The change was positive, even if presumably unprincipled. There were barely any voices that gloated, and there was an overwhelming wish that the perpetrators were not Muslim. This was the first time I recognised a widespread realization in Egypt that terrorist attacks very effectively stain all Muslims and that denying that terrorists represent Islam isn't working. That change took over a decade to settle in. And a busy decade it was, what with the Iraq war and everything. But guess what, an even more radical change has happened in the few months since then, and its catalyst is the disastrous aftermath of the Arab Spring.

In response to Charlie Hebdo I expected a fringe that thought the attackers were justified because Charlie Hebdo was profane. And I found it. It's about the same size as it has always been, maybe slightly larger because this attack is directly related to religion. Interestingly this fringe also started to count some Christians among its rank after it turned out Charlie was also disrespectful to Jesus. This fringe is there, it will always be there. I saw fringes like it in the US, I saw fringes larger than it among Europeans. What matters is that this fringe doesn't act on its convictions, and that for the overwhelming majority they remain just convictions.

There is also another fringe, possibly of equal size, that condemns the attacks without qualification. The response from this group is virtually indistinguishable from the response of people in New York or Berlin. Many of them changed their avatars and profile pictures to Je suis Charlie. Most of them talk about how this is the fault of Muslim communities who should stand up to their responsibility. This fringe is relatively new, and it is growing. It also consists mostly of Muslims.

But neither fringe is really effective. In Egypt, the mainstream is normally both a clear majority, and very difficult to gauge. And the mainstream this time has a very complex, very unsympathetic, and very embittered response.

The mainstream has been molded mostly by the Aran Spring. Specifically by its Jihadi autumn. The rise of ISIL and the daily terrorist attacks by the MB and ABAM in Egypt, combined with a Western position seen as almost allied with the MB in Egypt, have led to very little sympathy. Egyptians watched all the westerners getting horrified by the death of 13 people, and compared it with the almost robotic calls for dialog with Islamists in Egypt. People comtrasted the amount of sympathy for the Frenchmen killed, and contrasted it with the blasé attitude towards Egyptian victims of terrorism. People couldn't understand why their massive demonstrations against terrorism were termed orchestrated and full of thugs while smaller French protests were hailed as historic.

People looked beyond the borders of Egypt. They saw a Syria devastated as much by Western backed Jihadists as by Bashar. They saw pictures of McCain wih Al-Nusra. They saw a bombing the very next day in an Alawite cafe in Lebanon. They saw an Iraq torn apart by an American invasion, an American backd government, and American backed "moderate opposition" from Syria who turned out to be not so moderate. And then they saw representatives from Israel, Turkey, and Qatar marching arm in arm with the French president.

But for many, the straw came from Nigeria. As the world didn't give a flying fuck over 2000 Nigerians killed by Boko Haram, but freaked out over a dozen French people.

The argument goes that Islamic extremism is a problem of Muslim countries that was exported to the West. Thus bombings in a Muslim country are an "insurgency" or an "uprising" that are th fault of the Muslim victims. Bombings in the west are terrorist acts which are also the fault of Muslim victims of terrorism in the Muslim world. But wait, the trio that carried out the Charlie attack were citizens of France, they weren't raised in Muslim countries, their ideology isn't the fault of a Muslim in Mauritania or Indonesia. Their ideology is a product of Islam in France. As a matter of fact, it's France that exports terrorism to the Muslim world. There are more Frenchmen in ISIL killing Muslims in Iraq and Syria than there are from most Arab countries.

The assumption that Muslims have to deal with terrorism or apologise for it because white people are dying is not only absurd, it's also infuriating. Because the fact is, terrorists kill a lot more Muslims than they kill westerners. Way way more. Muslims have to deal with terrorism not because the lineup of blondes on Fox are demanding it, but because it's killing them on a daily basis. And as Muslims are trying to deal with terrorism on a daily basis by physically fighting it, by ploughing through a semblance of normal life, or by stating opinions that could get them killed; it's honestly not very helpful for people whose daily life remains completely unchanged to demand that they also apologise.

A lot of Muslims in Egypt are also very adamant that they are not Charlie. They completely condemn the killing of the cartoonists or the killing of anyone for saying an opinion. But they also refuse to give in to the notion that insulting Muslims as a group and their religion is now a litmus test for freedom and courage. They understand you have a right to insult them, but they refuse to idolise or respect you for doing this.

The Muslim world has to think long and hard about what Islam means today and how Qutbist and Wahabi ideology have hatched so many extremist groups in their midst. There has to be introspection, and a long military and intellectual battle for the lives and souls of Muslims. But this is a fight that Muslims have to fight on their own for their own reasons. Muslims should not be forced to apologise for Europe's failure to integrate minorities or for its botched plan to repatriate terrorism in the Muslim world. They should not be denied the right to peacefully protest the distasteful denigration of what they hold dear or of themselves as a group. This is especially true now, that many Muslims are fighting a very real daily battle against terrorism.

I don't get Obama on Syria

Nine out of ten Egyptian conspiracy theories are utter bullshit. But only five out of ten are based on bullshit observations. Many are concocted to address very real contradictions that seem to have no logical explanation. One such theory has been formulated to address why Israel and the US see the Assad regime as a bigger danger than the ISIL state at the borders of Israel. And the theory goes like this: ISIL is a creature of the CIA designed to invite foreign intervention, its limits are set, and its parameters are known. However Assad, specifically in alliance with Iran and Russia poses a strategic danger to Israel and the United States and thus must be eliminated.

I believe this theory to be utter and complete crap. I understand why it has gained a lot of traction in Egypt, because people see Israel and the US acting counter to any sense, and thus there must be something sinister cooking. But the fault of Egyptians is that they have never, and probably will never, understand that sometimes the US just acts plain dumb. People can't fathom that the behemoth of the US can have a foreign policy so inane and destructive. They think that ineptitude, bad ideas, and horrible execution are the domain of Arab governments; but not the US. The US must act out of planning, out of strategy, out of long term well considered goals. The US has quantum computers simulating all scenarios, it has nefarious aims, it is a puppet master.

The reality is of course very different. Arabs in general have a problem understanding that US foreign policy is a series of fuck ups of varying magnitude, seldom interrupted by stories of success. Vietnam and Afghanistan are simple fuck ups. The destruction of Iraq and the rise of ISIL are mega fucks. It's that simple, and that's fairly obvious to most Americans. But Arabs find it very hard to digest.

Therefore people have to explain the position of the US regarding the Syrian civil war through this prism. I understand that the theory is incorrect. But I don't understand the thought process and the mindset through which the US finds itself supporting proto-ISIL for years against Assad only to be shocked that he will be replaced by a murderous genocidal medieval Islamist state. Don't get me wrong, I get the technical aspects of how the common wisdom in Washington came to be that Obama should simply have overthrown Assad earlier, despite the patent inanity of the argument.

I understand that Washington's foreign policy is controlled in a bipartisan manner by neocons and liberal ultra-interventionists who lobby any administration into supporting "Moderate Islamist" takeovers of Arab countries. I understand that this romanticised view of "democracy" is what initiated America's support for the "Arab Spring" long before the mass demos in Tunisia and Egypt. But I don't understand how such think tanks could be so resistant to facts, counter evidence, and major time failures of their experiments on the ground.

I understand that the theory of the Arab Spring is that the US should handover control of the region to "moderates", the MB in reality to cut a long story short. And that these "moderate Islamists" are who the people of the region popularly want to be ruled by. In return, the Arab countries will localise Muslim "rage" and thus the West will be free from terrorism. But evidence on the ground seems to indicate otherwise. In Egypt for example, when the MB came to power, they accumulated around them a shell of Islamists that ran the spectrum from ISIL affiliates to televangelists. The "moderates" did not turn out to be so moderate. And when they went for a power grab, the US showed absolutely no opposition.

In Syria, the think tank theory is that Assad is the main problem. If Assad just abdicates or is killed, all will be solved. How did that work out in Libya? Did everything turn out great when Ghadafi was killed? Or did the country devolve into a warlord state? Why should Syria, divided as it is, be any better than Libya which is basically composed of one sect and one ethnic group?

The narrative is that Syria started out when children wrote slogans on the walls and Assad just went ahead and murdered them, and then people went out to the streets to protest. That the revolution in Syria started out secular and peaceful. But that is not true. Ask any Syrian, but really ask them, as in ask them followups about how the "revolution" started and you will find out that it was always from day one a sectarian war. It was always a Sunni and Kurd bid to breakaway, it was never a popular revolution. After all, Syria is a synthetic construct, held together only by Baathist's ardent secularism and pan-Arabism.

The argument then is, even if we assume the Syrian "revolution" is sectarian, don't Sunnis have the right to choose who they want to be ruled by. But they want to be ruled by ISIL! And they don't want elections to determine this. In area after are "liberated" from Baathist control, the rebels established Sharia courts to rule. Dress codes, floggings, crossings, and public executions were commonplace in rebel held areas long before ISIL started to consolidate power in Syria. Syria is 40% non-Sunni. Can I really ask the 40% to just accept that the 60% want to rule them through a system where Christians will be deported and Yazidis will be enslaved?

But Assad killed 200,000 people!! Did he? Yes, 200,000 people died in the Syrian civil war so far. But less than 10% of them are civilians. That's to say the majority of the dead are combatants. And about half of the dead are from Assad's side of the conflict. Which begs a question, why would a hundred thousand Syrians give their lives and continue to fight for Assad? Because they are not fighting for Assad. They are Shiites and Christians and Ismailis and Druze who are fighting for survival. Are they required to just surrender to ethnic cleansing? So if Assad is killed will that end the civil war? It will end it only if it means that the non-Sunni part of the Syrian population will fall into disarray and be mass murdered. Sure, that's one form of a solution. A final solution if you will. But more likely, a new leadership will from down the line will fill Assad's role and the area between Damascus and the Alawite mountains will continue to fight for survival.

But Assad used chemical weapons and barrel bombs against civilians! Well, the moderate opposition has blown up truckloads of suicide bombings in market area killing hundreds of civilians.

But Assad is using foreign fighters from Hezbollah and his forces are being trained by Iran!! Yes, he used hundreds of Hezbollah fighters against the tens of thousands of foreign fighters in ISIL, Al-Nusra and Ahrar Al-Sham. And yes, he's being trained by Iranians, just like the opposition is being trained by Turks and Americans. He is also being supported by Russia, but any support he receives fades against the endless flow of cash money from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to the Sunni militias.

But Bashar is killing his own people!! But it's not "his people" anymore. That's what you are not getting. What you call "his people", the Sunnis, are killing Assad's real people, the Shiites and the Christians. It's a civil war, it's a de facto divided country. Both sides are killers, no side is good, both sides have their reasons, none of the reasons are good enough.

So then, why is the US insisting that one side is right? I am not wondering why the US is not supporting Assad. I think it shouldn't. Baathists are inherently anti-Egyptian, and I will never forget how the Assads have always worked to undermine Egypt's security and interests. But that doesn't mean that we should blindly support whoever opposes Assad. We should take a look at who it is that's opposing him first. If there is one lesson everyone should learn from the Arab Spring it's that it's more important who would replace the old regime, before helping push it out. And please set questions of legitimacy aside, because as we established above, a liberal democracy based concept of legitimacy is not even under consideration in the Middle East. People are talking survival here.

So why is Israel more interested in seeing Assad go than it is in not seeing ISIL on its borders. Why are US think tanks convinced that Al-Nusra and Ahrar Al-Sham are moderates and that Assad should be bombed in tandem with ISIL so that these "moderates" can fill the vacuum? My theory is that it's just sheer and utter stupidity. It's also probably petty vengeance. Syria's consistent counter-western stance is not something that the US can easily forget, and Israel simply will not digest that Hezbollah pushed it out of Southern Lebanon. But why isn't Israel thinking about the endless conflicts it will have to face if Hezbollah is replaced by ISIL? Why is the US not considering that Ghaddafi never attacked the consulate in Benghazi with rocket propelled grenades, it was MB affiliated Ansar. Why doesn't the US consider that it is Iran they are having nuclear talks with now, that it is Assad who was convinced to destroy his chemical weapons, and that it was Saddam who turned out to have complied with WMD destruction protocols. These are all intelligent agents, they are not awesome people, but they are people you can talk to.

If ISIL has Sarin and a shared border with Israel, what kind of diplomatic pressure does Obama think he can exert then?

Terrorism has a religion

Not all Muslims are terrorists.

True. Even more, not most Muslims are terrorists, not even a significant minority, nor even a minority that can be represented by a percentage that can be written without scientific notation. However, the majority of terrorists in the world today are Muslims is also a cold hard fact. A large proportion of Muslims provide a cultural, moral, recruitment, and financial pool for terrorists is also an oft unmentioned fact.

The West's colonialism and intervention is the root cause of terrorism in the Muslim world.

Really? Well, colonialism has given the Muslim world a very burdensome heritage to deal with, certainly. But why is it that India and Pakistan suffered from a single colonial power, yet the heritage has yielded terrorism in Pakistan but not India? There is no doubt in my mind that without Bush's invasion of Iraq the problem of ISIL today would be insignificant, and I have no doubt that without Reagan's proxy war in Afghanistan there wouldn't have been 9/11. But the US also had disastrous immoral interventions in Central America that didn't result in people piloting planes into office towers.

The repressive and undemocratic nature of Arab regimes is what breeds terror. Terrorism is only a reaction.

But China is extremely undemocratic and yet there aren't any Han Chinese terrorists. Why is the White European convert to Islam ethnically cleansing Yazidis in Iraq? Who repressed him? If the regime in Egypt was one bit unfair to Muslims, it was a whole byte unfair to Christians, and yet Egyptian Christians never resorted to terrorism.

To me as a Muslim it might have taken some time to realise it, but there is something terribly wrong with how the mainstream of Muslim society conceives its religion.  Hearing this same statement repeated for years by semi illiterate blonde hosts on FOX News for years has certainly not helped me reach this realisation any faster. No seriously, hearing White people whose intentions are decisively malignant talk about the problem that Islam poses is one of the biggest barriers to many Muslims recognising the trouble they find themselves in.

But the Arab Spring, a horrible abomination as it has been, has had one nice side effect. It has brought to the forefront of Western rhetoric a conglomerate of neocon and liberal think tanks who are so colossally full of shit that they have jolted a lot of us fixated by what White people think out of our reverie. Hearing a whole lot of Westerners claiming that Morsi won the elections fair and square in Egypt, or that the Syrian opposition is "moderate," helped solidify one concept in my mind: I should squarely not give a fuck what anyone is saying in the West either way.

So with my reaction to the dumb blonde FOX bitch out of the equation, I was able to see the reality for what it is. There is only one religion in the world today, which provides a sizeable enough support base to allow a group of people to kill 100 students in a school. There is only one religion in the world today which provides a recruitment and financial base to allow a group of people to ethnically cleanse entire populations on purely religious grounds. There is only one group of people on Earth today who are seriously discussing the pros and cons of slavery or the proper way to beat a wife.

Muslims need to stop and think about what they have come to be. And it's not because of how the rest of the world perceives us. The rest of the world can try and may manage to isolate Muslims, to make them irrelevant, and try to ignore their presence. But it's the Muslims themselves who will suffer. The insane Iranian dude in the Sydney cafe killed nobody and was killed himself. The Taliban goons in Waziristan killed 100+ Pakistani children. Muslims are and will continue to be their own main victims. The cycle must be broken and Muslims must catch on with the rest of humanity.

There has to be a major revision, a significant paradigm shift. Muslims must decide that freedom of faith is an innate right. Muslims must understand that complete equality between genders and faiths before the law is not an option. Muslims must realise that secularism and liberalism are necessary conditions for success in the modern world. Muslims must collectively and without qualification internalise that even a hypothetical discussion of the merits of slavery is beyond the scope of what it means to be human.

Yes, it's true that we find ourselves in a very weak position today. Yes, it's true that there are a lot of people around the world who want to tear apart our cultures and destroy what sets apart. But the fact of the matter is, the reason they have such an opening to do this is because we as Muslims have reached such a low that it's kind of hard for people not to kick us while we are done. And yes, we as Muslims have to rise from this hole we find ourselves in. But ISIL is not a natural reaction, nor is it an understandable way to lash out. ISIL is a symptom of the cause of the low we find ourselves in. The low is of our own making, it's certainly being used by people who have no love for us, but they didn't engineer it. We engineered it through intellectual and cultural stagnation and lack of malleability.

To rise from the low Muslims must formulate a fundamentally new approach to the texts. The texts is the red line at which the moderate mainstream stops. And it is the snare through which the moderate mainstream allows itself to be bogged down into "exceptions" and loopholes that end up blowing in its face. Whenever mention of the texts is made, the Muslim mainstream withdraws into its protective shell. And honestly, not without good reason. When you have Israeli right wingers, the GOP, and European White Supremacists incessantly discussing how they would like to see the Quran revised, you can't blame Muslims for feeling defensive. But again, the vultures are not the cause of our ills, they are a side effect. Muslims must change the way they view Medieval jurisprudence fundamentally. Muslims must also take a long and hard look at what hadith means. But ultimately Muslims must also consider the way the mainstream reads and interprets the Quran and early Islamic history. This is a taboo of epic proportions in the Muslim world, but it has to stop being one. When there is even a possibility that there is an interpretation of Islam that accepts mass execution of school children, then something has got to give. We have to take a break and think about it.

Change! For your children you have to change.

خطبة الجمعة

من أكبر التحديات اللي بتواجهني في محاولة احتفاظي بصلتي بالإسلام المجتمعي والثقافي في مصر هي خطبة الجمعة. خطبة الجمعة تحدي هائل لإيمان كل من لديه خليتين أحياء في مخه. والحقيقة ان الوضع المزري لخطباء المساجد المسلمين بالمقارنة بتفهم وتفتح رجال الدين من الأديان الأخرى حاجة بتخلي الواحد يحس بنوع من الحسد. وده يجيبنا للمواضيع والأساليب المكررة في كل الخطب. كل خطب الجمعة تتضمن خليط من مجموعة محدودة جدا من المواضيع وأساليب الابتزاز المحفوظة. كل الاختلاف اللي نال خطب الجمعة بعد أحداث يناير هو تكفير من لا يصوت للإسلاميين ثم تأجيج التحارب المدني كل أسبوع.

خطبة النهارده في الجامع كانت خطبة مثالية تتضمن كل عناصر الخطب المحفوظة ما عدا الهجوم على اللي بيربوا كلاب:

١ الخطبة كانت كلها هجوم على كل من يدعو للتفكير والتجديد الحقيقي في الفلسفة والفقه الإسلامي. بالتحديد هو كان متضايق جدا من هجوم إسلام بحيري على هوس الإسلام التقليدي بالبخاري ورفعه لمرتبة الرسول واعتبار البحث في حقيقة أحاديثه كفر وجنون. فطبعا الشيخ عشان يثبت إن بحيري غلط دخل في خطبة مدتها ساعة كان بيسعى إنه يثبت فيها (بدون أدلة حقيقية) ان الهجوم على صحة البخاري جنون وان البخاري جزء لا يتجزأ من الإيمان، باختصار الشيخ قال حرفيا ان البخاري يأتي فقط بعد القرآن في صحته. طبعا سخرية انه بالشكل ده أثبت اللي بحيري كان بيقوله فاتت عليه تماما، بس ده مش مهم.

٢ أغلبية خطب الجمعة اللي بسمعها بيكون فيها كذب أو معلومات خاطئة أو مغالطات أصلها جهل أو كذب صريح أو تجاهل. مثلا كل ما يمت للعلم أو الإعجاز العلمي أو نظرية التطور بيكون خاطئ تماما وبشكل جذري، وكل ما له علاقة بالأحداث العالمية بيكون كذب، وكل ما له علاقة بحقوق الانسان أو الاضطهاد بيكون فيه استهبال وتغافل عن الحقيقة. النهارده الشيخ اختار انه يلفت انتباه الناس اللي نامت وهو بيمجد في البخاري عن طريق انه يدعي وجود حملة في الإعلام لتشجيع الشباب على الجنس قبل الزواج وهو كذب صريح. بس أعتقد ان من فكره ان الكذب لهدف نبيل حاجة كويسة.

٣ كل خطبة يجب أن تتضمن اتهام لشخص أو جماعة بالحقد على الإسلام والمسلمين. والنهارده الاتهام كان من نصيب بحيري. بغض النظر عن ان الاتهام عبيط ويحمل في طياته تكفير، لكن أنا دائما بحاول أفكر في الصورة الذاتية للناس اللي شايفة العالم حاقد على المسلمين. أصل معلش يعني، عشان حد يحقد على حد لازم يكون شايفه أحسن منه. والعالم كله مش شايف المسلمين أحسن منه، العالم شايف المسلمين همج وعناف (بغض النظر عن كون الصورة عادلة أو لا). مصيبة لا تكونوا فعلا مصدقين ان العالم بيحسد المسلمين وكده؟

٤ الخطبة متحلوش إلا إذا كان فيها حتة كده شتيمة في الستات. واللغة والطريق هنا محفوظين. هو هاجم دعوات تحرر المرأة في الإسلام ثم قال بتأثر تحررها من ماذا، من الإسلام؟ طبعا المفروض ان الموضوع اتقفل هنا لأنه أعطى قداسة لتمييزه ضد المرأة. وبعدين عشان يحلي البيعة لازم يقول الحتة بتاعت ان الإسلام كرم المرأة والجوهرة والبونبوناية الملفوفة واللؤلؤة وكده. بس الشيخ النهارده حب يجود فأضاف ان دي دعوات شيوعية. شيوعية؟ شيوعية مين يا حاج انت نمت في ١٩٨٥ ولسه صاحي؟ المهم الرد على الكلام ده مش صعب. إذا كنت انت هتعرف الإسلام على ان هو اللي بيتعمل في الستات في المجتمعات الإسلامية حاليا يبقى أيوه الستات محتاجين يتحرروا من اللي انت بتعرفه على انه إسلام. تسميته بالإسلام لا يغير من الواقع شيء. كما ان تسمية القهر والحبس والكبت والتمييز بالتكريم والتشريف مش هيخليه تكريم وتشريف.

٥ نهاية خطبة الجمعة المميزة النهارده كانت بالحتة المفضلة عندي. الشيخ قرر ان مناقشة "هؤلاء" لازم تبقى عن طريق إفحامهم. وجزء من إفحامهم هو اللجوء لحجة التخصص، الشويتين بتوع انت لو حبيت تسأل في الطب هتسأل طبيب، لو حبيت تسأل في الهندسة هتسأل مهندس، لو حبيت تسأل في الدين لازم تسأل رجل دين. أيوه بس يا حاج انتو قلتولنا ان مفيش كهنوت في الإسلام، وانتو كده كهنة. هو الدكتور ولا المهندس بيحجز ما بيني وبين ربنا؟ وهو الشيخ بيقدملي دراسات إكلينيكية وإثباتات نظرية وعملية لكلامه؟ وهو ربنا مش المفروض خالقنا بالفطرة نقدر نوصله ومش محتاجين سمسار في النص؟

للأسف أنا مش عارف أنا بقيت بحضر صلاة الجمعة ليه. هي دي الخلاصة

The two I's

I believe without the Jewish state of Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran the Middle East would have been a much more hospitable, diverse, progressive, stable, and tolerant place.

This is probably an axiom that anyone who studies the Mideast knows but very few people dare speak. Of course the response is always a permutation of: Holocaust, drive the Jews into the sea, anti-Semite, and never again. This of course completely misses the point, because do I wish Iranians were driven into the Gulf?

Israel is a foreign and synthetic entity implanted into the Mideast due to complexities of European history. It was formed by the mass migration of people whose roots in the region are so tenuous that they are likely non-existent. And they had to drive off people whose roots in the region predate even the ancient Hebrews'. But once the Jewish refugees had settled in historical Palestine they probably established an intrinsic right to live on that land and to practice their religion and culture and be first grade citizens.

But that was not enough. Jews had the right to statehood. Why? Because of reasons that had nothing to do with the Mideast. And because Jews had weapons and the cover of a very freshly and rightfully guilty Europe, Israel was allowed to ethnically cleanse Palestine, so that Israel would not only be a state for Jews, but would be a Jewish state. This sharp stab at the heart of the emerging Arab nations would reverberate to this day.

Yes, Israel's initial conception was not of a religious state, but it was one of a mono-cultural society. And Israel's practice has lead it down a path where it has become an expansionist, apartheid morass of right wing extremism. I recently got into the habit of following a diverse collection of Israeli Twitter accounts, and I was truly shocked. Israelis are not the Westerners I thought they were, they are not the secular self examining progressive people I imagined them to be. In fact, they mostly remind me of Muslim extremists. They are entirely focused on picking on Muslim societies so far away they have never had any interaction with Israel. They spend all of their time finding absurd parallels with absurd situations to justify the most absurd actions of Israel. And they truly and completely and consistently define their country's conflict as a conflict with Islam. As someone who has spent a lot of time reminding Arabs that the Arab-Israeli conflict is at its core a secular conflict over land and people, I was shocked to discover that perhaps the instigation of a religious view of the conflict is not as Arab driven as I once thought.

But as damaging as Israel's presence in its current form has been to the region, I believe it might have ended up well. After Sadat's initiative for peace, I believe enough pressure could have been accumulated on Israel to accept peace based on a two-state solution at a time when the West Bank was still salvageable. In return there would have been complete normalisation with Arab states. In a way this almost feels like it should have been inevitable. Instead something in the middle happened and said pressure never materialised, Israel instead went down its insane extreme right wing path and destroyed the territorial integrity of the West Bank, leaving itself in a situation where it either becomes the new Republic of South Africa or it becomes (gasp) a minority Jewish country.

That something was the Iranian revolution. In fact it wasn't even the revolution itself but a short period where everything went wrong and Khomeini lead the country down a path of adolescent auto-pilot. As Khomeini glided along with the unplanned and catastrophic US embassy hostage crisis, he directed the Iranian revolution in a direction it was not necessarily destined to take. As he glided along improvising he thought it would be a great idea to export the Islamic revolution. So there we went as Iran stabbed a scythe of influence and agency across the fertile crescent from Iraq to the shores of Lebanon.

The influence of Jewish Israel and Islamic Iran on the region has been disastrous. In Lebanon in the eighties they laid the groundwork for what the region could expect in years to come. It was not, in fact, Syrian "occupation" that lead to some of the more disastrous chapters of the Lebanese civil war. It was the agency to Israel by the phalange and to Iran by the budding Hezbollah that tore the country apart and would continue to this day. In Syria, the Baath regime was not always, as some insist, a minority controlled regime. In fact it was a despotic but secular regime that underplayed sectarian differences and kept the awkward state of Syria glued together through Arab nationalism. It was the decision by Assad senior to make Syria an agent of Iran that started the decomposition of Syria allowing the disastrous Syrian "revolution" to mushroom beyond anything the Islamist uprisings of the 70's could present. In Iraq, US instituted ballotocracy brought an Iranian proxy government dominated by Shiites which stressed sectarianism way more than Saddam ever did. Leading inevitably to ISIL.

What's really interesting is that the conflict between Israel and Iran and their neighbours is not an ancient conflict as western media dutifully recites. In fact Arab countries and Iran had excellent relations with Iran under the Shah. If the Iranian revolution had not happened, there is a very high possibility that in the absence of political tension, Muslim sectarian differences could have been mended. Israel also did not have to turn the conflict into a religious conflict. Certainly from Arab perspectives the conflict did not start out religious, but under constant pressure from Israel the PLO mutated into Iranian sponsored Hamas. While Israelis might think that turning the conflict religious helps them accumulate international support, they must realise they reside in a region that is becoming increasingly hostile and increasingly dangerous.

The way out for Iran is straight forward: Iran must abandon its self proclaimed role as the protector of Shiites in the Arab world. It must stop conflating religion and geopolitics, because ultimately it has worked against both its interests and the well-being of Shiites in the region. For Israel I don't know if there is a way out any longer. The way out was always the two-state solution. Everyone always knew the parameters of said solution: Contiguous land for Palestinians at exactly 67 borders, sharing Jerusalem and water, limited right of return for Palestinian refugees to historical Palestine, and normalisation with the Arab world. The west knew this was the solution, the Arab world knew it and proposed it explicitly in the Arab initiative, and even Palestinians knew it and endorsed it. But Israel has been on a suicidal path enabled by the US to destroy any possibility of this solution through settlements in the West Bank. The Israelis are convinced that the current state is sustainable, while some convince themselves that the Bantustans/enclaves in the West Bank can be a sustainable Palestinian state. The truth is, Israel is heading down a very disastrous path, and its friends are not helping it much by their enabling.

Why the Arab Spring hypothesis has failed

The Arab Spring hypothesis was simple: Arabs hate the US because Arabs want Islamist rule, the US is seen as propping corrupt autocratic secular regimes against the will of the people. If Islamists are allowed to rule through a form of illiberal democracy, they will eventually have to moderate along the lines of Christian parties in Europe, they will no longer hate the US, there will be no more wars in the Mideast and Israel will be safe.

This is obviously a load of BS. It might sound simple and elegant to a westerner, especially one racked by liberal guilt. But anyone with any understanding of Islamists could've (and did) predicted this would not work.

So how did it go? In Egypt the MB came to power, immediately moved to disenfranchise large sections of society, started supporting Jihadist groups, undermined the army, and lead to the creation of a critical mass of anti-Islamism that exploded in a conflagration of epic proportions. The US refused adamantly to accept that there is genuine societal refusal of Islamism in Egypt because that flies against the vogue theories of neo-cons and Arab Spring hypotheses. In Libya elections gave the MB a majority in parliament which they used to fund militias loyal only to them. When they lost the following elections, they moved to systematically deconstruct the vestiges of statehood that Libya ever had in a drawn out civil ... spat. In Yemen, democracy brought to the forefront a dominance of Al-Qaeda in multiple provinces, separatism in the South, and a sectarian war in the North that pretty much disintegrated the national army.

But the mother of all demonstrations of the utter and complete idiocy of the thesis behind the Arab Spring is of course Syria. In Syria the US, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar for divergent reasons insisted that Asad was the only problem and that by him going everything would be peachy. A gigantic civil war driven blind spot developed as the allies were busy trying to spin the media. In this blind spot ISIL rose from the ashes of Iraq, leading to the astounding scene of the siege of Kobane in Syria as ISIL and Turkey besiege a Kurdish town likely to be exposed to mass slaughter if it falls.

So what went wrong? A few catastrophic idiotic assumptions by the Obama administration went wrong.

First, the assumption that Islamist parties would go the way of Christian parties in Europe is demented. It ignores major difference in the nature of both religions, in the origins of the parties in both regions, and in the histories of the regions. The Arab world has a history of colonialism, no major regional wars in recent history to install a pacifist attitude, the religion has not passed through a period of secularisation, and liberal values are in no way part of social values in the Mideast as they are in Europe.

Secondly, the majority of Arab countries are entities that are entirely based on concepts of post-colonialist Arab nationalism. This is particularly true of Syria where there was no other glue holding together the country. The Arab spring was almost entirely driven by Islamists wanting to get to power through either guns or ballot boxes or both. The US knew this, and pretty much wanted it. But said Islamists are Sunni, and as Libya has shown clearly they have absolutely no intention of granting anyone who doesn't toe their line any quarters. In such a situation, what was the expected reaction of the Shiia, Alawis, and Christians of Syria? Were they expected to lie down and be subjected to a gradual but unavoidable campaign of ethnic cleansing along the lines of the Christians of Iraq? As the US, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia poured weapons and foreign fighters into Syria through the borders of Turkey were they expected to surrender to the mass slaughter coming, or were they expected to respond with equal ferocity.

But above all, the assumption that moderate Islamists are the only party capable of confronting and moderating radical groups was the cardinal error in the Arab Spring hypothesis. It shows the Obama admin has absolutely no idea how Islamists function and that it was easy prey to the bilingually bifurcated media machine of the MB. Because Islamists have never ever made any radical revision of the basic principles that drive all of them, they are all very vulnerable to being bullied into more radical positions by groups to their right. Given enough time, the MB in Libya certainly and without delay turned Jihadi, in Syria, the MB will inevitably gravitate towards ISIL. Leave a bunch of Islamists alone and through a convoluted process of medieval argument and head chopping they will all accumulate towards the extreme right and coagulate into one pulsating murderous sectarian monstrous entity.

And that is far worse than anything the autocratic allegedly corrupt regimes of the Pan-Arabist era could have produced.

Arab Spring indeed.