From: "Harald Beyer-Arnesen" <haraldba-AT-online.no> Subject: Re: AUT: Re: Antiterrorism = development of terror againstourstruggles Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 08:32:11 +0100 On 19. desember 2001 1:22, Peter van Heusden wrote: For me one of the most interesting aspects of Islam is its material practice. Muslims in Cape Town are very much practically involved in charitable work - 40 000 meals got dished out on Eid, for instance. One of my comrades in Tafelsig is only able to survive, in part, because of support from the community of his mosque. As I argued recently, Islam exists as a material reality which appears to be very much allied with the underdog in Cape Town. Now, in this it is hardly unique - churches, for instance, play something of the same role elsewhere. But there is something peculiar about the material practice of Islam in Cape Town, and maybe elsewhere, that makes it stand out and be much more politically visible. [...] Well I do not know particularily about Cape Town, but very likely an important part of the answer also there is Saudi etc oil money. Due to this money, there is also now everywhere more Qu'ran schools etc than there ever were in the Islamic golden age, and, could be added, much of what was written then, would never be allowed read now. Similar to prior to the reformation in Europe the Qu'ran is learned everywhere by root in Arabic, also for instance to Pakistani children here in Norway. The importance of the Saudi money has immensely increased, but the phenomenom is not that new. I like once more to quote Lafif Lakhdar, though the information can be got almost everwhere: "The integralist muslim sects, haloed with their martyrs from 1954 to 1966, especially in Egypt, swarmed clandestinely. Worse still, they became credible. All the more so since they were favoured by the fact that the unspeakable authoritarianism of those in power left practically no means of expression or autonomous organisation. Only the mosques were protetected from censorship. They became places where the masses whose ranks were broken by despotism received a politico-religious indoctrination. Then came the October war with its parade of intense Islamic propaganda, and the oil boom which enabled Libya and especially Saudi Arabia to distribute their petro-dollars to the integralist groups everywhere in order to undermine left-wing extremists, or pro-Soviet groups as in Syria. Even at the time when the modernist statist bourgeois faction was still credible, Saudi Arabia was used as the prototype by repressed or prosecuted Islamic archaism; and its emergence following the October war on the ruins of Nasser's Egypt as the leader of the Arab world gave the Brotherhoods of Sunni Islam not only more subsidies, but the model of an Islam true to itself. The propaganda pounded out by the western media – depitching Saudi Arabia as the new giant with the power of life and death over western civilisation – stimulated, in old and young alike, the nostalgic old desire for the return of Islam to its former strength." Always the new saviour, and this unfortunate fact of (the lost) old empirehood. These are elements too. Lafif Lakhdar also wrote then (1981): "The Arab intellectuals of today shun any criticism of Islam, of the most abominable of its dogmas, and even the translation of the publication of books clarifying the genesis of Islam such as Maxime Rodinson's *Mohammmed*. The main explanation for this is the fact that the Arab intelligencia as a whole has made a compact with the left and right factions of the bourgeoisie – factions which differ from each other as much as Tweedledum from Tweedledee." In the Arab world, those who think for themselves and are capable of elaborating a criticism of all the sacred or profane mystifications come up against the the political and religious censorship of the present Arab state – a censorship which is immensely worse than that of the caliphate state. The fact is that the best Arab poets and thinkers of the early centuries of Islam would not be able to exist in the present-day Arab world ...." Harald --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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