File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0112, message 163


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




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