(The Photo above is probably an Arab-style mush pit, or it could be some peculiar version of a stag party. It looks like both.)
Lost in all the publicity about Islamic militancy, political activism and terrorism is a quiet revolution- a takeover by stealth- that has been taking place across the Arab Middle East over the past two decades. Most westerners who are not specialists on the Arab World or long-term residents do not see it.
It is not a revolution with a view to the future, but one firmly committed to a questionable past. Its aim has been to gradually bend society to its will, re-orient it, and shift the acceptable mores toward those of the Salafi right (I am using ‘right’ here for lack of a better word, not in a historical context). The ultimate goal is the creation of its own intolerant version of an Islamic past that was actually noted for tolerance through most of its history. Ancient Moslem/Arab rulers from Andalusia to Baghdad were probably the most enlightened of their era. They did not shy away from relying on the best and the brightest minds and talents of their time, and often those were non-Arabs and non-Moslems. Churches and synagogues coexisted alongside mosques in the large cities along the Eastern Mediterranean Coast and in Spain for centuries, long before Tomas de Torquemada and his inquisitors clamped their own Taliban-style of intolerance on Spain- long before they started burning and massacring Jews in Continental Europe as a sort of perverse mass therapy. Long before they started burning women as witches in Europe.
This revolution by stealth has been undertaken with the connivance of many Arab rulers. About a quarter of a century ago, Arab dictators, potentates and monarchs discovered a latent force at their disposal, and an easy way to get rid of their annoying secular opponents and critics, especially those who called for financial accountability. In those days, the fundamentalists were on the margins of society, politically ostracized as reactionaries in most countries with the exception of Saudi Arabia.
Yet a two-way Faustian (or Shaitani) deal that evolved over the years, tacit in most cases, has allowed the Salafi fundamentalists a free rein to shift and redefine the acceptable moral standards of many Arab societies. The term ‘moral’, according to this deal, is confined almost exclusively to two issues: restricting the freedom of worship, and clamping down on social freedoms, especially the interaction between men and women. Beyond that, as far as the Fundies are concerned, anything goes. All the moral tenets of the Moslem faith regarding the sanctity of public (and private) property, financial accountability, abhorrence of injustice, and equality were thrown to the wind.
Today we have a beast that everyone warns us about, but we are warned about only the public side of the beast, the more sensational side. This side of the Fundamentalist threat is easier to deal with and contain than the more serious hidden side. We are warned about the terrorism, the violence, and the occasional street demonstrations, and most of these occur on the far shores of a nervous Europe and some other places. What about the more serious danger, the real time bomb that is ticking in the heart of the Arab World, the insidious infiltration and take-over of public institutions and of the de-facto morality-and-thought police that has evolved over the recent years? Even if the terrorism is defeated, the seeds of the terrorists' vision have been planted deep within these societies. Certainly this more serious long-term problem is not a result of the partition of Palestine, or the loss of Jerusalem twice in one generation. Nor is it a result of the intrusion of foreign powers into the region. It is a direct lovechild of the coupling of the avarice of the rulers and the selective morality and hypocracy of the Salafi Islamic fundamentalists.
Cheers
Mohammed
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