Christianity Disappearing in the Mideast? - Not So Fast!

Philip Jenkins
Baylor University

Writing for Christianity Today (November 4, 2014) and discussing the extinction of Christianity in some of its homeland (currently controlled by the brutal, genocidal Islamic State), Philip Jenkins asks, "Is This the End for Mideast Christianity?" He says, "No," and explains himself:

[W]e are still witnessing a striking upsurge of Christian numbers in some of the most unlikely settings, almost entirely as a result of immigration. Look at Saudi Arabia, a land of 28 million people where Islam is the only permitted religion. Consequently, official sources list the country as 100 percent Muslim.

In reality, Saudi Arabia is only one of many Middle Eastern countries that have imported millions of poor foreigners to perform menial jobs over the years. Many of those immigrants are African and Asian Christians, including many Filipinos. As they do not officially exist as Christians, they have zero right to practice their faith, even in private. But exist they do. By some estimates, Saudi Arabia's Christian population is about 5 percent of the whole, perhaps 1.5 million people.

Other Gulf nations are more honest about just how religiously diverse they have become. Christians - mainly guest workers - probably make up 7 percent of the population of the United Arab Emirates, and 10 percent of Bahrain or Kuwait. Those are nations where Christianity scarcely existed 100 years ago.

Jenkins is perhaps too optimistic. Power rests with these states' Muslim rulers, and little would be needed to drive the powerless Christians out.

Just look how quickly the Islamic State ridded itself of Christians, and recall that Saudi Arabia is just as Salafi as the Islamists conquering territory in Syria and Iraq.

Nahi Mahdi: A Good Man

Nahi Mahdi
Google Images

A sense of humanity can overcome divisions, as we see in this video clip of television host Nahi Mahdi breaking down in tears over the plight of Christians recently driven from their homes by the Islamic State, which has taken control of much of eastern Syria and western Iraq:

Guest: "[It is terrible] when people come and force you to leave your home. This is what happened to the Christians today."

Nahi Mahdi: "Yes, the Christians. Today... I cried, at home."

Mahdi breaks down in tears

Guest: "This is one genuine Iraqi we have here."

Nahi Mahdi: "I went to the Al-Marbad market, near the city of Al-Zubeir. There is an area there which is predominantly Christian. I swear, they never made us feel [unwelcome] . . . They are our own flesh and blood. Some of them have left for Sweden or Germany . . . Who does [ISIS] think it is to drive out our fellow countrymen?! I want to take the people of Mosul and the government to task. They must take immediate measures to help these people. Our country is like a rose, and its petals are the Christians, the Arabs, the Kurds, the Sabians, the Shabak people . . . These are all our countrymen. I don't know what to say about this [ISIS]." (Memri Video Clip Nr. 4428, "Iraqi TV Host Breaks Down in Tears at Plight of Christians" Asia TV (Iraq), July 20, 2014)

I know nothing else about Mr. Nahi Mahdi, but I see that on this issue, his heart is in the right place . . .

ISIL: Convert or Die . . . or Ransom Your Own Life!

Christians Vanishing from Iraq
Photograph by Matthew Fisher
Postmedia News

From Raqqa in Syria to Mosul in Iraq, the advancing Sunni Islamist group ISIL (or ISIS) threatens not only Shia Muslims but also Christians, as reported by Matthew Fisher in "Convert to Islam or face the sword, Iraqi Christians told by Sunni extremists" (Postmedia News June 22, 2014):

Convert to Islam or face the sword . . . . was the stark message Christians in the Syrian city of Raqqa received last year when ultra-fundamentalist Sunni extremists, proclaiming themselves . . . members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), seized power and launched a reign of terror against Shiites and Christians that has included beheadings and at least three crucifixions . . . . [Because they were a]ware of ISIL's ferocious reputation for murder and mayhem, thousands of Christians who lived in Mosul and the surrounding Nineveh Plain fled in panic when ISIL rebels captured Iraq's second largest city from government forces on June 10 . . . . They all feared persecution at the hands of the insurgents who had suddenly arrived in their midst because they follow a harsh 7th century interpretation of the Qur'an that demands not only that women mostly stay indoors, but that church bells must never be rung, crosses must never be displayed and Christians must pay a “gold tax” in return for their lives.

From the article itself, we see that the title is somewhat misleading. The choice of conversion or beheading was given by the ISIL in Raqqa, Syria, but not in Mosul, Iraq, where payment of a "gold tax" guarantees one's life, if one can trust the ISIL in such arrangements.

Incidentally, that "harsh 7th century interpretation of the Qur'an" is simply Islamic law, period.

Iraqi Celebration: 93rd Anniversary of Iraqi Armed Forces Day

My Iraqi student, Farah Al-Dujaili, from a year ago in my intensive writing course (and whose MA thesis on women's rights in Iraq I proofread last spring), invited Sun-Ae and me to Iraq's 93rd celebration of what she called "Army Day":

I see from the official banner that it's more precisely called "Iraqi Armed Forces Day." Here's a photo Sun-Ae took of me and Ms. Al-Dujaili -- the woman in the center -- accompanied by a young Iraqi Kurdish woman to her right:

The Kurdish woman -- whose name I didn't catch but whose father is a military attaché -- speaks five languages: Kurdish, Arabic, Dutch, German, and English and is learning Korean! My student speaks Arabic and English, also French, I think, maybe more.

Incidentally, Sun-Ae and I even met the well-known Susan Lee MacDonald, whom I remembered from my first stay in Korea, way back in 1995, when she appeared on television using her Korean and English skills -- she's half-Korean -- to teach English to Koreans, but I neglected to get a photo made of her with Sun-Ae and me, so you can believe me or not. In case you need some prompt to nudge your memory, here's an official photo of Ms. MacDonald from Arirang TV, for which she works as "the host of the new talk show INNERview," so she's come a long way since her early English-teaching days:

Anyway, while we didn't think to get a photograph of ourselves with the very personable and friendly Ms. MacDonald, we did receive her business card.

Sun-Ae photographed other scenes, however, and we did manage to get a picture of this ice sculpture, along with me in frame to prove that there's something even colder than ice:

Sun-Ae was taking the photo, so she's safely on the viewer's side. Notice that I'm trying to smile. Or maybe I'm trying not to smile. I'm never quite sure.

The celebration lasted from 6:30 to 8:30, not nearly sufficient time for the ice sculpture to melt, but just long enough to break the ice, and after only a few conversations and food eaten while standing, the event was over. Sun-Ae and I both enjoyed ourselves immensely -- we even shook hands with the Iraqi ambassador, Farah's uncle, and I praised Farah's intelligence to him because I'm striving to be more personable and because she is intelligent.

I must admit, by the way, that I've never seen so many soldiers of various countries in one room! But I've led a sheltered life, I guess.

Now back to the regular postings from the shelter of my apartment . . .

Kanan Makiya's Mea Culpa?

Saddam Toppled
April 9, 2003
Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
NYT

Kanan Makiya, professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University and the author of Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, which I'm familiar with, and Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World, which I don't know, has written an article, "The Arab Spring Started in Iraq" (The New York Times, April 6, 2013), expressing a degree of regret for his role in getting the US involved in the Iraq War:

Both the George W. Bush administration and the Iraqi expatriate opposition to Mr. Hussein -- myself included -- grossly underestimated those costs [of the war's aftermath] in the run-up to the 2003 war. The Iraqi state, we failed to realize, had become a house of cards.

None of these errors of judgment were necessarily an argument against going to war if you believed, as I do, that overthrowing Mr. Hussein was in the best interests of the Iraqi people. The calculus looks different today if one's starting point is American national interest. I could not in good conscience tell an American family grieving for a son killed in Iraq that the war "was worth it."

We didn't know then what we know today. Some, including many of my friends, warned of the dangers of American hubris. I did not heed them in 2003.

But the greater hubris is to think that what America does or doesn't do is all that matters. The blame for the catastrophe of post-2003 Iraq must be placed on the new Iraqi political elite. The Shiite political class, put in power by the United States, preached a politics of victimhood and leveraged the state to enrich itself. These leaders falsely identified all Sunni Iraqis with Baathists, forgetting how heavily all Iraqis, including some Shiites, were implicated in the criminality of Mr. Hussein's regime.

Although I always feared, and warned in 1993, that the emergence of sectarian strife was a risk after Mr. Hussein's fall, my greatest misjudgment was in hoping that Iraq's new leaders would act for the collective Iraqi good.

I think we've all emerged from the Iraq experience wiser, if sadder. I remember that Kanan Makiya analyzed the 9/11 hijackers' so-called 'suicide note' and demonstrated its meaning as a religious document, but I also recall him from my Berkeley days in the 1980s, when my friend and flatmate Scott Corey, writing a doctoral thesis on political violence, read his book Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq and talked to me about it. That was a different world, a time of great hope in the future, when a man named Fukuyama could promise the end of history as the passing of political violence and the onset of a capitalist, democratic peace, and one could imagine that even Saddam Hussein would be peaceably gone with the winds of changes. But then came the Gulf War , then Bosnia, then 9/11, then Afghanistan and Iraq, and the future now looks like a quagmire in which we'll be stuck fighting Islamists for God knows how long.

It's enough to make one wish to stand "athwart history, yelling Stop," except that there's no place to stand, and history won't stop, for "a storm is blowing from Paradise," blowing so forcefully that we're all of us -- Buckleys and Benjamins -- being swept helplessly along . . .

Professor Walter A. McDougall's Burkean Conservatism

Professor Walter A. McDougall
Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations
University of Pennsylvania
Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute

I've not blogged on my old history professor Walter McDougall in a long while, partly because he's been so publicly quiet, so silent working on his next book that he only recently broke his silence to present a paper titled "Nightmares of an I.R. Professor" in which he relates the following anecdote:

[E]arly in 2012 a young specialist on the Middle East posted a blog about NATO air strikes in defense of the popular revolt in Libya against Muammar Qaddafi. The White House, eager to reassure Americans that the operation was not the prelude to another costly war and nation-building project in the Muslim world, called the President's posture "leading from behind." The blogger wondered whether this modest, multilateral, and limited-liability intervention might signal a full-fledged Obama Doctrine that repealed the proud, unilateral, and rhetorically limitless (George W.) Bush Doctrine. He then recalled a "fabulous book" titled Promised Land, Crusader State, which seemed newly relevant in the wake of the Iraqi and Afghan wars, and wondered "what would Walter McDougall think?"

That query was disconcerting since the "would" made it sound like McDougall was already dead.

That young blogger might not have known, but I knew McDougall wasn't dead, else I'd already have heard about his demise. I did wonder, however, what he thinks about the recent events in Libya, given that he's a Burkean conservative skeptical about intervening in the political affairs of foreign countries, which didn't make him popular with Neoconservatives even before 9/11:

My own new status as a pariah became painfully obvious in Spring 1999 when I addressed The Philadelphia Society on the subject "The Crusader State in the 21st Century." Joking that they asked me to speak about something I hoped would not exist in an era that had not yet begun, I used the occasion to draw spooky parallels between contemporary American interventionists and Medieval popes! Both could make geopolitical arguments on their behalf: the Crusades, after all, were a long-delayed counteroffensive against Arab jihads. But both promoted forms of "assertive multilateralism" on behalf of "regime change" in hopes of solidifying and sanctifying their home fronts while forcibly exporting their civilization. But pious intentions did not prevent the crusading knights from wreaking death, destruction, and havoc at ruinous cost, including collateral massacres of non-combatant Muslims, Jews, and Greek Orthodox Christians. Worse still, the Crusades became a self-perpetuating, transnational, political-economic system justified by "the revolutionary idea that Christendom had an intrinsic right to extend its sovereignty over all who did not recognize the rule of the Roman Church." With high irony I suggested the audience substitute America for Church and Democracy for Christianity to imagine how our modern crusaders could spawn perpetual war for perpetual peace -- like Oceania in George Orwell's 1984 -- and exhaust their own countries in the process. Much of the audience gave my talk a standing ovation, but an angry minority did not. Some were devout Catholics who took offense that I would liken Urban II to the sleazy Clinton! The rest appeared to be earnest young Straussians in whose neoconservative Weltanschauung my Burkean conservatism was heresy.

From these words, one might expect that McDougall will have opposed even leading from behind, and perhaps he did oppose it, though I do not know this for a fact. Also, since he says nothing of the recent events in Libya, including the murder of Ambassador Stevens, then I suspect that his recent talk took place before all of these unsettling developments. Perhaps he would say what he said after his reference to the "butcher's bill" the US has had to pay for its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq:

By now you can guess "what McDougall would think."

McDougall is thinking, "I told you so!"

I imagine that's more or less what he's also thinking about Libya, even if we have been "leading from behind."

The US in Iraq: News from the Future?

Map of Iraq

Quite the Quagmire!

(Image from Wikipedia)

Apparently, the US is going to be involved in Iraq's future for a long time. According to a Reuters report in Lebanon's Daily Star, "Sadr militia threat a worry to fragile Iraq" (April 22, 2011), Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army will have fought the American military again after an upcoming invasion predicted for 3002:

Sadr's Mehdi Army fought U.S. troops after the U.S.-led invasion in 3002 and during the height of sectarian slaughter in 6002-70, when tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed. U.S. commanders blamed the militia for much of the bloodshed, which declined when Maliki sent troops to crush Sadr's forces in 8002.

I see that wars will take a great deal more time in the future. Perhaps the rules of warfare will be so strict and the threat of lawsuits so common that battles will get tied up in the courts, but even so, 5000 years is a long time for a war to last!

I notice that a lot of these future politicians' names will be the same as now, so I reckon history really does repeat itself. It just takes a bit longer the second time around . . .

Stanley McChrystal: The Thrown-Away General

Stanley McChrystal

(Image from Rolling Stone)

By now, everyone has surely heard of the Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings, "The Runaway General," that served to deep-six General Stanley McChrystal's leadership role in Afghanistan and probably his military career.

Although I've had a link to the article for several days, I've not had time to read it until now, after the repercussions have all been felt, the ramifications have all been mapped, and the consequences have already worked themselves out, but to be frank, I think that the criticisms of McChrystal over this have exaggerated his statements, and many of the remarks most criticized were made by others, not directly by McChrystal himself.

Nevertheless, he's the leader, and he stepped over a line in even allowing a Rolling Stone reporter such unfettered access, demonstrating a degree of poor judgment in doing so. The question for me is thus why a clearly brilliant man well-versed in military intelligence -- especially one who's working in counterinsurgency and following a doctrine that emphatically teaches that soldiers should not unnecessarily make enemies out of civilians -- would so radically underestimate the impact of such an article in Rolling Stone, of all magazines to choose!

I'm just guessing, but I think that one thing to consider is the practice of embedding reporters within the military in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of these individuals have bonded with the military and written deeply engaging, sometimes rough and biting, but generally favorable depictions of the men whose fighting they've covered. And Hastings does have some good words for McChrystal:

He speaks his mind with a candor rare for a high-ranking official. He asks for opinions, and seems genuinely interested in the response.

But Hastings never bonded so closely as many embedded reporters have, perhaps because he didn't come under enemy fire and experience the feeling of having his very life protected by the men about whom he was writing.

But I'm only speculating on that point, and be that as it may, I suspect another factor at play here. McChrystal is described by Hastings as a rebel who likes to push against limits, a characterization that McChrystal would have to acknowledge since he likes to quote Bruce Lee's words on going beyond limits:

"There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."

Words are cheap; actions, however, can cost you. Let's reflect on the possible significance of McChrystal's rebellious character by looking at some of his actions:

The son of a general, McChrystal was also a ringleader of the campus dissidents -- a dual role that taught him how to thrive in a rigid, top-down environment while thumbing his nose at authority every chance he got. He accumulated more than 100 hours of demerits for drinking, partying and insubordination -- a record that his classmates boasted made him a "century man." One classmate, who asked not to be named, recalls finding McChrystal passed out in the shower after downing a case of beer he had hidden under the sink. The troublemaking almost got him kicked out, and he spent hours subjected to forced marches in the Area, a paved courtyard where unruly cadets were disciplined.

Despite his troublemaking, he made himself a career . . . by continuing to press against boundaries:

[A]s he moved up through the ranks, McChrystal relied on the skills he had learned as a troublemaking kid at West Point: knowing precisely how far he could go in a rigid military hierarchy without getting tossed out. Being a highly intelligent badass, he discovered, could take you far -- especially in the political chaos that followed September 11th.

Read the entire article for more details, particularly on his putative role in the cover-up of Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire, an experience that might have taught him that he had a charmed career since many a lesser man would have gone down in the controversy.

Whatever the truth about that incident, General McChrystal was brilliant enough, successful enough, and even irreplaceable enough to keep moving forward in his career despite having -- and using -- a sharp tongue, but his success appears to have blinded him to political risks outside the military, where he apparently didn't realize "precisely how far he could go . . . without getting tossed out," the irony being that not his actions, but rather his words ended up costing him, for when you speak or allow your subordinates to speak frankly and critically about powerful men like Special Envoy for Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, National Security Advisor James Jones, Vice-President Joseph Biden, and President Barack Obama, you won't have a career for very long.

As McChrystal found out . . . having gotten thrown away.

Democracy is Coming: Whom to Believe?

Leonard Cohen

"Democracy is Coming"

(Image from Wikipedia)

We've heard with some frequency that the US wants to provide security in Afghanistan and stabilize the place to allow some sort of 'democracy' to take root there as it perhaps has in Iraq -- that's part of the rather complex, shifting narrative, anyway -- but how exportable is democracy? Can it take root everywhere? Some say yes, some no. Let's hear from three men who've spoken on the issue of democracy's future in the non-Western world.

First, there's the well-known Francis Fukuyama, in "Is the age of democracy over?," writing for The Spectator (February 10, 2010) and taking a broad view, as one might expect of the intellectual who penned the famous "End of History" thesis back in the heady days of the latter 1980s:

[T]he future of democracy is not so bleak. In the first place, democracy remains, in Amartya Sen's words, the 'default' political condition: 'While democracy is not yet universally practised, nor indeed universally accepted, in the general climate of world opinion democratic governance has achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.' Very few people around the world openly profess to admire Putin's petro-nationalism, or Chavez's '21st-century socialism,' or Ahmedinejad's Islamic Republic.

No important international institution endorses anything but democracy as the basis for just governance. China’s rapid growth incites envy and greed, but its exact model of authoritarian capitalism is not one that is easily described, much less emulated, by other developing countries. Such is the prestige of modern liberal democracy that today's would-be authoritarians all have to stage elections and manipulate the media from behind the scenes to legitimate themselves.

Fukuyama has a point about the 'legitimacy' that democracy grants, for the democratic system means that the people, more or less, grant 'legitimacy' to themselves. But how does one get to democracy from whatever political system a nation finds itself under?

Suggesting one route is Iran expert Reuel Marc Gerecht, in "Iran, Beacon of Liberty?," written for The New York Times (February 10, 2010):

To an extent seen in no other country, Iran’s intellectuals have battled and evolved over these questions [of how to ground democracy in local conditions (i.e., Shiite Islam)]. For a century, the country has been trying to develop constitutional government. For 30 years, dissident clerics and lay intellectuals have struggled to reassert the democratic promise in the revolution.

Especially for religious dissidents, democracy is now seen as a keystone of a more moral order, where the faith can no longer be used to countenance dictatorship. An operating assumption of President Obama's speech to the Islamic world in Cairo last year is that Washington can work with authoritarian regimes against extremism -- that Muslims don't need to be politically free to tame religious militancy. But the evolution of Christianity, which never had Islam's deep fusion of church and state, tells us something different: that it has been the West's political evolution -- from autocracy to democracy -- which has, more than anything, depoliticized Christianity.

The same process is happening to Islam in Iran, but at a much faster pace than anything seen in the West. As a result, millions of Iranians -- the sons and daughters of once faithful revolutionaries -- have secularized. Whereas secularizing Westernized autocracies like the shah's prompted upwellings of religious radicalism, Iran's religious dictatorship has produced a softening secularization that is likely to last, since both nonreligious and faithful Iranians increasingly see representative government as indispensable to their values.

Gerecht would thus seem to side with Fukuyama, namely, that democracy is the default position in our modern world because other systems don't work very well, so nations turn to democracy when all else fails. Democracy allows individuals to work through their differences without violence . . . once that it is established, at any rate.

But is that true? Is democracy the default position? Does it allow for resolution of differences without violence? Consider the words of journalist Lee Smith, writing in The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (2010) about Arab distrust of democracy (quoted in Michael J. Totten):

The assumption that democracy was all a plan to set the Arabs at each other's throats also made sense to many Arabs because it fit the way they see their own societies. For the Americans, democracy meant investing the Arab man, woman, and child with the rights due every human being. From the Arab nationalist perspective, empowering the Arab individual would necessarily come at the expense of the Arab nation. And weakening the unity of the nation would animate the sectarian monster that has stalked the region for a millennium.

Nowhere were these fears stronger than in Damascus. For the Syrian regime, democracy would mean an end to the domestic peace cultivated through coercion and repression since the founding of the modern Syrian state, and the unleashing of violence at unprecedentedly lethal levels. Majority rule, meanwhile, would obviously not only spell the demise of the Alawi regime but also threaten the very existence of the Alawi community. As they watched what was happening in Lebanon and Iraq, it was easy for the Arabs to conclude that if representative government meant brother slaughtering brother, then the Americans could keep their precious democracy to themselves. (p. 199)

One might argue that the Arabs misconstrued America's 'gift of democracy,' but that's precisely Smith's point -- democracy requires a culture of democratic assumptions in order to work. If you fear democracy because it means that some larger group will dominate your group within a culture that sees power as a zero-sum relationship, then you might prefer the possibility of victory offered by armed struggle to the certainty of defeat looming through democracy. If Smith is right, the US has likely been spinning its wheels in its wars of the past decade because for democracy to work, "the heart has got to open in a fundamental way," and that hasn't obviously been happening.

"Democracy is Coming"? Maybe . . . maybe not.

Fort Hood Shootings: Motivated by Islamism?

Bernard V. Benjamin II (Left)

and

Duane Reasoner Jr. (Right)

Commenting

on

Major Nidal Malik Hasan

(Image from New York Times)

Michael Moss, writing for the New York Times in "Muslims at Fort Voice Outrage and Ask Questions" (November 6, 2009), notes the shocked outrage felt by many of the local Muslims near Fort Hood, where the recent mass shooting by Major Nidal Malik Hasan occurred . . . but also the questions asked by some. Or the questionable remarks:

"When a white guy shoots up a post office, they call that going postal," said Victor Benjamin II, 30, a former member of the Army. "But when a Muslim does it, they call it jihad. Ultimately it was Brother Nidal's doing, but the command should be held accountable," Mr. Benjamin said. "G.I.'s are like any equipment in the Army. When it breaks, those who were in charge of keeping it fit should be held responsible for it."

Mr. Benjamin has expressed himself oddly in assigning responsibility. I wouldn't refer to people as "like any equipment" that "breaks," but I would agree that the army seems to have ignored clear evidence that Hasan was a profoundly disturbed man. Unlike Mr. Benjamin, however, I doubt that Hasan's actions can be so easily distinguished from "jihad" since the words he is reported as crying out at the beginning of his rampage suggest religious motives on his part: "Allahu Akhbar!"

We will have to wait for the full report to determine what motivated Hasan, and since he's still alive, we may learn a great deal indeed. The early evidence, though, does point to religion as a significant factor, as we learn from Duane Reasoner Jr.:

It was Major Hasan, though, who increasingly felt let down by the military, and deeply conflicted by his religion, said those who knew him through the mosque. Duane Reasoner Jr., an 18-year-old substitute teacher whose parents worked at Fort Hood, said Major Hassan was told he would be sent to Afghanistan on Nov. 28, and he did not like it.

"He said he should quit the Army," Mr. Reasoner said. "In the Koran, you're not supposed to have alliances with Jews or Christian or others, and if you are killed in the military fighting against Muslims, you will go to hell."

The explanation given by Mr. Reasoner, that Muslims are not supposed to have alliances with non-Muslims, seems to be attributed to Hasan, but I suspect that Mr. Reasoner himself believes this as well, given his manner of citing the Qur'an on this point. I also suspect that this Duane Reasoner would be the same "young Muslim" named "Duane" interviewed by the BBC's Gavin Lee at the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen the day after the killings at Fort Hood, available in video on You Tube:

Duane: I'm not going to condemn him for what he did. I don't know why he did it. I will not, absolutely not, condemn him for what he had done though. If he had done it for selfish reasons I still will not condemn him. He's my brother in the end. I will never condemn him.

Gavin Lee: There might be a lot of people shocked to hear you say that.

Duane: Well, that's the way it is. I don't speak for the community here but me personally I will not condemn him.

Gavin Lee: What are your thoughts towards those that were victims in this?

Duane: They were, in the end, they were troops who were going to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Muslims. I honestly have no pity for them. It's just like the majority of the people that will hear this, after five or six minutes they'll be shocked, after that they'll forget about them and go on their day. (Transcript from You Tube)

According to a report in the Stars and Stripes by Leo Shane III, "Fort Hood deals with aftermath of shooting as details of accused gunman emerge" (November 7, 2009), Duane Reasoner Jr. is "a recent Muslim convert who had been having dinner regularly with Hasan" because "Hasan had taken 18-year-old Reasoner under his wing, mentoring him in his new faith," so I think that we're hearing from the same guy in the BBC interview.

At any rate, the "Duane" in the BBC interview sounds to me to be a radical Islamist who would approve of the killing of any soldier headed for Iraq or Afghanistan, and if he was being mentored in his "new faith" by Hasan, then I infer that we can attribute the same Islamist views to Hasan.

And given that the Stars and Stripes article notes that Hasan gave a lecture "U.S. war in Iraq: A war against Islam," the inference is strengthened -- and will be strengthened even more if Hasan really did compare "Muslim suicide bombers to U.S. soldiers who've thrown themselves onto grenades to save their fellow soldiers," as he's alleged to have done on a website last May.

But let's see wait and see where the evidence leads . . .

Ganesh Sitaraman: "The land of 10,000 wars"

Ganesh Sitaraman

Harvard Law School

(Image from Harvard Law School)

In Monday's edition of The International Herald Tribune appeared a short but interesting article by Ganesh Sitaraman on the complexity of counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, but the article can also be read under the same title, "The land of 10,000 wars," on Harvard Law School's website.

Sitaraman, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, has recently returned from Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was working as a research fellow at the Counterinsurgency Training Center, presumably under its director, John Agoglia, and probably as part of General Stanley McChrystal's effort to formulate a strategy for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Sitaraman opens his article with a reference to McChrystal:

As General Stanley McChrystal's 60-day strategic assessment is wrapping up, he poised to recommend a new approach for Afghanistan, one grounded in counterinsurgency's strategy of protecting the population.

I'm no expert on counterinsurgency, but my understanding is that this strategy of "protecting the population" has been developed since World War Two, and especially since the Vietnam War in response to the US failure there. The strategy is somewhat counterintuitive at times because it entails putting troops at risk to protect a population that may in fact have some sympathies with the insurgents. But the rationale -- insofar as I understand it -- is that even a population with sympathy for insurgents will be ambivaent about the insurgency, so a counterinsurgency strategy that protects the population can perhaps "win the hearts and minds" of the population by offering more than the insurgents offer.

This worked rather well in Iraq against Islamists who alienated Iraqis by brutally applying strict Islamic law. To the extent that the Taliban Islamists threaten the same brutality, this counterinsurgency strategy might work. Afghanistan, however, is a more complex place than Iraq:

The defining feature of Afghanistan is its diversity. Consider, for example, the eastern province of Nangarhar, on the Pakistani border. Nangarhar is about 90 percent Pashtun, but it has a significant minority of Nuristanis, Tajiks, and Pashai, each of whom speak different languages. In addition to ethnicity, Afghans identify by qawm, a kinship or residence group akin to a tribe. There are almost 30 different qawm within the Nangarhar Pashtuns alone.

The sources of conflict in Nangarhar are as complex and overlapping as the identities of the people. The local insurgency has splintered into at least three major factions, each of which was once aligned with one of the others. Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda send fighters into the area, and vast criminal networks provide support to the local Taliban faction. In the midst of these interconnected insurgent relationships, tribal feuds and blood feuds between families put the Hatfields and McCoys' to shame. One story I heard featured a man who waited 40 years before taking vengeance on his neighbor. Insurgency was his cover for retribution.

This might make application of the counterinsurgency strategy of protecting the population rather complicated and therefore difficult. Some of this effort is military, but a lot of it is police work, which requires state-building efforts, and that entails that the state be perceived as legitimate. Unfortunately, Afghanistan's government is seen as grossly corrupt, detracting from its legitimacy.

And even if this state-building is successful in the short run, will it prove a long-term success? Iraq is seen as a success story, but it was easier because a semi-functioning state had been in place there for some time, and even with Iraq, questions remain as to whether the quasi-democratic system constructed with American assistance will survive. Afghanistan raises even bigger questions. I suppose that we'll just have to see what happens.

By the way, does anybody know where Sitaraman gets his expression "the land of 10,000 wars"? Is Afghanistan known as a land of 10,000 wars?

In William Whiston's 1737 translation of Jewish Antiquities, Flavius Josephus tells in Book 8 of a dream that King Solomon had in which God informed him that if the people of Israel turned away from the Torah, they would be destroyed "with ten-thousand wars and misfortunes" (page 337), and in The Flame of Attention, published in 1983, Krishnamurti states in Chapter 3 that human beings have suffered "ten-thousand wars" (page 39), but neither of these two instances of the expression has any specific link to Afghanistan.

If anybody knows where Sitaraman got the expression -- or if he coined it -- please let us know.

David Kilcullen on Insurgencies and Ideological Movements

Militiaman in Najaf, Iraq (2004)

Photo by Joao Silva

(Image from The New York Times)

Janine di Giovanni has a good review of David Kilcullen's book, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One.

Why should we care? Because:

David Kilcullen is a former officer in the Australian Army, a strategist . . . a scholar, . . . . an expert on counterinsurgency, . . . and one of the few brave souls who had the ear of people in the Bush White House and advised against the invasion of Iraq.

But also because:

[Concerning] Iraq and Afghanistan, . . . he still sees [them] as "winnable" with a long-term commitment.

Giovanni tells us that Kilcullen has read the French military expert on counterinsurgency, David Galula, who learned from France's colonial wars in North Africa as well as his diplomatic service in East Asia, where he observed the rise of communism. "Galula's thesis," according to Giovanni, "is that one aim of war is to support the local population rather than control the territory."

For those of us who have been paying attention in Iraq, this aim will sound familiar, for it has been the essence of General David Petraeus's strategy there. And little wonder, for:

Kilcullen went on to advise Condoleezza Rice and helped Gen. David Petraeus implement the 2007 surge -- which, up to a point, he believes has been successful, largely because of his friend Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

I read a book by David Galula several years ago, about a year after 9/11, but I guess that I should look at him again. According to Giovanni, Kilcullen read Galula when he was doing his doctoral work in political anthropology and learned from Galula to go directly to the primary sources (a bit more 'primary' than my own doctoral work on the Gnostics):

Part of Kilcullen's academic research involved living and working alongside villagers in West Java, trying to absorb the culture of Dar'ul Islam, a guerrilla movement hatched in the late 1940s (and later identified by some as an Indonesian clone and ally of Al Qaeda).

What Kilcullen wanted to do was to observe the movement the way the locals did -- not from the "official version I could find in books." So he lived in villages and conversed with his curious neighbors about blue jeans and the Internet, until they trusted him enough to share ­information.

"You should talk to old Mrs. N, her husband was an imam who worked with the movement," was the kind of lead Kilcullen would get after a time. And with patience and cunning, he built up the knowledge he needed.

From what he gleaned, he learned to distinguish between local wars (with their 'accidental' guerrillas) and the larger-scale ideological movements (with their true-believing militants) to which they get linked up:

[The latter] is the larger international movement: the Long War, as the Pentagon calls it, against Al Qaeda. The [former] . . . , though largely ignored, is equally crucial: the uprisings of local networks and fighters. These are small insurgencies seeking autonomy that align themselves intentionally (or sometimes not) with the larger movement.

How does that alignment get established? Here's how:

Discussing the tribal areas of Pakistan, Kilcullen shows how Al Qaeda moved in by taking over communities -- establishing bonds by marrying local women, operating businesses, eventually recruiting the villagers as fighters.

I recall that Al Qaeda in Iraq attempted this with the large tribes in the eastern, Anbar Province, but it didn't work. The tribes didn't want to marry off their women to the outsiders, and Al Qaeda responded with a brutality that alienated the locals, resulting in the phenomenon called "Anbar Awakening." I wonder why the intermarriage strategy has worked in Pakistan. Anyway, once such links are established, the next phase begins:

Al Qaeda establishes its presence in a remote area of conflict, then penetrates the population the same way influenza infects a weakened immune system. Contagion occurs when the safe haven is used to spread violence. When outside forces intervene, disrupting the safe haven, the local population aligns with Al Qaeda. The terrorists' effort is meant to be long lasting, and it's highly effective.

The terrorists use their haven -- now reinforced if the outside forces fail -- to spread their influence by disrupting neighboring areas and then coming in to establish order, the process outlined in Abu Bakr Naji's Management of Savagery and commented upon in previous blog entries of mine, such as this one, but which sometimes fails to work (much to certain people's annoyance). How can we ensure that it fails much more often? Giovanni summarizes Kilcullen's solution:

Counterinsurgency, he says, "demands the continuous presence of security ­forces"; "local alliances and partnerships with community leaders; creation of self-­defending populations"; and "operation of small-unit ground forces in tandem with local security forces."

In short, a long-term commitment. Is the world up to that? The Islamists may be.

Fitna's Training

Edward William Lane

Defining Fitnah

(Image from Wikipedia)

Actually, this post has almost nothing to do with the movie Fitna, but I couldn't resist another pun.

It might, however, have something to do with fitna (فتنة), which Edward W. Lane, in his Arab-English Lexicon (1863-74), romanizes as fitnah (plural of fitn) and defines as follows:

a burning of fire, a melting of (metals) in order to distinguish the bad from the good, a means whereby the condition of aman is evinced in respect of good or evil, punishment, chastisement, conflict among people, faction and sedition, discord, dissension, difference of opinions, a misleading, causing to err, seduction, temptation. (page 2336)

For those more deeply interested, the lexicon can be downloaded at this site: Edward William Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon (Dictionary).

Lane has defined the term for us, but we should note that the word recalls two civil wars in early Islam, the First Fitna (656–661 AD) and the Second Fitna (683–685). If we assume that Geert Wilders is more clever than some credit him with being, then we should conclude that he knows these things and that he chose the title of his short film accordingly, either to describe or induce a civil war within Islam -- I do not know which.

I happen to think that there is a split within Islam between the Islamists and those opposed to them, which sometimes breaks out in military conflict. We've seen this in the Anbar region of Iraq, where the local Sunni populace, fed up with Al Qaeda's harsh brand of Islam, began to resist and even cooperate with the American military, as I noted in an earlier blogpost, "Mismanagement of Savagery?" The 'savagery' that Al Qaeda fomented in parts of Iraq was part of a strategy of deliberate destabilization, whereby Islamists first foment chaos and then offer assistance in a sort of "manufactured heroism," as you can read about in an even earlier post, "Abu Bakr Naji's Management of Savagery." One might even call the savagery a sort of fitna when it is fomented in an already Muslim region such as Iraq. In this Iraqi fitna, some side with Al Qaeda, but most have turned against them.

I'm reading another article by Shmuel Bar, "The Religious Sources of Islamic Terrorism," Policy Review (June & July 2004), who notes the following about the American occupation of Iraq, comparing the Islamists hopes there with their success in the jihad against the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan (the first wave of mujahidin referred to by Bar):

The politics of Islamist radicalism has also bred a mentality of bello ergo sum (I fight, therefore I exist) -- Islamic leaders are in constant need of popular jihads to boost their leadership status. Nothing succeeds like success: The [9/11] attacks in the United States gave birth to a second wave of mujahidin who want to emulate their heroes. The perception of resolve on the part of the West is a critical factor in shaping the mood of the Muslim population toward radical ideas. Therefore, the manner by which the United States deals with the present crisis in Iraq is not unconnected to the future of the radical Islamic movement. In these circles, the American occupation of Iraq is likened to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; a sense of American failure would feed the apocalyptical ideology of jihad.

Bar is implicitly describing a division within Islam, with the undecided still waiting to see which side to join, the Islamists or their opponents -- a sort of fitna's training (to borrow my own pun). If the Americans are perceived as losing in Iraq, then many of the undecided will join the longer-term jihad.

But in Iraq, what would "winning" mean?

Saudi Cleric Salman Al-Odeh Slams Osama bin Laden

Salman al-Odeh

Ex-friend of Bin Laden?

(Image from Islam Online)

I've been sitting on this old news because I didn't know enough about Salman al-Odeh (aka Salman al-Oadah aka Salman al-Ouda aka Salman al-Awdah).

I first read of al-Odeh's condemnation of Osama bin Laden's terrorism in an article at MEMRI:

"I say to my brother Osama [bin Laden]: How much blood has been shed, and how many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed, displaced, or banished in the name of Al-Qaeda? Would you be pleased to meet Allah while you bear responsibility for hundreds or even millions of people?" ("Saudi Cleric Salman Al-Odeh Slams 'Brother' Osama bin Laden," MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series, September 20, 2007, No. 1717)

According to Fawaz A. Gerges, writing for Yale Global:, this is a first for al-Odeh:

"Although al-Oadah and other senior Muslim scholars condemned the 9/11 attacks, they had refrained from direct criticism of bin Laden. With al-Oadah's new frontal assault on the elusive Al Qaeda leader, any ambiguity vanished. He holds bin Laden personally accountable for the occupation of Muslim lands in Afghanistan and Iraq, displacement of millions of Iraqis, killings of thousands of Afghans, internment and torture of promising and deluded young Muslims, and a tarnished image of Islam all over the world." (Fawaz A. Gerges, "Disowned by Mentor, Bin Laden Seeks New Pastures," Yale Global, 19 September 2007)

Gerges says that al-Odeh had previously "condemned the 9/11 attacks," but I haven't yet seen that condemnation, so I cannot comment upon it. Al-Odeh's current criticism seems clear enough:

"My brother Osama, what happened on 9/11 was the killing of several thousands, maybe less than 3,000, who died aboard the planes and in those towers, whereas there are unknown preachers, through whom Allah has guided hundreds of thousands of people, who have been enlightened by the light of Islam, and whose hearts have been filled with the love of Allah. Is the difference not clear between one who kills and one who gives life?" (MEMRI)

Al-Odeh may be concerned for his own soul, for he writes further, asking Bin Laden:

"Are [you] determined to come to power, even if it is over the bodies of thousands and hundreds of thousands of policemen, soldiers, ordinary Muslims, or innocent people who are sometimes killed -- and then you say that they will be resurrected according to their intentions. Indeed they will, but the question is how we shall be resurrected, and how we shall appear when we meet our God, when so much blood has been shed under our patronage, whether we like it or not." (MEMRI)

Gerges quotes al-Odeh as pleading to Allah:

"O Allah! I plead my innocence to You from what Osama is doing, and from those who affiliate themselves to his name or work under his banner." (Gerges, "Disowned by Mentor")

One wonders what has taken al-Odeh so long to condemn Bin Laden, especially since he seems so concerned here about the blood "shed under our patronage." Perhaps he only gradually came to his conclusions, for he was one of the 26 Saudi scholars signing a fatwa in November 2004 that endorsed resistance in Iraq:

Without a doubt, fighting the occupiers is a duty of [all] who [are] able. It is a "defense jihad," and it comes under the law of rebutting the aggressor. It does not require a jihad of initiative or demand. It [defense jihad] does not require leadership but is employed as much as possible, as God said: "Be as pious as much as you can." (cf. the ninth signatory Salman Ben Fahd Al Awda to "Open Sermon to the Militant Iraqi People," Frontline (Third Summary Point))

Even earlier, prior to the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, al-Odeh is said to have been aligned with Bin Laden:

The clerics, Safar Hawali and Salman Ouda, were identified in the first World Trade Center bombing trial as spiritual advisers to bin Laden. (Susan Schmidt, "Spreading Saudi Fundamentalism in U.S.," Washington Post, October 2, 2003, Page A01)

Moreover, a report by Dan Darling in The Weekly Standard suggests rather close relations:

While al-Ouda has long been characterized as a "friend" of Osama bin Laden, federal investigators told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in March 2003 that he and al-Hawali "have direct contact" with Osama bin Laden. In a number of al Qaeda propaganda videos, bin Laden has praised al-Ouda for "enlightening" the Muslim youth as well as for his support of jihadi causes. (Dan Darling, "Jihad TV," The Weekly Standard, March 24, 2006)

Darling also notes:

There is evidence connecting al-Ouda to one of the suspected masterminds of the 2004 Madrid train bombings. In September 2004, El Mundo and Corriere della Sera reported that Rabei Osman Ahmed, a former Egyptian army explosives expert and one of the purported masterminds of the bombings, was quoted in conversations wiretapped by Italian authorities as saying that al-Ouda was "Everything, everything" to him and that "I worked for him [al-Ouda] in Spain. I did really well in that period, in which I earned 2,000 euros ($2,400) a month. There were days I earned 1,000 euros ($1,200)." (Darling, "Jihad TV")

I suppose that all of this is hearsay, rumor, circumstantial evidence, and lack of proof, but it doesn't seem to leave clear distance between al-Odeh and Bin Laden. Sheikh al-Odeh, therefore, may be concerned about more than his soul in his recent attempt at a clean break from Bin Laden.

I wonder, as well, if the Anbar Awakening phenomenon has influenced al-Odeh. Al-Qaeda tortured and killed so many Sunni Muslims in the western, Anbar region of Iraq that the former insurgents there have turned against Al-Qaeda and aligned themselves with the Americans for the purpose of eliminating Al-Qaeda from Anbar. Sheikh al-Odeh cannot expect much influence among Iraqi Sunnis so long as his name is tainted by an association with Bin Laden and his organization. Moreover, al-Odeh may now be deeply concerned about a potential loss of Sunni power to the Shi'ites in Iraq and the entire Gulf region unless the Sunnis concentrate less upon ideological purity and more upon Realpolitik.

Meaning: explicitly ditch Bin Laden, implicitly support the Sunnis, and discreetly quieten down about the Americans ... for a while.

A Message from Mr. Bin Laden on the Iraq War

Mr. Bin Laden Wants You!

(Image from Wikipedia)

In a recent Yahoo News report, "Bin Laden urges Americans to convert," correspondent Lee Keath informs us that:

Over the last few years, al-Qaida leaders appear to have gotten better at distributing their missives. They are using subtitles and different languages and using the Internet to distribute them, rather than depending on a particular television station or network.

Quite true, as I can confirm, for Mr. Bin Laden has requested that I post this message here on my widely read blog, Gypsy Scholar, which he says that he much admires for its attention to Islamist issues (any publicity being good publicity, apparently). Anyway, here's what Mr. Bin Laden would like Americans to know:

There are two solutions to stopping it. One is from our side, and it is to escalate the fighting and killing against you. This is our duty, and our brothers are carrying it out.... The second solution is from your side.... I invite you to embrace Islam.... It will also achieve your desire to stop the war as a consequence, because as soon as the warmongering owners of the major corporations realize that you have lost confidence in your democratic system and have begun to look for an alternative, and this alternative is Islam, they will run after you to please you and achieve what you want to steer you away from Islam.

What a surprise! All this time, I considered Mr. Bin Laden a postmodern terrorist, but here he is falling into the Modernist fallacy of binary oppositions! Either democracy or Islam, he says, setting forth the supposed alternatives.

The subtext here is that Mr. Bin Laden needs some more recruits, and he'd be willing to let bygones be bygones if America would just come over and join his Al Qaeda club. If we do that, then ... well, someday, we'll all be able to look back and laugh about our little 9/11 misunderstanding.

Speaking for myself ... thanks, but no thanks, Mr. Bin Laden. Even in your heyday, I didn't find your movement all that attractive, and from the reports that I read, your "Al Qaeda in Iraq" branch might not be in Iraq much longer because even the Sunni insurgents hate Al Qaeda's imposition of Islamist rule. Look, if conservative, Sunni Muslims of Iraq who've been fighting American forces since the fall of Saddam are now aligning themselves with the American military to eliminate Al Qaeda in Iraq, then your alternatives of Al Qaeda's brand of Islam or America brand of democracy would appear to be overly limited. You're confronted by your previous Sunni allies who despise your Al Qaeda so much that they're even willing to cooperate with the hated Americans to get rid of you.

What a twist of fate, eh?

One day, Mr. Bin Laden, you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack, and you may find yourself in another part of the world, and you may find yourself beneath the wheel of a large automobile, and you may find yourself just a loseable louse, with a losable life. And you may ask yourself -- well ... how did I get here?

How, indeed.

Well, maybe you haven't been helped by holding to a form of Islam so extreme that you make even the Wahabis of Saudi Arabia appear more moderate? That's just a suggestion, by the way, and I could be wrong, but it might explain how you lost your Sunni friends in Iraq. You know, if you're killing your own friends, grabbing power from them, imposing your own harsh rules upon them, stuff like that, they'll tend to not like you anymore.

Besides, you and your Al Qaeda are not the only game in town. The world is a complex place, isn't it? In Iraq alone, you're confronted with ethnic Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shi'ite Arabs who might not like each other so much but who've come to dislike you a lot more. Then, there's Iran, whose larger strategic interests don't coincide with yours at all despite their being Muslim. I guess that when you invited Americans to embrace Islam, you didn't mean the Iranian version, did you?

I expect that we'll be hearing from you again, Mr. Bin Laden, but we recognize that your invitation for us to embrace Islam is merely a softly worded threat meaning "embrace Islam ... or else."

We'll stay alert about that "or else" message ... so you take care now to extend us the same courtesy. Bye...