retreat

Bin Ladism long dead

2011-05-07T18:07:00.000-05:00

Bin Ladism as an ideology—indiscrimination between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, jihadism against American imperialism; death to America, the Jewish state, and the Saudi monarchy; and the possibility of an all encompassing Islamic state and umma—may not survive as a totality, assuming there was one. What is important to note is that in their more basic elementary fragments, such elements survive on their own, rather than as a totality, in various areas, and in varying degrees, within the Arab and Islamic worlds. The only thing that Bin Ladism adds to such common sense notions is their actualization in the context of a violent revolutionary struggle. In other words, slogans are redeemed inefficient in their own right—they’re only words—and could only be brought to justice (and to earth) through revolutionary struggle. Hence the jihadism that Bin Laden supported and financed in Afghanistan under the Soviet occupation (1979–1989), the attacks against U.S. embassies and American military and civilians, and, last but not least, the spectacular character of 9/11 (where, for once, reality supersedes fiction), which has set new benchmarks that the Qaida was unable to replicate anymore. It is therefore such revolutionary struggle that sets Bin Ladism apart from the rest—not the fragmentary content of its ideology—and which precisely prevents it from having a strong line of adherents among the Arab and Muslim youth. Moreover, since the Qaida was never set as a territorial organization, the way Hamas and the Hezbollah are, it floats around as a virtual nation-state without any concrete links to a population. Hence the excitement about Bin Ladism has waned rather than accelerated since 9/11, and by the time Bin Laden died this past week, he knew that his Revolution would never materialize. This is not to say that his ideology as a totality or in its fragments is not there anymore. Without the idea of a Global Revolution most of Bin Ladism would be sheer common sense. Bin Laden died not only defeated and isolated (probably “bored,” said the New York Times), but in a home with no connections (not even a phone line or an Internet connection), as if waiting for death to come by, and it finally came by way of the Obama Administration. By contrast, when Saddam Hussein was caught, stood trial, then executed, thanks to a poor coordination between the Bush Administration and the Iraqi federal government, he had plenty to do and was at the height of his powers. In Bin Laden’s unfortunate case, the Grand Revolution looks like a utopianism that was bound to fail and rapidly disappear, while the Baathist power structure, as epitomized by the likes of Saddam Hussein (and Asad, Mubarak, and the rest), is there to stay. Let us not forget that, in spite of the Arab revolts, all the infrastructures of power are still there untouched. By contrast, Bin Ladism, which has built its ideology on nonsensical fragments commonly found in Arab political discourses, had no way to materialize in practice. Bin Laden therefore died like a bored university professor who some time ago produced lots of words, but whose main achievements were decades behind rather than ahead of him. If, as has often been noted, the young who are taking it to the streets in the Arab world are not using anti-imperialist slogans, but are rather coming through with more concrete demands, it is because in most instances they’re not the ones behind state and party organizations; hence the slogans of the protesters are no indication that the Arab political discourse of the modern nation-state is yet shifting in another direction. Caught in a globalized capitalist world, the modern nation-state is unable to set itself into practices that make sense locally, that is, for the disfranchised populations whose per-capita income and modes of living are far off from their counterparts in advanced liberal societies.

Even though president Obama took on his behalf the decision not to publish the photos and videos of Bin Laden’s body with his head and body torn with bullets, what the White House decided to release instead is what ultimately became “the” photo of the event: the group around the president which knew of the Bin Laden operation, and which was able to watch it “live,” with a direct commentary from CIA director Leon Panetta. Ever since the Nuremberg trials, the West has at great pains set for itself the task to prosecute crimes against humanity, wherever these may have occurred. Since then, many of such crimes which have either touched on the peripheries of Europe (Serbia and Kosovo), Africa, and the rest of the world, were also subjected to tough investigations and prosecutions against the persons or groups who committed them. Since groups are impossible to prosecute, it was indeed those who “represented” them that generally stood trial. The idea here is not so much revenge per se, as much as a willingness to “represent” evil, show it, and bring to public life those who are allegedly responsible for such crimes. The important thing here is therefore the publicity of all such operations: instead of the vendetta feuds that were normally in use until World War II, the aim here is to make the process public, whether the hearings where the perpetrators are openly accused of their crimes, the rebuttals by lawyers and culprits, or the decisions themselves by judges and magistrates. Hence within the whole judicial process that became the norm in 19th-century Europe, and which replaced the old system by ordeal, everything has to be carefully examined and judged accordingly. In the case of Bin Laden, the decision was made, which was never admitted as such openly, to bring him dead rather than alive, hence a process à la Nuremberg was out of question, and would have created an impossible process to manage logistically or otherwise. But then justice was rendered, at least in the grand north American tradition, of punishing “the one” who was “known” to be behind the 9/11 massacres and other killings as well. What is still missing in all this, however, is due process and a fair trial, hence the importance of the photo released by the White House. The photo publicizes the decision-making process and provides it with an aura of legitimacy. It does so by humanizing the protagonists-as-decision-makers, beginning with president Obama himself, who appears not only stone-faced, but more importantly, not even as the central character. You’ll have to look well to find him, and there he appears on the edge of the table, as if sitting on his own and oblivious of the others. What the protagonists are watching, we’re unable to see, and we’ll have to make up for such a gap in our minds, as the best of Italian and Iranian neorealism have taught us. We’re nearly sure that they’re watching the operation unfold, but which moment exactly—the decisive one where bin Laden was shot dead?—and does it really matter to know? The photo “works” precisely because it adds suspense to the hors-champs, incorporating the unseen and out-of-frame within the suspended narrative, while capturing le moment décisif (Henri Cartier-Bresson) at a decisive moment that we’re unable to see and determine. The photo, in other words, adds a touch of “realism” in a secretive process, handled, as we can witness, mostly by mid-aged family men whose life was devoted to the Washington belt, but who manage to appear here in their more humane unseen self, like weekend family men and women watching a good TV show. The monstrosity of the act of killing Bin Laden, the precision and ruthlessness with which it was executed, add to the importance of the photo by humanizing the protagonists. Even though the president made the final decision, and was liable for it, it was, indeed, group work that finally mattered (as should be the case in a liberal democracy)—and the photo precisely underscores the collective aspect of the team work. In the absence of a fair trial, had Bin Laden survived, the legitimacy of the killing appears well founded, precisely because of the team work which was publicly revealed thanks to this unique photograph—and to the sublime work of ideology.

The photo was taken on May 1 2011, and uploaded on Flickr a day later:

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. Seated, from left, are: Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, Assistant Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command; Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Standing, from left, are: Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; National Security Advisor Tom Donilon; Chief of Staff Bill Daley; Tony Binken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; Audrey Tomason Director for Counterterrorism; John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Please note: a classified document seen in this photograph has been obscured. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Source:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/5680724572/in/photostream

a new third political order?

2011-05-05T16:55:00.003-05:00

A postcolonial “second order” was de facto established in west Asia and the middle east in the aftermath of WWII, which replaced the post-Ottoman “first order” that protected the nascent nation-states and their bourgeois middle classes and professional élite groups in the aftermath of the empire’s dismantlement and sudden demise. As it turned out, such groups were doing well and prosperous as long as the French and British colonial order was there to safeguard the middle east from further fragmentation. The 1952 free officers revolution in Egypt and the 1958 Qasim coup against the Hashimites in Iraq were the first indicators of the end of the post-Ottoman colonial bourgeois rule, with all its liberal underpinnings (free press, multi-parties, banking and finance, and family owned industries). By 1963 and the coming of the Baath in Syria and Iraq, the tone was clearly set that we're into "socialism," one-party state rule, secret services, and a preponderant role to the military and their affiliates, which ended up controlling education and major industries. Qaddafi's coup in 1969 against the Idrissi dynasty, the rejuvenation of the Baath in the 1970s under Saddam and Asad, reinforced the trend, while the Iranian revolution in 1978–79 completed the circle of the monolithic state and its military and intelligence apparatuses. So it took three decades after WWII for the political and social “second order” to take shape in west Asia and the middle east. Are the present revolts destined to dismantle that order or consolidate it? The elements that consolidated the old order, and which are still there, came from the rural peripheries and small cities, and were rooted in the military. In the four decades since they've come to power, they've lost touch with their original peripheries, hence what we're witnessing now is the class struggle emerging from large sections of the populations that have been disfavored and marginalized. However, there isn't much of a political program for all those lower classes, which have been joined by fragments of the middle classes that lost their purchasing powers over the years, and young techies that do not fit well into the current societal stalemate. High unemployment and birth rates, inflation of college degrees, the low status of women, and the failure to industrialize, are certainly the main culprits behind the gross failures of the nascent nation-states to modernize and compete with their Asian counterparts. Hence it's a curious combination of elements that are coming together in those street protests, more class- than ethnically-oriented, whose final resolution would take several decades to settle. To be sure, there will be more openings towards more representative political systems (multi-parties etc.), but that won't be enough, hence the possibility of a rigid consolidation if the social forces fail to mature in the right direction. I'm as usual fairly pessimistic, as I don't feel that the region as a whole is yet ready for a mature "liberal" solution.

the economics of sharia law

2011-04-24T20:57:00.002-05:00

Kuran, Timur, The Long Divergence. How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. ISBN 978–0–691–14756–7. U.S. $29.95.

Even though Timur Kuran is overall convincing at laying out arguments on the backwardness of Islamic practices regarding partnerships, corporations, banks, loans with interest, waqfs (mortmain properties blocked from circulation), and contracts in general, he seems less convincing at explicating why Islamic societies were held back from competition with Europe from the middle ages up to modern times. Indeed, his main assumption that it was Islamic law that held back the economy escapes the problem rather than points at its cause in a convincing way. Legal systems in general are more an outcome of social conditions, rather than the major force that would bring social relations to a more developed level. In other words, history shows that whenever the law is “behind” social practices, whether cultural or economic, they tend to be addressed sooner rather than later. A case in point, which Kuran explains at length, is the ban on loans with interest that both Jews and Christians had to abide by in the early European middle ages, which in both instances were bypassed due to the socio-economic conditions in Europe at the time. Even in modern times, legal systems tend to struggle in order to match cultural and economic developments. Witness how the American common law had to battle, since the nineteenth century, its formative period, with issues like private property, contracts, the corporation, slavery, rights of minorities and women, abortion, and gay and lesbian rights, in order to become congruent with the nascent capitalism and the mores of the times. It therefore seems quite obvious that for any society and civilization, at every historical juncture, it is the totality of social relations, or the mode of production, which in the last stance is what impacts politics and law. There are times when the law falls behind the evolution of social relations, which could be attributed to anything from the weakness of the state, or to the nature of legal reasoning itself, for instance, a need for complete overhaul that is constantly delayed, due to lack of adequate resources or for political reasons. However, Kuran addresses Islamic law for over a millennium, and for that long a period it would be absurd, as he does, to blame economic backwardness solely on the law, as suggested in the book’s subtitle and its various chapters. It goes without saying, however, that there is a “divergence”—and a wide one for that matter—between Islamic economies and their western counterparts; the Mediterranean economies of the last millennium, between east and west, point to such a divergence. Even though Islamic law shares the blame, it is more of a symptom of a much broader and deeper problem, than the major culprit.

Kuran’s demonstration often questions the reasons that did not push “communities” and subcommunities from tailoring Islamic law to their own needs and aspirations. In other words, if Islamic law proves to be, indeed, the main culprit, or the prima causa, in the history of economic backwardness of middle eastern societies, why hasn’t there been any resistance to its rule? Or why, in the vast Islamic empires since the Umayyads and Abbasids up to the Ottomans, no major challenges were posed to the legal limitations on partnership, inheritance, loans with interest, and waqfs? Why is it that no corporations, loan institutions, public debt and banking services have emerged even in rebellious peripheries? Or why is it, as far as economic and legal practices are concerned, no significant changes are to be noted between the Shi‘i and Sunni sects? Why is it that no group, subgroup, community or subcommunity broke the general rules in order to establish more aggressive economic and legal practices?

Kuran’s reasoning assumes that, first, Islamic law reached such a level of maturity and comprehensiveness so as to rule out any possible defections on the part of groups and communities, whether urban or regional: “On the face of it, the presumed comprehensiveness of Islamic law ruled out self-governance on the part of subcommunities; one could not replace divine law with human-made law even in limited domains.” (107) Such passages do suggest that, first, Islamic law reached such a level of comprehensiveness and a systematic character by the early middle ages to the point that it would undermine other sub-laws from emerging, which would have been secular and more competitive. In other words, the divine character of Islamic law gave it such an aura that no community would have even dared to challenge it. But what if the reverse proves to be the truth, namely, that three to four centuries since its inception, Islamic law failed to develop a systematic character, and that at no point there was even an attempt to develop a system of codes à la Justinian? What in effect persevered since the 10th–11th centuries was a de facto process of “accommodation” of the broad principles of the law, which were never comprehensive in the first place, to the needs and aspirations of the local regional communities; and even at this level, it was custom that reigned supreme, rather than sharia law. Such a failure to create a corpus of Islamic law that would have served as a comprehensive code for the various regions and communities of “the lands of Islam” has been accommodated for in various forms from one epoch to another. In Ottoman times, for example, a clear division was instated between sharia law, on one hand, and the regional bureaucratic “secular” laws, commonly known as the qanunname, on the other, which in itself was a bland admission of the inoperative character of Islamic law in such matters as rent, taxation, and crime. Moreover, even for the core of sharia law, the Ottomans adopted Hanafism out of the four Sunni schools, a flexible school that accepts “custom” as regionally operative, while assuming the status of “law” (“habit is tenacious,” states one of the “general rules” of Hanafism). What the Ottoman centuries therefore point to is precisely the level of “autonomy” that subcommunities have assumed on their own, a self-rule that was made possible not so much by sharia law itself, but rather thanks to the very nature of the societies on the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa.

The main problem in Kuran’s book is not only his desire to see in Islamic law the prima causa of economic backwardness, but more importantly, in an inability to properly describe the sociological and historical nature of the societies and civilizations which were operating under Islamic law. Which gives Kuran’s study the impression that things could have been otherwise were it not for Islamic law. But what if things could not have been that much otherwise, precisely because the societies that were subject for centuries to sharia law operated under their own ecological, tribal, urban and social limitations? Indeed, a major weakness of the book is that it does not delve deeply enough into the political and economic organizations of such societies: Would a system more open than sharia law made them any different? Assuming that in the past millennium the bulk of Islamic societies were under prebendal and patrimonial absolutist dynasties, where prebends in the form of land grants were donated as signs of loyalty to urban élite groups, were the social conditions ripe enough to create a milieu that would have hosted more competitive economic practices from the ones already in place? Is it really a problem with sharia law itself, and the fact that it imposed all kinds of restrictive uncompetitive norms, or was it a limitation coming from social structure? Historians working within a sociological comparatist perspective (such as Barrington Moore and Reinhard Bendix) have often noted that “feudalism” in its European connotations was a privilege that failed to materialize in the middle east and Asia (except perhaps in Tokugawa Japan), and that such a failure was what led to the general backwardness in the past millennium. The point here is that when speaking of economic performance over long periods, one cannot escape the totality of social structure—the “law” being one of the components of society rather than its determining agent. Had the economic practices covered by Kuran been indexed to social structure instead of being reduced to their legal underpinnings, economic backwardness would have eo ipso looked messier, with no prime cause in sight.

Even though a big advantage of Kuran’s approach is his excellent description of economic practices over a millennium with their legal underpinnings, his ascription to “law” the prima causa of all economic backwardness does a disservice to his enterprise. As already pointed out, in various passages Kuran seems uncertain as to how much the “holding back” was an outcome of the “law” itself: was sharia law, as divine law, so powerful that no community could be set free from its creed? And why with all the “autonomy” that communities enjoyed in most Islamic empires, no alternative economic systems came to light? As in the passage above (107), Kuran seems to suggest that the “divine” aspect of the law made it irreproachable. Such arguments, however, do not feed well for a complex undertaking on economic development, and end up too circular, if not solipsistic: Islamic societies have created a divine legal system, to which they’re imprisoned, precisely because of the divine character of the law. For example, notice how Kuran is at loss when he questions the reasons behind the failure of anything close to a “corporation” or a “corporatist structure” in Islam. Having first noted that “free incorporation” would have implied “the right to incorporate at will, without the consent of a monarch, president, or parliament” (121)—which makes “corporation” even stronger than “partnership” (which in Islam was limited to the basics)—Kuran then notes that, under such conditions of “free incorporation,” “of necessity subgroups of the community would enjoy a measure of self-governance” (122), which in turn, would pose a challenge to the ideal of communal unity, and which in the case of Islam would have implied a challenge to the divine character of sharia law. As in other passages, and whenever we’re faced with a crucial “shortcoming,” in this instance the “corporate structure” (even the Roman Church behaved as a corporation), it was the “law” that halted the process: “In adhering to the ideal of a unified community and withholding legal rights from subcommunities, jurists and political theorists doubtless thought to deny social divisions legitimacy.” (122–23) So, if the “corporation” or “the fictitious person,” which as legal notions stand as prerequisites to one another, have not been embraced in Islam, it is because as radical innovations, they would have undoubtedly posed a threat to “the ideal of undifferentiation,” namely the Islamic community of believers known as the umma. The problem with such views is that they give the false impression that it was Islamic law that prohibited communities, which for the most part were based on strong kinship and tribal ties, from embracing the corporation (and other prerequisites, such as the fictitious person and competitive partnerships), hence in moving in the direction of openly liberal markets. But were such handicaps and constraints imposed by the monolithic nature of Islamic law, as Kuran seems to suggest, or by the social structure of Islamic societies, which in turn are an outcome of the ecologies and terrains in which they have evolved?

Zouhair Ghazzal

Loyola University Chicago

zghazza@luc.edu

Why the Arab revolts are not political, at least not for now

2011-04-06T21:09:00.002-05:00

The Arab revolts have thus far taken different routes, even though their root cause may be similar. In Tunisia and Egypt, the army stood off the conflict, posing as arbitrator rather than protagonist. Such position led to a relatively bloodless resolution to the uprisings, at least for now. In neighboring Libya the army, composed of 50,000 or so poorly trained and equipped elements, dissolved rather rapidly, while the ruling clan managed to survive thanks to its private militias (the seven Qaddafi sons have, we are told, each their own militia, 5,000 each on average). In Yemen the state lost control over most of the national territory, but the president Ali Saleh survives in his presidential compound thanks to tribal links and his well-trained presidential guards, in spite of daily manifestations that have metamorphosed into a thriving business. In Syria, the bloody demonstrations have been spreading at a slow pace, with thousands (mostly male) demonstrators in various cities managing to break the security vanguards of the ruling clan. The Syrian revolt will thus to be fought city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood, and clan by clan, so much this urban society is fractured along kinship loyalties.

Observers of the Arab revolts have often pointed to their presumed “political” character in the narrow sense of the term: namely, that what is common to all of them is that urgent demand to overthrow an existing corrupt ruling group, which took control of the state apparatuses decades ago. What is therefore “political” in this instance is the overthrow of a corrupt régime as an apparatus that dominates “civil society.” But what such a view often overlooks, however, is how much is at stake beyond the usual opposition of state and civil society. In effect, analysts typically miss the fact that the link between state and civil society is so abstract as to become analytically useless. A more fruitful approach would be to point to intermediary institutions, such as political parties, municipalities, daily practices, the social uses of space, charismatic leadership, as necessary components of society, whose political expressions have been cruelly lacking in the Arab societies that have been witnessing uprisings and revolts. Such a crucial shortcoming, which has been present for over half a century, in the so-called postcolonial period, will only postpone the move towards more democratically representative (and industrialized) societies.

With the end of the Second World War and colonialism, it took over three decades for the middle east, as an inherently incoherent region, to establish a political order that would become its trademark. In fact, both the 1952 free officers revolution in Egypt, and the 1958 bloody end of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, have set a dubious pattern of a sudden military takeover of civilian rule at the hands of low middle class officers from rural landowning families. The Baathist coups in Iraq and Syria in the early 1960s had consolidated that already familiar pattern of the breakdown of civilian bourgeois rule, and its concomitant replacement by a one-party state with faked mass-mobilization strategies. Such an arrangement meant the end of politics in civil society at large, and the current uprisings and revolts would not be enough to get politics back on track. At best, such uprisings could be termed “cultural,” in that they seem to emanate from groups (not to be limited to the youth) which by and large have learned their modus vivendi from the globalized media landscape in terms of mass communication, body language, and the social uses of space.

What therefore needs attention are the implications of the dismantlement of civil society in the Arab world at large for over half a century, and why the revolts sweeping the region at present won’t be enough as a remedy. What is at stake are practices that delve much deeper into the socio-political and cultural substrata.

Arab and Islamic empires of the past centuries give the false impression of states tightly controlling their societies, which some historians have wrongly attributed to long-term “absolutisms.” In reality, those states were more prebendal and patrimonial than “absolutist,” as the core of state formations was the clan and tribe of the ruling dynasty which distributed prebends to loyal urban groups. In modern times, with military power and technology, the grip of the state over society has only marginally solidified, giving that illusion of mighty control, while in reality the state only contributed at crushing and postponing movements in civil society that could have created possible alternative political formations and representations.

Having already overestimated the power of the authoritarian state, we should refrain from either overestimating its downfall or for a rapid emergence of political movements in civil society in the near future. Indeed, what we have been witnessing since December 2010 throughout the Arab world are the “cultural” expressions of large segments of frustrated groups in society. Besides the fact that 65 percent of the populations of the Middle East is under the age of 35, high unemployment, the failure to industrialize and modernize at a large scale, the marginalization of women in public life and the dismantlement of family values, have all contributed at pushing protesters into a “public sphere” that exists only marginally, that is, as a space whose social use has been severely truncated for decades. As globalization has created a mediatized world of images that centers on the body and its social power, it is that kind of culture, which is primarily non-political in its essence, that protesters have espoused, while the bringing down of the likes of Ben Ali and Mubarak are only symbolic acts which help to foster that needed energy of belonging together among protesters. It remains to be seen, however, whether such cultural representations would find a much deeper political expression, in terms of deeply rooted institutions, in particular that there is much at stake in the cultural values of society. Think, for instance, of family values and the role of women in public in Arab societies: Would it be possible to industrialize and modernize at a large scale without dismantling many of the traditional family values, and without giving women more public prominence and freedom? We should know by now that technology and science are not neutral entities, which could be exported and implemented at will, without their ideological underpinnings. It remains uncertain, however, how much awareness there is at the implications behind cultural change, and whether there is, indeed, any willingness to find political expression for popular discontent.

mysteries of minorities

2011-04-04T19:23:00.001-05:00

The harassments that Christians are facing today in countries like Iraq and Egypt tend to be seen in isolation to similar problems across the middle east, on one hand, and from historical precedents on the other; and while routinely associated with a surge in Islamic values across the Arab and Islamic worlds, their economic underpinnings are overlooked.

In the old Islamic empires, Christian and Jewish minorities were simultaneously referred to as “the people of the book” and ahl al-dhimma, the former referring to the identification of minorities with their holy scriptures, while the latter limited them to their status as minorities, in particular in matters of political representation and taxation (the special jizya tax). In Ottoman times, such minorities were integrated within the millet system, which grosso modo implied, as with the previous empires, poor political representation and special taxes, together with the legalization of economic practices that were forbidden to the majority of Muslims under sharia law. Thus, when Jews fleeing the Spanish inquisition in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries opted for the Ottoman empire, they were greeted within the millet system, on one hand, and as potential moneylenders on the other. Such historical millet-specific economic functions tend to be overlooked these days, in particular in relation to the hardships that Christians have been going through in the middle east. That 2010 implied the end of Christianity in Iraq, and that the hardships of the Copts in Egypt have been under the hood during the Mubarak autocratic rule, and have only accelerated since his departure, beg the following questions: How come autocratic régimes, like Baathism under Saddam Hussein, Nasserism up to Sadat and Mubarak, or Syrian Baathism, manage the status of minorities far better than the more “democratic” ones? It is, for instance, no secret that under Saddam Hussein the Christians of Iraq were much safer than now, and that an explanation of the kind that they have been targeted because of a sudden rise of Islamic jihadic groups, which the nascent federal state is unable to control, would certainly not suffice, and is inadequate as an explicans. What needs to be explained here—the explanandum—is the relative “security” that Armenians, Christians and Jews, in their lives and properties, have benefited from in Ottoman, colonial, and postcolonial times, but only when the postcolonial independent state acted like a mini-Ottoman state, with millet rights and privileges. There seems therefore, prima facie, at face value, a contradiction, which is precisely what needs to be explained: Why under autocratic conditions, in countries like Iraq, Syria and Egypt, minorities feel much safer than in less autocratic and more open conditions? The reason is that postcolonial autocratic states have stabilized around post-Ottoman notions of power, where millets were kept with similar economic rights and privileges. Whenever such autocratic states have shifted in another direction, as is the case in Iraq and Egypt, the “protection” accorded by the state is not there anymore, and the minorities find themselves competing with other groups, in particular the Muslim majority.

The real secret here may well be the so-called “pluralism” in sharia law, which permitted a special legal status to minorities and foreigners. Up to the early 19th century, such special legal status did not create large economic discrepancies between communities. By the 19th century, however, competition across the Mediterranean pushed for greater legal autonomy to minorities. In areas where sharia law was particularly weak, such as partnerships, moneylending, and corporations, minorities benefited from their special legal status, namely, the fact that laws outside the sharia system were applicable to them—and to them only—either within their own confessional millets, or else through capitulations and special mixed courts.

It is, indeed, that relative economic “success” of minorities that is often overlooked today. Is there any connection between the economic and cultural edge that minorities were able to secure, and the harassments and massacres that they had to endure? Let us note here that the first calls for autonomy, in the form of regional and territorial nationalisms, in the Ottoman empire, were to erupt in Greece and the Balkans, in regions where the Greek Orthodox faith was predominant.

In a recent book, the economist Timur Kuran notes that until the late 18th century Muslim role in trade and commerce was significant, as there is no historical evidence that Muslim merchants left trade to Christians and Jews, even though both Islamic economic and legal practices lagged behind their counterparts in medieval and early modern Europe in practices like partnership, the corporation, the legal person, primogeniture (as opposed to equal inheritance), money lending, the letter of credit, trust funds (as opposed to the closed waqfs), stocks, bonds, treasuries and public debt. But with the expansion of capitalism, the industrial revolution, trade and colonialism, the trend has begun to shift towards non-Muslim minorities, as more aggressive trade practices were needed. As sharia law leaves the door open for “legal pluralism,” the denominational communal courts served the purpose of granting legal protection for practices that the sharia courts would otherwise not have permitted. Better still, non-Muslim minorities had that unique option to opt for the legal authority of their own choice, pending on what was at stake. “By the end of the 19th century,” however, “the Ottoman Empire’s Muslim merchants were decidedly secondary players in its external trade with Europe, and at home, too, they had lost enormous ground to local minorities” (Kuran 191). Soon, the dhimmi communities who were commercially active became, like the foreigners of the empire, protégés of European powers or of their inside cohorts. Some, seeking better protection, or to be exempted from specific taxes, either became consuls or dragomans (tercümans) in consulates.

Herein lies the shift that occurred from the “protected” millet status to one that was life threatening to non-Muslim minorities. To understand the significance of such a shift by the late 19th early 20th centuries we need to go no further than the decline of the populations of non-Muslim minorities in Anatolia. Historians of the empire (Kemal Karpat and Justin McCarthy) give on average 10 to 25 percent for non-Muslim minorities in Ottoman Anatolia, when it was still within the empire’s jurisdiction. But with the killing and deportation of close to 1.5 million Armenians, and other minorities (primarily Greeks) by the end of WWI, Turkey’s population of today’s minorities stands at less than 1 percent of the total of the republic. Nor was such a movement of deportation and harassment to stop with the foundation of the republic or in the aftermath of WWII for that matter. The last episode, known as “the pogrom against Greek businesses,” on 6 and 7 September 1955, when Adnan Menderes was prime minister (1950–60), emptied the heart of Istanbul, the Beyoğlu (Pera) area, from its Greek businesses, amid large scale riots that pushed many Greek families to leave their homes and fortunes behind in their rush for more secure countries (Zürcher 231). Ironically, the Greeks were targeted at a time when Turkey’s economy was most successful, achieving a 9 percent growth rate over the ten-year period of the Menderes administration, with rapid urbanization and industrialization, thanks partly to foreign aid. Which begs the question, Why are minorities targeted even in times of relative economic success, when the country is not challenged by external enemies?

Yet, Turkey is the only country in the region to have successfully industrialized and modernized, well situated within the prestigious G–20 membership. Why was it the first Islamicate society to systematically eliminate its minorities? Was the elimination of minorities an operation necessitated by the growth of the nation-state, industrialization, modernization, laissez-faire capitalism? In other words, does the “imagined community,” which acts as a prerequisite for the nation-state, necessitate that “minorities” be targeted to create a “coherence” in the imagined ideology?

political or cultural theater?

2011-04-02T21:58:00.001-05:00

The events in the Middle East are portrayed as people versus their despotic rulers, innocent masses against corrupt states, utopian crowds versus crony capitalists of the nouveaux riches, religious versus secular, and tribalism versus the cold raison d’état of the statism. That politics is perceived as a theater of expressivity against corrupt and oppressive rulers, good guys versus bad guys, is commonplace. In the wake of the financial collapse in the US and the rest of the world in 2008–09, the bad guys were the Wall Street bankers, who, behind our backs, and while benefiting from our trust (in the money that we’ve safely deposited in their banks), they went ahead and engineered all kinds of “immoral” (rather than illegal) transactions. The financial collapse was thus seen in terms of individuals defecting as a group from common sense behavior against the majority of innocent actioners. Similarly, the middle east uprisings are portrayed as an action of an innocent majority versus a corrupt minority in power. But how come such a minority managed to rule the uncorrupt majority? By sheer force? What political discourse and analysis hardly reveal is the amount of consensus behind political power, whatever the degree of coerciveness involved: indeed, it all comes to a matter of degree rather than deeply rooted principles. That oppressors and oppressed belong, therefore, to the same cultural landscape (ethos), that they may share similar cultural values, is what is often overlooked once the veil of consensual coercion has been broken—but to what kind of political order exactly? In other words, once the consensus that lies behind political power (from the most totalitarian to the most liberal) seems to have been broken, amid, for instance, street protests and violence, political power is de facto portrayed as “out of sync”—or out of touch—with the masses, hence hiding (repressing) the very idea of consensus even behind coercion and oppression, not far away from the consensus that we find in liberal democracies. That is to say, what is occulted here is what protesters are finally aiming at. Thus, when we ask the trivial question, What is it that they want, what is it that they are aiming at?, we get the trivial answer, They want political freedom, uncorrupt governments, and a radical régime change. Whether to some this implies western laissez-faire liberalism, or on the other end, a Muslim radical theocracy or a moderately Islamic liberal government (in the style of the Muslim Brothers), important as it may as an issue, is not what is at stake here, at least not for the centrality of the revolts. We want to unmask what has been left out in all this: the real motivations of the protesters, why they’ve been coming, with their bodies, alone or en masse, day after day. We want an analysis along the following lines: the body, the visible, the gaze, time and (public) space, all of which pertain to a particular political culture. We want to argue that the broad movement launched across the middle east, which is now shaped as a region whose coherence (or lack thereof) is being made and unmade through the protests, targets an entire cultural landscape, between oppressors and oppressed, wealthy and poor, the state apparatuses and those outside them.

The Wrestler

2009-01-31T16:27:00.006-06:00

Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008) should have been more appropriately entitled “the wrestler and the stripper.” There is more in the “friendship” between Randy (Mickey Rourke) and Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) than the usual setting of boy-meets-girl. One is a professional wrestler whose prime period has come to an end, and is painfully resuscitated through weekend shifts in the New Jersey clubs, while the other is a mid-aged professional stripper, whose “colleagues” tend to be younger women in their twenties, with the kind of “I shouldn’t be here in the first place” attitude. Both invest their lives very professionally in their respective jobs. However, at face value, nothing brings wrestling to stripping, one is mostly dominated by macho male figures, where the body is at the same time glorified, trashed, and subject to great physical kinky violence, while the other is mostly female, and where violence is symbolic in nature, even though it could turn nasty at times. Which is precisely what brings wrestling to stripping: the body. Both are physical performances, situated within closed spaces, and both need a great deal of motivation, discipline, and professionalism. And that’s precisely what we’re offered to see in the “Wrestler”: fairly accurate descriptions of both spaces, which do not connect per se as physical and professional spaces, but only though the “connection” that Randy makes in his van every once and a while to meet Cassidy in her working club. It is indeed those “rides” in the New Jersey area (that same area of the Sopranos, David Chase, and Philip Roth), portrayed as if they were rides in the middle-of-nowhere, in cities and suburban spaces where emotions of intimacy have vanished, which awkwardly connect the two disconnected milieus. Randy first approaches Cassidy very professionally, generously paying her for “private” lap dances mixed with “private” talks. In the wake of his heart attack and bypass surgery, and recovery in a hospital room and then in the loneliness of his shabby trailer, Randy feels that urge to get more “intimate” with Cassidy. It is indeed that longing for “intimacy,” which all of a sudden comes as an urge in the middle of the film that feels awkward, as both Randy and Cassidy have protected themselves all their lives within the professional spaces of wrestling and stripping from the vagaries of personal relationships and intimacy. When Randy wanted to tell Cassidy about his heart operation and the decision to drop wrestling for the rest of his life, he realized that he couldn’t do it in the stripping club—in the professional space where he had met her as performer. He insists that they meet outside, in his van parked in a nearby parking lot reserved for the club’s customers. They meet briefly in the van, and Cassidy is obviously not at ease dropping her mask of professional performer in order to transit to the confidante and lover role. We learn from this encounter and later that both have suffered from failures and dysfunctional lives—and who hasn’t?—Randy is portrayed, even by his own daughter, that he’s a failed father, who was always absent in the most crucial moments, while Cassidy has a nine-year old son from a failed relationship. When Randy manages to convince her for a “one-beer” deal in a bar (after shopping for a present for Randy’s daughter), Cassidy had to cut short on Randy’s kiss, and offer for another drink. “You still see me as a stripper,” was one of her takes on Randy, and “I can’t mix my professional life with that of my customers,” was her second one. Here’s the core of the film now fully developed: Cassidy’s blatant fear of “mixing” the two lives—the personal and the professional. The professional implies ritualistic encounters and distance: keeping those men at distance is a prime professional ritual. Then there’s the money, and in stripping it comes piecemeal, all based on bodily performance and nothing but performance. Same thing for Randy: the ring protects him from the audience-cum-mob through a professional relation of pure performance, which brings him the income he needs for survival (at the beginning, his landlord manager locks him out for one night for defaulting on his payments). When Randy realizes the pain of personal relationships and their futile nature, he returns, in a sudden shift, to what was obviously his last performance. He dies performing, throwing himself at an “audience” that looks more and more like a mob of bloggers, rather than a real “public” in the conventional nineteenth-century sense. That was the only time that Cassidy drove in the emptiness of the New Jersey suburban landscape to meet Randy in his professional milieu, as if she was indebted to him in a way she couldn’t figure out: to see him burn himself out to death on the ring with his cherished “audience.”
Technorati Tags: The Wrestler

Between secularists and jihadists

2009-01-25T14:49:00.001-06:00

Among all what has been said about Ghazza in the last few weeks, and all the ranting and raving about the savagery of Tsahal and its shelling of civilians, one article stands out: “How Israel helped to spawn Hamas,” by Andrew Higgins in The Wall Street Journal of January 24–25. Even though, as I’ll argue in a moment, Higgins’ main arguments are both historically and sociologically flawed, they at least question Israel’s historical links with the likes of Hamas and the PLO: did Israel’s paranoiac attitude towards Palestinians since 1948 help ferment the likes of the PLO, Hamas, and the Hezbollah? The argument goes principally along the lines of a division between so-called “secularists” and “religious activists” or “jihadists” in Palestinian politics, which grosso modo reflects a broader division in Arab societies on the eastern Mediterranean. The secularists among Palestinians were for the most part represented by the PLO under Yasser Arafat, while the religious activists are now mostly under Hamas rule in Ghazza. Higgins goes on to say that Israel inadvertently and very naively radicalized both groups. First, its relentless fears over “Palestinian nationalism” in the 1960s and 1970s pushed it at war with the PLO, which back then was a weak and insignificant organization, mostly rooted among the lumpenproletariat of the Palestinian camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. That eventually led to a radicalization of the PLO, and its institutionalization in one of the Arab summits in Fez (Morocco) as “the sole representative of the Palestinian people.” Eventually, Israel had to stage a costly war against the PLO in Lebanon in 1982, pull the organization out of its Lebanese conundrum, only to negotiate (through Norway) a peace treaty with its leaders from their Tunisian exile. But Oslo notwithstanding, Arafat, now in Jericho, would keep his defiant tone until the very end, that is, until he was eaten by disease and old age (and an alleged poisoned assassination). As to Hamas, an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers, it was a direct upshot of the first intifada in 1987. Higgins makes the point that Israeli intelligence “welcomed” Hamas as a way to weaken a “secularist” and “nationalistic” PLO.

There are several problems with such a conceptualization of Palestinian politics. First, it divides Palestinian politics grosso modo among so-called “secularists” and “religious” zealots, as if such a division marked some kind of a coupure épistémologique, an epistemological break that would translate into different visions of society and politics among the two groups, or as if the likes of Arafat and Shaykh Yasin were totally two different brands of politicians in Palestinian society (not to mention their broad impact on the impoverished Arab masses). Of course, they were different, but in what way? Was it that one was more user–friendly with the “Zionist enemy” than the other? Or was it for their different views of politics and society? Let’s first observe that such a division has been around on the eastern Mediterranean for some time. In Egypt, where it probably all began, the Muslim Brothers under Hasan al-Banna created their movement in the 1920s when the country was still under British rule. The Brothers were rivals at the time to the Wafd Party, Egypt’s prime organization for the middle classes, and then in the 1950s and 1960s, to Nasser’s monochromatic dictatorial rule, which abolished multi-party politics, and nationalized major financial and economic resources. By the 1960s Nasser succeeded at a total cramp down of the Brothers, jailing their main ideologue Sayyid Qutub, and executing him in his prison cell. Upon Nasser’s death in 1970, Sadat was dissatisfied with Egypt’s sole reliance on “communist friends,” and the spread of “socialism” in society. He thought of the “Islamicist” groups as a counter–point to communism. Hence a revival of the Brothers since then, and a political resurgence that ultimately led to the public assassination of Sadat by a member of one of the Islamic groups close to the Brothers.

We can discern that kind of duality—between the secularist and the religiously rooted movements—in many Arab and Islamic countries. Think of the Syrian Baath Party and its own Muslim Brothers as a prime example. When Iraq was liberated from the Baath in 2003 the spectrum of parties that emerged was no different from what other neighboring societies had already witnessed. But to think of the Syrian Baath as more “tolerant” or “secular” than its Muslim Brothers is like trying to choose between two different methods for putting an end to civil society (or what is left of it). To view them as a product of colonialism, imperialism, and Zionism, would be a gross mis-conceptualization, and an easy way to root the failures of Arab politics into alien forces imposing the nation-state from the outside. It would be more helpful to conceptualize the differences between the two in terms of a combination of class and ethnic identities and the violent competition over the monopoly of religious discourse. Religion today is not closeted anymore, as it used to be in Ottoman times, in the hands of the ulama class. As religion has become more fractured and specialized, with banks offering an “Islamic interest” on deposited capital, and with doctors offering “Islamic” medical service, it has opened up to all kinds of media-type political an social salvations. Thus, the likes of Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the late Shaykh Yasin of Hamas, in spite of their public attire, they both are not a product of the traditional ulama class, receiving all kinds of challenges from the latter. To covet his rule, Nasrallah has to maintain a two-tier ulama infrastructure, where the lower-tier is the most militant, hidden as it is under the veneer of the more prestigious first-tier of the likes of the fatwa-maker Fadlallah.

What is it then that distinguishes the two groups of so-called “secularists” and “religious” zealots? Certainly not a view of politics that would absorb the multiplicities of social formations that exist in their societies, as all of them tend to be intolerant towards social diversity and laissez-faire liberalism. In the Baath party’s slogan of “unity, freedom, socialism,” what is most disturbing is that claim for “unity,” which often concretely translates as a monolithic one-party system that would place all “classes” of society under the wise aegis of the Baathist state. Freedom and socialism, whatever meaning we ascribe to them, would only come at the price of a political unity, which, historically, often implies a one-party system. But between that kind of “unity” and the “oneness” of a “fair” “Islamic state” (whose model would be the dysfunctional rule of the first four caliphs, not to mention the prophet in person), and the secularism of the Baath, what’s the real difference? Isn’t it that in all their variations and diversities all such discourses share a destructive common ground, and an intolerant political sphere?
Technorati Tags: Hamas, secularism, Arab politics

The illusion of the one-state solution

2009-01-22T17:46:00.001-06:00

It does seem at face value that the Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi, was generous in his op-ed piece this morning in the New York Times when he proposed a one-state solution to the lingering Palestinian–Israeli problem. Personally I think it’s a mixture of ignorance and cynicism to make such a proposal, which de facto and de jure would mean the end of the Jewish state as we’ve known it since 1948. The ignorance part kicks in when the problem is reduced to its moral and legal aspects, namely that the Palestinians have been dispossessed since 1947–49, and therefore must be given their just rights all over again—let’s call it the restitution argument. What such an argument ignores, however, is the major disadvantage that the Palestinians have been facing ever since encountering the first set of Jewish settlers in the 1880s when the Ottomans were still there administrating the Arab provinces of what later became Palestine under the British. Palestinian “society” was structured back then on the administrative hegemony of its urban notables on one hand, and its impoverished peasantry on the other. As the peasants did the bulk of the labor, paying the “rent” to the urban notables on the top, they were the main source of wealth in society, and also its most dispossessed and impoverished part. The infrastructural weaknesses of Palestinian “society” under Ottoman rule have been well documented by historians, and there’s no need to go over them here. Suffice it to say that such structural weaknesses, which are shared by other societies in Greater Syria, and which have hardened in the last few decades, make it very hard to construct a modern political framework that would institute a leadership that would democratically coordinate its strategies with other groups in society. The current violence in Ghazza is less between Israelis and Palestinians and more internal wars among Palestinians, precisely an outcome of such structural weaknesses. Qaddafi himself is an outcome of such a dysfunctional political and social system which has reduced the modern middle east to a spectacle of moribund kingships and dictatorships, and republics where sons are inheriting their fathers. The one–state solution would not work precisely because the two–state solution would not work in the first place. When Qaddafi says that the two–state solution would create an insecure Israel, he seems to be thinking in terms of Palestinians constantly smuggling weapons into the would-be Palestine and shelling their Israeli neighbors. The real instability, however, comes from the inability of Palestinians to create a viable political framework that really works for them. Only then Israelis and Palestinians would be at peace. In the meantime the one- and two-state solutions seem both improbable. The only alternative for now seems a federation between the Ghazza strip and Egypt on the one, and another one between the West Bank and Jordan on the other. The Palestinians would free themselves from politics and begin to work to improve their society.

A Zionist Starbucks

2009-01-22T13:47:00.003-06:00

The 1960s were a period of transitions whereby values that had been reshaped as an outcome of the Second World War had to be reformulated more visibly in public. Thus, values related to gender equality at home and at work, feminism, sexuality and homosexuality, the family, race, generational differences, manners, education, world peace, the end of third world colonialisms, and work ethics, all took shape and were formulated half a century ago. The 1980s were also another period of change, but in contrast to the sixties the changes were less visible, less dramatic, more mundane, as they translated for the most part in the deepening of that introvert selfish culture that the earlier period could barely conceal. In effect, even though the sixties supposedly promoted openness towards “society” and “the public sphere,” and peace with the newly liberated third world cultures from imperialism and colonialism, it failed to promote a genuine interest in anything called “the public good.” The 1980s–1990s saw the democratization of consumerism and the satisfaction that it entailed: anything from Prada to Starbucks, the Internet, the ipod, the iphone and blackberry, the laptops, all made life more interesting, but that didn’t make us more “social,” more political, or more engaged with others. The Iraq war was notoriously unpopular before it even began, but with a jargon that belonged to Vietnam and the culture wars of the sixties, not out of interest in what Iraq is at the moment, and what it could be. We therefore willy-nilly belong to the culture of indifference (narcissism) of the sixties, and we’re only interested in delimiting a “just cause,” without a real involvement in a culture—ours and all the others out there.

So when the two-week war broke out in Ghazza, which is still not over, people all over the world had their hearts for the suffering Palestinians. We’re all now into that discourse of the historical “rights” of the Palestinian people and the bi-national state. Israel is by contrast perceived, at least implicitly, as an imperialist and neocolonialist state with no legitimate rights of its own, having dispossessed the Palestinians of their legitimate territorial rights towards the end of the British mandate in 1947–49. When the Ghazza war broke out “we” were naturally as “leftists” on the side of the weak, the oppressed, and the dispossessed, or in toto, les damnés de la terre, as Franz Fanon famously labeled them. We were therefore, needless to say, on the side of the “Palestinian people.” Such euphemisms, however, prevent us from addressing what is presently urgent: namely, that it wasn’t the “Palestinian people” who was subject for two weeks to shelling and deprivation, but large fractions of the Palestinian lumpenproletariat under Hamas rule. On the other “conservative” “right” side of politics Hamas is unequivocally qualified as a “terrorist organization,” which is too soft a description and beside the point. The truth is that we need to be more articulate, look for details and concepts of value in order to begin thinking anti-state organizations of the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah as a radicalization of politics due precisely to the absence of politics in the Arab world. We’ll be unable to think along those lines as long that everything in politics is translated into cultural wars that belong in both spirit and essence to the sixties. That’s why a radical evaluation of Iraq and Afghanistan hasn’t even begun yet, because our concepts are muddled into obsolete cultural notions of imperialism and colonialism, or the rights of individuals and people to bring their own destinies with their own hands and minds.

Which brings me to one of those “cultural” non-political events that attracted my attention on the web the other day. During the two-week Ghazza war, a group of young clueless (unemployed and underemployed) students staged small manifestations in support of the war, one of them in front of the main Starbucks in Hamra Street in Beirut, Lebanon. A sixties hangover: that’s probably the best way to describe the dozen or so of “leftists” who were there that night in front of the Hamra Starbucks to terrorize customers sipping their espressos, cappuccinos, and lattes. The young revolutionaries who were shouting slogans against globalization, Zionism, and Israeli and American imperialisms, came complete with wirelessly connected laptops, urging passersby and customers to join their revolutionary website. As they must have been upset at the sight of bourgeois customers with their Starbucks mugs, and as if indoctrination was not enough, they’ve aggressively begun drawing the Star of David on the tables, accusing Starbucks (and indirectly its customers) of “complicity” with the Israeli aggression in Ghazza. In my time as student—and that was a long time ago—the target used to be Pan Am, and that honor soon shifted to MacDonald in the 1980s, and now we’re into the Starbucks era. Obviously, progress is always somewhere around the corner.

Stripping Ghazza from its ideological extremes

2009-01-10T18:54:00.002-06:00

The July–August 2006 war against the Hezbollah is widely perceived to have been a total failure: poorly prepared and improvised as a reaction to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, the war has been subjected to lots of criticisms inside Israel, in addition to several internal army investigations, all of which made the now-exiting prime minister Ehud Olmert widely unpopular. Yet, since the end of that ill-fated war, and since beefing up the UN forces (known as UNIFIL) on the Lebanese–Israeli border, the border has been relatively quiet. Not only there hasn't been much “resistance” activity, but better still, the Hezbollah has been denying any “involvement” or wrongdoing whenever a rocket or two would hit the north of Israel. A sign perhaps that the 2006 war may not have been a futile failure after all. But the main question that lurks is the following: is the Hezbollah getting domesticated in internal Lebanese, regional, and international politics? The question is important for several reasons. First of all, since 1982 Israel has been fighting mini-wars without a clear win or lose situation. In 1982 Israel forced the PLO out of Lebanon, then had to go through two successive intifadas in its own occupied territories, and by the early 1990s, when the Lebanese civil war was technically over, the Hezbollah had by that time matured into a formidable foe, forcing the Israelis to withdraw humiliated in the early summer of 2000. In all such events Israel was far from the neat wars it fought with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria since its existence as an independent nation-state, subjecting Arab states and armies to clear defeats in 1948–49, 1956, 1967, and 1973. The so-called extremist groups and organizations à la Hamas and Hezbollah have lots of popular support at home and across the Muslim world, are financially backed by the Iranian mullahs, and benefit from the unpopularity of the Arab states and their dismal policies and economies. Can they be sucked into “war” situations and “defeated”? Or is their evolution purely “internal,” that is exclusively bound in the final analysis to their home constituencies? In the latter situation one has to expect a slow evolution of such groups to internally contain their violence, amid failures of the modern nation-state across the eastern Mediterranean (and elsewhere).

Such questions have resurfaced in the last two weeks amid the massive Israeli operation against Hamas in the Ghazza strip: could Hamas be defeated? Can such nonstate micro–jihadic groups be defeated?

All societies have to domesticate their own violence in order to survive. In many ways, politics is a process of violence distribution, which in the modern world implies empowering the state through its monopoly over violence. If violence has to be channelled through the agency of the state, then all groups and factions in society have to subdue to that kind of channelling, refraining from anything on their own. When, for instance, the Hezbollah decides unilaterally on its own to kidnap soldiers on the Israeli border, it broke that sacrosanct rule of violence channelled through the agency of the state. In effect, Israel’s problem is that it has to periodically endure that violence on its borders precisely because its neighbors are unable to control it internally.

To understand such a phenomenon, simply go through some of the statements of the Hezbollah leadership and some of their Palestinian and Iranian friends in the last week. In his speech celebrating the martyrdom of Ashura, the Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah claimed that “all possibilities remain open.” Now that the Hezbollah has been—at least temporarily, if not permanently—disabled as a war machine on the Israeli border, in spite of successfully recovering from the 2006 war, it has to keep up the ante through speech and immaculate conception. Thus, we’re told in that same speech by Nasrallah that among the “possibilities” is to “never let the armed struggle of the resistance die down.” In case you’ve wondered why the Hezbollah has been rich in discourse in the last two weeks, but inactive militarily, here is an encouraging answer: “We still do not know the size of the project and its prospects, as well as the size of those involved in it.” The “project” in question must be the assault on Ghazza: is it only a facade to something much “deeper,” like an imperialistic plan for the region as a whole? The Hezbollah while procrastinating on such an ontological issue is keeping its options open. Addressing himself directly to Olmert, Nasrallah said that “the July 2006 war would look like a promenade compared to what we’ve been preparing for the Israelis in the near future.” Which should de facto imply that such a “new war,” assuming it ever concretizes, would be even more destructive and costlier than the previous ones, for both Israelis and Lebanese, one has to assume. But do the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah think in terms of economic costs at all? Is there an economic rationale that would reason in terms of the economic prosperity of their “base”? One thing about such extremist groups is that they tend to operate through a double “base”: one that is internal, for instance, the majority of the Shia in Lebanon, or the Palestinians of the Ghazza strip, while the other is universal and cosmopolitan. In the end, it’s the internal one that matters, even as the two do resonate in tandem most of the time. The other aspect is that of religious ideology: “Faced with all such provocations, we need to receive our inspiration from the spirit of Hussein...and his love for martyrdom. We’re ready to give ourselves and our spirits...and our our brothers, sons, and our beloved ones the martyrs for the sake of what we believe in.” And Nasrallah added in that same martyrdom speech: “We’re not afraid of your planes and threats…We’re ready for all possibilities and ready for every attack.” Now that it’s all about rhetoric, and rhetoric is by definition cheap, Nasrallah is “amazed” that among Lebanese officials there wasn’t much that matched his own rhetoric: “I would have liked among all the voices from Lebanon which served to appease the Israelis, or the intermediaries with Israel, regarding the borders with Israel, to have heard one single voice responding to Israeli threats against Lebanon and the Hezbollah.” Notice how Lebanon and the Hezbollah are two separate entities, the former protected by its national army, while the latter by its own militia. But the question that begs itself here is why did the Hezbollah, in the last two weeks, opt for rhetoric—and only rhetoric? Why that kind of rhetorical language when, as Nasrallah himself stated in that very same speech that “the Zionists are slaughtering our people (ahl) in Ghazza and threatening our people in Lebanon”? Why not go into action, since Nasrallah is so much adamant about the fate of his “people”? Notice how people is used as a generic term for “ahl,” rather than society or culture. But since we’re into rhetoric let’s go even further. We’re now into a full critique of “the Arab governments,” understood as separate entities from their “people,” due to a lack of cohesiveness between “people” and “leadership” (both Hamas and the Hezbollah provide counter-examples to the Arab anomalies), and to “the ruler of Egypt” in particular for remaining idle all that time, and for sewing relationships and normalizing relations with the Zionist state. All that must be stopped, shouts Nasrallah to the crowd of the martyrdom of Hussein.

Similar revolutionary calls for “liberation” came from other sources all over the Arab and Islamic worlds. The Palestinian Ahmad Jibril, known for his radical stance within “the popular front for the liberation of Palestine—general command,” urged for “the opening of all fronts, beginning with the Golan Heights.” When questioned on the missiles that were fired from Lebanon, with fingers pointing at the “general command” (with a Hezbollah benediction?), Jibril retorted that “we, Iran, and Syria are all in the same trench.” The ex-leader of the Iranian “revolutionary guards” urged Syria to mass its troops on the Golan to force Israel withdraw its forces from Ghazza, speculating at the same time that “if Hamas manages to take as hostage 20 Israeli soldiers victory would be on its side.” Others spoke of “cloning” the Lebanese 2006 experience into Ghazza right now.

Where does this language of perpetual never-ending trenches, martyrdom, hostages, provocation, and revolution to victory come from? That would need a long détour, for which I’m not yet prepared. What we know for sure is revolutionaries and their semantics of affection for the “people” have still a long way to go.

You said withdrawal?

2008-11-29T21:41:00.001-06:00

“Frankly speaking, the agreement is very clear,” said Alaa Muhammad, a 29-year old journalist from Basra, shortly after seeing the ratification vote on television. “But some members of Parliament disagreed with it just to attract attention. They have no idea about what benefits the people. What I saw today made me feel I want the forces to stay longer, because without these forces we will eat each other.” (New York Times, November 29, 2008)

The agreements—a broad “strategic framework” and a more detailed strategic pact that were ratified Thursday by the Iraqi Parliament—set a deadline that critics of the war have long waited. They require that all American forces withdraw from Iraq no later than December 31, 2011, but they offer no timetable for withdrawals.

Should the U.S. withdraw by 2011? Would Iraq be safe enough by that time? The Iraq war was fought with the total indifference of the American population, whether those who were for the war or those opposed to it, as it all derived from cultural symbols that go back to the 1960s, the students protests and the intensification of the Vietnam war. Iraq was therefore not perceived for what it is—a failed nation-state—and for what it really needs—a chance to become for the first time in its troubled post-Ottoman history a nation-state.

Could American indifference, coupled with an immature Iraqi political system, give birth to the beginnings of a modern stable nation-state? Is that possible? Like the 29-year old Iraqi journalist from Basra, one of those territories that used to be controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army, until they were ousted early this year by Maliki’s federal governmental forces, I’m suspicious about the 2011 deadline and wish the US forces would stay longer—much longer to be honest.

The Hezbollah coup

2008-05-15T18:57:00.000-05:00

People thought for a long time that a plausible solution to the growing Hezbollah phenomenon would be a political one: that, gradually, and in proportion to its Shii constituency in the south, the Beirut suburbs, and the east of the Biqa valley, the Hezbollah would be offered parliamentary seats and cabinet positions. With such a scenario the Hezbollah would transform itself into a manageable political beast, gradually giving away its stockpile of arms in favor of a common political life. Besides that such a scenario looks at the Hezbollah crisis as something manageable within the already dysfunctional Lebanese parliamentary system, it perceives such a phenomenon in terms of a “political anomaly,” rather than, say, a sociological crisis with deep historical underpinnings. Indeed, such an overt political optimism is part of a Lebanese tradition that perceives groups and parties in terms of political relations at home and abroad. The Hezbollah is thus a combination of Syrian and Iranian proxies, while regional pressures would only come to an end once more equitable solutions are found to the region as a whole, from Palestine to Iraq and beyond.

That Hezbollah thesis of a gradual absorption spectrum within traditional Lebanese politics was indeed an optimistic one. For one thing, it translates an inability to understand phenomena sociologically and historically, with an eye on social structure and its political implications. What is rather sought for is actually just the reverse: that all “anomalies” are an outcome of inside and outside political imbalances. On the other hand, as for the majority of Lebanese the Hezbollah phenomenon is a rather strange aberration, politicizing it would render it more comprehensible. A socio-historical rationalization would simply be out of reach.

But with the Hezbollah coup this past week political optimism has only witnessed its final breakdown—at least we hope so. It’s not the Hezbollah that’s being “absorbed” here into Lebanese politics anymore, but the party of God dictating its own rules to the Lebanese constituencies at large. That sudden reversal could be even compared to the various military coups that were common in the Arab world back in the 1950s: the Free Officers revolution in 1952, the end of the Iraqi Hashimites and the coming of Qasim in 1958, and Syria’s union with Egypt in 1958, all of which marked an abrupt end to the era of bourgeois middle class parliamentarism. Even though the Lebanese middle class is by far more robust, and better rooted and diversified, than its Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi counterparts, it is as if the specter of military politics has finally hit Lebanese doors—irreversibly as it seems for now. Not even the long 15-year civil war has brought into the picture what few hours had unraveled in west Beirut last week: namely, the militarization of political life, with a possible end of traditional middle class hegemony. All that happened with over half a century of delays vis-à-vis the likes of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. That Lebanon has survived that long, notwithstanding its successive civil wars (in particular 1958 and 1975), with a parliamentarian system that was willy-nilly democratic, could be ascribed to two major historical factors. First of all, a strong Christian middle class that held the reign of commerce (and previously land tenure and agriculture). Second, a rapid evolution from an agrarian Ottoman framework to a financial commercialism that was urban oriented. Moreover, what’s remarkable about such an evolution is that the groups that initially had made Ottoman politics, trade, taxation, and land tenure possible, were the same that pushed for its financial and commercial urbanization. So what saved Lebanon from its common Arab fate was the migration between mountain and city that occurred by the middle of the nineteenth century, which broke the common stalemate between poorly capitalized rural and urban spaces. Once the mountainous rural economy reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, in particular with the Egyptian withdrawal in 1840, the traditional élite was already looking for alternatives. The coming to an end of the politics of the notables, in conjunction with steam-boat technology and the growth of trade across the Mediterranean, are among the factors that had contributed to the sudden growth of Beirut by the end of the nineteenth century. By WWI Beirut had outpaced a much deeply seated city like Damascus at all levels.

What we’re therefore witnessing in Beirut and Lebanon right now may well be a delayed turnover to the kind of militarized politics and shut down of the liberal public sphere that swept core Arab countries back in the 1950s and later. Barrington Moore’s well known thesis that failed democracies occur when the interests of a monetized landowning class overlap with those of an urban commercial and financial bourgeoisie may be just about right for our purposes here. Even though the histories of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, have, in spite of their common Ottoman background, more dissimilarities than a solid common ground, it is nevertheless striking that their landowning classes grew separately from their urban financial and manufacturing classes. The landowning gentry, which protected itself from the commercialization of land thanks to the grant-like Ottoman land tenure system, was too fractured and weak to establish any cohesive “national” politics. In what became the urban political space of the postcolonial states, the interests of tribal chiefs, landowning gentry, and the urban commercial and financial class, mixed together in no coherent order. As they were all seen as remnants of the old order, they were soon replaced by various military régimes from modest rural landowning origins. What comes next is a closed political system, composed for the most part of army officers, landowners, bureaucrats, and remnants of the old urban bourgeoisie whose only left option was a political scene imposed by the military.

Lebanon for its part averted that kind of scenario precisely because its landowning class of central Lebanon (the mountainous areas of Kisruwan and the Shuf) transformed itself by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a vibrant urban class. It’s that kind of self-transformation that gave Lebanon a democratic break for over half a century, which even the fifteen-year deadly civil war could not damage. That self-transformation of the Christian landowning classes, which in the process transformed the Maronite church itself, and thrown the Druze of the mountains and the urban Sunnis into a new unprecedented commercial adventure to which they were poorly prepared, is what saved Lebanon in the final analysis from the poor record of the militarization of politics that had swept the Arab world. In hindsight, the 1958 brief civil war and its aftermath—such as the politically immature and destructive 1969 Cairo agreement, and the 1975–1990 bloody civil war—were in combination tragic events that led the Druze and a majority of Sunnis to shyly “embrace” what they had labeled as the “Maronite state” of Lebanese capitalism and its pro-western tendencies.

But if central Lebanon, and parts of the north, have embraced a westernized turbo capitalism (without a much needed robust judicial system), the south was left pretty much on its own with its landowning and ulama Shii families and clans. The autonomy of the South—or more precisely what’s traditionally known as Jabal ‘Amil—was already there in Ottoman times: besides the tightly controlled port of Sidon by both the Ottoman authorities and the Shihabi emirs, much of Jabal ‘Amil and its surroundings was indeed left to a conglomeration of landed élites, ulama, and local chieftains. In colonial and postcolonial Lebanon the majority of the Shia in the south, north, and elsewhere were left to their ulama and senior families (the Himadehs, ‘Usayrans, As‘ads, and Bayduns, to name only few of the most prominent families) which were supposed to “represent” the Shia in parliamentary affairs and in Lebanese politics in general. As dissatisfied Shiis from the lower rural and urban classes soon began to join the ranks of various Palestinian militias, autonomous Shia movements of the lower classes began to form in the 1970s: that was the case of the Amal movement under the guidance of Musa al-Sadr (the vanished imam). Thus, even though the ulama movement, as was the case in Iran and Iraq, was in sharp decline in the WWI-WWII period and its aftermath, it received its jolt of reinvigoration thanks to paramilitary organizations of the likes of Amal in which the ulama played a key role in the eyes of the lumpenproletariat. Such a rejuvenation of the ulama was picked up by the Hezbollah in the 1980s, amid their reintegration within their militarized bureaucracy. The success of the integration, however, worked mostly in favor of the junior ulama, who managed to bypass the authority of the senior ulama, in a situation that resembles the formation of the Iraqi Da‘wa party back in 1957-59 by dissatisfied and alienated junior ulama (e.g. Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr).

By the time the Pax Syriana became the norm in the 1990s, the Hezbollah had emerged into a full fledged bureaucratic and military alliance of sorts. Its fascist nature stems from a combination of poorly developed groups among Shiis: landowners, overseas immigrants, merchants, ulama, and an uprooted popular urban class, have all come together in a broad and unlikely coalition, while the rest of Lebanon has avoided such a fate and taken a different turn.

Lebanon’s core problem is therefore socio-historical rather than political. We’ll be witnessing, however, in the coming years, constant attempts to solve the Hezbollah problems through political bargains: let’s give them a bigger share in government, let them have a bigger parliamentary bloc, and let them have what they want in decision making. But if the last week has proved anything, it’s that, politically speaking, the Hezbollah immediately hit a wall once its military “successes” were granted from day one. In all logic, the Hezbollah should have pushed further to transform its military takeover with political immunity: take the governmental Seray by force, and intimidate the leaders of the ruling majority of the likes of Sanyura, Junblat, and Hariri, if not force them downright into exile. None of that happened, however. It’s as if the Hezbollah, all of a sudden, could not figure out how to capitalize on its all too sudden military takeover of west Beirut and the Druze mountain: What to do next? The Hezbollah must have asked themselves: could we rule the two-thirds of Lebanon that doesn’t want us and is incompatible with our Islamic beliefs? In real life, however, people do not ponder on abstract questions in all their logical conundrums. As individuals and groups we’re always mourning our pasts, and in that process, the impossibility to coming to terms with our pasts pushes us towards more violence and hatred towards the other.

Marienbad

2008-05-03T17:54:00.000-05:00

The French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, who died earlier this year and whose reputation rests for being the pope of the nouveau roman, published La jalousie in 1957. The title seems to play on the double meaning of jalousie in French: the first is jealousy, and the second refers to a vertical blind, or a Venetian blind, as it’s sometimes called. The nameless protagonist is here simply observing meticulously—every object, every gesture, every shade. Which is precisely what brings the double meaning of jealousy together: meticulous observation is neither free nor disinterested, as it is guided by a sense of obsession and rivalry towards an object, on one hand, and the invisible medium that makes observation possible and lucrative—sort of blind, where the observed cannot see the observer, or where the observer remains for the most part invisible.

L’année dernière à Marienbad, which was scripted by Robbe-Grillet and directed by Alain Resnais in 1961, has now been released in a restored version in the US (and playing this week at the Music Box in Chicago). I saw it for the first time in a ciné-club in the early years of civil-war Beirut, when I was sophomore/junior in chemistry/physics, and didn’t make much of it. But when I had a second look at it yesterday, in its new US release, Robbe-Grillet’s jalousie kept creeping in to my mind.

Marienbad may be complicated or simple, depending on how much you make out of it. But one thing is certain: it is solely narrated from the viewpoint of a single narrator, a handsome middle-aged man with an Italian accent, and designated as X throughout the film. By contrast we hardly know anything of A, a slightly younger woman than X, except for what X phantasizes about her in his monologue. In effect, X’s monologue is obsessive, systematic, and precise in its target: A. X is therefore the observer’s guide: not only is he the one to obsessively observe A continuously, but we observe A, the château and its world, and its aristocratic bourgeois guests, through the eyes—and consciousness—of X. In other words, we’re trapped to the screen through his eyes and consciousness—perhaps more to the latter than the former. In short, the screen is X’s consciousness.

X’s obsessive consciousness runs twofold. At one level, and that’s the essence of the film, he is obsessed with A, her gestures, thoughts, body, posture, and the few things she has to say. One might think that it’s all driven by pure jealousy (hence my connection with jalousie), but, in the final analysis, what really matters is how you come to perceive a jealous act. Jealousy could be perceived as a simple rivalry over a woman, and there’s something to suggest that kind of direction: a mid-aged man, identified as M, positioning himself as a rival-lover-cum-husband, is portrayed as linked to A in some obscure relationship. But even though his relation to X turns sour, it does not seem to guide X’s obsessive lust. Indeed, X’s obsessive gaze seems to suggest that a man’s lust for a woman is jalousie tout court, whether there is a rival lover or not. That’s where jalousie and Marienbad come together: they both portray jealousy the act (feeling) per se, and the process (act) of observing the desired object. The two combined come to represent the consciousness of that main protagonist beleaguerer.

Marienbad is therefore all about seeing, phantasizing, and constructing a selective type of consciousness out of the fragmented images within the space-time continuum. X’s memory is therefore his consciousness, which translates as his obsessiveness with A. X’s gaze reconstructs in his consciousness A’s space-time continuum, as we only get to “know” through X’s jalousie. Otherwise, A’s attitude—confronted with X’s lust and perseverance—is callous at best, as she keeps begging him with the same supplice: “Mais, je vous en prie, laissez-moi!” That kind of leave-me-alone attitude only underscores her indifference, probably finding X’s insistence unattractive, and his character boorish. But whatever that may be, she does not have any memory: not only she can’t remember anything, but there is no “consciousness” of anything in her. Only those infested with that jalousie sickness—that is, who suffer for being who they are, and for falling prey to a beloved object—do enjoy that luxury of memory, and of space-time recollection. What in effect the film portrays accurately—in a documentary fashion—are X’s specific recollections, which are all related to A. Once we step “outside” what A may be doing, feeling, or thinking, we’re into the pure repetition of le même. In effect, X’s recollections of the château, its entourage and clients, are one of sameness: the same gestures, postures, bodies, and utterances, from one year to another. Memory seems here incapable of distinguishing anything—or rather of naming anything with accuracy—hence that infernal sameness: only A makes—creates—the difference. If A is différence (or différance), the others (les autres, including le château) are répétition. At the very end of the film, the château’s massive garden is described by the narrator as “typically French,” that is, without all the natural elements, like flowers and trees, that would make it lively, non-symmetrical, and without the infinite mathematical repetitiveness. In other words, the garden is like the château itself, its endless unpopulated corridors, symmetries, rooms, and guests: it’s all about good manners, mathematical symmetry, and bourgeois obtuse mannerisms. When X engages with M in a public “fight,” it’s through well ordered games like matches and dominoes.

Only X’s obsessiveness with A—his consciousness of her and her time-space—disrupts that enduring mathematical order. It is that obsessive consciousness of the observer who suffers which disrupts that order—in one’s mind—through an act of violence—that of intruding into another’s space-time. There are even few scattered scenes in A’s bedroom—scenes that A herself cannot or pretend not to remember—that do suggest that X was prying on her from an unknown location (through a jalousie? A Blue Velvet kind of voyeurism?): even in that seemingly “private” space it is indeed the suffering observer that remembers in a non-linear non-chronological space-time. As that kind of voyeurism verges on violence, there is a scene where violence is physically perpetrated, when M, the jealous lover-cum-husband shoots A. But, again, such a scene, like many others, is solely from X’s perspective, in that awkward reality-fiction combination that determines the assortment of events in a peculiar space-time configuration (and there’s no point in asking where reality begins, and where fiction ends). What’s interesting about that scene, where A is shot while lying in bed, is the physicality of violence, which in other scenes never moves beyond touching or fondling A. It has been reported that to Robbe-Grillet X’s attitude is that of a rapist, that is, one to which the erotic-sexual gaze receives its satisfaction only through (ritualized) sexual violence. Be that as it may, one can see that X’s type of consciousness is one of lust and suffering, which borders on violence, whether it consummates itself in an act of rape or not. But then X’s order becomes a mathematical order all by itself, like its surroundings, obsessively repeating its own gestures, appearances, and utterances.

Foucauldian musings

2008-05-01T22:05:00.000-05:00

In Paul Veyne’s Foucault (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008, no English translation yet), “discourse” comes as a third medium layer between the subject’s individual consciousness and society at large. If most philosophical and epistemological systems have the knowing subject as epicenter (e.g. Husserl’s intentional phenomenology, or the Heideggerian Dasein), by contrast the social sciences took the side of society, ignoring the subject as a flawed subjective entity. What’s missing is that in-between “language” that tells us what to do and not do, and what to say and not say: in short, something that poses limits to our thoughts and makes every discovery rare and precious. That’s precisely what Foucault meant by discourse. Thus, for art, for example, there is the individual artist on one side, and society at large on the other, but what makes a work of art possible is that tertium quid that defines what is possible at a certain time in a particular society. Discourse would not, however, be able to concretely materialize within a spacio-temporal terrain without the apparatus (dispositif) that would make its very existence possible. The discourse of law in a particular society would not be possible without the various apparatuses of justice through which discourse would operate: the tribunals, the judges, experts, lawyers, and all the institutions that would make a legal case possible.

What is interesting in Veyne’s study are his historical and sociological digressions. As a professional historian of the Greco-Roman empire, Veyne is primarily interested, through his Foucauldian musings, in an epistemology of historical and sociological knowledge. As the sociologist Jean-Claude Passeron has argued, in a book that is subject to Veyne’s attention, we’re into, as far as the social sciences and humanities are concerned, a non-Popperian world: that is, we cannot think those sciences within the narrow categories of induction, deduction, and scientific verification. Passeron and Veyne opt for the Weberian ideal-type notion as a preliminary starting point, only to subject it to some insightful tweaks. Thus, ideal-types like feudalism, the Byzantine Empire, or the Tokugawa Shogunate, are semi-proper names (semi-noms propres): they denote something, and beyond that something that they denote, they have absolutely no credibility. What those names denote are the referents that are need for any historical and sociological denotation of social reality. The meaning of those semi-proper names are defined by the endless referents that denote it. We can call that process of documentation as one of indexation of social reality which would make the semi-proper name meaningful and understandable. We can additionally bring Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology into the picture here through the indexation that is implicit in the users’ need to routinely index speech in order to make one another’s utterances comprehensible. The Foucauldian discourse, through its various apparatuses, would therefore act as the medium through which the individual subjective actions achieve meaning.

Once we define historical and sociological epistemology along that line, it becomes more clear that various political idiosyncratic positions would only look for what they really are: as pseudo-epistemologies of the life-world. For example, the critique of orientalism falsely poses itself as a critique of western knowledge, while confusing in one go orientalism with colonialism and imperialism: one would act in conjunction with the other, or they would all act inseparably from one another. But that’s more of an unsophisticated and idiosyncratic political stance than a usefully genuine cognitive epistemological theory.

this is not a war: summer 2006

2008-04-30T19:50:00.000-05:00

Beirut, 07/17/2006

On the front-page of the London-based Saudi daily al-Sharq al-Awsat (07/17/2006), was a photograph of Hezbollah’s leader Hasan Nasrallah. Not that Nasrallah hasn’t been portrayed enough in photos and videos around the world, and that his facial traits have become analogous with Che Guevara’s, but what’s unique in the front-page photo is that it was reproduced from a TV set located in Beirut. The newspaper’s headline warned that, “Lebanon is getting destroyed, and the political loop is becoming tighter on Hezbollah.” The accompanying photo showed a televised Nasrallah, speaking a day after his home and office were completely shattered in the southern suburb of Haret Hurayk, and telling his audiences that “we’ll continue to struggle, and now that there are no red lines anymore, we’ll hit our enemy even harder.” But the underlying message was, of course, that “even with all that massive air bombing, they couldn’t get me. I’m here alive and kicking!” The most interesting element though was not the message itself—what it said and its timing—but the composition of the photograph. As Nasrallah’s head occupied three-fourth of the frame, the remaining one-third showed what looked like black smoke from damaged properties in Beirut. Maybe the photographer had nothing fancy in mind—just a nice shot combining Nasrallah’s televised face with Beirut burning in the background. Or maybe he (or she) had something fancier. But whatever the photographer’s aim it clearly depicts the classical paradox of the framed image versus the unframed reality. The words and face of Nasrallah, as framed by the TV set, versus the reality outside. People tend to use language through repetition, creating more redundant than creative utterances, while politicians have mastered the art of redundancy even more so than others. The Hezbollah have succeeded at projecting an image of themselves as men of deeds, individuals who are working day and night and plotting for revolutionary action in the Middle East, and, indeed, in the world at large. The Hezbollah, however, is more image than reality, or the reality of Hezbollah is its image, and primarily its televised mediagenic image. Besides its own al-Manar television station, whose building has been completely wrecked by massive air-strikes (even though the station managed not to shut off completely), the Hezbollah image is transmitted all around through the well known Arab satellite networks, of the likes of al-Jazira and al-Arabiyya. It also benefits from the benevolence of millions in the Arab and Islamic worlds. In sum, Hezbollah is all words and images, or more precisely, it projects an image of itself all around the world in spite of a very thin layer of (military) action. Its best historical moment was presumably in the late 1990s, when Hezbollah guerillas were active in the then occupied South Lebanon, leading eventually to a shaky Israeli withdrawal in May 2000. But even Hezbollah’s claim for “victory” in the aftermath of the withdrawal has been recently more and more disputed on the ground that the Party of God had unlawfully monopolized all “resistance” as its own, forcing others, in particular “leftist” militias, not to participate. It also outmaneuvered a cowardly divided Lebanese political class by forcing the country into a war-with-the-enemy rather than diplomatic negotiation.

The likes of Hezbollah and Hamas strive from the process of protracted civil wars which are the daily bread of Arab and Islamic societies. As such societies have emerged from Empire formations that were poor at integrating their populations, the postcolonial modern state is either powerless as in Lebanon, or else, as in Baathist Syria and Iraq of the old régime, it manipulates under its habitual authoritarianism the various antagonistic civil groups.

Beirut, 07/24/2006

Time condenses. Not only does it bring memories of the past, but, more importantly, it tells us that on the essentials, we, our society and environment, are not changing. Time stands still in a particular fashion. The feeling that we are stranded in time, unable to exit, unable to even properly express ourselves, unable to find this other with whom to communicate, all of that fills us with weariness and disgust. I’m tired because I’ve come to expect all this debacle—not in its empirical happenings perhaps, but in that innate feeling of a general breakdown, another one of those broad catastrophic moves. When at 18 the “first” “civil war” broke out, it gave me a great deal of freedom: I had perhaps the same existential feeling as that of Sartre under the Nazi occupation in the early 1940s. “Never have I felt more free,” he said with arrogance—and disillusion regarding what French society was supposed to provide in terms of “personal freedoms” and the like. The hypocrisy of bourgeois thought and third-fourth-republic politics, Victorian sexuality, and Catholic and public school education, all came in new light with the Nazi occupation: no one is supposed to conform to such hypocritical values anymore, hence we’re freer than ever. Notice how an outside disaster, a totalitarian rule, are what triggers freedom in thought and behavior. It is as if one needs an overt political hostility to begin moving on his own. I still remember my joy at the 1975 breakup. The long sufferings that I had gone through in my first year at the American University of Beirut (AUB) campus materialized into an objectified conflict, one where the subjective sufferings met with external destruction. Surely, I must have thought back then, something was wrong with that society. It has always been my feeling that something was wrong—ever since I set foot in Beirut in 1965, and shifted schools from Aleppo to Juniyeh. At first sight what liberal capitalism brings to a post-empire nation-state is an atmosphere of decadence, which in effect is a combination of political, cultural, and sexual decadence. People’s “niceness” and “informal” practices hide the fact that, unlike, say, a genuinely liberal society like the US, individuals are not freely available to one another, meaning that you’ll have to find “your own place” through networks of friends, and networks of friends’ networks. Not only does confessionalism hinder openness, but, more importantly perhaps, closed societies, whose tribal and peasant origins are not far away, tend to be structured on a hierarchy of violence among and within the (confessional) groups, so that “lower” families remain “boycotted ” by the “upper” ones—for instance, in terms of marriage and inheritance, local politics, and labor (the former working for the latter). In such a relationship of employers versus employees, the employees will at some point find their route to salvation by doing politics outside the traditional channels: war as politics. Foucault once said that “Le droit est donc une manière réglée de faire la guerre,” which means that in a society with a judiciary system the law becomes an organized—structured—way to regulate conflicts. But when the judiciary is not there, the hierarchy of violence does it all, and politics as usual is war. The war machinery then effectively materializes into bloodier conflicts that bypass daily routine, attempting at creating another hierarchical order—a process that is generally prompted by the lower families.

In many ways, the 2006 war is by far deadlier than the 1982 invasion, even though most of Beirut—in its second war week—still benefits from regular electricity and water supplies, and has not been shelled for the most part. The level of destruction is, however, more intensive than 1982, as entire neighborhoods and villages are in the process of being leveled off. Israel’s problem with Hezbollah and Lebanon is not even political but technical. The weakness of Arab political structures renders political negotiations next to impossible: there is no politics simply because politics implies a state’s power over its population by means of investigative knowledge. In other words, it is not enough for the state—or sovereign power—to dominate, as this could be achieved, among others, by military power, but through modes of knowledge that in their essence are of an investigative nature. It is indeed the state’s knowledge over its population that provides it with that legitimate authority to monopolize violence. Otherwise, the state’s (legitimate) monopoly on violence, to use Weber’s most notorious expression, will follow the logic of the hierarchy of violence among groups.

In their third and fourth weeks, the Israelis will have only one goal: to destroy as much as possible of the rocket launchers. This is not a political aim, as much as a pure military strategy and civil concern, where the wellbeing and safety of Israeli citizens in the northern half of the country (and possibly beyond that) is at stake. If that proves successful, then the deadly military machine of the Hezbollah would at least have been partly damaged, and a long painful process of grueling political negotiations would ensue. Israel would have locked Hizbullah for the next decade or two, but then the real challenge would be internal, within Lebanon itself, and at this level it would be unlikely that the Lebanese would know how to accept the logic of the modern state. It would be, in effect, déjà vu all over again.

A society that lacks statist power, or conversely, one where the state rules by sheer force, share their common lot of political névrosés. As groups and sub-groups are left struggling on their own, they will be permanently immersed in situations of war.

Undated

On ne parle pas aux gens. On les regarde juste de l’extérieur. C’est cette extériorité qui détermine en fin de compte nos relations aux autres.

Est-ce regarder veut dire connaître ? Toute l’emblématique photographique provient de ce connaître dans le regarder. Simplement regarder. Regarder sans connaître. Connaître à travers le regard.

Mon aversion pour l’écrit—cet ennui profond dès que je touche une page blanche—cette haine et peur de l’écrit—de ce que j’écris—provient du fait que je n’écris pas ce que je veux, comme je veux, d’une manière la moins structurée que possible. Jouer avec l’écrit. Prétendre que l’on n’écrit pas.

Beirut, 07/25/2006

The NYT has published this morning a cover story on besieged Beirut, describing the city as a terrain divided in two: the bulk of the city, we’re told, lives a more or less “normal” life, while the southern Shii suburbs—known as the Dahiya—are bombed on a daily basis, and have witnessed massive destruction and population exodus. In the first Beirut, the “normalcy” of life is presumably an expression of the ethos of people that aspire to go on with their lives, leave the past behind them, and heal the scars of the fifteen-year civil war by forgiveness and openness to others. By contrast, the second Beirut still holds the banners of death by armed struggle, revolution until victory, and where the awkwardly hasty Israeli withdrawal of 2000 is looked upon as a major achievement. If we were to trust the Hezbollah’s al-Manar, whose broadcasting studios have been reduced to rubble, this second group is showing no resilience. Witness, for instance, this young man, as videotaped on al-Manar TV, who “informed” the viewers that the 1982 Israeli invasion brought to death his first sister, and even though his second sister just died in her Dahiya apartment in an air strike, he is still fully behind the great leader Nasrallah. Now that video is cheap, and at the disposition of professionals and laymen (prosumers) alike, the covering of world events in the last two decades has reached massive—if not hysterical—proportions, only to be met with the total indifference of viewers to the conflict-as-image. In those “live” images, transmitted from around the world, what are we supposed to see? Where do we begin when we start piecing together “our” war “narrative”? What role is the image supposed to play? A Chinese anecdote recounts the story of a wise man who points to the moon with his finger, while the idiot sees only the finger but misses the moon. When we see the young man in his thirties, sweating in his black T-shirt, pointing with his finger to his demolished sister’s home, while stating how “proud” he was to have two of his sisters falling into the ranks of “martyrs” of Islam, are we supposed to focus on the demolished apartment complex, the pointing finger, or the uttered statements on martyrdom and the leader’s greatness? Or maybe all of the above? The Canadian communication expert Marshall McLuhan became famous for stating that the medium is the message. I tend to think that if we’ve become mostly indifferent to “live” broadcasts it is precisely because either the message is redundant, or else there’s no message. When I say “there’s no message,” I mean we’re not even given the opportunity to see an image from a particular angle/distance, as the video medium and the endless flaw of cabled images on a 24/7 basis, flatten every frame. Roland Barthes argued in his essay on photography that every photo has a punctum, that mysterious “point” that captures the viewer’s attention and guides him to other points within the photographic frame. The punctum could be anything from a person’s hands, lips, or a tree lurking in the “background.” But contemporary televised video, however, does not even open that possibility to be amazed at a frame’s architecture. The 30 frames that make up each second have become the flux-of-indifference.

The Lebanese have become accustomed at describing their never ending civil wars as “the wars of others on our land,” to quote the title of a book by a famous journalist. The current war is therefore no “civil war” but an outside war where Israelis are fighting Iranians and Syrians through their Hezbollah proxies. As usual, the drawback for such an approach is that it fails to see the essential, namely that internal conflicts, which in reality are either masked or sublimated civil wars, “translate” into regional or possibly international conflicts. In the aftermath of Hariri’s assassination on 14 February 2005, Lebanon’s di-visions became visible in their new-old configurations barely a month later, when on the 8^th of March Hezbollah gathered its pro-Syrian supporters (estimated at one-third of Lebanon’s population) at the Riyad al-Solh square, and when the following week, on March 14, over a million Lebanese came to the streets in a broad coalition of “moderates” requesting that the “truth” be revealed on Hariri’s tragic assassination. The “center” of this “national” coalition was at the nearby Martyr’s—Freedom’s—square, only a block from Riyad al-Solh. Today those million or so are passively “watching” (through which medium? Which images?) the other pro-Syrian-Iranian-Shii third massacred, exiled, its neighborhoods and villages leveled down, and its properties destroyed, while its “leadership” is still claiming victory after victory. The two-Lebanon has emerged since then, and what we’re witnessing today is the actualization of such a di-vision through violence—certainly not its bypassing into a political settlement.

Now that we’re into the third week of the new-old war on Lebanon, and the never ending Lebanicized civil wars, the outlook is that it would be better to let the Israelis finish off the job at reducing and neutralizing Hezbollah’s military might. But even if such a démarche finally succeeds, the Lebanese will be left, in the final analysis, with the most essential task to come, namely another round of political and economic reconstruction. Besides asking the obvious question whether anything could still be added to the 40-billion dollar staggering debt from the “previous” civil war, does politics exist in Lebanese society in such a way as to open up for a “political consensus”? Did politics ever exist in the first place?

Jacques Rancière has argued that politics is inseparable from democracy, in the specific sense that politics, as a system of distribution of power relations, based in turn on the rule of law and individual rights, can only be democratic. Otherwise, we’re left to authoritarianism, administration, bureaucratic routines, and individuals trapped in their daily lives without much access to the public good. The problem, therefore, is certainly not the existence of confessional groups per se, but the “precedence” of such groups over “individual rights” and the “public sphere” at large. To use a well known formula by Bruno Latour, Lebanese have yet to learn how “to make things public.” The 14^th of March definitely made few “things”—such as Hariri’s probe and the Syrian occupation—“public,” in the sense of having both exposed publicly while creating a broad consensus around them. It made those things as artifacts, or as matters of concern. More importantly, regarding Hariri’s assassination and Syria’s occupation of Lebanon, there was a movement that aimed at expressing such events in public, for instance, in photography shows, graffiti and banners, forums, and the use of space. But by the time of the parliamentary election of summer 2005, such a movement had already faltered into business as usual, meaning it all got back into the politicians’ hands and their electoral “lists” and insulting speeches.

The Lebanese sectarian and non-sectarian factions thus seem more at ease at blaming the enemy, whether it’s the Syrian, Iranian, Israeli, American, Zionist, or imperialist enemy, than at being able to look inside. Witness what’s happening right now: two-third of Lebanon is watching while the other one-third is systematically targeted, watching for the Israelis to finish off with Hezbollah’s arrogance, while at the same time praising the resistance against the Zionist enemy. Even if Hezbollah’s downsizing, and the pacification of the south through NATO-European troops, are both successfully achieved, the big internal problem of political reconciliation confronting the Lebanese state and society would be of such a magnitude that it would be difficult to handle. For one thing, with the indifference of the two-thirds who are more or less sleeping well every night with enough electric power to run their A/C machines, Shii ressentiment is growing faster than ever. The great divide was always there, but it received a new twist in the wake of Hariri’s assassination. Moreover, while the Sunnis have learned since the 1950s and 1960s that allowing armed militias in parallel to the Lebanese army only leads to an impotent state, the Shiis have yet to accept that fact. In short, the Sunnis’ embourgeoisement, their adopting of consumerist and exhibitionist postures, has yet to happen to the bulk of the Shiis.

To be sure, there isn’t much in Lebanese culture that would prepare even an average layman to understand the political shortcomings of the system. My tenant-neighbor, with whom, as landowner, I’ve harbored a long-standing feud over his tenancy contract, told me the other day, as we were both in the elevator, that “every time we think it is the last time, something new comes up. But this time, I feel, it will surely be the last.”

07/27/2006

On sent toute sa vie comme fermée à jamais devant soi. Instant de mort. Le temps se condense plutôt qu’il ne se répète. Condensation plutôt que répétition. Un incident qui condense le temps. Tout y était déjà là : l’horizon politique bouché des régimes socialistes autoritaires, les frères musulmans, le manque d’une culture locale moderne. Ces gens ne sont bons que pour l’export-import. Ils s’oublient eux-mêmes. Ne savent plus qui ils sont, tellement ils ont traversé des continents et cultures, sans savoir quoi que ce soit à leurs modes de pensée.

07/28/2006

The massive Israeli onslaught on Lebanon since July 12 has brought considerable damage to the Lebanese economic and human infrastructure in general, and to Hezbollah’s capabilities in particular. Top Hezbollah officers, including its secretary general Nasrallah, have been telling the media that the swift and colossal Israeli retaliation at the kidnapping of its two soldiers was to be “expected.” If “expect” here means that we “knew” that the Israelis would begin retaliating as soon as we would kidnap their soldiers, and we “knew” that such an action would entail massive civilian and military damage on our side, then what’s the economic rationale for such an action? Do the likes of Hezbollah—nonstate militias with considerable societal roots and influence—have any “economic” rationale? Is there any economic rationality behind their actions? Either Hezbollah seriously miscalculated, or else its political and ideological stances have little economic logic behind them. But even if it did miscalculate the kidnapping of the two soldiers, its handling of the war in the last couple of weeks only points to further miscalculations, including its bombing of Haifa, Israel’s third largest and top industrial city, on a quasi-regular basis. The truth of the matter, however, is that Hezbollah did not miscalculate, as it knew exactly what it was doing. But how does then Hezbollah calculate, assuming, of course, that it did not mis-calculate? At face level, Hezbollah does seem, indeed, to be taken by its own revolutionary ideology—the kind of non-empirical and (non-?)utopian zeal of the kind “revolution until victory.” Such stances are presumably important to reinforce the normative values within the group by establishing purpose and cohesion. The revolutionary stance, however, should not have in principle distracted Hezbollah from any economic reckoning. Even the Party of God needs, after all, to perform some calculations for its investments and losses. The Party, which is routinely described as a “terrorist organization,” acts more like a hodgepodge of diverse social institutions—schools, hospitals, mosques, religious study groups, ulama networks, media outlets, and real estate and financial loans—which taken together are the equivalent of a social security system for the bulk of the Shii underclass (over one-third of Lebanon’s present population). It would therefore make sense that the Hezbollah, in spite of its military zeal, would like to keep up its civil networks at all costs, the latter should in principle be the raison d’être of the Party. But now that both civil and military networks are slowly and systematically dismantled, or have at least suffered enormous damage, did Hezbollah mis-calculate? The dismantlement of networks should make Hezbollah less popular among its pundits, as homes and business have suffered colossal damage. In the final analysis, either the population at large cares about its businesses and wellbeing, or else it will accept Hezbollah for ever—no matter what. In the latter case, there isn’t much of any economic planning and expectations (or disappointments). But actors, even if diehard Hezbollah fans, are also rational economic actors, and make their decisions accordingly.

It is impossible to understand Hezbollah’s modus operandi without taking into consideration the simple fact that its main benefactor and patron, The Islamic Republic of Iran, grants it up to a $100 million a year, and that the Syrians, from the Iranian cash influx, sell the Hezbollah Syrian and Russian made mid- and long-range rockets, which Haifa’s population has been receiving over its heads recently. The Hezbollah therefore finds itself in a catch-22 situation: if it does not satisfy its Iranian and Syrian patrons, it will lose its cash flow; and if it does, it would place a great deal of its military and civil infrastructure at high risk. The $100 million donation also explains why Hezbollah always snubbed local Lebanese sectarian politics, opting instead for dubious regional and Islamic alignments. In sum, had it accumulated its cash flow through local donations, both its sectarian politics and economic rationale would have been different. Had the Hezbollah been self-subsidized, it would not have bailed out from Lebanon’s sectarian system—only to be re-“integrated” in a humiliating way as an outcome of this war--and it would have been more responsive to the economic expectations of its Shii constituency.

07/30/2006

What we do not reveal to ourselves proves even more important than the few things we reluctantly admit. This seems paradoxical, since how do we “know” that which has never been revealed? There is revelation in writing, and another that remains purely mental, which absorbs us in our sleep- and day-dreams, but never reveals itself on paper. So, we incessantly have that awkward feeling that things are not coming together at the right moment.

Se bien sentir dans sa peau. To feel well in one’s body—and I never did myself. Those Lebanese bodies were unlike mine: I must have felt that discomfort in me for ever. Maybe the turning point was the move from Syria to Lebanon in 1965, and maybe it was not. Maybe the discomfort was always there, well rooted genetically deep into my body. In any case, “it” separated me from the rest of humanity: wherever I am, I’m not at home. Rootless, sexless, friendless, and always with a writer’s block. With age, I’ve learned to overcome the phobias of the past and to become a good company to myself—to myself only, without sharing my life with anyone else.

Beirut is not a city done for loners, pedestrians, and romantics in mind. There’s no genuine communication in this city for people that live anonymously, that do not know one another, as there isn’t much that gets people together anonymously. It’s a city of small networks, whether sectarian, secular, artistic, or political. The architecture, and the production of space and its organization, reflect a non-concern with the public sphere, of doing things together for the sake of the community, of making things public. It’s a city made for those who already know one another, have a place in society, and a space of their own. Not only the world at large does not exist, but obedience to the state is looked upon as pure nuisance, taxes are avoided, and even stopping at a red light is a burden. It is this blindness to the other that creates societies within societies that are totally insulated from one another, and that gives a party like Hezbollah free reign to endlessly stockpile weapons and rocket launchers in civilian areas. What time brings is the sudden relief of the “all too understandable” phenomenon: it happens suddenly after long periods of wandering in all directions, like looking at those poorly designed apartment complexes, with their narrow balconies and car parks, and whose uninspiring designs is already obsolete before even the inhabitants come to occupy their apartments. In my quality of flâneur, I’ve been pondering those streets back and forth—but without much joy, and with that naïve questioning as to why I feel so much “outside” all of this, as if I am deeply hurt that I’m not part of this society—that I’m not accepting “it,” and “it” is not accepting “me”—as myself, my own self.

Our memory does not operate by working out beings in a particular terrain, because as individuals we’re not anymore part of a terrain, but located within abstract networks of relations. That’s why the terrains we inhabit only inadvertently are constructed in such a dysfunctional way. Look at a typical modern Lebanese neighborhood, and it has that awkward feeling of a Syrian neighborhood planned “from above” in any of the Syrian cities, or of a village constructed in that ugly combination of concrete and white bricks, without much planning, meaning without much concern for people to connect, to love life, to love to be and act together. In those abandoned villages, where village life has ceased a long time ago, and where people “drop by” occasionally from various locations—the capital or nearby city, the Arab or western land or African continent, the mahjar, or a provincial town—the terrain becomes representative of bits and pieces of individualistic enterprises, a montage and collage of individual dreams and broken selves, which for the most part have not much in common: the brand-new villa of an African migrant, who once in a while checks on his “family,” the home of a retired general in the army who got fed up from the city’s slums, a small state-sponsored hospital, a school, shops here and there, and mostly empty lots, all in no particular order. We’re unable to escape that kind of empty order wherever we are, to the point that the old distinction between monde urbain and monde rural has vanished, and has been replaced by that quasi-continuous and intangible terrain. If we’re not interested anymore by what the quotidian has to offer us, and we’re permanently attempting to “connect” through our cell phones, fax machines, the internet, cable and the dish, it’s because we think it is of no importance. People remain “at home” and go out whenever necessary, opting for the comfort of their home toys, DVD machines, cable TVs, instant messaging, and dildos.

07/31/2006

When in May 2000 Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon, ending its 18-year occupation, the Hezbollah claimed all “resistance” and “victory” against the “enemy” all to itself. It constructed its ideology on the dubious notion that “resistance” must be pursued at all cost, until the “final victory” is met—the latter seems to be standing for an eternal jihad of all sorts. Moreover, the Hezbollah claimed all to itself the jihad and success against the enemy only by refusing the tacit cooperation of other “leftist” militias, some of which were eager to contribute in both material and men. More importantly, however, was the situation into which the Lebanese state was de facto placed into throughout the 1990s by the Hezbollah and its Syrian sponsors, which at the time were occupying most of Lebanon. Not only did the Hezbollah and Syrians forbade the Lebanese state from any negotiation with the enemy, but more importantly, the Israelis withdrew suddenly without any formal agreement with Lebanon. But because a withdrawal to the international borders without a formal agreement is no peace at all, the Hezbollah and Syrians (not to mention the Islamic Republic of Iran) got exactly what they wanted: a situation of permanent war, which in effect implied a protracted Lebanese civil war. In effect, the war with the external enemy implied pursuing a protracted internal civil war, the latter being the main locus to the former, rather than the other way round. Why would someone opt for a combination of internalized and externalized wars rather than civil peace is a complicated issue that cannot be tackled successfully here. Suffice it to say that in principle, namely, following common sense economic rationality, a rational actor (agent or user) would opt for a situation where he would enhance his economic well being—hence the necessity for peace, which implies diplomatic relations, open borders, trade, and cultural exchange. The Hezbollah for its part is an organization, which, even though enjoys substantial popular roots among the Shia, is nevertheless not self-subsidized, and benefits most from tributary capitalism. In effect, the Islamic Republic of Iran is a prototype of a rentier (tributary) state, which survives mainly from the rents of its oil fields, rather than from a systematic taxation system. Moreover, the popularity of the Iranian theocratic régime stems mainly from its distribution of some of the oil rents to its population, in particular the poor who benefit from all kinds of state services. In similar vein, the Syrian state finances half of its 5-7 billion dollar annual budget from the revenues of its oil fields in the north, close to the Iraqi border. The Hezbollah benefits, in turn, from the unusual “alliance” of interests between two incompatible states. This mariage de raison between Syrians and Iranians financially benefits the Hezbollah, thanks to an annual Iranian “donation” of $100 million. The Hezbollah also receives as additional bonus arm shipments from both the Iranians and Syrians, including the notorious medium- and long-range missiles, and the Katyushas, which have wrecked havoc the northern Israeli cities in the present war of attrition. As is well known, if jet fighters are the weapons of the educated and wealthy, missiles are the quintessential weapons of the poor and the dispossessed. But in its guerrilla war of attrition, the Hezbollah has only created enormous damage to its own civil and military infrastructure, not to mention the damages inflicted to its non-constituency, such as the bulk of Beirut’s and Mount Lebanon’s populations, all of which are not traditional Hezbollah supporters, even though they are not necessarily admirers of Israel either. In short, Hezbollah’s successes, if any, seem at the moment of a symbolic nature, whether inside Lebanon on in the Arab and Islamic worlds at large. But symbolic does not, however, translate necessarily into economic, at least not if you’re following the political strategy of Hezbollah, which does not seem to be linked to any economic rationale at all, but geared only towards symbolic benefits. Why should that be so? After all, Lebanon is a full-fledged capitalistic society, without even the traditional political and juridical boundaries that would limit the “damages” of capitalism, and you would thus expect that such a market logic would be ubiquitous among all sectarian factions. In an ironic twist, the Hezbollah is precisely benefiting from the logic of capitalism über alles. For one thing, in order to give free reign to sectarian divisions, the Lebanese have opted for a historic compromise of a weak and ineffectual state. Second, this weak state was only thought of in conjunction with poor or limited public services, so as not to mimic the autocratic structure of the État providence of neighboring Arab states, all of which favor the suspension of sectarian conflicts through a dominating state ‘asabiyya. Hence for Lebanon, since the economy cannot be a state-controlled bureaucratic enterprise (as it currently is, among others, in Syria and Egypt), it had to be capitalistic in its very essence, forgetting that the nature of capitalism, precisely because of its unfettered logic, requires a strong state and an active judiciary, both of which are absent in our case here. The Hezbollah benefits precisely from such weaknesses, while at the same time enjoying the benefits of unconstrained capitalism. Thus, when two-third of Lebanon was playing the import-export game, the Hezbollah, benefiting from the largesse of its Iranian and Syrian donors, was stockpiling weapons in some of the warehouses of the heavily populated Dahiya neighborhoods, and installed rocket launchers all over the south and the Biqa‘ valley.

08/02/2006

We must rethink Hezbollah in its internal Lebanese role, namely as a representative of the bulk of the Shii underclass. Without this relationship to the underclass, Hezbollah’s role would be totally misunderstood, for instance, it’s a terrorist organization that is a mercenary to Iran, to its foes, and it’s a revolutionary militia to its admirers. Even though it’s a bit of both, Hezbollah must be primarily perceived in terms of its social and economic functions—in relation to Lebanese capitalism, and its centers and peripheries. It seems therefore more than ironic that Hezbollah is looked upon as a “revolutionary” party, whose main would-be mission is nothing but the “liberation” against the Zionist “enemy.” That Hezbollah—and its “revolutionary” cohorts (e.g. Hamas)—need an externalized “enemy” in the form of Zionism, colonialism, or American imperialism, should not be that difficult to understand. Indeed, the externalized enemy, in the absence of a “strong” Hobbesian state, “prevents” the internalization of the conflict in the form of a direct civil war. Moreover, the externalization of the conflict, for the likes of Hezbollah and Hamas, only helps at maintaining an internalized masked (or sublimated) civil war. In sum, were it not for that fictitious external enemy, the internal damage would have been unbearable. How does then the dialectic between internal and external work? What is its logic? When the Other is your next-door neighbor, and you have strong qualms against him, you either express such feelings overtly, or else you proceed through a détour. In effect, such circularity is common not only to individuals and groups, but also to states. In other words, your live your antagonism (hostility) to the other that is close to you through a third party—or better still, a diminished other, what Lacan has labeled as objet petit a. Between the real Other (with a capital O), and the diminished other (small o), lies the true relationship of hostility, the battle for recognition, and the slave-master relationship. The naïve interpreters all over the world, by posing Hezbollah as the “legitimate” “liberator” of occupied territories, have misplaced the whole problem. The real problem in the humanities and the social sciences is when researchers read the actors actions at face value, thinking that in doing so they’re “objective.” Not only did Hezbollah not “liberate” Lebanon from anything, but it even drained that medium-income country, whose only resource is a service economy set within a barbaric capitalism without much political and juridical boundaries. The dynamic of Lebanese capitalism has set the seaport capital Beirut as its main hub. The transfer of powers between mountain and city occurred late in the nineteenth century, when the mountain’s economy proved too scarce to satisfy the restless desires of a fast growing bourgeoisie, in particular among Christians, when sectarian conflicts signaled a weakening of Ottoman power and additional concessions to Europe. As capitalism installs itself where it thrives best, Beirut became the hub of all commercial activity centered around the Mediterranean, while other regions in the north, east, and south, thrived less well. Mount Lebanon for its part became like a résidence secondaire for the new wealthy urbanites, giving the mountain a new unexpected accessory role in the expansion of capitalism. But central Mount Lebanon proves to be the exception that proves the rule all too well. When in May 2000, upon Israel’s sudden withdrawal from Lebanon, I visited the newly “liberated” south, I stood at the “gate” that separates Lebanon from Israel, known as Bawwabat Fatima, and was struck at the proximity of the two borders, a proximity that transformed the ritual of stone-throwing a journalistic feast. What I did notice, however, was what was on the other side of the fence. As we’re always separated by “civilizational” fences in this part of the world (e.g. the two Beiruts of the 1970s and 1980s), we can only “peer” at the other side from a distance—de loin. The settlement that was right in front me at the other side, and whose name I totally ignore (the Hezbollah guards were uncooperative in that regard), looked green all over: I cannot but overemphasize the greenness of the other side, so striking when compared to the dry mediocrity on “our” side. Since the early pilgrims-cum-settlers of the 1880s, who for the most part were Russians escaping the pogroms, or east Europeans escaping anti-Semitism, and even though both groups were not Zionists per se (the ideology was still in the process of formation), there was this notion of the settler as peasant farmer, which later became the main ideology of the kibbutz. Thus, even though those early settlers were financed by the Rothschilds, they had for the most part a hard time physically surviving, and the early settlements proved to be a complete failure. But then at the turn of the century, the flux and determination of new settlers, and the institutionalization of the kibbutz ideology, paved the way for the troubled period of the British mandate in which the “superiority” of Jewish culture and practices became obvious. It has since then became routine to regard every Israeli citizen as a peasant farmer—and there’s no shame in that. Moreover, as Israel adopted a system of liberal democracy and capitalism, the “socialism” of the founding fathers de facto transformed the Israeli state into an État providence. But even though Israel should have looked in par with other European states in this regard, what made this country so unique was indeed the experience of the kibbutz.

When in a society every citizen is regarded as a peasant farmer, nature is radically transformed. By contrast, the border on the Lebanese side of Fatima’s “gate” looked as if it was left lurking under Ottoman times. In effect, the south, north, and east of Lebanon all share common misgivings, created by a rapid expansion of capitalism, and a weak state that neither protects its borders nor provides adequate minimal welfare services.

08/03/2006

La photographie comme art de la question rendue visible.

It has become increasingly difficult to even do few “banal” and “innocent” snapshots of my “own” Beirut neighborhood, which is not at stake and hasn’t suffered thus far any destruction or casualties. It’s ironic that these days you need a reason for a snapshot. I’ve got accustomed, even since taking photography seriously in the last ten years or so, of receiving from a passerby the casual question: Why are you doing this tree? This building? This highway? It’s like asking, Why do you do photography at all? What for? And to which there’s obviously no answer at all, or there’s a very simple answer not worth answering, because your passerby will anyhow not appreciate it, or it needs a very complex answer, perhaps in a book form. But then the question, Why are you doing this tree?, could, indeed, be even more complex than originally thought. Our interlocutor may not be asking about photography in general—people tend to be more realistic and practical than that—but why this tree, in that particular situation, rather than any other tree? That’s a much tougher question than asking about the raison d’être of photography in general. It’s the mystery behind each frame that is worthy of existence in its own right. I’m doing this tree simply because it is there, it exists as a being among other beings. What photography therefore targets is what some phenomenologists call the intentionality of consciousness: thanks to language, we have in our minds the notion of “tree” in general, so that the word “tree”-as-“sign” refers to a general and abstract notion of “tree.” But then my consciousness, through the organs of perception located in my eyes and brain, targets this specific tree out there, and to the phenomenologists this specific tree cannot be explicated by the general concept of tree. Indeed, it has an existence of its own that is unaccountable by the existence of other trees. Photographers seem to have captivated the charm of the existence of things and objects for their own sake, and with no other reason than the fact that they exist as such. The best photographers have framed “objects” in such a way that would point to the complexities of objects-in-space and of light. An object simply exists, hence its charm.

This afternoon, right after lunch, I went to buy the newspapers. Under the heavy white sun of August, Beirut is totally empty these days, with nothing happening—except the war, but at a close distance. Beirut’s dreary atmosphere, its humid heat, the non-paved streets, the people who move around in sealed air-conditioned cars, all that was pretty nauseating—but is it still? Empty streets, parking lots, and isolated objects, under a heavy sun that turns even the blue sky white, have become among my favorite topoi. They probably remind me of shadows of persons that could have been there, but are not there anymore. All Beirut is shadowy: the shadow of the Ottoman architecture, which is not there anymore; the shadow of the old downtown, which is now replaced by an anemically uncreative space; and the shadow of the Arab-Turkic-Islamic cultures, which have been replaced by a patchwork of westernized discourses.

Moving around in that anemic space is no problem as far as I’m concerned. Not only I’ve learned to accept it, and since 1993 been photographing it thoroughly, but in a perverse way there’s an element of Lacanian jouissance into it. As I walked for the nth time into my neighborhood streets this afternoon to buy my newspapers, I felt that lightness, a liberation from the burden of narratives, discourse, and language, which I feel in poorly designed slums and neighborhoods all over Syria. Broken pavements, empty lots, and buildings growing in no particular order, have become a comforting sight. What adds to the excitement these days is the fact that any snapshot of Beirut has become a risky business—even framing a trash can is risky! While framing a dead body, one of those bodies hit by Israeli military power is not. People still look at photography as providing evidence of a reality out there, while I tend to see it as the subjective perception of a single person, as objectified through the lens’s technological grasp.

Before going back home with my newspapers in hand, I decided to gamble, and make few snapshots of “my” neighborhood. There’s no real feeling of a neighborhood in this city, as people do not connect to space, or to a terrain that they would explore slowly and systematically. What they connect to are several dots in space. And what I myself enjoy most—quintessential Lacanian jouissance—is filling the empty dots in “my” neighborhood. Watching those empty lots with dried up grass and plants growing in all directions, and unimaginative apartment blocks where professional bourgeois have placed their lifetime savings, could have been, under the heavy August sun, a dreary experience. But my genuine interest in those locations transformed them into light things, which pushed me towards framing them with my camera. Maybe what I enjoyed the most this time—now that Beirut is risky business—is that I cannot solely protect myself with my compulsive habits. Within minutes I managed a dozen shots, mostly of empty lots and poorly designed spaces. Soon afterwards, a block from home, three young guys came to me, one was running, while the other two followed me with a motorbike. “Why are you taking pictures?,” asked the young man in English and Arabic, while the other two were following closely on the other side of the street. “That’s my neighborhood. I live there—right there!” “So what? What do you need all those pictures for?” “I simply love taking pictures.” “An old lady told us that you took a picture of her home and street. That scared her!” “Sorry about that. We’re all a bit nervous these days.” It’s always nice to enjoy the thrill of provocation: to take pictures for no reason at all!

This past weekend’s massacre at Qana, in which over 40 innocent individuals were buried in a quasi-shelter, half of them children, did prompt hundreds of photos around the world. As the Israelis stopped all military action in the area, in order to allow rescue workers to do their job, Lebanese and international photographers rushed in, bouncing their stuff all over. As in the first Qana massacre (Qana-1) in 1996 in the wake of Operation Grapes of Wrath (also staged against Hezbollah), the human disaster was “communicated” by means of satellite images, whether video or still photography. But even within a decade, technology in that area has changed so much that images are now made and transferred at much higher rate. Which is not necessarily good news when it comes to quality. War images pose a particular problem of their own. For one thing, they’re supposed to portray the suffering of others, and somehow looking at the suffering of others from the comfort of one’s safe home, laptop screen, or summer vacation in the Caribbean, could pose all kind of moral or artistic problems—at least if someone cares. But what is it that we really care about? What is it that we would like to see? What is it that we would like to re-present in the suffering of others? If re-present means presenting something that is an artistic representation—a duplicate—of an event or a thing that exists out there, then what is it that we would like to present? How should it be presented? Well known photographers, of the likes of James Nachtway and Salgado, have become known both for their “decency” and “artistry” at covering the sufferings of others. They both did most of their work in black-and-white, and they’ve been traveling the world at large looking for people’s sufferings. Even though their styles are pretty much different (we’ll see whether that’s an important element when it comes to war and suffering), opting for black-and-white flushes a classy tone in every picture—color would have flattened the “seriousness” of the black-and-white, and would have rendered each frame less “tragic.” In other words, as the black-and-white brings nostalgia into every frame, color may have something “tragic” into it, precisely because it flattens and disrupts the time distance that is needed to “appreciate” the image: if black-and-white is nostalgic, color is actuality, and the actual—the “real”—is flat. But should the sufferings of others have anything nostalgic to it? Should we reach for distance—or the artificiality of distance—in war and suffering? Why not the digital colors that most photojournalists use these days? Does a digital color palette betray reality? Or is it so real that it prevents us from creating that needed distance in order to fully appreciate?

In the wake of Qana, al-Hayat carried under the huge banner of “Qana-2: the massacre,” a large colored photograph of two 5- to 7-year old girls that were dead on a stroller (or what seemed like one). At the beginning I couldn’t even tell whether they were dead or alive. They could have been sisters, or next-door neighbors, or two girls who did not know one another. While death brought them together, photography pulled them posthumously to the world at large. The innocence of their dusty faces, their gaze, made them look as if eternally surprised.

08/04/2006

Unsurprisingly, and even though most Beirut and a great deal of Lebanon is perfectly “safe” for now, the population at large has been quite “passive” to the unfolding events. You would expect that for a population paying all the bills for all those “liberation wars,” and for a middle-income country with a 40-billion debt from a previous civil war, and whose infrastructure is slowly being undermined day-by-day, that all such factors should have prompted a massive movement of public discussion and political awareness. But it didn’t. What some have labeled, without much thought, “the Arab street” is a pure myth that has no real existence. In order for a “street” to exist, it must do so in a combination of symbolic, political, and concrete urban terrains. A “street” must first exist concretely as part of an urban setting. For instance, suburbia with its sealed middle-class homes and shopping malls does not generally prompt for political action. One of the reasons is that people in such environments do not “come together” face-to-face except in sealed private spaces like shopping malls, and even movie theaters lose their traditional force of provocation by being encapsulated into such malls. And with the car being the most common tool of individual transportation, it has become synonymous with personal freedom, bypassing the luxury of daily interactions at a street level—and that of the patient flâneur. Arab cities have passed all too suddenly from the closed system of the Mamluk-Ottoman city to suburbia without much in between, except perhaps for the colonial city, which surrounded the old city, locking it like a belt. But that was a short-lived experience, which proved with no memorable consequences for later periods. In effect, the sudden coming of dictatorial regimes in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, pushed urban planning to the cities’ peripheries, creating a mixture of poor and wealthy suburbia at the same time, while the old city, too costly to reform, and too archaic by modern tastes, was left to the popular classes and the usual flock of tourists.

Beirut lost its old city a long time ago, while the colonial city was irreversibly damaged during the 1975-1990 civil war. Another antiseptic and not-so-vibrant downtown was constructed in lieu of the colonial city, attempting to preserve in the meantime every building and shop worth preserving. But with all its restaurants and cafés, the downtown area is nevertheless not a place where people really meet. You could spend your lifetime in that space without meeting anyone.

When last year, in the wake of Hariri’s assassination, a million Lebanese flooded on March 14 the downtown area with their bodies, voices, looks, and flag parading, it was thought (at least for a while) that Lebanon was finally maturing into a genuine democratic republic, and that the Hezbollah-organized demonstration, a week earlier, showed the differences between a Lebanon that was “free” and another one that was under the dictatorship of the Party of God and its Syrian and Iranian patrons. But what observers failed to see was that in both instances the manifestations looked powerful for the precise reason that they acted as referendums to the ongoing political situation at the time: “groups” tend to come “spontaneously” on their own whenever faced with a combination of internal-external threats. The Lebanese, through Hariri’s assassination, were finally able to publicly mourn the fifteen-year civil war. What they now need is a memorial wall in the downtown freedom’s square area where they would inscribe the name, in alphabetical order, of everyone of those 150,000 or so who were slaughtered during the civil war.

But while mourning Hariri—and the civil war—the Lebanese also realized, to their great dismay, the old-new postwar di-visions. Now Lebanon seemed like poised to be physically divided into two Lebanons. The growing and perseverance of Hezbollah since 1982 has undoubtedly armed a third of Lebanon in an unprecedented way, while the other two-third has other projects in mind—and is unarmed. Needless to say, when the lumpen proletariat is armed to the teeth, receiving $100-million grants a year from an Islamic republic, we’re already into a masked (or sublimated) civil war. What capitalism did to the Shia, was uprooting them from their Shiism, displacing and fragmenting their ulama class, destroying their agricultural villages, while pushing them towards slum neighborhoods. The Hezbollah’s role was precisely to create a political umbrella for such a fractured community.

08/04/2006

Every society rests on a particular view of knowledge: its epistemology, history, sociology, or in brief its modes of organization and transmission. Lebanon, like the rest of the Arab world to which it belongs, does not have a modern knowledge that is its own, that is, created and constructed for the specific purposes of Lebanese society and its history. Instead, knowledge is composed of a patchwork of mainly western traditions, and, worse still, the Lebanese intelligentsia is neither aware of the problem, nor of its historical roots. People look for the most part at the Ottoman heritage as a question of professionalization in a dead area, and of bickering among professionals. What has created such an historical anomaly is the hiatus between the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Up to that period, knowledge was in the hands of the ulama class, its various schools and hierarchies. By the early twentieth century all that old order was already gone.

08/05/2006

Small fragments of Lebanon—not even the totality of Beirut—live a westernized lifestyle. Such a lifestyle, however, associated as it is with capitalism and liberal democracy, and even though “western” in its essence, differentiates itself from the latter in several respects. First, there isn’t much “continuity” between those westernized fragments and what lies outside them. Indeed, a great deal of this “outside” is beyond the reach of the capitalist centers. Think of Beirut’s Dahiya as an example of such fragmentation: even though the Shii suburbs would not have been what they’re today had it not been for capitalism, they’re a world of their own, outside state control. Second, those who benefit the most from the westernized lifestyle tend to live apocalyptically, as if doomsday is right next door. As the Lebanese system seems more and more fragile, and more prone to regional disturbance, the “end” of this system, if not its outright “impossibility,” are in everyone’s minds, or at least in their unconscious (understood as consciousness limit and terminal point). Third, the young live in that system without the material stability that characterizes core capitalist countries. In sum, it’s a capitalism that produces more marginals than other capitalisms, which explains why the Shia prefer Hezbollah’s rule over that of a powerless state. Finally, Lebanese capitalism is neither “protected” by a modern culture nor critiqued by a modernist (or postmodern) counter-culture that would be specific to Lebanon. Lebanese excessively consume the cultures of others, in particular the European and North American, which they mistakenly perceive as “universal” in their essence. There’s therefore no sense of a culture created in Lebanon for the sake of a “national” polity, which leads to a mediocre political class, and a professional middle class, but depoliticized and with no genuine culture to take hold of political life.

08/06/2006

It is undeniable that the present war on Lebanon is the first in a long series of wars. It has introduced Israel, the region, the US and the world at large, into unprecedented challenges, to a new type of guerrilla warfare, and to the regional and global risks that “cheap” but destructive weapons (e.g. rockets and missiles) could pose to civilian populations and a country at large. Because Israel has mismanaged the war, to the point of “losing” it, it will have to come back again—maybe a year, two or five years from now—and face Hezbollah in a new battle. The jihadic type of guerrilla warfare is not new to the Arab and Islamic worlds, and it even comes with variations (e.g. the Afghani, Iraqi, and Palestinian warfares), but that’s the first time that a guerrilla group has achieved such a high level of military organization, combined with a stockpile of cheap but destructive weapons, enough to put on hold the lives of 5 million individuals in a high-income industrial state. It is also the first time that, while the war is still going on, the future of the war is based on a balance of power: the long-range Iranian Zelzal missile, which can presumably hit the densely populated Tel Aviv, versus Israel’s ability to destroy Lebanon’s economic infrastructure. Ultimately, both could happen—and that would be the end of round one, and the beginning of the preparations for round two. Definitely, the real star in this war is not even the Hezbollah, or Nasrallah, for that matter—but the short-, medium-, and long-range missiles. Were it not for those missiles, Hezbollah’s military performance would have been unremarkable, similar to the low performance of the Palestinians. The existence of those missiles, which one day could be upgraded with chemical, biological, and nuclear heads, in the hands of a jihadic guerrilla organization is historically unprecedented, and, amazingly, the Europeans, now that they’re withdrawn into their hedonistic lifestyles, seem to either downplay the unprecedented threat, or ignore it completely. Now Europe and the US have to shift to new military and political strategies to take account of the weapons of the poor. A new era has just begun. Precisely because this era is new and has just begun, it has nothing decisive: we’ll have to first understand the new rules of the game, how to handle the newly acquired weapons of the poor, before moving into another (more stable) era. But that could be several decades ahead.

08/08/2006

Yesterday, as I was working on my dad’s insurance papers, the whole AUB world, in all its petty details, came back to haunt me. When in 1974-75 I was right in the middle of a personal catastrophe, I thought of the breakup of the “street wars” in 1975—at that time, I had no awareness of a “civil war”—as my revenge against an objectively corrupt and unfair order of things. This time, I see this war as another revenge—but this time I can see better what went wrong with me and with this society. As the body is the epicenter of life, my cerebral hatred towards the Lebanese—men and women—is primarily physical. It all begins with the body—le corps est têtu, the body is stubborn, said Barthes. The stubbornness of the body—of my body—places me with those damned Lebanese into the same situation all over again. Nothing has changed in twenty years, and nothing will change in the coming twenty years. It’s precisely those last twenty years—or thirty-two years, if I were to do the count beginning with my entry at AUB—that haunted me all day yesterday. I’ve been haunted by underachievement, lack of performance, successive failures, lack of motivation, not being at the center of action, not having enough women, money, prestige, status, and power, hatred of teaching and academic performance—and for being looked down upon, underestimated, and mocked, by practically every indecent person I’ve met. Which is fine, as long as I can still function.

Traîner avec son corps

The Lebanese are glued to their bodies.

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