Hi!! Remember me?<\/p>\n
I’ve missed this; more commentary and news may follow, time permitting. But I’ve run into something too interesting not to share, partly in the hopes that someone else may be able to look more closely at the small connection I’m seeing and explore how much substance is contained there. And at its core, I think there is a gem of such good news that I stopped reading and started typing this right away.<\/p>\n
Last year, in writing about terrorism and philosophy<\/a>, I made the claim that modern Islamism was deeply influenced by Western political philosophers (and, I claimed, by the Romantic movement that could claim a descendent in Nazism). This came from some peripheral references in the chunks of Qutb I read that made me think of Fanon, and by the close fit of Fanon’s Romantic beliefs into the worldview of radical Islamists.<\/p>\n Well, to quote one of my favorite books – “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!<\/i>” It turns out that the connection may be more direct than my casual fantasies.I picked up Bernard Lewis’ collection of essays ‘From Babel to Dragomans<\/a>‘ and have been working through it in my odd moments. One of his essays, on Pan-Arabism, makes the following connections:<\/p>\n …the first theoretical statement of pan-Arabism is the work of a certain ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (?1849 – 1902), nowadays generally regarded as the ideological pioneer of pan-Arabism…He is principally remembered for two books, both of which were attacks on the Ottoman Sultanate in general and on the reigning Sultan, Abdulhamid II, in particular…The second [book], entitled Umm al-Qura<\/u> (The Mother of Cities, i.e. Mecca)…is hardly more original than the other [Lewis suggests that Kawakibi’s first book was a hash of Della Tirannide<\/u>, by Alfieri], being to a large extent a reflection of the views expressed by the English Romantic poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt in his book The Future of Islam<\/u>, published in 1881 and setting forth the idea of an Arab Caliphate.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Bin-Laden’s core philosophy is thus the restoration of something that never was – an Arab (as opposed to Turkish) Caliphate. Something suggested originally by a British Romantic poet. The philosophical lineage is there; now it just needs to be explored. Blunt’s book is at the UCLA library, and sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll go pick it up and report.<\/p>\n But we’re not done yet.<\/p>\n Lewis continues:<\/p>\n The second intellectual precursor of pan-Arabism was another Syrian, this time a Christian, Negib (Najib) Azoury (birthdate unknown – died 1916). Azoury was a Maronite or Uniate Catholic Christian who studied in Istanbul and Paris and later became a provincial official in Jerusalem. He left his post in unknown circumstances and seems to have been condemned to death in absentia in 1904, when he fled to Paris. In the following year, he published a book, Le reveil de la nation arabe<\/u>. He spent most of the remaining years of his life in Paris, where he formed an organization – probably a one-man show – called the ‘Ligue de la patrie arabe’ … The name, it has been remarked is reminiscent of the anti-Drefusard ‘Ligue de la patrie francaise’, which flourished in the late eighteen nineties. His writings reflect the anti-Semetic obsessions with worldwide Jewish power which were current in anti-Dreyfusard circles… <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n So the roots of Islamist thought can be seen as going back to the salons of London and cafes of Paris. That matters, both because it shows that the philosophy we’re fighting against is a relatively recent one – this isn’t thousands of years old – and that it had other paths to follow:<\/p>\n The new and significant elements in Kawakibi’s writings are 1) his clear and explicit rejection of the Ottoman Caliphate; 2) his insistence on the Arabic-speaking peoples as a corporate entity with political rights of its own and 3) most radical of all, his idea of a spiritual Caliphate which would presumably leave politics and government to a secular authority separate from religious authority and law, entirely within the scope of human decision and action.<\/b> That last is why I’m posting this on a Good News Friday. <\/p>\n Because I believe this demonstrates that there are roots in Islam – in recent Islam – that we need to water and cultivate as a part of creating our own ‘Good Philosophy’ antibodies to Bad Philosophy<\/a>. That won’t be easy, but I’ll suggest that we have to try.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Armed Liberal finds that the connection between radical Islamism and the radical Western Left may be more direct than even he had thought. He thinks that’s good news for us all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n(emphasis added)<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n