The Iran nuclear deal, the future of Islam, and Ayatollah Khamenei’s Letter to Western Youth

 Published at Iran's View.

If I were a faithful and pious Muslim and if I were to take a look at the state of the religion of Islam and Muslims today, I would be extremely worried. And even though I am not a Muslim faithful but an Arab secular Christian woman, I can still worry for my Muslim sisters and brothers and the religion of Islam. This is not a selfless concern. The future of minorities in the Middle East depends largely on the state of the Muslim religion, which is the religion of the majority. Also, the Muslim religion and its people are part and parcel of my cultural background, of who I am as an Arab Christian, as much as Muslims of the Middle East are culturally shaped by their presence as pieces in a mosaic of religions and sects, which the region never ceased to be, until al Qaeda and its most notorious branch, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS, came to be.

Again, as an Arab Christian, I was educated not on the holy Qur’an, but on the religion of Islam and its History. I grew up seeing Islam as a religion of conquest and enlightenment in the Arts and Sciences. I grew up seeing Islam as a forward progressive religion. Of course, as in every religion, I could perceive some extremism here and there, some backwardness, but these seemed marginal, or so was my perception during the late seventies, early eighties, until al Qaeda and its most notorious branch, ISIS, came to be.

Since 911, I have been asking myself: what happened to Islam? More so since the emergence and mainstreaming of sectarian killings inside Iraq after the 2003 US invasion and the recent mass displacements of religious minorities by ISIS in the Middle East, the largest since the Ottoman Empire disintegrated.

To answer this question one must understand what happened between the late seventies and the early eighties and how the struggles born out of these years came to their conclusion as the iron curtain fell on the Soviet bloc ushering in a short era of revigorated and unchallenged American and western imperialism.
During these decisive years, we witnessed an Islamic revolution in Iran that rose against western imperialism while another Islamic movement in Afghanistan came to be subsumed, and consumed, by the goals of western imperialism. We also witnessed a war on Iran from the West, with Iraq as a proxy, meant to challenge to the nascent Islamic revolution of Iran. 

These events, which will lead to a profound misunderstanding inside Islam, took place after the strong anti-imperialist sentiment in the Middle East, in which Palestine was the main conduit, was sidelined through a partial peace between Israel and Egypt. The Palestine struggle was buried by partial peace and the Palestinian resistance lost the support of most Arab states. This was going to lead to the still-born Oslo peace process and the slow asphyxiation of the Palestinian struggle, while Israeli settlements flourished as they continue to do until today.

The eighties end with the triumph of western imperialism. But in the Middle East, the Islamic revolution of Iran stood in the way of this triumph, albeit weakened and its society profoundly wounded by the Iraq war. After the end of the Iraq-Iran war and Ayatollah’s Khomeini’s death, the Islamic revolution of Iran had survived but the country was going to spend the next decade rebuilding itself amid a climate of increasing hostility, unilateral and multilateral sanctions.

Iran’s Islamic revolution inspired many and in many ways in the region. Islamist groups and Islamist movements rose in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. Only few survived and those who did, like Hezbollah, did so because they understood the spirit of the Islamic revolution of Iran, as it stood, as an Islamist insurgency, first and foremost, against western imperialism. Hezbollah resonated with the populations of the Arab world because it revived the Palestinian struggle and the struggle against western imperialism. At the same time, Hamas was born to challenge the occupation of Palestine, based on a non-compromising attitude toward the occupation, but with a different spirit marked by the context of inter Palestinian rivalry heavily weighed by outside and competing regional influences.

This is why Hamas and Hezbollah, two groups moved by the same goal for many years, find themselves today at odds because the forces that have been pulling Muslims apart since the event of the Islamic revolution of Iran, not only are still at work today, but they are now aided by scores of terrorist Takfiri groups claiming to be working for Muslims and Islam.

The Islamic revolution of Iran had clearly designated the anti-imperialist struggle as the defining project of modern Islam. But the Islamic revolution of Iran was not the only Islamic movement renewing the search to redefine Islam in modern times. However, the Islamist groups who came before it and most of those who were inspired by it sought a return to an era of Islam before western imperialism to find the tools to challenge western imperialism. 

Thus, the nostalgic return to Islam resulted in ambiguity toward the West. I am thinking here specifically of the Muslim Brotherhood. The ambiguity is in confronting modern western imperialism with conceptual tools that existed before this imperialism. This is at best a flight strategy, at worst, a legitimization of Wahhabism, the gangrene that’s been eating at the heart of Islam. Ambiguity exists also in the fact that running away from modernity prevents these movements from ever understanding imperialism, replacing understanding with mystification, leaving modernity to exert a fascination on their entire ideological conceptual apparatus without ever being able to understand it.

This is a tragic misunderstanding, by the insurgent Sunni branch of Islam, of how to conduct the struggle for relevance against western imperialism and renew the search to redefine Islam in modern times. Western imperialism, in its essence, is about the superiority of science and technology. By choosing nostalgia and pre-imperialist conceptual tools, insurgent Sunni Islam could then only fight western technical superiority and the way of life it implies with increased barbarism. Hence, al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The Islamic revolution of Iran, on the other side, has sought to fight western imperialism with the elements of its alleged superiority; technology. But contrary to other Muslim countries that had sought nuclear technology as a way to achieve military superiority, like the West, Iran sought nuclear technology only for civilian purposes and as a right to achieve equal status, to oppose to western imperialism the right to dignity. Because western imperialism sees itself as superior in status, it refuses dignity to others, to subdued countries, and it does so mainly through technology.

But, no matter how much Iran seeks nuclear energy for civilian purposes and technological research, the West can still be suspicious of Iran’s intentions. The recent deal concluded between Iran and the P5+1 adresses the question of suspicion by claiming that the requirement for trust was replaced by evidence and verification. Moreover, and away from gauging the intentions of the Islamic republic, the West should celebrate Iran’s quest for civil nuclear technology, under verification, on the basis that anything else than progress, including technological progress, will lead to barbarism. Of course, one might argue that technological progress has its own load of barbarism. European colonialism, and later American colonialism, in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and in the Americas, have many features of the barbarism we are witnessing from groups like al Qaeda and ISIS today. But that’s the problem with all technologies, they raise our living standards while at the same time becoming tools of the fundamental Human condition that aspires to God but has the instincts of a beast, so that without Ethics, technology or not, barbarism is always lurking behind the human condition. However, technology gives us at least the promise of lifting us from the condition of barbarism with the hope for a better life.

In renouncing, or more exactly, never wanting nuclear technology for military purposes, despite having the tools and the know-how for nuclear technology, the Islamic republic of Iran chose progress and Ethics over barbarism. It chose to confront western imperialism with both western superiority tools, technology, and its own tools taken from the moral handbook of the Islamic revolution. This is how, Iran’s negotiators unrelentelssly referred to Ayatollah Khamenei’s fatwa against developing nuclear weapons. Recently, Iran’s president Rouhani repeated this in a different form by affirming that Iran will never use its technological knowledge against other countries. This is how, to calm suspicions and ends unjust sanctions, Iran committed on July 14, 2015, to an unprecedented list of demands and inspections, effectively halting any potential imaginary nuclear military program. This ‘renouncement’ comes at a time when Iran is seen as a major player in a region shaken by various threats, conflicts, warfare, displacements, ethnic cleansing, barbarism and terrorism.

How could then Iran relinquish a nuclear military program when it needs it the most? That’s the question that was put forward recently by Vali Nasr. His answer is that pressured at home, the Islamic republic is relinquishing its regional standing to focus on its political survival at home. Nasr opposed in his argument the Islamic revolution survival at home to its regional standing.

I argue here that Nasr’s argument relies on the falase western perception of the Iran Islamic revolution and the false dichotomy between the internal and the external context.

A lot has been said about the internal pressure after the 2009 events in Iran and the idea that these events led Iran to enter the negotiating arena endures today. But it is based on many false assumptions and there is plenty of evidence for this. It was the US, in the first place, who started the process of the negotiations. Concerning the 2009 events, many studies attempted to validate the claim that the elections were stolen by Ahmadinejad but to no avail, Ahmadinejad was the choice of Iranians in 2009 and there was no elections’ fraud as alleged by western media. The wikileaks cables even show it was the US who was pushing the fraud narrative, contrary to the reality on the ground. Concerning the 2009 events too, there were many false assumptions concerning Iranian youth and how they were against the Islamic revolution but a western study shows that these assumptions were false and Iranians youth, in great majority, even those who are critical of the government, have integrated and internalized the Islamic revolution’s conservative values.

About the dichtotomy between the internal and the external context, this dichotomy can be proven false, especially in the context of ISIS, which Nasr recognizes as a threat to Iran. In the context of ISIS, the survival of the Islamic revolution of Iran equals the survival of Islam in general. Because that other branch of Islam which chose barbarism over modernity, as ISIS, its promoters and its mentors do, is taking Muslims on a self-destructive path from which there is no going back. Within the new context of ISIS, there will be victims to protect and dignity to restore to all Muslims so that it is through its Islamic revolution and particular Islamic message open to modernity,that Iran will exert its regional influence and this cannot be done without opening up and getting rid of years of ostracization and sanctions.

Of course, opening up is a risky move for the Islamic revolution of Iran, but it is also an ideological move, it is about Islam, defending Islam against itself by spreading a different kind of islamist message. It is also about rightfully assuming the leadership the Islamic republic of Iran deserves in the region and the world.
Iran did not relinquish its regional influence, isolating its revolution from the world to better save it by accepting a deal on its nuclear program. On the contrary, the Islamic republic of Iran will be exerting its influence differently and even more greatly on Muslims and the Islamic message, simply because in the context of ISIS, the survival of Islam will depend on the survival of the Islamic revolution of Iran, and one might argue that the survival of the Islamic revolution of Iran will depend on the survival of Islam as a whole as a religion well entrenched in modernity. This is the problematic we are facing now in the Middle East, and this is what makes reactionary rulers fear Iran.

After the beginning of the Arab Spring, there was panic among reactionary Persian Gulf rulers that the Islamic revolution of Iran model was going to spread in the region, as this commentator noted, so they unleashed al Qaeda and ISIS against revolutionary and anti-imperialist political Islam as embodied by Iran. This is why, after the nuclear deal, Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif sought to address these fears through a series of visits and diplomatic initiatives to Arab and foreign capitals.
In light of what preceded, one could argue that it is not internal pressure that forced Iran to the negotiating table, but rather a regional context threatening Islam as a whole that convinced the Islamic revolution of Iran that the only way to positively affect Islam and the region, and therefore save its core mission, was to get rid of the imposed isolation and sanctions.

This is why, in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015, one more attack among too many perpetrated by an Islamist insurgency gone bad, and while the only initiative the world could expect from Iran was the initiative around the nuclear talks, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, launched his own dialogue with the West on the Muslim religion and the Islamic message. #LetterForYou was addressed to the western youth and the world, through social media as an attempt to explain Islam away from al Qaeda/ISIS stereotypes.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s letter to the western youth has deeper meaning. It is the continuation of the Islamic republic of Iran’s policy of openness, which complements the nuclear deal.
By opening a dialogue with western youth on Islam, Khamenei’s letter seeks to extend the respect and normalcy gained from merely negotiating as equals with the West to all Muslims and the religion of Islam. Khamenei explains that he chose to address youth because it is too late to correct misconceptions about Islam among adults in West, especially when these misconceptions have been forged also in the West.

Someone has to save Muslims from themselves. The West is not going to do it. The Islamic revolution of Iran has achieved resistance, survival, dignity and respect. It is best positioned to take on the task. And this task starts and ends with an honest conversation about Islam. This is the deep meaning of Iran’s supreme leader letter to the western youth. After the nuclear deal, the Islamic republic of Iran is up to counter the message of barbarism with true knowledge in all domains, in the domain of technology as in the domain of religion.

This mission is of the utmost importance today. If you followed the nuclear deal and you didn’t pay attention to ‘Letter for you’, then you didn’t understand the most important thing about the deal: a dialogue of civilizations on the basis of mutual respect and dignity against the new barbarisms that threaten Islam.

An empty gesture: 'Obama names US envoy to the Muslim world'

I am very very upset since I read this new item today: 'Obama names US envoy to the Muslim world'.

Obama is unnerving me by proving himself dumber than Bush when it comes to anything Muslim. Can you imagine the following title: 'Obama names US envoy to the Christian world' or 'Obama names US envoy to the Jewish world'.

First: there is o such a thing as a unified Muslim world. Obama must know this since he lived in a Muslim country. Indonesia is so different from Saudi Arabia, as an example...

Second: I see some racist underpinnings to this. Lets put all Muslims under one heading, they are all the same.

Third: Also there is a centralized hierarchy for lets say Christian Catholics, there is still no such a thing as a Christian world...While there is no centralized religious hierarchy in Islam...

Fourth: Obama announces this ridiculous news item while there is an offensive going on in Afghanistan...

Fifth: even though, as one commentator commented on this post, the envoy is to the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) which is 58 members body, and not to the 'islamic world' which is a virtual entity that exists only in the mind of Bin Laden and those who are waging a war on terror, it is still an empty gesture since the Confernce is a body of diverse and diverging interests with no real impact on Muslims and Islam, and since Obama still has to address the problems of the middle east and not of Islam and Muslims per se...And this measure from Obama is by any means a diversion meant to hide his inaction on Palestine

Last but not least: Obama is playing in Bin Laden's hands in seeing the Muslim world as one unified entity...

And like everything that has Obama's trademark, this is a nice empty gesture...

US public diplomacy still ineffectual among Arab-Muslim countries participating at the OIC. And that is what is missing from Obama's diplomacy toward Muslims...concerns for the middle east and Arabs...

The center that sponsors the dialogue between the US and the 'Muslim world' is a center that advocates Israel only interests and war on Iran and the Palestinians...

I am not seeing US-Muslim relations set on a better path soon...And by the way look who is cheering.

Troubling Pro Israel Propaganda

Not different from the hate propaganda disseminated by Bin Laden.

Seen on Richard's Blog

'Is there something wrong being a Muslim in this country ?'

Barack Obama is labeled by his detractors as a Muslim. But he is a Christian. However, many in the US consider the Muslim religious label as an indicator of something bad, passively spreading and perpetuating racist préjugés against a religion.
Finally, what has become a racist pervasiveness in the mind of many US citizen was condemned today by Colin Powell during his endorsement of Barack Obama at 'Meet the press'. And believe me, Powell must have had some courage to question this pervasive racism as nobody else did it so clearly since 9-11. Watch it around minute 4 and 45 seconds.

Maureen Dowd: 'Moved by a crescent'

Michael Tomasky commenting Powell's endorsement in The Guardian:

"...What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?"
He then described a picture he'd seen in a magazine of a grieving mother at the tombstone of her son, a soldier who had died in Iraq. The tombstone listed his age and awards, Powell said, but across the top "it didn't have a Christian cross. It didn't have a Star of David. It had a crescent and a star of the Islamic faith."
It was incredibly moving - the words and the anecdote were extremely well chosen, and they're worth dwelling on for two reasons. First, it's needed saying for months now that there's nothing wrong with being a Muslim in this country. And second, it's not too much to say that, of all the political leaders in America, only Colin Powell could have said these things and made them stick. A Democrat making that case would be seen as just another politically correct harpy. It's pretty different coming from a Republican and a soldier.

More bigotry: For McCain, an Arab is not a decent family man.

Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts

Muslim Arab countries should follow the example...
Hat tip to Old Brit.

Islam and Modernity: The interrupted Dialogue

The paradox of recent western intellectual interest for Islam is that it is embedded in contradiction; there is a strong call for the secularisation of Islam and, at the same time, a deliberate verging on Racism and hysteria from self appointed western liberals and secularists, making the dialogue, between Islam and modernity, Islam and secularism, illusory, if not impossible.

Some may argue that there was never a dialogue between Islam and modernity. This is a gross misinterpretation of history, and of the geography of Islam and its multiplicity. History tells us that Islam was the west's intellectual portal to modernity and that Arabic translations of Greek philosophers formed the basis for the first true enlightenment, well before the 18th century enlightenment . There is little common ground between these different Muslim individuals: a Saudi Muslim, a Syrian Muslim, a Palestinian Muslim, an Iranian Muslim, an Indian, a Lebanese, an Indonesian, a Turkish Muslim, and so on...
Some may argue that it is Muslim immigration to the west, and the lack of integration to their host countries, that is the problem behind the 'clash of civilisation'. However, demographic data show us that Muslims in the west and in most Muslim countries have completed their demographic transition toward a more secular society, they have high levels for the education of their children, boys and girls included, lower fertility and birth rates, better birth control, and so on...

The current question for a dialogue between Islam and the West is best formulated by Parvez Manzoor:

The unspeakable horrors of 9/11 and the subsequent ‘war on terror’ have put a big question mark on the future of Islam’s dialogue with modernity. The total collapse of moral order in the gruesome chain of kidnappings and decapitations in Fallujah and the annulment of war ethics and sanctioning of sadistic savagery in Abu-Ghuraib are hardly likely to promote further conversation. Any Muslim reflection on modernity as a universal insight into the human condition has therefore little meaning in a world where the Muslim has to run constantly for cover. Modernity’s claim for authority has now been eclipsed by the imperial demands for compliance and acquiescence – not only politically but also ideologically, not only militarily but also morally. What cogency then can an Islamic critique of modernity have, when the authority of modernity now simply reads as the power of Empire?

Mr. Manzoor concludes that the best way to resume the dialogue is through Faith and a dialogue on Transcendance. While I do not agree, as an atheist, that Faith is the best route for Tolerance and dialogue between religions, I am forced to admit that secular western intellectuals have been unheard advocating a dialogue. On the contrary, they have been embracing the imperial enterprise of the west on Muslim countries in the name of values, values, they insist, are part of the Judeo-Christian culture, promoted by nobody else than Zionist Jews and Christians alike ,on the basis of the fact that the US was founded only on Judeo-Christian principles. It is as if History starts with the foundation of the Americas and the new empire. If we are to take History seriously, one may speak of a Judeo-Muslim-Christian culture before promoting this false dichotomy between Judeo-Christian values and Islamic values, because this is the history of the people of the Middle East and Europe. There was no such a dichotomy before the new empire, the US, was even born. However, self appointed liberals are espousing this dichotomy in the name of western secularism whose only assumption is a false and contradictory one; the assumption that Christianity and Judaism are secular religions while Islam is not. Therefore, Islam should secularise or cease to exist. No self appointed secular is ready to recognise that Judaism and Christianity were never forced to secularise at a fast pace and without economic development and individual freedoms. So, our self appointed western secularists call islamic regimes who opress their people as moderate while they oppose any Islamic liberation movement from the inside. This is the contradiction at the heart of secular western critiques of Islam and one that is understood by Ordinary Muslims as a call for submission; Submission to the secular 'God' instead of submission to their faith. This is definitely an imperial enterprise supported by secularists either with their full knowledge or with an implicit bias toward the cultural roots of their own religion, in which case they are not true secularists.

I have therefore to admit, in the face of the failure of modern western secularism to promote Tolerance, a failure for which secularism is not the only responsible ( and this could be the subject of yet another lenghty post), that a dialogue on Transcendance and Faith is all we are left with in order to end this modern war of religions.

It is in this spirit that the atheist in me, and the midlle eastern Christian from a minority culture in the ME, recognises the role of Faith in society to end the non sensical ongoing religious war. And it is in this spirit that I wish my fellow bloggers and readers, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and people from other Faith or non faith, a happy Christmas and peace for the new year.

Tariq Ali: Mullahs and Heretics, a secular history of Islam

Turkey's secularism and the resurgence of eligion in the public sphere in the UK, the US, and France.

Swimming against the current: Emmanuel Todd on Islam and the West

In his new book 'Le Rendez-vous des civilisations', French demographist, sociologist, historian and political scientist Emmnanuel Todd, with fellow scientist Youssef Courbage, prove, with scientific data based on demographics, birth rates, education, and some other factors studied by demographists, that Islam is a religion moving toward secularisation, as other religions did before.

This is an excerpt from an interview with Todd published in the French magazine Marianne, and translated in Truth.org.

"Iran worries some observers more than Iraq did before the American intervention.

The question of Iran presents itself in the form of a stream of images and facts difficult to interpret as seen from France. There are the absurd statements of President Ahmadinejad, images of women covered in black and the ambient Islamophobia. All that masks the deep reality of Iran: a society in the midst of rapid cultural development, in which there are more women than men enrolled in university, a country in which the demographic revolution has reduced the number of children per woman to two, as in France or the United States. Iran is in the process of giving birth to a pluralistic democracy. It's a country where, certainly, not everyone can stand for election, but where people vote regularly and where swings in opinion and majority are frequent. Like France, England and the United States, Iran has lived through a revolution that is stabilizing itself and where a democratic temperament is blossoming.

All that must be related to a religious matrix in which the Shiite variation of Islam values interpretation, debate and, ultimately, revolt.

For a simple Western observer, the similarity between Shiism and Protestantism is not particularly obvious.

It would be ridiculous to push this comparison to the extreme. But it is clear that - just as Protestantism was an accelerator of progress in European history and Catholicism was a break - Shiism today brings a positive contribution to development, notably in the domain of birth control: Azerbaijan, certainly post-Communist, but also Shiite, has a 1.7 fertility rate, while the Shiite Alawite regions of Syria have completed their demographic transition, unlike the majority-Sunni regions. In Lebanon, the Shiite community, Hezbollah's social base, was behind on the educational and social levels, but is in the process of catching up with the other communities, as one sees in the development of fertility rates.

Iran is also a very big nation that demonstrates a realistic awareness of its strategic interest in a region where most of its neighbors possess the nuclear weapon: Pakistan, (and, via the presence of the American Army) Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel. In that context, the reasonable European attitude would be to accompany Iran in its liberal and democratic transition and to understand its security preoccupations.

In your book, you make the altogether surprising hypothesis of a possible secularization of Muslim societies.

To the extent that within the Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Buddhist worlds, the drop in fertility has always been preceded by a weakening of religious practice, one must wonder whether the Muslim countries in which the number of children per woman is equal to or less than two are not also in the process of experiencing, unknown to us - and perhaps also unknown to their leaders - a process of secularization. That's the case of Iran."

MORE

Also: Secularism and Islamism in the Arab World (thanks Issam)

Foiling Terror Plots: It Is Either Minority Report Or Conspiracy

And of course, none of the above is democratically acceptable in a free open society.

Despite all the talk and wars on Terror, can somebody tell me how many terrorists have been publicly tried up to now ? That's a legitimate question since we, citizens, are spending our tax money on these wars on terror, and we are renouncing our fundamental freedoms and rights because of the whole WOT business.

When reading the latest terror report from Germany, I stumbled upon a text full of hypothetical terms to describe the latest raid of the German police on the alleged perpetrators. So, with particular attention to the highlighted text in what follows, I was struck by the higly hypothetical feature of the plot. I also realised that this highly hypothetical feature was present in all foiled terror plots since 9/11. Indeed, most terror plots since 9/11 have the following in common:

- They are at the stage of 'possible' intentions;
- They are foiled even before reaching the stage of active planning;
- They are 'creative', at least in the minds of those who discover them;
- They are full of western converts to Islam, and most often alleged ex Mossad agents Jews who converted to Islam. These converts appear to be more and more playing the role of the psychics pre-cogs in Minority Report;
- Once they are publicized, they disappear from the public eye and we don't know what happens to their possible perpetrators;
- And every demand for a public and open investigation about these terror operations is either ignored by our governments, or staged, or treated with contempt via a media campaign aimed at labelling those who ask for the Truth as conspiracy theorists.

Now enjoy the reading:

"Three terror suspects have been arrested in Germany. They are thought to have been plotting bomb attacks on Frankfurt Airport and the US military base at Ramstein.
The US air base at Ramstein was one of the possible targets of the three suspects.
Three Islamist terror suspects have been arrested in Germany, under suspicion of plotting bomb attacks on Frankfurt Airport and the US military air base at Ramstein.

The three men were arrested in Medebach-Oberschledorn in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia on Tuesday afternoon. Around 20 police were involved in the arrests, and there are reports that shots were fired. According to the Associated Press, the three men were staying in a vacation apartment. Local newspaper Hessische-Niedersächsische Allgemeine reported that police from Germany's elite GSG-9 unit had stormed the flat. Raids also later took place in other federal states, according to media reports.

According to information obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE, the three men were Daniel S. from the state of Saarland and Fritz G. from Neu-Ulm in Bavaria, both of whom are German converts to Islam, as well as Adem Y., who is believed to be from Turkey. The three, who had apparently founded a terrorist cell, have been under intensive investigation for several months. All three men were considered radical Islamists and had contact with Islamist groups in Germany and Pakistan.

The investigators spontaneously made the arrests on Tuesday afternoon after the men were observed moving chemicals that could be used to make bombs from one storage location to another. Police believe that the men wanted to experiment in the coming days and weeks with the chemicals and possibly start building a bomb. They were, however, far away from making a bomb that could be detonated.

The choice of targets was also not yet fixed. As well as Frankfurt Airport and Ramstein Air Base, the men had apparently also discussed other locations, such as a nightclub. The preparations for the attacks were, however, at an early stage.
The group was treated very seriously by German investigators right from the beginning. US authorities were also informed about the threat and raised the security level at their facilities as a result.

A spokesman for the Office of the Federal Prosecutor confirmed the arrests to SPIEGEL ONLINE early Wednesday morning. Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung also confirmed the arrests in remarks to the German broadcaster ARD. "There was an immediate threat," he said, without going into details.

The suspects are due to appear before the Federal Court of Justice later on Wednesday."

And of course we will know very little what will happen after next wednesday.

The disrepute of reason: Hirsi Ali, cause célèbre

"As the heresies that men do leave/are hated most of those they did deceive." Shakespeare, quoted by Timothy Garton Ash in his critique of Hirsi Ali.

We live in a civilisation that doesn't know what Enlightenment means anymore. Enlightenment means, above all, Reason or the faculty to think with clarity and according to certain logical principles which constitute the Ethics of thinking and writing. The ethical principles of Enlightenment extend to humanist values which consider the Human individual as more sacred than religions and dogma. According to these definitions, Hirsi Ali is the contrary of an Enlightened person. Swinging from one extreme to another, from approving the fatwa on Salman Rushdie to becoming the leader of the Islamophobics, is in no way a road to Enlightenment. Our false comprehension of Ali's personal transformation is confounding actually Enlightenment and hostility to a certain religion, Islam, portrayed as the most backward of religions.

True Enlightenment is against religious dogma to the extent this dogma affects our intellectual ability to think with clarity and reason, while what appears to be more important for Hirsi Ali, her followers, admirers, those who hire her, listen to her, call her a courageous person, and even some of her critics, is not the intellectual method of rigourous thinking but the surface, the fact that a charge on religion gives the thinking the mantle of Enlightenment.

There is much talk about Hirsi Ali now. She is launching her book 'Infidel', an 'autobiographical' account, as well as her Muslim bashing career outside Europe, after having fomented hatred and contributed to destabilise centuries old tradition of religious tolerance in Holland.

Lies after lies and intellectual imposture after intellectual imposture, Hirsi Ali is leading us into the dark about Islam, and her own 'Enlightenment' is becoming our Disenlightenment. From one book launch to another and from one interview to another, Ali maintains as autobiographical some core elements from her personal history, and that of the women she pretends to speak for to substantiate her attacks on Muslims and Islam, despite the fact that these elements were proven exaggerated, distorted, and sometimes false.

Many have critiqued Ali, without insisting on the intellectual dishonesty or imposture of her arguments. Among her critics are leading scholars as well as public intellectuals: Timothy Garton Ash, Ian Buruma, Laila Lalami, Maria Golia (read Golia's essay here), and most recently Lorraine Ali. But most Hirsi Ali's indirect and silent critics are those women and men who work tirelessely to combat Female Genital Mutilation in African countries and the scholars who help them in debunking the myth and educating African women about the practice.

I am going to point out the intellectual dishonesty, logical and moral fallacies of Ms Hirsi Ali. I think the first intellectual dishonesty to emerge is in her attempt to espouse an outside critique of Islam. That is. A borrowed critique. She echoes Pryce-Jones and Bernard Lewis . It is not that an external critique is impossible or unacceptable. Although external critiques of non western civilisations have been tainted by false and arrogant assumptions about other cultures by the western coloniser, they tend to tell us more about the critic than about those who are criticised. Pulling together personal experience of Islam, an internal particular view of Islam, as Hirsi Ali does, and external colonialist critique, serves two purposes. The first purpose is psychological, it is to hide behind other people, not to reveal the essence of private experience. There is a tendency here to blurr the lines of the identity of the person who formulates the critique. A tendency to hide behind a formal critique disconnected logically from personal experience and not revealing any knowledge about the set of beliefs of the person who articulates the critique. Indeed, in doing so, Hirsi Ali asserts her identity as citizen of the West and supresses beliefs related to this former identity. This is the psychological fallacy of Hirsi Ali's postion and we will see later in the article how she reacts to any attempt at revealing her inner self through her critique of Islam.
The second purpose is intellectual: Hirsi Ali's experience of Islam, as painful as it is, cannot become pertinent in a theoretical framework unless Ali is able to stretch this experience within a valid generalisation. As the need to borrow the theoretical critique of Islam from the outside is obvious in Ali's writings and public declarations, we are forced to conclude that her private experience of Islam is not valid enough for theoretical generalisation serving to indict the religion. Lets call this fallacy 'the theoretical fallacy' or the attempt to make a theoretical link between generalisations and a particular observation which is disconnected from these generalisations. Anybody who has done Epistemology One in college or university should understand this. Yet, our intellectuals, both admirers and critics of Ms Ali, didn't seem to notice this fallacy.
The other way with which one can interpret Hirsi Ali's attempt at uniting an inside personal experience with an outside theoretical critique of Islam is opportunism. That is. An attempt to publicise her story within an already established theoretical framework making it more meaningful and giving it more impact than it deserves on the theoretical level. With both ways, theoretical fallacy or opportunism, Hirsi Ali does not come out as an honest intellectual with a sharp and clear mind.

One might object that Hirsi Ali has more than her own story. She has worked with Muslim immigrant women in Holland and must have drawn some conclusions from her social work with these women. Yet, by all accounts, not only Ali dismissed the plight of these women to liberation within their own faith and religion but she is not popular among Muslim women whom she pretends to speak for.''Hirsi Ali is more a hero among Islamophobes than Islamic women.'' Writes Lorraine Ali.
Ian Buruma mentions a televised meeting she had with women in a Dutch shelter for abused housewives and battered daughters, several of whom objected strongly to the film Submission. "You're just insulting us," one cried. "My faith is what strengthened me." According to Buruma, she dismissed their objections with a lofty wave of her hand.''

Not only Hirsi Ali wants us to believe that her personal story and her work with immigrant Muslim women in Europe is the basis for her fallacious generalisation but she wants us to think that her tragic personal story has nothing to do with a potential harm to her psyche which might have fueled her hatred of Islam. In doing this, Hirsi Ali is trying to elevate her personal story to the level of a detached scientific observation.
''By age 14, Somalia-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali had survived genital mutilation at the hands of her grandmother, a fractured skull from her Qur'an teacher and brutal beatings from her devout Muslim mother. By comparison, her father was kind. The Somali rebel, who had largely abandoned his family to plan coups and marry three more women, only meddled when it came to arranging his 23-year-old daughter's marriage. When Ayaan refused, he disowned her.''

However, her attempt to persuade us that she draws on her personal story as a scientist draws on a particular detached observation is very fragile because she appears to be in a state of denial about herself and dismisses the real problem, the psychological trauma certain practices produce on women, in favour of a 'theoretically valid' political charge on Islam. This is related to what I called before 'the psychological fallacy' . I find this shocking because not only she dismisses her own trauma and suffering but that of other women. There is a moral fallacy at work here. It is of course in her own right to consider her painful experience the way she does but she seems to be willing to attribute this reaction to other women in Africa and the pure evocation of the word 'trauma' puts her on the defensive at the risk of building profound contradictions in her narrative.
1-'People can see that there is not much trauma in my story.'
2-"Why are journalists obsessed with personal history?" she asks... "From my background, being an individual is not something you take for granted. Here it is all you, me, I. There it is we, we, we. I come from a world where the word 'trauma' doesn't exist, because we are too poor. I didn't have an easy life compared to the average European. But compared to the average African, it wasn't all that bad. I know that to some people I am traumatised, that there is something wrong with me. But that just allows them not to hear what I say."

Hirsi Ali finds it patronising to Muslims when her critics say that it is unrealistic to expect as she advocates that all Muslims should adopt her stance in order to reform their 'Backward' societies. Yet she patronises at lenght when she states that her fellow women and Africans are incapable of feeling trauma because they are too poor. How can she imagine these people, who are too poor and unable to feel trauma or to think 'I', will be able to revolt against the backwardness of their societies ?
''But as Hirsi Ali writes, they were normal events in her childhood and in the lives of people she knew. Death and illness were commonplace in Africa, and by African standards she lived well. There is nothing melodramatic in Hirsi Ali's prose.''
For to hear what Hirsi Ali has to say about Islam, one has to paradoxically discard her Trauma story, the particular stories of million of women, the suffering of million of women, the work of NGOs to end the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Africa. To discard the trauma of million of women is to forget the reality of FGM on the ground, that FGM is mostly a tradition perpetuated by women, that it is not particular to a religion -Egypt's copts have adopted this practice - but to some cultures. To discard the Trauma of FGM is to focalise on its horror seen from the outside than from the inside, thus producing the effect of striking the imagination and channeling the moral outrage from one of compassion to one of hatred.
Here we can find the second intellectual fallacy of Hirsi Ali's thinking; after having connected disconnected particular stories of muslim women to a borrowed general theoretical framework on Islam, and after having denied the trauma story in order to elevate these particular stories to the level of detached scientific observations, she had to admit in face of mounting criticism that FGM is not only the work of Islam. Indeed, ''Muslim clerics fought the practice as early as the 1820s*, as Sudanese anthropologist Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf writes. However, against all odds, Ali kept transforming and changing the nature of FGM in her speeches and writings, exploiting its many facets to continue her charge on Islam. This will become particularly easy for her after 9/11 when Ali started to widen the scope of FGM to include it in wider issues on women and Islam like virginity, submission and other gender relations.

After 9/11, riding on the hatred and fear of Islam, Hirsi Ali wanted us to believe that there is more horror to Islam and that FGM is only one of the evil facets of this religion. She continued to keep FGM in her arsenal in order to build a more horrible vision of Islam:
''The little shutter at the back of my mind, where I pushed all my dissonant thoughts, snapped open after the 9/11 attacks, and it refused to close again. I found myself thinking that the Koran is not a holy document. It is a historical record, written by humans. It is one version of events, as perceived by the men who wrote it 150 years after the Prophet died. And it is a very tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war.''

This is how the project for Submission with Theo Van Gogh was born and the assassination that followed and the rise of Hirsi Ali to the status of the 'Black Voltaire', and the social unrest she provoked in Holland and her subsequent disgrace, as well as her present hiring officially as Muslim basher by the neoconservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institue (AEI).

While I was writing this essay, I wondered if Hirsi Ali will be able to regenerate or mutate into something else if the world would radically change in the near future and if her Muslim bashing career would be of no use. Certainly, I said to myself, but in the process she will loose some of her credibility and become just a public buffoon. Because the only thing that is giving her credibility now is our willingness to let our imagination be stricken by something we fear and don't know about; Islam.
I disagree for example with Garton Ash when he writes:
''Having read many interviews with her, and spent an evening in London talking to her both onstage and off, I have enormous respect for her courage, her sincerity, and her clarity. This does not mean one must agree with all her views.'' Most of all, Hirsi Ali lacks courage, sincerity clarity and intellectual honesty.
Going from one extreme to another, Muslim extremist in kenya, xenophobe fanatic in Holland stirring silent anti-immigrant sentiment in the dutch population, and official Muslim Basher in the US, Ali positions herself along the majority line, radicalises our fears and aspirations while securing herself a membership for a very high position in the dominant and most successful clan.

''Usually people make excuses for their culture and family etcetera. I could tell the story that we in the Third World have things that the West could learn from, which is obviously true, but that isn't what I wanted to show. My argument is that western liberal culture is superior to Islamic tribal group culture.''

Because in going from one extreme to another and from one identity to another, Ali is fleeing herself while being totally unable to really free herself, continually looking for a clan in which she can indict her former self, away from her inner self and contradictions, with the help, well, of the clan and its idelogy... Ali is not genuine in the sense that she is unable to confront herself and think for herself. During her journey, there will be no looking back for Hirsi Ali, no introspection, and no Enlightenment. There will be only a Fuite en Avant, more extremisms, more exagerations, more lies, and well, more intellectual impostures and dishonesty. All these things we will have to read in our newspapers and swallow in a non critical way in the name of a fake enlightenment whose only justification is Muslim bashing but accomodates itself well with Torture, Extraordinary renditions, Illegal Wars, Opression, and Crimes against Humanity. Because our society doesn't know what true Enlightenment means anymore.

I think also that our present western culture had lost its positive power of imagination and kept only the imagination of fears. There was a time when orientalist thinking yielded more positive images of women from these cultures and their relations to men. Think of Delacroix. Think of Pierre Loti. I visited Istanbul at the end of last summer and, standing on the Pierre Loti hill, the golden horn stretching before me, among many Muslim couples and families, I felt a different culture of relationships between genders around me. It wasn't a wicked one, not more wicked than in any other culture. Few women wore headscarves. I had arrived with my husband there in a small boat in the company of a young couple. The girl was modest and wearing also a headscarf, she was carrying flowers given to her by her fiancé who was sitting next to her holding her hand. There was joy, love and extreme sensuality in the air on that day, or at least this was my feeling. Coming from another culture, I didn't feel threatened by these people. I didn't feel the need to change the women who were sittting with their boyfriends and husbands around me. I didn't feel the men as less respectful or more threatening for these women than the men we know.

Blessed are the pre 9/11 orientalists I thought, they, like Loti, projected some very colorful fantasies on Islam and gender relations in Islam. Present day post 9/11 orientalists and their disciples are missing the point. They have adopted one fantasy, the fantasy that Bin laden and few Muslim radicals have implemented in our imagination. And while Loti, a man who made nostalgia the mark of his writings, must have been wrong about Islam, as much as Bernard Lewis and the neo-cons are today, and as much as Hirsi Ali, who is just imitating them and adopting their narratives adorned by a personal story, helping them perpetuate the fears of Islam, is wrong, Loti can at least claim to be on the good side of fantasy, the side that inspires and opens up imagination instead of abandoning it to fear, irrationality and intolerance...

Read also on ZNet, A genre in the service of Empire, thanks to Homeyra

Against Submission: The latest Buruma Critique of Hirsi Ali
UPDATE: African Aid Group Wins Hilton Prize for Educating African Women Against FGM.

November 2007: Hirsi Ali on Defeating Islam (not only radical Islam she insists)

And thanks to Erdla from the Gorilla's Guides team, below are two links to enrich and engage on a rational debate about Islam:

'Aqoul: Hirsi Ali proves that stupidity is dangerous.

A Financial Times special on Islam in Europe (for those who want to know and not follow their racisdt inclinations)

*''Despite the prevalence of the ritual, historically there has also been strong opposition that can be traced to the precolonial era, when indigenous efforts attempted to extirpate it. The first resolute and strong anti-circumcision movement in precolonial Sudan was religiously galvanized in the name of Islam. Before the annexation of the Sudan by Mohamed Ali, in the Turco-Egyptian Empire in 1821, El Sheikh Hassan wad Hassona, then a powerful religious cleric, initiated a campaign to exonerate Islam and redefine its position, especially in the eyes of people who attributed circumcision to Islamic religious ideology.''

Karima, Selma, Aicha et les Autres...

Photo-journalism windows on Contemporary France.
From Territoires de Fictions.
Muslim Women and Fashion:

Karima, Selma, Aïcha et les autres...
LEMONDE.FR | 19.02.07

©

Their other Works
Read also this great post from Ted Swedenburg : Hijab couture goes mainstream

Alain Gresh on France and Islam

Alain Gresh is former editor in chief of Le Monde Diplomatique, journalist at Le Monde Diplo where he writes on questions related to the Maghreb and the Midlle East. He is also the author of the blog Nouvelles d'Orient. He is the president of the Association of journalists specialising in the Maghreb and the Middle East (AJMO) and the head of the commission 'Islam et Laïcité'. His new book titled 'Islam, the republic and the world' is published at Pluriel.
This conference was given at the French Alliance at Abu-Dhabi and the link is an audio in two parts (In French). There is one part which is a summary of the talk in Arabic, the rest is devoted to questions form the audience. It is very important we got serious sources on the question of Islam in Europe and especially in France, and Gresh is an excellent source.

Sweden, Tolerance, and the Dialogue between Cultures

I am personally against veil wearing for Muslim women who live in the West. But I am also against the degradation of the dress code in western society. Little girls dressed like their moms and mothers dressed like their teenage daughters. I am also against an official ban on the veil except in places where all religious signs are forbidden by law.

I contemplate some European countries' recent moves to ban the veil in the name of integration as being as much a provocation as the wearing of the veil is a sign of defiance of western culture from some Muslim women who live in the west.

I contemplate also the recent swedish stamp with two women wearing a veil and one other unveiled women with her child and the accompanying text :

''The pictures in the issue do not show the traditional view of a person’s interaction with pristine nature. Irina Gebuhr has instead chosen to highlight the relationships between the people depicted on the stamps. For example, a group of immigrant women who are talking with one another and looking out over a lake are shown on the picnic motif. At the stamp’s top corner an elk appears, which for many is the very symbol of Swedish nature. It depicts a meeting in nature, but also a dialogue between cultures.
Summer by the Lake are Irina Gebuhr’s first stamps. "I could never have imagined being given such an assignment, but as a person who works with images I have studied many stamps, looking at their colors and designs and wondering about the small format," says Irina. She adds, "There is a great difference between working on a well-defined stamp assignment and having artistic freedom in the studio. In the studio I have more freedom to let indistinct, irrational and mysterious emotions shine through and affect the creative process. Having said that, I cannot deny that some of this natural flow has also spilled over into the motifs for Summer by the Lake."

I can't imagine any other western country taking this courageous initiative. Yes, Tolerance requires courage, courage to let artists speak and positive emotions flow to connect us with others, courage to not delve into prejudice, confrontation and the demonisation of the other.

Document on recent Swedish stamps, the veil stamp is featured page 8.

Hat tip: Blogger Shaykhspeara Sha'ira at Al-Baal Café

UPDATE: Read what Ken Livingstone, London's Mayor, has to say and what he will do in regard to the recent veil controversy in the UK.