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| Deutchland Ander Alles |
| 10.30.05 (3:19 am) [edit] |
Had the opportunity to entertain a nice Bavarian girl in my flat the other day. We were heading to the old city to atend a mutual friend's birthday party, or, as the germans say, birthtimecongratulationpa rty, and she mentioned she was hungry when we were only a block away from my place.
Over the course of sharing with her my hoarde of what may be the world's best olives, spinach pies, thick yogurt, and baklawa, we broke into a gentle discussion of the Palestinian in my class at the University of Damascus who refused to shake my hand upon meeting simply because I am American and who informed me that he is my "enemy both in class and outside of it"--all this without yet knowing my name.
Fom there the conversation turned, over tea, to the Iranian despot's latest statement of erasure regarding "Occupied Palestine." At this, she demurred saying that this was common for them and that we shouldnt fuss over such lamentable but harmless rhetoric.
After reminding her that this was the first time in years that Iran had made such a blatantly genocidal statement at such a public event at such a high level, and then casually mentioning that such talk may not be so empty in these days of the side issue of Iran's mad race for the bomb, she took it a bit more seriously.
Nonetheless, she by and large stuck by the entrenched policy of Europe which reads roughly as follows: There is no clash of civilizations. Our heads fit nicely and comfortably into the guillotine which our immigrants are preparing for us in a generation or two and besides, we aren't worth defending anyway.
I may be exagerating slightly. But it is fair to say they don't believe in a "clash of civilizations", they will not tolerate any suggestion that the forces of 9-11, Khobar Towers, Madrid, London, and Achille Lauro et. al. are anything other than the more or less justified reaction of Arabs to Past and Present Imperialism, Israel, U.S. greed, and perhaps some isues of poverty and education.
But as we nibbled on honey-dipped Damascene beignet, Patricia (pronounced "Patritzia") interjected that what really most concerned her was that it seemed as if the U.S. and Islam were very much alike. That the two, if there is a clash, are equally wrong because they were both religious! There is no clash between Europe and Islam, she said.
Quoth she: "My grandmother used to take me to church when I was young and I suppose I am a Catholic but I'm not religious, for heavens sakes! I don't go around reading or quoting the Bible like your president seems to!"
To her, it is the idea that there is revealed truth that is anathema. Suicide bomb all you want: The idea that there might be death, judgement, heaven, and hell is the true barbarism.
Europe, she said, has grown beyond religion. To which I replied that europe was not growing at all but rather shrinking, losing influence, and dying on nearly every level. I mentioned a British friend who teaches English at the British cultiural institute in Damascus who had only that day confided in me that the only reason any Syrian wants to learn English, and, hence, the only reason she has a job, is because they all want to learn about America--some because they love it and others because they hate it but they all want to learn about it.
Patricia conceded that Europe was not doing well but that this was because of economic reasons. She was not trained in the art of asking what may lie behind the economic and the material in this world. Questions of the human spirit, the soul, and the deeper needs of man are buried so deeply under the Marxism, the Hegelianism, the Rousseauianism, the Enlightenment, and the Reformation that the process of trying to dig them out is a painful one indeed. Personally, I felt awful on the bus as we sat in the blaring horns and careening near-death experiences which constitute the Damascene street because as we spoke, the exchange parted us further and further. I am unused to trying to convince someone that there may be something more to live for than comfort and she was certainly unused to having such a thought asserted. We finally stopped our conversation just outside the door of the party. She went in; I turned around and went home.
I didn't even call my Norwegian friend with whom I have spending the last few weekends. The son of a convert, he prides himself as being the first native-born Catholic in Norway since the country went entirely over to Luther 350 years ago. We spent many's a happy evening until the subjects of gay unions, abortion rights, and being taxed up to 60% of one's income accidentally came up. I knew as I went home that night from his elegant apartment that our friendship was dying young.
It's hard to party when you realize that Usama Bin Ladin is right: Europe is Byzantium, within the palm of Islam's hands. Europeans are absolutely right in thinking, as I am more and more convinced that many of them subconsciously do, that Islam is more appealing to their souls than the dispair, ennui, hedonism, and materialism which has characterized the past 200 years of their history. And indeed, under Islam, they may be swathed in darkness but their women will again bear fruit, their men will have something to fight for and believe in, and the abject servility of the European people will be raised at least to the level of submission, a word which translates neatly into Arabic as "Islam."
Then we'll see how we define American exceptionalism, shall we? When the pope has to flee to Washington because Rome is under Sharia law, will he crown the U.S. president Holy American Emperor or will he persist in denouncing everything we do to defend Christendom? When there are no more romance languages left besides English will he finally substitute English as the lingua franca of the church? God willing, you and I won't know the answer to these questions. But our children, or their children, just might.
"All The News From Anti-Christendom That's Fit To Print And Plenty That Ain't."
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| Mom, like, get a Hijab! |
| 10.02.05 (5:01 am) [edit] |
Sitting in one of the restaurants which I tend to leave unsick, sipping a coffee, reading about Arab Nationalism, and feeling very international about myself, I witnessed an extraordinarily common site.
Strolling in that leisurely Near Eastern way down the street was a mother and daughter. One didn't have to know the pair intimately to surmise with confidence that the coincidence of schnaz and jaw were not accidents.
The mother must surely have been something of a looker in her day and her hennad faux red hair was nonetheless shiny and full as she proudly carried it atop her well-proportioned and attractive middle-aged frame.
The daughter may well be a looker in her day, which is today, but it's a moot point since no one is allowed to look: She is has decided to be "muhajaba" (veiled) and that means "no looking."
"She has decided to hold out for a man who will marry her for her moral character rather than for her body" will be how her mullah would answer if queried. But the reality is that all her friends do it and so do all their friends. Whether she wants to be loved for her character or her face, she is going to wear the trapping of her generation. This means that, for the rest of her life, the colors available to her from the entire range of the ROYGBIV spectrum, include Black, Brown, and off white, the latter being frowned upon but still common enough in liberal Syria.
The two ambled down the street together in the unathletic way of non-westerners for whom exercise and esteem of the body are highly suspect concepts. As they passed by the front of my cafe, I became aware that I was witnesing what I have been reading about for the past few years. It's not just the Middle Eastern barbie doll which has had its head covered: The whole generation has draped a crepe over flower of its youth and seems to want to incise the clitoris out of its lust for life.
Indeed, this generational retrogression, which my own recently post teen-age mind finds amusingly counterintuitive, goes right down to the heart of the Islamic world. Reading about secular pan-arab nationalism, essential to understanding middle eastern polities (minus, now, Iraq and Lebanon) as they are today, is like reading ancient history.
When you mention Nasir to young people today in the Middle East, they are likely to gently scold you, an ignorant westerner, for not knowing that he was "almani", secular, and an enemy of Islam.
Nationalism, pan-arabism, anti-reactionaireism, socialism, and all the rest of the catchwords of the 20th century are like the cuneiform carved on the walls of ancient Assyria: interesting to foreign academics whose living balances atop remaking the Near East into one beautiful progression from The Pharos and the Babylonians down to today. But it's entirely meaningless to the people who actually live here now.
The catchwords, as I am hearing them now, are "Consumerism", "Moral Decline", and "Revival." The only things which mullah and baathist can all agree on are "western corrupting influence" but where the Baathist or Nasirist would have difined them as "imperialist", they are now simply "decadent" or "anti-islamic."
The paradigm has shifted drastically in the Middle East even in the 10 years that I have been studying it! The soviets and their influence are out. The fearful spectre of the spread of communism is somewhat less dangerous than Alexander the Great rising from the dead and marching to Transoxiana.
What is happening is a subtle and quietly orchestrated melding of pan-arabism into pan-Muslimism and socialist doctrines of nationalization of industry into religionization of law and civil society. The chiliastic western paranoias about the eschaton born in the inter-bellum period of the 20th century have now been absorbed and reformed as Messianism among the shiites, and Caliphalism among the Sunni.
The resultant beast, shifting, ungainly, and hideous, which wants to "erase Bethlehem from the map," is Islamism.
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