Middle East Press on Pakistan Democratic Movement, Trump Vs Biden and Greek Anti-Fascist Struggle: New Age Islam's Selection, 12 October 2020
By New Age Islam Edit
Bureau
12 October
2020
• Who Is Leading The Pakistan Democratic
Movement: Maryam Nawaz Sharif Or Maulana Fazlur Rehman?
By Mehr Tarar
• Trump Vs Biden: Michigan Offers a Glimpse of
America’s ‘White Salafis’
By Mohammed Almezel
• Fighting For Palestine
By Mark Muhannad Ayyash
• The Greek Anti-Fascist Struggle Is Far From
Over
By Marianna Karakoulaki
• In Dune, Paul Atreides Led A Jihad, Not A
Crusade
By Ali Karjoo-Ravary
------
Who is leading the Pakistan Democratic
Movement: Maryam Nawaz Sharif or Maulana Fazlur Rehman?
By Mehr Tarar
October 11,
2020
Maulana
Fazlur Rahman [L] and Maryam Nawaz Sharif [R]
Image
Credit: APP/AP
-----
On both
sides, cars and SUVs lined the narrow road as if forming a protecting boundary.
DSNG vans of major and minor TV channels were in a neat formation, one behind
the other. I had no idea what was happening inside as I arrived, on October 8,
at the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) office in Model Town for my
interview with the PML-N Punjab President Rana Sanaullah, a veteran politician
of a formidable moustache and no-words-mincing chequered reputation.
Getting out
of my nondescript car in front of the gate, as I walked through the negligible
security system, I heard PML-N’s Vice President Maryam Nawaz Sharif’s voice,
loud and clear, through a loudspeaker. In the mid-sized lawn of the office, a
convention of PML-N’s parliamentarians and ticket holders had begun a few
minutes ago. Since I had a clear view of the stage, I stood at the entrance of
the canopied gathering of many men and a few women, most of whom were listening
in well-behaved quietness to their new leader’s old speech peppered with a few
novel twists to the oft-repeated narrative. Interjecting the speech were the
prepared slogans of solidarity with Nawaz Sharif. A large number of them milled
outside the canopy, talking to one another, or wolfing tea and snacks served on
white-clothed large tables. Many of them were inside the building, crowding
various rooms, corridors and conference areas, in nodding-head seriousness of
talking about things that matter.
Maryam
dressed in simple black edged in tiny yellow embroidery, statuesque and
stunning as always, stood behind a staid podium, articulate, passionate, fiery.
Her words reflected a fury barely concealed. It sounded personal: the wrath at
the alleged victimisation of her father, herself, her family. Maryam’s speech
followed that of her father’s address to his party leaders and workers. Sharif,
earlier, boomed on a giant screen: “Imran’s selectors [military establishment],
you will have to answer for this. You cannot go home without answering. Without
Pakistan's parliament, its institutions cannot operate. Even the judiciary
cannot work. We will make you answer, we will not sit back until we get one.”
Nawaz
Sharif, in his self-imposed exile that initiated after an alleged short-term
deal with the establishment while he was serving a seven-year jail sentence, is
now leading the fight for democracy in Pakistan though video speeches from
London. Despite Khan’s government’s demand for fulfilment of the conditions of
Sharif’s medical treatment in London, the main one being of his return in four
weeks, and Islamabad High Court’s order for an immediate return, Sharif is
adamant about his stance of saying put in London on medical pretexts. The court
has declared Sharif an “absconder.”
Vive la
révolution.
Over the
next few weeks, and probably the next few months, Maryam would be repeating the
same thing with a few new statements, punctuated with reminders of the glorious
tenures of Nawaz Sharif’s three-time prime ministership, threats of removal of
Imran Khan’s government, predictions of the imminence of removal of Imran
Khan’s government, and what would happen if removal of Imran Khan’s government
was not achieved within the framework of the agenda of PDM.
That is the
Pakistan Democratic Movement, an alliance of 11 opposition parties, major and
minor, in terms of their national presence and impact. The raison d’etre of PDM
is the fight for supremacy of democracy. Ostensibly. The slogan, originally of
PML-N, is the sanctity of vote–vote ko izzat do. Asif Zardari-led Pakistan
People’s Party (PPP) echoes the sentiment. The stimulus is the establishment’s
alleged rigging of the 2018 elections that brought into power Imran Khan, his
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) government’s “inefficient” running of the
affairs of the country, the “bad” governance, and the inability to control
prices of necessities, tariffs of basic utilities, and failure to provide cheap
housing and employment.
The real
reason, allegedly, is Khan’s government’s alleged pushing to the wall the
opposition leadership. The modus operandi is a series of cases of financial
corruption or misuse of authority against the major opposition leaders. The
collective pain of the alleged growing political irrelevance is the unifying
force behind PDM, an alliance of parties that are as ideologically and politically
opposed from one another as Vladimir Lenin and Winston Churchill, or Mao Zedong
and Harry S Truman. You get the gist. Maulana Fazlur of Jamiat
Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) is the first chairperson of PDM.
Maulana’s
electoral power and shifting political loyalties are debateable, on any given
day. What is uncontested: his madrassa and Deobandi support. His biggest
strength is his hordes of madrassa students who rally to his call for a
protest, on any issue, anywhere, against anyone. Two of Maulana’s major cards
against his opposition are that of religion and treason. Standing next to
Maryam for a press briefing after the dinner hosted in his honour at the
Sharif’s Jati Umra residence on October 7, Maulana reiterated his mission: “We
want to give the people a legitimate government and a parliamentary system
through this movement.”
On being
asked if he would support Maryam’s candidature for prime ministership in case
of PDM’s success in its mission of the overthrow of Khan’s elected government,
Maulana, in his diplomatic smiling best responded: “At the moment, we are
fighting for the rights of both men and women to elect their own government.”
In 1993, commenting on Benazir Bhutto’s prime ministership, Maulana had
categorically responded that “Islam prohibits female leadership, and female
leadership is against Sunnah.”
Maulana in
January 2014 stated: “TTP’s suicide bombings are Allah’s wrath upon us. And so,
there is a need to earmark and eliminate the real enemy of Pakistan: every
woman who wears jeans. From earthquakes to inflation, all kinds of disasters
are caused by the immodesty of women. A woman who is not covered like a sack of
flour is a walking and talking weapon of mass destruction for her state. And
Pakistan has a multitude of such nuclear missiles in all its major cities.”
In 2014,
Maulana called the females participating in PTI’s Azadi dharna “as having bad
characters,” labelling them “as women from the dark side of society.” On the
murder of social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch in 2016, Maulana passed the
judgement: “Shamelessness and exhibitionism are a scourge in our society,
spread through women like her.”
On the
Aurat (Women) March of 2020, Maulana’s views on females fighting for their
rights reverberated in his familiar derision for equality of genders: “If
anyone thinks they can come on roads under different banners and threaten our
culture and Islamic values, they should know that we will also come out to stop
them... Wherever you see such elements, ask the law [enforcement authorities]
to stop them, but if the authorities provide protection to such protests, then
get ready for any sacrifice. We cannot let religion and our cultural values be
bad-named.”
Quoted are
just a few of the countless statements regarding the status and honour of women
espoused by the honourable first chairperson of PDM, the alliance of opposition
parties that will be fighting for the sanctity of vote and “rights of men and
women to elect their own government.”
The main
faces, the biggest attraction, the “crowd pullers” of PML-N and PPP, are Maryam
Nawaz Sharif and Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari. Their most important quality is their
last names. There are some remarkable people in Maryam and Bilawal’s parties
who in a different, in a better, in a fairer world, would be great leaders.
People like the former prime minister, the brilliant Shahid Khaqan Abbasi of
PML-N, and the diehard party loyalist, the eloquent Qamar Zaman Kaira of PPP.
In the reality of 2020’s game of thrones, they would always stand a step behind
their leaders who notwithstanding their personal charm and prowess of oration
have attained their positions of party leadership on the power of their last
name. Dynastic politics trump merit-based politics, and that is the hard,
unchanging truth of the parties that today pride themselves on being the
torchbearers of democracy and the sanctity of vote.
PDM,
following its 26-point agenda, will hold its first rally in Gujranwala, Punjab,
followed by rallies in Karachi on October 18, Quetta on October 25, Peshawar on
November 22, Multan on November 30, and Lahore on December 13. Alliances for
democracy are not a new phenomenon in Pakistan: 1964’s Combined Opposition
Parties, 1968’s Democratic Action Committee, 1977’s Pakistan National Alliance,
1983’s Movement for Restoration of Democracy, and 2002 Alliance for Restoration
of Democracy. The debate on the success and failure of those alliances is
beyond the scope of this op-ed. What is important today is to understand the
rationale behind PDM’s emergence: survival of two political dynasties or
sanctity of vote, and/or concern for the wellbeing of the common man?
And for the
Pakistani nation, it is the time for a collective introspection: “Fool me once,
shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of
us.”
https://gulfnews.com/opinion/op-eds/who-is-leading-the-pakistan-democratic-movement-maryam-nawaz-sharif-or-maulana-fazlur-rehman-1.1602399847667
-----
Trump Vs Biden: Michigan Offers a Glimpse of
America’s ‘White Salafis’
By Mohammed Almezel
October 10,
2020
13
people, some of them associated with the far-right Wolverine Watchmen militia
group, were arrested for alleged plots to take Michigan governor hostage and
attack the state capitol building, in Lansing, Michigan, US
Image
Credit: Ador T Bustamante/Gulf News
-----
Win or lose
on November 3, Donald Trump has already reserved his spot in history. Like him
or not, the 45th president of the United States will be remembered as the man
who galvanised American politics in a way only few other politicians can claim
of.
No American
politician, perhaps since the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, has evoked
such emotions that may very well dominate the American psyche long after he
leaves office. Trump will always be remembered as a genuinely polarising figure
who awakened nationalist passions Americans thought they had buried deep over
years of an incessant progressive tide with the elections of such liberals as
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
When Black
Lives Matter protests gripped the country following the death of a black man at
the hands of white policemen, it was fundamentally seen as a natural reaction
to the rise of the Trump nationalist phenomenon, which led the way to the
resurgence of white supremacists and anti-minorities sentiment. Groups such as
the Proud Boys, the Patriotic Movement, and the Three Percent — essentially
names of far-right armed militias, have of late become part of the political
discourse.
Over the
weekend, a court in Michigan charged Barry Croft, a white supremacist and
active member of the Three Percent, and five others with “domestic terrorism”
plot to kidnap Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer and a plan to
storm the government buildings to “overthrow the state government”.
The
Michigan case might help researchers understand the thinking and actual ability
of armed militias in the US. Researchers have been warning about the rise of
the threat posed by these groups especially in an election that pits one half
of the country against the other in a way America may have never seen before.
Such schism has of course been heightened by political tension over the
response of the Trump administration to the coronavirus outbreak and the
economic downturn which led to record number of unemployment and the summer anti-racism
protests.
Growing
domestic terrorism
Months
before the Michigan arrests, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies
(CSIS) said the US “faces a growing terrorism problem that will likely worsen
over the next year.” In the June report, the CSIS said based on its data set of
terrorist incidents, the most significant threat likely comes from white
supremacists and that over the rest of 2020, the terrorist threat in the US
“will likely rise based on several factors, including the November 2020 presidential
election.”
There is no
evidence of course that links the Michigan plot directly to Trump’s policies or
speeches, who on few occasions condemned such acts of terror. But Whitmer, the
Michigan governor, expectedly put the blame squarely on the president. She
referred to his call, during last month’s debate with Joe Biden, to the Proud
Boys to “stand back and stand by”.
“Hate
groups heard the president’s words not as a rebuke, but as a rallying cry. When
our leaders speak, their words matter. They carry weight. When our leaders
meet, encourage or fraternise with domestic terrorists, they legitimise their
actions, and they are complicit. When they stoke and contribute to hate speech,
they are complicit.”
Conspiracy
theories
The Trump
speeches have no doubt evoked nationalist sentiments. When he speaks of radical
left conspiracy to take over America to “take away your religion”, abolish the
right to bear arms, restrict individual freedoms and open the door to
immigrants, white groups may think it is their ‘constitutional duty’ to fight
back.
A little
known European-born conspiracy theory, the Great Replacement, has over the past
few years found many believers in the US. The theory claims that, with the
complicity or cooperation of the ‘liberal elites’, the white European
population at large is being progressively replaced with non-European peoples,
specifically Arab, Berber and sub-Saharan Muslim populations from Africa and
the Middle East through mass migration, demographic growth and a European drop
in the birth rate.
In August
last year, Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old white supremacist and subscriber to
the Replacement Theory, opened fire in a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, and
killed 23 people, mostly immigrants of Mexican origin. In online notes he posted
before he committed the massacre, he said he was inspired by the mosque
massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which a white terrorist shot and
killed 51 Muslims during Friday prayers.
Far-right
extremism
Terror
based on extremist religious or racial tendencies has been rife well before the
Trump presidency. Al Qaida, Daesh, white supremacists, and many other terrorist
groups existed and wreaked havoc for decades. But it is perhaps one of those
rare occasions in history when such tendencies are inspired by a mainstream
politician — particularly one who occupies the highest office in the world, the
White House. President Trump, for all fairness though denied repeatedly that he
will ever condone extremist behaviour.
But in his
clear Machiavellian pursuit of retaining power, he realises that his chances of
re-election mainly rest with white America — and not any white; the ‘Salafi’
white America. Similar to those Muslim Salafists who seek a puritan society
that mirrors in their view the early days of Islam, a world ruled by Sharia
only, the white Salafis dream of an America that is purely white; a segregated
America well before the civil right movement and ‘liberal onslaught.’
As the
presidential election nears, it is less than three weeks away, it will be
important to watch the far-right dynamism, the behaviour of the white Salafis
of America.
The race to
the white House looks increasingly tight, despite the early Biden lead in the
polls. Yet it is far from over. But even if President Trump loses the election,
there is not doubt that his impact on the American political, social and racial
discourse will remain long after he has left the Oval Office.
https://gulfnews.com/opinion/op-eds/trump-vs-biden-michigan-offers-a-glimpse-of-americas-white-salafis-1.74475288
-----
Fighting for Palestine
By Mark Muhannad
Ayyash
10 Oct 2020
In the last
few years, Israel has further cemented its grip on Palestine. The list of
Palestinian losses is depressing: the marked movement towards international
recognition of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel, official
annexation of Palestinian land, an increase in the number of settlers and the
development of settlements on Palestinian lands, the horrific besiegement of
Gaza and the world’s participation in the siege, the “de-development” of the
Palestinian economy, uninhibited killing and maiming of Palestinians,
suffocating restrictions on movement, gender-based violence in prisons and at
checkpoints, continued demolitions of Palestinian homes, the stifling of
Palestinian activism and speech for Palestinian rights in Western Europe and
North America, and the rising tide of diplomatic normalcy between Israel and
Arab states.
Add to the
mix common social issues like patriarchal oppression, interpersonal conflict,
crime, socioeconomic inequality, family feuds, and political corruption,
combined with a lacklustre and largely handcuffed leadership, and you begin to
get a picture of how remarkable Palestinian resistance really is.
That
Palestinians do not give up is precisely what is so historic and inspiring
about their resistance. For more than 100 years, the Palestinian people have
been resisting and fighting for Palestine, holding on to what they have left of
it, clinging on to the hope of one day reclaiming what they have lost.
Attention
is often given to the armed resistance, but far more numerous, diverse, and
long-standing is the unarmed Palestinian resistance. Labour strikes, boycotts,
legal actions, political and community organising, demonstrations, marches,
hunger strikes, passing the keys of demolished homes from one generation to the
next, the formation of Palestinian societies and cultural groups in exile and
refugee camps, lobbying politicians across the world, building creative local
and sustainable economies, and everyday acts of resistance are all peppered
throughout the history of the struggle.
Resistance
also comes in the form of cultural productions that narrate and communicate the
suffering of Palestinians; intellectual and academic studies that illuminate the
history and lived realities of Palestinians; the development of political
manifestoes and ideologies that pave a path forward towards freedom and
liberation.
It is
impossible to count the number of people who have given, and continue to give,
their time, efforts, livelihood, and their lives in the fight for Palestine.
The problem is not that these lives are never reported or (re)presented in the
international discourse. The problem is that the core and underlying essence of
Palestinian actions remains unregistered and unaccounted for, it is buried and
prevented from being released into the mainstream discourse.
The Emirati
and Bahraini political elites, for example, never register these lives when
they proclaim their so-called peace deals with Israel. Many Palestinians, as
well as common Bahrainis and Emiratis who have no say in the policies adopted
by their rulers, have rightly labelled these agreements a betrayal of the
Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause.
Palestine
is entirely absent from these “peace in the Middle East deals” not just in
terms of Palestinian officials being excluded from negotiations and agreements,
but in the real tangible sense of erasing Palestinian lands, rights, freedoms,
and lives from the geopolitical landscape and political grammar. These deals
seek to constitute a new status quo in which it becomes normal to accept that
Palestine does not exist and therefore deserves, or even has itself earned, its
erasure.
We do not
need to imagine how this normalisation of erasure would operate in the
mainstream discourse of Western European and North American media. It has been
happening for many years. For a recent example, the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation (CBC) despicably apologised for using the term Palestine on air
just one day after one of its hosts dared to pronounce this apparently
forbidden and offensive word.
Hiding
behind vacuous policies filled with fluff and pretentious legalistic
phraseology, the CBC maintains that Palestine does not exist as a modern state
and therefore does not warrant naming. These kinds of actions and policies,
which are active in other settler-colonial and neocolonial countries, are an
affront to the millions of lives that have dedicated their very existence to
the fight for Palestine.
The ‘problem’
of Palestine
One of the
mechanisms in which Palestine is erased in the two examples above is the
casting of the question of Palestine as a “problem” in the sense of a nuisance
to the peace and tranquillity of the world order, since Palestine does not fit
the conventional categories through which the world order is made legible.
Thus, the
very same categories that emerged in the colonial era in order to dispossess
and/or rule over Indigenous peoples across the world, such as laws of property
ownership, statehood, and sovereignty, are presented in the contemporary world
as “natural” categories that simply describe how the world is “naturally”
organised.
Mainstream
discourse does not question how these categories were produced and “validated”
through brutal colonial violence and state terror; instead, it asserts that the
categories are justified in their violence because the oppressed fail to belong
to these categories which are designed to oppress and eliminate them. And in
this world that is birthed and developed in and through colonialism, this comes
to pass as somehow sensical.
In The
Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, WEB DuBois explored what it means to be
continuously asked, directly and indirectly, “How does it feel to be a
problem?” This question, which continues to be asked of Black Americans,
reveals nothing about the struggles, aspirations, and lived realities of Black
lives in America. Rather it tells us much more about the power structures in
which Black Americans come to be constructed as a “problem”.
The
question, in short, never probes the questioner’s own role in rendering Black
life as a “problem”, or in creating the social, economic, cultural, and
political conditions that oppress and suppress Black life.
Similarly,
Palestinians are cast as a “problem” in the international arena, shifting the
burden of becoming unproblematic on the subject that has been produced as a
“problem” – an impossible task whose sole purpose is really the eradication and
erasure of the subject that has been constituted as a “problem”.
For
imperial allies led by the United Kingdom and then the United States, the
Israeli settler-colonial state, and Arab states that largely have been quick to
acquiesce and serve imperial interests, Palestine has always been posed as a
“problem” which must be dissolved. If only those who render Palestine a
“problem” would have the courage, they would ask Palestinians what they really
intend to ask: how does it feel to have the world wish that it did not have to
deal with you? How does it feel to be entirely unwanted, unheard? How does it
feel to be entirely instrumental for others in your very being and non-being?
These are
precisely the kinds of rhetorical questions that the Gulf ruling elites are
asking of Palestinians today. Palestine has seen its fair share of allies who
appear to stand with Palestinians, only to move on and leave it behind. It is
this sense of being left behind that haunts and seems to follow Palestinian
resistance that I want to underscore. That in addition to facing all of those
immense difficulties of erasure perpetrated by settler-colonial and imperial
powers, of which the CBC and Canada are a part, there is also a more hurtful
kind of erasure that can take place in the space where Palestinians join hands
with others from the “Global South” seeking collective liberation.
If I repeat
the term Palestine too much in this piece, it is because it needs to be
affirmed and reaffirmed, continuously, forcefully, and vociferously. The effort
to erase Palestine, of which the CBC and the UAE/Bahrain ruling class are but a
small part, is not going away but is in fact gaining momentum. Whether the CBC
or the Emirati and Bahraini authoritarian rulers are intentionally erasing
Palestine is really irrelevant, what matters is the effect of their discourse,
actions, and policies, which is the erasure of Palestine – a project that has
reached an advanced stage.
In this
sense, yes Palestine is so far a losing cause. It will likely continue to be a
losing cause for the foreseeable future. But make no mistake, Palestine is not
a lost cause. So long as the injustice continues unabated, Palestinians will
fight for Palestine. And even if freedom remains beyond reach, Palestinians in
Palestine and beyond will at least show the world that the violence of this
settler-colonial, neocolonial, and post-colonial world order will never defeat
the spirits of those who are being crushed at the bottom of this order.
Yes, in
fighting, Palestine will be a nuisance, but in the sense of always reminding the
powerful that they are not the “forces of the good” that the world order is
neither orderly nor just. To register and release into the mainstream
discourse, the essence of Palestinian actions of resistance is to realise that
when Palestine does not fit into dominant categories, this is not because of a
shortcoming of Palestine, it is because of the violent and oppressive purpose
of those categories.
To register
Palestinian lives is to realise that the creation of a Palestinian state, for
example, is not an end in itself, an effort to join the rest of the world of
nations through the category of statehood, but was always, at least for the
countless lives that have fought and continue to fight for it, a means towards
true liberation and freedom – towards a decolonised life.
----
Ayyash is the author of A Hermeneutics of
Violence (UTP, 2019). He was born and raised in Silwan, Jerusalem, before
immigrating to Canada. He is currently writing a book on settler colonial
sovereignty.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/10/10/fighting-for-palestine-2/
-----
The Greek Anti-Fascist Struggle Is Far From
Over
By Marianna
Karakoulaki
10 Oct 2020
“Golden
Dawn is a criminal organisation,” declared an announcer from the top of the
Court of Appeals in Athens on Wednesday, making public the landmark verdict in
the biggest trial of self-professed fascists since Nuremberg. Thousands of
anti-fascist protesters who had gathered outside the court burst into cheers,
hugging each other in celebration at a decision they had been waiting for for
more than five years. The mood, however, quickly turned sour as police released
tear gas and used water cannon to disperse the crowd.
The brutal
police response that followed the verdict was indicative that the anti-fascist
fight in Greece is still far from over. Yes, the leaders of Greece’s neo-Nazi
party, which terrorised the country for years, will be behind bars. Yes, the
party’s name will be erased from the Greek political scene. But its dangerous,
divisive and often deadly ideology is still well embedded in Greek society.
Golden Dawn
was born from the ashes of the Greek military junta (1967-1974) in the early
1980s. The party’s founding leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, a Holocaust denier
and Hitler admirer created a cult of personality and charmed those who leaned
towards the far right and felt like their views were not represented by
Greece’s political parties by promising to make their voices heard. His words
were the law for the party’s members.
After
silently growing its membership base for years, Golden Dawn was recognised as a
political party in 1993. The Greek political elite and media, viewing the party
as a caricature doomed to remain on the far-right fringes of Greek politics,
refused to take it seriously. Nevertheless, the party’s members trained like an
army for years and continued to expand their reach. During the day, they
organised food distribution networks and blood donation events – of course only
for ethnic Greeks. At night, they terrorised underdeveloped neighbourhoods of
Athens, attacking everyone who did not fit into their racist ideals.
Greece’s
devastating economic crisis was what finally allowed them to gain enough public
support to become part of mainstream politics. As the economic devastation
discredited Greece’s established mainstream parties, they used the growing
public anger towards political elites to secure 18 seats in the country’s 300-seat
parliament in the June 2012 elections.
After
entering the parliament, they attempted to hide their neo-Nazi roots by
portraying themselves not as violent racists, but Greek patriots. They created
a narrative in which they were true patriots, ready to give their lives for the
motherland and stand up to those who “ruined” the country with their pro-EU,
left-wing or liberal views. They presented themselves as white, Christian
nationalists who will do anything to protect the Greek people and Greek culture
from external influences.
Despite
these attempts to revamp their image, however, they never tried to hide their
hate for anyone who did not fit their definition of an “Ideal Greek”. They
continued their attacks on migrants, who they believe do not belong in Greece,
and leftists who they accused of “not loving their country enough”.
In fact,
Golden Dawn’s election success, which made them the third strongest party in
the country, encouraged its members to unleash even more violence on the
so-called “enemies of Greece”. After all, thousands of Greeks, by casting a
vote for Golden Dawn, had legitimised the party’s stated goal of ridding the
country of all non-Greek people and “unpatriotic” ideas.
Only a few
months after the election, on January 17, 2013, two Golden Dawn members killed
Sahzat Lukman, a Pakistani migrant, on his way to work. Nine months later,
anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas was murdered. His death sparked a long
investigation, which led to the start of the Golden Dawn Trial in 2015.
Greek media
initially attempted to portray Fyssas’s death as the result of a fight between
football hooligans. But the Greek anti-fascist movement refused to let this
happen. Through the hashtag #antireport on Twitter, as well as other online
platforms, they told the real story – Pavlos Fyssas was killed by Golden Dawn.
They organised protests, campaigns and events on a daily basis until the day
the authorities arrested the leadership of the neo-Nazi party.
As soon as
their criminal activities became public, Golden Dawn lost political power and
supporters. The ones who claimed to protect Greeks from foreigners had killed a
Greek – albeit an anti-fascist Greek. Suddenly the group’s supporters realised
they would be stigmatised if they continued to remain affiliated with a
violent, fascist party. Golden Dawn no longer represented the Greek ideal. They
were criminals. Golden Dawn was no more.
Ideologies,
however, do not die with political organisations that represent them. They
often find themselves other facades.
This is exactly
what happened in Greece. After Golden Dawn’s fall from grace, other groups
following fascist ideologies popped up – groups that promised to protect the
country from the “refugee invasion”; groups that claimed they would take
revenge for Macedonia; groups that said they were working to keep Greece as the
homeland of Greeks and no one else. They refrained from using the name “Golden
Dawn” even though many of their members were former members or supporters of
the party. Meanwhile, some prominent members of the disgraced political party,
including Michaloliakos’s henchman Ilias Kasidiaris, formed new political
parties. And, perhaps most alarmingly, despite Golden Dawn leaders being
branded criminals and murderers, Golden Dawn’s rhetoric has been adopted by
many in the Greek political and media elite. The ideological stances that made
Golden Dawn appealing to a large section of the Greek public – its
anti-immigration rhetoric, jingoism, Islamophobia and racism – have become the
new normal in the country.
So Wednesday’s
verdict may be the final nail in Golden Dawn’s coffin, but the ideology that
once allowed the party to enter Parliament is still well embedded in Greek
society. The Greek fascism represented by the party can still find its way into
the parliament under different banners and through other “patriotic” members of
Parliament.
If we are
to learn one lesson from the short history of Golden Dawn, it is this: Fascism
will be defeated not in courtrooms or parliaments, but on the streets. Golden
Dawn was brought down thanks to the relentless efforts of the Greek
anti-fascist movement – they exposed the party’s crimes, its ideology, and
violent nature when everyone else chose to look away.
Court
rulings, as important as they may be, can eliminate political parties and
groups, but they cannot eliminate ideologies. If Greece is to completely rid
itself of fascism one day, it will be through the righteous struggle of Greek
anti-fascists.
The Greek
anti-fascist movement, despite its criminalisation by the Greek media and
certain political elites, never stopped the fight. They have been and will
continue to be, the first line of defence against fascism and the most vocal
supporters of refugees, migrants and workers in the country.
Golden Dawn
may be no more, but the Greek anti-fascist struggle continues.
-----
Karakoulaki is an award winning multimedia
journalist. She is a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham where
she researches violent borders and necropolitics through the Balkan Route. She
is an editor and director at E-IR. Her co-edited book Critical Perspectives on
Migration in the 21st Century was published in 2018.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/10/10/the-greek-anti-fascist-struggle-is-far-from-over/
-----
In Dune, Paul Atreides Led A Jihad, Not A
Crusade
By Ali Karjoo-Ravary
11 Oct 2020
Fans of
Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Dune, were disappointed to learn this week that the
release of Denis Villeneuve’s much-anticipated film adaptation of the book has
been pushed back to October 2021, almost a year later than expected.
Dune is a
foundational classic of science fiction and marks, in many ways, the
popularisation of the genre. In the hands of Villeneuve, the film is poised to
be a blockbuster, and the buzz that emanated from its first and only trailer,
released on September 9, 2020, is still palpable.
But fans
familiar with the books noticed a major omission in its promotional materials:
any reference to the Islam-inspired framing of the novel. In fact, the trailer
uses the words, “a crusade is coming”, using the Christian term for holy war –
something that occurs a mere three times in the six books of the original
series. The word they were looking for was “jihad”, a foundational term and an
essential concept in the series. But jihad is bad branding, and in Hollywood,
Islam does not sell unless it is being shot at.
Dune is the
second film adaptation of the popular 1965 science fiction novel by Frank
Herbert. Set approximately 20,000 years in the future on the desert planet
Arrakis, it tells the story of a war for control of its major export: the
mind-altering spice melange that allows for instantaneous space travel. The
Indigenous people of this planet, the Fremen, are oppressed for access to this
spice. The story begins when a new aristocratic house takes over the planet,
centring the narrative on the Duke’s son Paul.
The
trailer’s use of “crusade” obscures the fact that the series is full of
vocabularies of Islam, drawn from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Words like
“Mahdi”, “Shai-Hulud”, “noukker”, and “ya hya chouhada” are commonly used
throughout the story. To quote Herbert himself, from an unpublished 1978
interview with Tim O’Reilly, he used this vocabulary, partly derived from
“colloquial Arabic”, to signal to the reader that they are “not here and now,
but that something of here and now has been carried to that faraway place and
time”. Language, he remarks, “is mind-shaping as well as used by mind”,
mediating our experience of place and time. And he uses the language of Dune to
show how, 20,000 years in the future, when all religion and language has
fundamentally changed, there are still threads of continuity with the Arabic
and Islam of our world because they are inextricable from humanity’s past,
present, and future.
A quick
look at Frank Herbert’s appendix to Dune, “the Religion of Dune”, reveals that
of the “ten ancient teachings”, half are overtly Islamic. And outside of the
religious realm, he filled the terminology of Dune’s universe with words
related to Islamic sovereignty. The Emperors are called “Padishahs”, from
Persian, their audience chamber is called the “selamlik”, Turkish for the
Ottoman court’s reception hall and their troops have titles with Turco-Persian
or Arabic roots, such as “Sardaukar”, “caid”, and “bashar”. Herbert’s future is
one where “Islam” is not a separate unchanging element belonging to the past,
but a part of the future universe at every level. The world of Dune cannot be
separated from its language, and as reactions on Twitter have shown, the
absence of that language in the movie’s promotional material is a
disappointment. Even jihad, a complex, foundational principle of Herbert’s
universe, is flattened – and Christianised – to crusade.
To be sure,
Herbert himself defines jihad using the term “crusade”, twice in the narrative
as a synonym for jihad and once in the glossary as part of his definition of
jihad, perhaps reaching for a simple conceptual parallel that may have been
familiar to his readership. But while he clearly subsumed crusade under jihad,
much of his readership did the reverse.
One can
understand why. Even before the War on Terror, jihad was what the bad guys do.
Yet as Herbert understood, the term is a complicated one in the Muslim
tradition; at root, it means to struggle or exert oneself. It can take many
forms: internally against one’s own evil, externally against oppression, or
even intellectually in the search for beneficial knowledge. And in the 14
centuries of Islam’s history, like any aspect of human history, the term jihad
has been used and abused. Having studied Frank Herbert’s notes and papers in
the archives of California State University, Fullerton, I have found that
Herbert’s understanding of Islam, jihad, and humanity’s future is much more
complex than that of his interpreters. His use of jihad grapples with this
complicated tradition, both as a power to fight against the odds (whether
against sentient AI or against the Empire itself), but also something that
defies any attempt at control.
Herbert’s
nuanced understanding of jihad shows in his narrative. He did not aim to
present jihad as simply a “bad” or “good” thing. Instead, he uses it to show
how the messianic impulse, together with the apocalyptic violence that
sometimes accompanies it, changes the world in uncontrollable and unpredictable
ways. And, of course, writing in the 1950s and 1960s, the jihad of Frank
Herbert’s imagination was not the same as ours, but drew from the Sufi-led
jihads against French, Russian, and English imperialism in the 19th and
mid-20th century. The narrative exhibits this influence of Sufism and its
reading of jihad, where, unlike in a crusade, a leader’s spiritual
transformation determined the legitimacy of his war.
In Dune,
Paul must drink the “water of life”, to enter (to quote Dune) the “alam al-mithal,
the world of similitudes, the metaphysical realm where all physical limitations
are removed,” and unlock a part of his consciousness to become the Mahdi, the
messianic figure who will guide the jihad. The language of every aspect of this
process is the technical language of Sufism.
Perhaps the
trailer’s use of “crusade” is just an issue of marketing. Perhaps the film will
embrace the characteristically Islam-inspired language and aesthetics of Frank
Herbert’s universe. But if we trace the reception of “the strong Muslim
flavour” in Dune, to echo an editor on one of Herbert’s early drafts, we are
confronted with Islam’s unfavourable place in America’s popular imagination. In
fact, many desire to interpret Dune through the past, hungering for a historic
parallel to these future events because, in their minds, Islam belongs to the
past. Yet who exists in the future tells us who matters in our present. NK
Jemisin, the three-time Hugo award-winning author, writes: “The myth that Star
Trek planted in my mind: people like me exist in the future, but there are only
a few of us. Something’s obviously going to kill off a few billion people of
colour and the majority of women in the next few centuries.”
Jemisin
alerts us to the question: “Who gets to be a part of the future?”
When a
director or writer casts people of colour out of the future, when a director
casts Islam out of the future, they reveal their own expectations and
anxieties. They reveal an imagination at ease with genocide, with mass death,
and with a whitewashed future that does not have any of the “mess” of the
contemporary world. That “mess” is other people, people who defy control.
Unlike many
of his, or our, contemporaries, Herbert was willing to imagine a world that was
not based on Western, Christian mythology. This was not just his own niche
interest. Even in the middle of the 20th century, it was obvious that the
future would be coloured by Islam based on demographics alone. This is clearer
today as the global Muslim population nears a quarter of humanity. While this
sounds like an alt-right nightmare/fantasy, Herbert did not think of Islam as
the “borg”, an alien hive mind that allows for no dissent. Herbert’s Islam was
the great, capacious, and often contradictory discourse recently expounded by
Shahab Ahmed in his monumental book, What is Islam? Herbert understood that
religions do not act. People act. Their religions change like their languages,
slowly over time in response to the new challenges of time and place. Tens of
thousands of years into the future, Herbert’s whole universe is full of future
Islams, similar but different from the Islams of present and past.
Herbert
countered a one-dimensional reading of Islam because he disavowed absolutes. In
an essay titled: Science Fiction and a World in Crisis, he identified the
belief in absolutes as a “characteristic of the West” that negatively
influenced its approach to crisis. He wrote that it led the “Western tradition”
to face problems “with the concept of absolute control”. This desire for
absolute control is what leads to the hero-worship (or “messiah-building”) that
defines our contemporary world. It is this impulse that he sought to tear down
in Dune.
In another
essay, Men on Other Planets, Herbert cautions against reproducing cliches,
reminding writers to question their underlying assumptions about time, society,
and religion. He encourages them to be subversive, because science fiction
“permits you to go beyond those cultural norms that are prohibited by your
society and enforced by conscious (and unconscious) literary censorship in the
prestigious arenas of publication”.
We should
recognise Herbert for exploring Islam and religion without essentialising them,
without reducing them to a cliché grounded in a timeless original model or relegating
them to the domain of superstitious humanoid aliens. But in the same essay, he
warned that “if it becomes too prestigious, science fiction will encounter new
restraints”, expressing worry about the looming power of self-censorship in the
face of respectability. Unfortunately, he was right, and it seems like the
subversive elements of his own work, embedded in his deep exploration of
“jihad”, have been subsumed into the Christianising “crusade”, at least so far.
Let’s hope this extra year allows the film to do better.
-----
Josephine H Detmer and Zareen Taj Mirza
Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Bucknell University
-----
Karjoo-Ravary received his PhD from the
University of Pennsylvania and writes on the history of Sufism and its
influence on politics, material culture, and literature, including speculative
fiction. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center. Ali is
also an editor at ajammc.com.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/10/11/paul-atreides-led-a-jihad-not-a-crusade-heres-why-that-matters/
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URL: https://newageislam.com/middle-east-press/middle-east-press-pakistan-democratic/d/123111
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