Mid Point In the Middle East? Part II

By Tariq Ali

This is the second part of an editorial in the March/April issue of the New Left Review in 2006. The editorial talks about key events in U.S. foreign policy, and the world, over the past couple of years.

Tariq Ali is an editor for the New Left Review and a historian who has writen books on history and contemporary events as well as fiction books.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

Inferno in Iraq

If it is Syria’s shelter for the Iraqi resistance to the east that has made it the target for an American siege, it is with good reason. For in Iraq itself, the war has gone from bad to worse for Washington. Confronted with a dauntless insurgency, the Occupation is still—after three years and an outlay of over $200 billion—unable to assure regular supplies of water and electricity to the people it has subjugated. Factories remain idle. Hospitals and schools barely function. Oil revenues have been looted wholesale by America’s local minions, not to speak of a horde of us contractors on the take. Wretched as living conditions were for the majority of the population under un sanctions, under the Americans they have deteriorated yet further, as sectarian killings multiply and minimal security disappears.

In the midst of these scenes from hell, the morale of the occupiers themselves is showing signs of giving way. Denied the luxury of a casualty-free attack from 30,000 feet, American troops are stalemated: confined to barracks, embarking on missions only with air power or ultra-protective ground cover, but still losing lives almost daily. In a February 2006 Zogby poll of American troops serving in Iraq, 72 per cent thought the us should pull out within a year, and of those 29 per cent thought they should pull out ‘immediately’. Less than a quarter—23 per cent—backed the official stance, reiterated by the president and most of the domestic establishment, that the us must ‘stay the course’. Military reserves are now so depleted that the Pentagon has announced a waiver on criminal records for army recruits and is increasingly forced to rely on mercenaries bought in the marketplace.

The political cover laboriously constructed for the invasion has not fared much better. A first round of elections for a puppet government was boycotted en bloc by the Sunni community. A Made-in-usa constitution had to be rammed through with a manipulated plebiscite. A second round of elections has led to quarrels between the different American clients, and accompanying parliamentary deadlocks. Vast sums spent on bribes to assorted figures and funding for favoured candidates have yielded scant rewards, with the humiliation of the stipendiaries of both the cia and the Pentagon, Iyad Allawi and Ahmed Chalabi, at the polls. At the time of writing, the American viceroy is using a Kurdish president to oust a Shi’a premier who has become inconvenient. Popular cynicism about the ‘Purple Revolution’ is general, the credibility of the authorities in Baghdad all but invisible.

Not that the liberation of Iraq is close at hand. The continuation of the Occupation has led to an intensification of the sectarian tensions upon which it has rested. Lethal attacks by Sunni on Shi’a and Shi’a on Sunni have now become a daily occurrence, with tragic loss of life in both communities. The initiative for these came at first from deadly bigots in the Sunni resistance. But the originating responsibility for a disastrous slide into communal warfare, alongside and interwoven with a patriotic struggle against the foreigner, lies with the Shi’a clerics—and above all Ayatollah Sistani—who threw in their lot with the conquerors of the country, fatally exposing their communities to risk of retribution from the resistance, so long as ordinary believers followed the direction of their leaders. The cisterns of sentimentality ladled over the collusion of Sistani with Bremer, Negroponte and Khalilzad rival those once poured over that other taciturn, dignified elder of his country, who in the evening of his years protected his people while keeping his distance from the occupier. But the Pétain of Najaf can expect a better fate. Gratitude for his role in saving the American bacon should assure him of the Nobel Peace Prize for which Thomas Friedman, a swaggering champion of the invasion, has recommended him.(1)

Had the Shi’a leadership at large, and Sistani in particular, told the Americans to pack their bags in the spring of 2004, when Sunni and Shi’a alike rose against the Occupation, Iraq would now be a free country with a reasonable prospect of communal harmony, founded on joint struggle against the invader. Instead Sistani and his entourage joined forces with the Americans to suppress the revolt of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army in the south and the Sunni resistance in the north and west of the country, with the aim of taking power in Baghdad under us tutelage, and building a sectarian regime on demographic preponderance and foreign arms. The confessional parliamentarism of this option has predictably guaranteed a deepening of sectarian hatreds, as the taint of collaboration with the enemy spread downwards, leading to indiscriminate retaliation and then reciprocal massacres by jihadis on one side and death squads on the other. The progenitors of this mayhem are now using it as a pretext to prolong their invasion of the country, with kickbacks to Sunni politicians to induce them to plead with America to stay, as if the occupation that has unleashed it were the remedy rather than source of an ongoing catastrophe.

The reality is that there is only one way to halt this spiral of violence: the path refused by Sistani in 2004, and now taken up once again by Muqtada al-Sadr—a national agreement between Sunni and Shi’a leaders, the maquis in the provinces and the militias in the capital, to secure the expulsion of all occupying forces from the country without further ado. ‘Cut off the head of the snake and remove all evil’, as Muqtada exhorted on returning from Lebanon to a shattered Samarra and Baghdad. His militias, largely made up of the urban poor, are recruited in quarters that were once strongholds of Iraqi communism. The expeditionary armies from America and Britain could not last a month in Iraq, if the Shi’a at large followed the example of their Sunni compatriots. Indeed, it would take only a vote in the puppet parliament demanding the immediate withdrawal of foreign forces to make the position of Washington and London untenable. Given the modern history of Iraq, there would still be many grave tensions in the relations between the two communities, not to speak of the recent role of the Kurds as the Gurkhas of the invader. But until the spreading poison of Western intrusion is removed, there is no chance of wounds, past or present, healing. The Anglo-American armies need to be driven out of the country, bag and baggage, for Iraq to have any future.

Iran in the crosshairs

In Basra and Maysan provinces, in the far south-east of Iraq, the local Shi’a authorities are now refusing to cooperate with the British occupiers. Their change of attitude is likely to bear some relation to the new situation across the border. The victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran’s presidential elections of 2005 represents the biggest political upset of the new century in the region. The mayor of Tehran, a hard-core clerical militant from a working-class family and soldier in the war against Iraq, handsomely defeated the candidate favoured by the Western media and its masters: the corrupt clerical tycoon and political operator Rafsanjani, ruler of the country in the late 80s and early 90s, whose lavishly financed campaign—complete with hi-tech rallies, bumper stickers and hijab-edrah-rah girls—was overwhelmed by the protest votes of the dispossessed. Running on a platform of egalitarian redistribution—‘put the oil money on the table of the poor’—with a cd portraying his millionaire opponent living in the lap of luxury, while he gave much of his own salary to the needy, Ahmadinejad was the only candidate who could, with any conviction, put on street-cleaner’s clothes to sweep the Tehran gutters. Against Rafsanjani’s hollow establishment rhetoric, he called for concrete solutions to the housing crisis and unemployment, and the problems these caused for young couples wanting to get married, as well as promising an end to corruption and to compliance with us dictates on energy issues.(2) As a result, the campaign was sharper in tone and offered a more serious choice of social policy than did the elections of 2004 in the United States, or 2005 in Britain, and saw a higher turnout.

Ahmadinejad reaped a harvest of discontent not only with the corrupt and brutal record of Rafsanjani’s presidency, but also the time of his spineless successor. Under the reformer Khatami, economic conditions steadily worsened even as oil prices rose, while naive overtures in foreign policy, Gorbachev-style, merely produced Bush’s Axis of Evil, much as the Russian versions met with Reagan’s Evil Empire. Ready to defend the rights of foreign investors, but rarely those of independent newspapers or student demonstrators, given to vacuous dialogues with the Pope on spiritual values, but incapable of firm protection of civil rights, Khatami manoeuvred ineffectually between contradictory pressures until he had exhausted his moral credit. Ahmadinejad’s base in the popular classes embeds a greater social sensibility in the new presidency, but there is no guarantee the practical outcomes will be better. The millions of young, working-class jobless, crammed into overcrowded living conditions, are in desperate need of a coherent policy of national development. But Islamic voluntarism is not a stable alternative to creeping neoliberalism, and the temptation to ratchet up cultural repression to compensate for economic frustration is usually irresistible.

In Iran’s sprawling, opaque political system, the presidency is surrounded with competing centres of power, nearly all of them more conservative than the incumbent. The Supreme Leader Khamenei does not want to be upstaged by a young firebrand. The mullah–bazaari nexus behind Rafsanjani has already thwarted Ahmadinejad’s efforts to clean up the Oil Ministry, and remains entrenched in the Expediency Council. The pro-Western middle class that identified with Khatami is licking its wounds, and looking for a comeback. All are ready to pounce on any inexperience or misstep, of which there will be not a few.(3) The social backdrop to such disputes remains tense enough in its own right. The skewed development model inherited from the Shah, battered by nearly a decade of war, then subjected to Rafsanjani’s inflationary boom and Khatami’s privatizations, has produced a vast black market, an unofficial unemployment rate of 25 per cent and a looming agricultural crisis. Students are disaffected, labour rebellious, the Arab south-west, Kurdish and Azeri north, and Baluch south-east simmering. There is ample material in this maze for every kind of domestic and imperial intrigue to topple the unwelcome victor of a popular contest. Meanwhile, those who once dreamt of ‘liberation’ via a us intervention should take note of the worsening nightmare in Iraq.

But for the moment, it is Iran’s external role that holds centre stage. Here too the directionless clerical state has left a scene of confusion. Since the end of the Iran–Iraq War, its foreign policy has been little more than a ragbag of incoherent opportunism, combining conventional diplomacy of a cautious, typically collaborationist sort with largely costless gestures of solidarity to fellow-Shi’a abroad, principally Hizbollah in southern Lebanon, with crumbs for the Palestinians. Tehran was tactfully silent during the Gulf War of 1991, with not even a peep of complaint when us troops were stationed in the Holy Places. It instructed its surrogates in the Northern Alliance to pave the way for the American invasion of Afghanistan. It collaborated with the cia in preparations for the occupation of Iraq, and directed sciri and its other political assets to prop up us rule in Baghdad. In exchange for these favours to the Great Satan, what has it received? American armies camped on its eastern and western borders, and American threats to obliterate its reactors.

Even by the standards of today’s ‘international community’, the Western campaign to oblige Iran to abandon nuclear research to which it is entitled under the Non-Proliferation Treaty itself is breathtaking. The country is ringed by atomic states—India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel—and American nuclear submarines patrol its southern coast. Historically, it has every reason to fear outside threats. Although neutral, it was occupied by both British and Soviet forces during World War Two. Its elected government was overthrown by an Anglo-American coup in 1953, and the secular opposition destroyed. From 1980 to 1988, the Western powers abetted Saddam Hussein’s onslaught, in which hundreds of thousands of Iranians died. In the war’s final stages, the us destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in the Gulf, and for good measure shot down a crowded civilian passenger plane.

At present, Iran has little more than primitive gropings towards the technology needed for nuclear self-defence. Yet these are being presented as a casus belli by Bush, Blair, Chirac and Olmert, whose own states are armed with hundreds—in the American case, thousands—of nuclear weapons. Whining and cavilling over the small print of Vienna protocols, however warranted, is a futile pursuit for Iranian diplomacy. The country would do better to choose the right moment and simply withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Of all the anachronistic emperors in the world, it is the most brazenly naked. There is not a shred of justification for the oligopoly of the present nuclear powers, so hypocritical it does not dare even speak its name—Israel, with 200 nuclear bombs, is never mentioned. There will never be nuclear disarmament until it is broken.

To face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires a coherence and discipline of which there is little sign at present. With their own operational habits and doctrines to the fore, the Iranian clerics have played a profoundly divisive role in keeping the Shi’a parties and Sistani, Tehran’s bearded queen on the Iraqi chessboard, pitted against the resistance forces. A de-confessionalized alliance of forces from Tehran to Damascus, via Basra and Baghdad, would both damp down communalist conflict and strengthen Iran’s position. Little in the recent Iranian record suggests the country’s ruling institutions are capable of dealing with imperial arrogance when they confront it, other than with a hydra-headed incompetence. However, circumstances may now be forcing them into decisions they have so far sought to evade. It will not be easy to dress up surrender to Western threats as dignified national wisdom. It will not be difficult to turn Shi’a crowds and militia against the Western occupation across the border. Tehran controls more significant hostages today than a mere embassy. It is unlikely, if the country kept its nerve, that the Pentagon or its proxies would risk an attack.

Outlook

The crisis in the Middle East that began in 2001 is not in sight of any dénouement. At best, we are perhaps only at mid-point in the unfolding drama. New forces and faces are emerging that have something in common. Muqtada, Haniya, Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad: each has risen by organizing the urban poor in their localities—Baghdad and Basra, Gaza and Jenin, Beirut and Sidon, Tehran and Shiraz. It is in the slums that Hamas, Hizbollah, the Sadr brigades and the Basij have their roots. The contrast with the Hariris, Chalabis, Karzais, Allawis, on whom the West relies—overseas millionaires, crooked bankers, cia bagmen—could not be starker. A radical wind is blowing from the alleys and shacks of the latter-day wretched of the earth, surrounded by the fabulous wealth of petroleum. The limits of this radicalism, so long as it remains captured by the Koran, are clear enough. The impulses of charity and solidarity are infinitely better than those of imperial greed and comprador submission, but so long as what they offer is social alleviation rather than reconstruction, they are sooner or later liable to recuperation by the existing order. Leaders comparable to figures like Chávez or Morales have yet to emerge, with a vision capable of transcending national or communal divisions, a sense of continental unity and the self-confidence to broadcast it. Thanks to its ex-mayor, there is now a statue of Bolívar in Tehran. The region awaits an equivalent spirit.

Meanwhile, the emplacements of the hegemon have scarcely budged. The current turmoil is still confined to those areas of the Middle East where for twenty years or more American power never really penetrated: the West Bank, Ba’athist Iraq, Khomeinist Iran. The real us anchorage in the region lies elsewhere: in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Jordan. There its traditional clients have held the line, and are on hand to help out with regional problems. Beyond them, Europe and Japan stand shoulder to shoulder with America on Iran and Palestine, while Russia, China and India make no difficulties. It is too soon to count on imperial defeat.

Notes

1. Reuel Marc Gerecht, ex-cia Middle-East chief, had a similar view. In an essay that begins: ‘The January 30 elections in Iraq will be easily the most consequential event in Arab history since Israel’s six-day defeat of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s alliance in 1967’, Gerecht concludes: ‘Continue to pray every night for the health, well-being and influence of Grand Ayatollah Sistani [sic] . . . It is a blessed thing that Sistani and his followers have a far better understanding of modern Middle Eastern history than the American or European liberals.’ ‘Birth of a Democracy’ in Gary Rosen, ed., The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq, Cambridge 2005, pp. 237, 243.
2. For a hostile account from the Left, see Iran Bulletin—Middle East Forum, series ii, no. 3, December 2005. For a cinematic examination of the class polarization in Iran see Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold (2003), scripted by Abbas Kiarostami—the film was banned by the Khatami government. Will Panahi’s latest offering, Offside—about women and football—share the same fate under Khatami’s successor?
3. Denial of the Judeocide, a typical expression of the ignorance, stupidity and prejudice of fundamentalist culture, is one of the first examples. Euro-American outrage—the French Socialist Party’s Fabius has gone so far as to call for an international travel ban on Ahmadinejad—is, of course, the merest tartufferie. Iran had no part in the Shoah. Turkey, on the other hand, denies the genocide for which it was responsible, without bien-pensant opinion in Europe batting a diplomatic eyelid: indeed, no cause is so eagerly embraced, in the name of multiculturalism, as rapid Turkish entry into the eu. Armenia is not Israel: who cares?

Image From:
U.S. Army

Mid-Point in the Middle East? Part I

By Tariq Ali

This was an editorial in the March/April issue of the New Left Review in 2006. The editorial talks about key events in U.S. foreign policy, and the world, over the past couple of years.

Tariq Ali is an editor for the New Left Review and a historian who has writen books on history and contemporary events as well as fiction books.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

Looking down on the world from the imperial grandeur of the Oval Office in the fall of 2001, the Cheney–Bush team was confident of its ability to utilize the September events to remodel the world. The Pentagon’s Vice Admiral Cebrowski summed up the linkage of capitalism to war: ‘the dangers against which us forces must be arrayed derive precisely from countries and regions that are “disconnected” from the prevailing trends of globalization’. Five years later, what is the balance sheet?

On the credit side, Russia, China and India remain subdued, along with Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Here, despite the attempts of Western political science departments to cover the instrumentalist twists of us policy with fig-leaf conceptualizations—‘limited democracies’, ‘tutelary democracies’, ‘illiberal democracies’, ‘inclusionary autocracies’, ‘illiberal autocracies’—the reality is that acceptance of Washington Consensus norms is the principal criterion for gaining imperial approval. In Western Europe, after a few flutters on Iraq, the eu is firmly back on side. Chirac now sounds more belligerent than Bush on the Middle East, and the German elite is desperate to appease Washington. On the debit side, the Caracas effect is spreading. Cuba’s long isolation has been broken, the Bolivian oligarchy defeated in La Paz and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has assumed a central role in mobilizing popular anti-neoliberal movements in virtually every Latin American country.(1)

More alarmingly for Washington, American control of the Middle East is slipping. No irreversible setbacks have yet occurred, but in the past year the position of the us in the region has weakened. The shift has not been uniform—at least one front has moved in the opposite direction, with a successful intervention in Lebanon. But elsewhere the tide of events is running against Washington. In Iran and Palestine, elections have humiliated those on whom it had counted as pliable instruments or interlocutors, propelling more radical forces into power. In Iraq, the resistance has inflicted a steady train of blows on the us occupation, preventing any stabilization of the collaborator regime and sapping support for the war in America itself. The Cheney–Wolfowitz political project of establishing a model satellite state for the region lies buried underneath the rubble of Fallujah. In Afghanistan, guerrillas are on the move again and Washington is wooing Taliban factions close to Pakistani military intelligence. Further revelations of torture by us and British forces, and plunder of local resources by the invaders and their agents, have intensified popular hatred of the West across the Arab world. American forces are overstretched, and the belief of troops in their mission is declining. Establishment voices at home are beginning to express fears that a debacle comparable to—or even worse than—Vietnam may be looming. But outcomes across the whole theatre of conflict still remain uncertain, and are unlikely to be all of a piece.

Palestine

Western enthusiasm for rainbow revolutions stops, as is to be expected, when the colour is green. Hamas’s triumph in the elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council has been treated as an ominous sign of rising fundamentalism, and a fearsome blow to the prospects of peace with Israel, by rulers and journalists across the Atlantic world. Immediate financial and diplomatic pressures have been applied to force Hamas to adopt the same policies as those whom it defeated at the polls. Numerically, the extent of that victory should not be overstated—with 45 per cent of the vote on a 78 per cent turnout, Hamas took 54 per cent of the seats. But morally, given the undisguised intervention by Israel, the us and the eu to assure a Fatah majority, the result was equivalent to a landslide. Palestinian voters rebuffed the concerted threats and bribes of the ‘international community’ in a campaign that saw Hamas members and other oppositionists routinely detained or assaulted by the idf, their posters confiscated or destroyed, us and eu funds channelled into the Fatah campaign, and us congressmen announcing that Hamas should not be allowed to run. Even the timing of the election was set by the determination to rig the outcome. Scheduled for the summer of 2005, it was delayed till January 2006 to give Abbas time to distribute assets in Gaza—in the words of an Egyptian intelligence officer: ‘the public will then support the Authority against Hamas’.(2) Popular desire for a clean broom after ten years of corruption, bullying and bluster under Fatah proved stronger than all of this.

Uncompromised by the Palestinian Authority’s combination of greed and dependency, the self-enrichment of its servile spokesmen and policemen, and their acquiescence in a ‘peace process’ that has brought only further expropriation and misery to the population under them, Hamas offered the alternative of a simple example. Without any of the resources of its rival, it set up clinics, schools, hospitals, vocational training and welfare programmes for the poor. Its leaders and cadres lived frugally, within reach of ordinary people. It is this response to everyday needs that has won Hamas the broad basis of its support, not daily recitation of verses from the Koran.

How far its conduct in the second Intifada has given it an additional degree of credibility is less clear. Its armed attacks on Israel, like those of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade or Islamic Jihad, have been retaliations against an occupation far more deadly than any actions it has ever undertaken. Measured on the scale of idf killings, Palestinian strikes have been few and far between. The asymmetry was starkly exposed during Hamas’s unilateral ceasefire, begun in June 2003, and maintained throughout the summer despite the Israeli campaign of raids and mass arrests which followed, in which some three hundred Hamas cadres were seized from the West Bank.(3) On 19 August 2003 a self-proclaimed ‘Hamas’ cell from Hebron, disowned and denounced by the official leadership, blew up a bus in West Jerusalem, upon which Israel promptly assassinated the Hamas ceasefire’s negotiator, Ismail Abu Shanab. Hamas in turn responded. In return, the Palestinian Authority and Arab states cut funding to its charities and, in September 2003, the eu declared the whole Hamas movement to be a terrorist organization—a long-standing demand of Tel Aviv.

What has actually distinguished Hamas in a hopelessly unequal combat is not dispatch of suicide bombers, to which a range of competing groups resorted, but its superior discipline—demonstrated by its ability to enforce a self-declared ceasefire against Israel over the past year. All civilian deaths are to be condemned, but since Israel is their principal practitioner, Euro-American cant serves only to expose those who utter it. Overwhelmingly, the boot of murder is on the other foot, ruthlessly stamped into Palestine by a modern army equipped with jets, tanks and missiles in the longest armed oppression of modern history. ‘Nobody can reject or condemn the revolt of a people that has been suffering under military occupation for forty-five years against occupation force’: the words of General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israeli military intelligence, in 1993.(4).

The real grievance of the eu and us against Hamas is that it refused to accept the capitulation of the Oslo Accords, and has rejected every subsequent effort, from Taba to Geneva, to pass off their calamities on the Palestinians. The West’s priority now is to break this resistance. Cutting off funding to the Palestinian Authority is an obvious weapon with which to bludgeon Hamas into submission. Boosting the presidential powers of Abbas—as publicly picked for his post by Washington as was Bremer in Baghdad—at the expense of the Legislative Council is another.(5)us and Israel could achieve their objectives at less cost than had the old regime prevailed . . . The leader who stands most to gain from this new setting is President Abbas . . . He has become the central figure upon whom all depend: the Islamists, who need him as a conduit to the outside world; Israel, which will see him as the most palatable and reliable interlocutor on the Palestinian scene; the us and Europe, as they seek to shun Hamas without turning their backs on the Palestinians’—‘Hamas: the Perils of Power’, New York Review of Books, 9 March 2006. A photograph taken at the obsequies of King Fahd in Riyadh shows Abbas, Allawi and Karzai sitting together at the feet of more eminent mourners, as if auditioning for a Hollywood remake of a Three Stooges film. But since each of these involves some risk of boomeranging, more likely is an attempt to domesticate Hamas, in the belief that it too will relax with the fruits of office, and become in time as ‘pragmatic’ as its predecessor. This is certainly a reasonable calculation. Hamas is historically an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Egyptian branch is now scarcely more radical in outlook than the ruling party in Turkey.(6)plo rivals were decimated in Jordan and driven to Beirut. The Brethren’s inactivity was justified by a refusal to work with godless militants; instead a period of ‘mosque-building’ was in order. As the secular leadership was discredited in the 90s, Hamas, while retaining the cloak of Islam, adopted an increasingly nationalist persona. Like all religions, Islam offers a complete palette of ideological positions, from fulsome collaboration with capital and empire to impassioned opposition to them, with a great deal of mobility in between.

Whether Hamas could be so rapidly suborned to Western and Israeli ends may be doubtful, but it would not be unprecedented. Hamas’s programmatic heritage remains mortgaged to the most fatal weakness of Palestinian nationalism: the belief that the political choices before it are either rejection of the existence of Israel altogether, or acceptance of the dismembered remnants of a fifth of the country. From the fantasy maximalism of the first to the pathetic minimalism of the second, the path is all too short, as the history of Fatah has shown. The test for Hamas is not whether it can be house-trained to the satisfaction of Western opinion, but whether it can break with this crippling tradition. To do that would require the Palestinian national cause to be put on its proper basis, with the demand that the country and its resources be divided equally, in proportion to two populations that are equal in size—not 80 per cent to one and 20 per cent to the other, a dispossession of such iniquity that no self-respecting people will ever submit to it in the long run.(7)

Lebanon and Syria

To the north, the relative independence of Syria’s Ba’ath regime, and the institutional stability that allowed it to punch above its weight in the region, have long been irritants to Tel Aviv and Washington. Whatever its history of political opportunism, Damascus, unlike Cairo, has refused to scuttle the Palestinian cause by signing a separate peace with Israel, or to collaborate with the us occupation of Iraq. With the spread of the Iraqi insurgency in the provinces along its border, able to draw on a sympathetic hinterland, neutralization or removal of the younger Assad has moved up the American agenda.(8) Since us forces are now in no position to mount a second invasion, the obvious route to toppling the government in Syria was to create a pressure point in Lebanon, where Western powers can manoeuvre freely. For there Syrian troops, installed since 1976, were an exposed and unpopular presence. Forcing their withdrawal, it could be hoped, would foment domestic unrest conducive to regime change.

Contemporary Lebanon still remains in large measure the artificial creation of French colonialism it was at the outset—a coastal band of Greater Syria sliced off from its hinterland by Paris, once it became clear that Syrian independence was inevitable, to form a regional client dominated by a Maronite minority that had long been France’s catspaw in the Eastern Mediterranean. The country’s confessional chequerboard has never permitted an accurate census, for fear of revealing that a substantial Muslim—today perhaps even a Shi’a—majority is denied due representation in the political system. Sectarian tensions, over-determined by the plight of refugees from Palestine, exploded into civil war in the mid-seventies, providing the occasion for the entry of Syrian troops into Lebanon with tacit us approval, and their long-term establishment there—ostensibly as a buffer between the warring communities, and deterrent to a complete Israeli takeover, which was on the cards with the idf invasions of 1978 and 1982. Over time, Damascus came to exercise a pervasive control over wide areas of Lebanese political life. Its military and intelligence apparatus picked candidates for the highest offices of the state, manipulated cabinets and factional disputes, assassinated recalcitrant politicians and amassed personal fortunes in the process.

In 1994, the billionaire property magnate Rafik Hariri—a creature of the House of Saud—was approved for premier. Once installed in power, he became the Berlusconi or Thaksin of his native land, rebuilding the centre of Beirut with his own companies to his own profit and engineering an exchange-rate crisis when he was briefly ousted, to return as the only man rich enough to solve it. With his huge hoard of cash, he could purchase connections to give him increasing leeway in dealing with Damascus. Among friends acquired in these years was another venal politician, Jacques Chirac, to whose campaign funds he is said to have generously contributed.(9) France has never lost interest in its colonial foothold. By 2004, Chirac was seeking to make up for the desertion of the us over Iraq required by domestic considerations, and after arranging for a joint Franco-American coup in Haiti, had every reason to help Bush and Hariri expel Syria from Lebanon. Damascus, of course, knew what was afoot. In August, Bashar Assad summoned Hariri and—according to his son—told him: ‘If you think that President Chirac and you are going to run Lebanon, you are mistaken. This extension [of President Lahoud’s term] is going to happen or else I will break Lebanon over your head and over Walid Jumblatt’s’.(10)

The following week, France and the us pushed a resolution through the Security Council demanding Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarming of the Hizbollah militia. The response was not long in coming. In February, as the campaigning season opened for Lebanese elections, Hariri was blown up by a car bomb outside the St Georges hotel in Beirut. He was not the first Lebanese politician to suffer this fate—two previous presidents, Bashir Gemayel in 1982 and René Moawad in 1989, had gone the same way without much commotion. This time, however, the un Secretary-General immediately convened a Commission of Enquiry, dispatching a German prosecutor armed with plenipotentiary powers to investigate the crime, which duly concluded that Syria was responsible. Since this was plain from the outset, all that the Commission has revealed is the extent to which the un, under the miserable figure of Annan, has become an automaton for the will of the West. For, of course, Israeli assassinations—of leaders of Hizbollah, Fatah, Hamas—have never raised a whisper of reproach in the Secretariat, let alone any commission of enquiry. The fate of Lumumba, Ben Barka, Guevara, Allende, Machel, says enough about the continuity of these Western traditions.

In Lebanon itself, the killing of Hariri—whose largesse had built a wide clientele—provoked more genuine reactions, with vast demonstrations by the country’s middle class demanding the expulsion of Syrian troops and police, while a host of Western organizations arrived to assist the progress of a Cedar Revolution (11). Backed by threats from Washington and Paris, the momentum was sufficient to force a Syrian withdrawal, and produce a more congenial government in Beirut. But the various Lebanese factions remain as spreadeagled as ever, Hizbollah has not disarmed, and Assad has not fallen (12). America has taken a pawn, but the castle has yet to be captured.

Notes:

1. Over the last few years, Chávez has visited the major countries in every continent, embarrassing some of his hosts by demanding a global front against imperialism. His hour-long interview on al-Jazeera had an electric impact on 26 million Arab viewers. It received the station’s largest ever email response—tens of thousands—with the bulk of them posing a simple question: why can’t the Arab world produce a Chávez?
2. Graham Usher, ‘The New Hamas’, merip, 21 August 2005.
3. By the end of 2004, Israeli death squads and helicopter gunships had assassinated much of the Hamas leadership—Sheikh Yassin, Abdel Aziz Rantissi, Ibrahim Makadmeh, Adnan Ghoul, Sheikh Khalil—and tried but failed to kill Muhammad Dayf, Mahmoud Zahhar, and possibly Khaled Meshaal and Musa Abu Marzuq in Damascus.
4. Yediot Aharonot, 12 August 1993, cited in Khaled Hroub, Hamas: Political Thought and Practice, Washington 2000.
5. For this hopeful prospect, see Hussein Agha and Robert Malley: ‘Insofar as the burden has shifted to Hamas, the us and Israel could achieve their objectives at less cost than had the old regime prevailed . . . The leader who stands most to gain from this new setting is President Abbas . . . He has become the central figure upon whom all depend: the Islamists, who need him as a conduit to the outside world; Israel, which will see him as the most palatable and reliable interlocutor on the Palestinian scene; the us and Europe, as they seek to shun Hamas without turning their backs on the Palestinians’—‘Hamas: the Perils of Power’, New York Review of Books, 9 March 2006. A photograph taken at the obsequies of King Fahd in Riyadh shows Abbas, Allawi and Karzai sitting together at the feet of more eminent mourners, as if auditioning for a Hollywood remake of a Three Stooges film.
6. In the late 60s and 70s the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood stood by as their secular plo rivals were decimated in Jordan and driven to Beirut. The Brethren’s inactivity was justified by a refusal to work with godless militants; instead a period of ‘mosque-building’ was in order. As the secular leadership was discredited in the 90s, Hamas, while retaining the cloak of Islam, adopted an increasingly nationalist persona.
7. Virginia Tilley, The One-State Solution, Ann Arbor and Manchester 2005. For nlr’s positions on what a viable two-state solution might entail, see Perry Anderson, ‘Scurrying Towards Bethlehem’, Guy Mandron, ‘Redividing Palestine?’, Gabriel Piterberg, ‘Erasures’, Yitzhak Laor, ‘Tears of Zion’, nlr 10, July–August 2001.
8. Initially, it was hoped that Bashar, trained in a British medical school, would prove as amenable as the younger Mubarak or Gaddafi, both in the pocket of the West. His loyalty to the traditions of his father was a severe disappointment.
9. On the Elysée’s campaign, see Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria: Bashar’s Trial by Fire, Washington 2005, p. 259.
10. See Detlev Mehlis’s uniiic report on the assassination of Hariri, October 2005. Jumblatt is the—currently staunchly pro-Western—clan leader of the Druze.
11. Saatchi & Saatchi helped orchestrate ‘Freedom Square’ rallies; Spirit of America supplied sandwiches, flags and theatrical effects, including a huge Freedom Clock with an electronic ‘countdown to liberty’; a deck of ‘Most Wanted’ playing cards with Syrian faces—a gimmick pioneered by the Israeli paper Maariv when targeting Palestinians, and publicized globally by the American army in Iraq—was distributed. See CounterPunch, 18 November 2005.
12. During the recent crisis, several Syrian opposition groups offered the Assad regime a deal: a national government to defend the country against the West, followed by elections in which the Ba’ath Party would be a major player. The Ba’ath High Command turned it down, preferring to rely on repression at home and manoeuvring abroad.

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The Oppression of Shudras/Dalits in India, Part VI: A Hindu Liberationist Perspective

Finally, I've finished the series! The last time I posted a blog in this series was Part V on Oct. 28, 2006. I've been swamped with school and working for the newspaper, but I'm on break now until Jan. 24, 2007. So I'll also be working on my Mespotamia Burning series as well (which I also haven't done in a long time due to college and newspaper work).

‘So knowing this, and becoming calm, self controlled, quiet, patient and concentrated, he sees the self in himself, sees the self as all. Evil does not overcome him: he overcomes all evil. Evil does not burn him: he burns all evil. Without evil, without dust, free from doubt, he becomes Brāhmana. This is the world of Brahmā.’
-Brhadāranyaka Upanisad IV.5.23

The actual word, “Dalit,” means “crushed underfoot” or “broken into pieces.” The word comes from the 19th century activist Jotirao Govindrao Phule (1827-1890) who fought to remove the stigma of “untouchability” in India. The term also comes from the writings of the Dalit Panthers, a radical Dalit rights movement founded in 1972 in the state of Maharashtra.(1) And indeed, for Dalits, Sudras, and SC/ST peoples all over India this is the reality they still find themselves in today (by no fault of their own). For thousands of years Dalits and ST peoples had no right to property, were only allowed to eat food thrown away by higher caste Hindus, could not drink from town and village wells, weren’t allowed to enter Hindu temples, were denied access to education, performed menial jobs for upper caste Hindus, and were not allowed to live in the main towns and villages. They had to live on the outside, and since they couldn’t live in towns they had no right to ownership of property and thus “leading to [a] lack of access to all sources of economic mobility” which further caused “social exclusion and economic discrimination over the centuries.”(2)

Yet, still today, despite Indian independence in 1947 and a plethora of legislation outlawing caste discrimination against Dalits, SC/ST, and Other Backward Caste (OBC) peoples are just as thoroughly oppressed as they have been since before the founding of the modern state of India. Today, Dalits, SC/ST, and OBCs comprise about 52 percent of the Indian population,(3) and including lower caste Shudras, 77% of the population.(4) The reasons for the Dalits continued oppression are many, some of them religious, others economic, and still others political, with each category constantly melding into the next. Sagarika Ghose explains the situation of the Dalits quite well:

The dalit's pariah status derives its strength and justification from religious texts. In the Manusmriti, the dalit is described as "polluted," in the same way as a menstruating woman, a widow, or a person who has recently been bereaved is polluted. The dalit is "unclean" from birth. He violates, by his very existence, the brahminical obsession with hygiene...While the "untouchability" of the menstruating woman or the bereaved is temporary and he or she can escape the Untouchable condition after the period of "pollution" is past, the dalit can never escape his status: he is perpetually filthy.(5)

This “pariah status” thrust upon the Dalits by greater powers has caused much of the suffering we see today. In a census taken in 1991 it was found that 70% of all Dalit and SC households were landless, by the year 2000 it had increased to 75%,(6) this despite the fact that in 1990 the V. P. Singh government decided to implement the policies of the Mandal Commission Report of the Backward Classes Commission, a commission on how to deal with Dalits, SC/ST, and OBCs that came out with their report in 1980 (part of the report called for reserving 27% of all services and public sector undertakings and 27% of all higher education slots for students, to Dalits, SC/STs, and OBCs).(7) This landlessness and lack of property causes many problems for Dalits; because they have no property (that they own) they are often bonded-laborers and their children are forced to work as well, this causes many Dalits to be dependent on waste-land for grazing. A study in 1992 showed that in the state of Rajasthan, that as many as 89% of Dalits were involved in scavenging to make ends meat.(8) On top of land issues in 2000 49.06% of the working Dalit and SC population were agricultural workers with 32.69% being STs and only 19.66% being labeled as “other” which shows a “preponderance of dalits in agricultural labour.” Not only that but from 1991-2001 the number of agricultural workers increased. As for child labor, around 60 million children (reported) work in India, 40% of the labor force comes from Dalits and ST peoples.(9) Across all levels the situation for Dalits has been getting worse, not better, for all those statistics you can look at parts II and III on my blog series “The Oppression of Shudras/Dalits in India.” Now that the situation of Dalits in India is established (again, for more, see parts II and III) we can go on to what Hindus and Dalits have done since the late 19th century in fighting against caste discrimination and untouchability and how the Hindu religion can play a liberating role in the emancipation of Dalits instead of an oppressive role, by looking at the actions of Vivekananda, Gandhi, Ambedkar, and other Indian movements.

One of the early reformers of the Hindu religion (especially in relation to Dalits and women’s rights) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was Narendranath Datta, also known as Vivekananda (1863-1902). Vivekananda was born into an upper caste Ksatriyas family in Bengal and was educated in a Western-style university where he learned about Western philosophy, Christianity, and Western sciences. Latter on he joined the Brahmo Samaj (Society of the Brahma) which was “dedicated to eliminating child marraige and illiteracy” and was “determined to spread education among women and the lower castes.” Latter on he became a disciple of Ramakrishna (who preached on the unity of all of the world religions). Instead of adhering to the Vedas in a dogmatic way Vivekananda stressed the humanistic side of the Vedas and thus became a prevailing force in preaching the Vedanta school of thought to the United States and England.(10) The Vedanta school is one of the six orthodox philosophies of Hinduism which based itself on the “speculative portion of late Vedic literature” and is chiefly concerned with the knowledge of Brahman and the unification of oneself with her or his atman to attain the truth.(11) In 1897 he founded the Ramakrishna Mission at the monastery of Belur Math which sat on the Ganges River near Calcutta which was dedicated to social work for many in India, including Dalits.(12) Yet despite his work he had done very little as a whole for the Dalits and for emancipating the Dalits from caste oppression. What Vivekananda showed us (as did the other Hindu reformers I mentioned in Part V of my blog) was that one did not have to dogmatically adhere to the Vedas to be Hindu. Vivekananda was just as Hindu as anyone from the BJP or the RSS today (even more so) and yet he was able to fuse diverse philosophical beliefs and to reject the uglier forms of Vedic Hinduism in order to help out those of the lower caste and of the female sex. Yet Vivekananda was of the upper castes and his view was very much influenced by Western white beliefs. Despite his reforms he still was afflicted with an upper caste and bourgeois mentality that hindered him from truly offering an alternative to Hindus and to truly uplifting the lower castes and Dalits from oppression.

After Vivekananda, one of the last reformers during a significant period of reform for the Hindu religion in the 19th century (for more see Part V), came Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956) whom, states Ghose, emerged “from the context created by these nineteenth-century movements as well as deeper traditions of anticaste protests by Buddhism, Jainism, and the Bhakti culuts.”(13)

As a child Gandhi grew up in a Vaisya caste household where his mother was a strict adherent to Vaisnavism, a Hindu sect which worships the god Vishnu and his incarnations, especially those of Rama and Krishna. His religious life was also influenced by stands of Jainism and ahimsa (non-injury to all living beings), so the tenets of non-violence and that everything in the universe is eternal surrounding the young Gandhi all the time,(14) which helps us better understand his religious and moral philosophy latter in his life.

After growing up in India and being educated in England Gandhi’s first boat of fighting for those who were oppressed was during his time in South Africa, which won him acclaim in India and England. He studied the deplorable conditions Indians lived in and founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894 which took up Indian grievances to South Africa and England (since South Africa was a colony of England). Yet despite all this Gandhi still had many bourgeois tendencies that he would carry with him throughout his life (all though they would be morphed into more high-caste Hindu tendencies), in 1899 Gandhi argued all Indians that it was their duty as citizens under the English crown to defend South Africa during the Boer War. Yet after the war Gandhi continued to fight for the rights of Indians and took up more confrontational non-violent mass actions.(15) These battle in South Africa further more shaped his thinking just as his mother’s religious devotions had shaped his thinking in his youth. With this we will look at Gandhi’s actions relating to the Dalits and what he did (and didn’t do) for them and how, despite the fact that he was a very conservative and strictly observant Hindu (with upper-caste tendencies), he fought against the stigma of untouchability and urged reform all across India to help out the Dalits.

By autumn of 1920 Gandhi had become a very important figure in Indian politics and he had even managed to help refashion the Indian National Congress (founded in 1885) into a very formidable political tool for the fight against British rule, having the Congress Party branch out all over India by entrenching itself in Indians small towns and villages. In 1932, during a bout in prison, Gandhi started a fast (which his mother had done many times in his youth) to protest the British government’s move to segregate the Dalits by assigning them separate elections in the new constitution of India. His fast caused upheaval in the country and worked, thus starting Gandhi’s actions to remove the stigma of untouchability from the Dalits within Hinduism and the state of India. In 1934 Gandhi had resigned from his position in the Congress Party and also resigned as a member. Instead he wanted to build up national unity “from the bottom up” by setting up programs in rural India (85% of the population back than was rural) and educating around the countryside through himself and others. A part of this building “from the bottom up” included fighting against untouchability.(16)

Gandhi’s fight for Dalits was very much steeped in Hinduism. Instead of Hinduism being a barrier for him (or an excuse) in helping Dalits and coming in contact with them it was instead used as a jumping off point, a platform, for trying to remove the stigma of untouchability and it was something he used to the fullest. After resigning from the Congress Party his new mission, and revolution, was not necessarily home-rule for Indians by Indians (but he did fight against British rule) but was an “exercise in the autonomy, the dignity, and the freedom of the ‘non-subject’ by being neither colonizer nor colonized, neither oppressor nor oppressed, neither hawk nor dove...”(17) In the Brhadāranyaka Upanisad IV.5.23, which I quote above, it states that if one lives a righteous Hindu life one can become Brahmā, unified with Brahman. This was essentially how Gandhi saw the Dalit question. Because Dalits (or harijan as he called them, that is “Children of God”) where Hindu and because they were fully human and could indeed become unified with Brahman just as the Brahman caste could become unified, than one should treat Dalits with respect, and old traditions, such as untouchability, were misguided and hurtful. Gandhi said that “[t]he taint of Untouchability is an intolerable burden on Hinduism. Let us not deny God by denying to a fifth of our race the right of association and on equal footing.” The culmination of centuries of anti-Brahmin thought in Hinduism and different Hindu sects (such as Jainism) essentially meet each other in the figure of Gandhi (for more on this see Part V). Unlike Vivekananda he had actively tackled the question of the Dalits and had done much to try and reform Hindu’s in their thinking. Yet, as we can see today, very little has changed for the Dalit and her or his situation. Yet Gandhi was very much effected by strands of upper-caste conservative Hinduism, even though he showed us that one can still practice such strands without oppressing Dalits and other ST/SCs and OBCs. This is where Ambedkar comes into play.

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, born into a Dalit Mahar family in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, was a contemporary of Gandhi’s, and, like Gandhi, campaigned for the rights of Dalits all across India. Except his was a much more involved and militant campaign seeking the emancipation of all Dalits across India and one that scourged upper-caste Hindu practices and any semblance of elitist thinking and help from those who carried Brahminic tendencies. Unlike Gandhi who had been born into a well off family (Gandhi’s father served as a dewan, or chief minister, in Porbandar and Rajkot) Ambedkar was a Dalit and grew up being humiliated by his fellow school mates whom where high-caste. As a Mahar, Ambedkar’s duties traditionally were cutting wood for cremation, getting rid of dead cattle, washing wells, delivering messages over long distances, and other menial and degrading tasks. Also, all Mahar’s were to live in segregated areas outside of the villages and towns that they served.(18) Ambedkar was able to study abroad in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, where he meet such thinkers as John Dewey, one of the original founders of the school of pragmatism and a pioneer in functional psychology. His education abroad (which was due to a scholarship given to him by the gaekwar, or ruler, of Baroda)(19) greatly influenced his thinking, just as Gandhi’s education abroad. Yet his education abroad wasn’t the only thing that influenced his thinking, it was also his life as a Dalit, being treated as dirt by other Hindus, as well as a history of “powerful 19th century anti-caste movements in his own province” and “the histories of numerous heterodox, anti-Vedic, materialist sects/schools that have always existed on the fringes of Hinduism.”(20) (For more on this see Part V).

Originally Ambedkar was optimistic about the political and economic emancipation of his peoples, the Dalits, and that they would eventually be integrated into mainstream Indian society. Soon though he would come to realize that this was not the case, and while originally religion didn’t play an initial factor in his political struggles it soon would loom large. After intense struggles with getting rights to access drinking water from village wells, the right to enter temples, and the a struggle in voting rights in 1932 in where he held intense debates with Gandhi who opposed separate voting rights for Dalits, he quickly came to realize, in his mind, that the struggle for Dalit rights was essentially a struggle that was not only political and economic, but also had to do with the ingrained bigotry within the Hindu caste-system itself. He also became disillusioned with the Congress Party, which he saw as filled with upper-caste nationalism that cared more for home rule than for the emancipation of the Dalits. This led him to declare in 1935, “I was born a Hindu, but I will not die a Hindu.(21)

One large weakness that Gandhi had (all though it didn’t undermine his belief in Hinduism and it didn’t make his belief in Hinduism wrong) was that while he was indeed campaigning for the removal of untouchability from Dalits he was, as the same time, publically lauding the caste system as being divinely sanctioned and a source that brought harmony and community to Indian society, as supposed to the capitalistic and individualistic system of the West.(22) Yet what Ambedkar saw and what Gandhi saw, were to different things. Because Ambedkar lived the life of a Dalit he saw first hand how the opposite was actually the case. The caste system couldn’t be divinely sanctioned because it brought so much trauma and pain and suffering to so many people, this was something Ambedkar had experienced first hand while Gandhi, because of his caste privilege and economic privilege as a youth, never experienced. Essentially Gandhi was blind to the deep and inherent flaw in his statements lauding the caste system. If anything, the caste system only brought about social harmony through the oppression of Dalits, SC/STs, and OBCs, it was through their pain that society was able to “gain.” Because of this, Ambedkar was one of Gandhi’s harshest critiques. “Examine the Gandhian attitude to strikes,” stated Ambedkar, “the Gandhian reverence for caste and the Gandhian doctrine of Trusteeship of the rich...Gandhism is the philosophy of the well-to-do and leisured class.”(23) Ambedkar was able to see aspects of the Gandhian movement that others couldn’t (or refused to) see because of their caste background. What Ambedkar saw was a movement that was conservative, upper-caste, and bourgeois. Because Gandhi was upper-caste and because most of his leadership was upper-caste Ambedkar wanted nothing to do with Gandhi, his movement, or the upper-caste dominated Congress Party. Not that they would want anything to do with Ambedkar either since he argued that political democracy was meaningless without radical social transformation and a repudiation of the caste system.(24) Ambedkar stated that the “‘monster of caste’ crosses everyone’s path alike, every which way you may turn: ‘you cannot have political reform, you cannot have economic reform, unless you kill the monster [of caste].’”(25) Ghose states, “For Gandhi, Hinduism and the caste system were not negotiable. But Ambedkar rejected both Hinduism and the caste system as well as the claims of any upper caste to represent the dalits. For Gandhi, Untouchability was an evil within Hinduism, to be reformed by Hindus. For Ambedkar, upper-caste leadership of dalits was abhorrent.”(26) In his 1936 book, Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar stated that upper-caste Hindus and supporters of caste did not deny Dalits a way of life because they were “inhuman or wrong headed...but because they are deeply religious. The myriad hierarchies and taboos of caste have the sanctity of the shastras [scriptures]...people will not change their conduct unless they have ceased to believe in the sanctity of the shastras.”(27) So the real enemy is not the people observing caste but the shastras that teach people to observe the caste system.

With Gandhi, despite his flaws, we saw a devout and observant Hindu fighting to alleviate the Dalits of their plight. With Ambedkar we saw a Dalit militantly, and without remorse, completely take on the system of caste at full speed in order to emancipate his people by any means necessary. In fact, on October 14, 1956 Ambedkar, along with 200,000 or so of his followers, renounced Hinduism and converted to Buddhism in Nagpur, India in a final repudiation of Hinduism and of the caste system.(28)

Because of Gandhi and Ambedkar the constitution of India outlawed discrimination based on caste and also created “reservations” (affirmative action policies).(29) Yet despite the legal emancipation of Dalits, SC/STs, and OBCs, Dalits are still harshly discriminated against. Gail Omvedt wrote in The Hindu that:

The reservation system was instituted not so much on the basis of the Constitution as on that of the decades-old elite resistance to restructuring public employment. It serves several purposes. It allows the elite to maintain the facade of a generous patron of Dalits while continuing to deprive them of mas-level education and access to resources. It provides a process to absorb some of their brightest members into a system still based more on extortion and corruption than true public service. Finally, it continues to block true representation of the majority of the nation’s population.”(30)

Yet, even with these factors Dalits are still fighting as they have been since the death of Ambedkar. In 1972 emerged the Dalit Panthers (borrowing their name from the American Black Panther Party for Self Defense) which was made up mostly of militant poets and writers seeking full emancipation of Dalits in India. Yet within a few years the movement splintered and became coopted by the government elite as its members joined several government committees and panels. In 1984 the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) was formed after Dalit leaders Kanshi Ram and Mayawati Kumari broke away from BAMCEF (All-India Backward and Minority Employees Federation, set up as a “talent bank” for Dalits in 1976). The BSP was set up to represent Dalits, SC/STs, and OBCs in the government of India. Yet despite their rise in power in key states such as Uttar Pradesh it has fromed governments with and has allied itself with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the utter embodiment of conservative caste worshiping Hindu nationalism, especially when it attacks Muslims, Dalits, and others whom are not high-caste Hindus. Ghose explains that their hasn’t been able to be a solid Dalit and “society of the backward” movement because of the nature of the caste system (because of the many diverse states Dalits from different parts of India can’t even speak to each other due to language barriers) and “because of the nature of agrarian relations, which pits backward castes against each other and thus divides the society of the backward.” Also, “[s]ince brahmins have become urbanized, it is the intermediate backward castes (those just above the ‘pollution line’) who have become owners of the land on which the dalit is a laborer. This has led several dalit intellectuals to argue that the greater enemy of the dalit is no longer the brahmin but the intermediate castes,”(31) which I’m sure delights many of the Brahmin caste.

Yet despite all of this we have seen in Parts V and VI how Hinduism, instead of being a tool for oppression, can instead be used as a tool for liberation. Instead of taking the Vedas and other religious texts at their word many Hindus have been able to reject certain aspects of sacred Hindu literature that have Brahminic supremacist tendencies, and have still be able to hold onto their core Hindu beliefs, but without harming themselves or others. Also, we have seen, especially in the example of Ambedkar, how Dalits have taken their destiny into their own hands in order to liberate themselves. We see that Dalits can see certain aspects of so called “reformed” Hinduism that others can’t, mainly that many of these “reformed” Hindus were actually still perpetuating high-caste tendencies and were in effect, talking down to Dalits (such as Gandhi’s term “harijan,” which Ambedkar and other Dalits found utterly repugnant). Because of this, Dalits are the ones who are to liberate themselves and no one else, anyone other than a Dalit actively trying to lead Dalits is essentially perpetuating their upper-caste privilege and in turn is doing more harm than good. No one can claim (without being ignorant to history, caste oppression, and utterly arrogant) to be a leader of Dalits except a Dalit. Hindu’s can, and should, fight for Dalit rights. By saying that Dalit’s are the only ones who can liberate themselves however doesn’t mean that upper-caste Hindu’s are off the hook. In fact, the opposite is true. Because many upper-caste Hindu’s enjoy benefits in a society that is based on caste oppression and the exploitation of Sudras, Dalits, SC/STs, and OBCs, they must critically look at themselves and at the caste system in place that keeps them propped up in a life of privilege. Upper-caste Hindus (who don’t need to loose their religious beliefs, all though for some that may be impossible, and others, at no fault of their own, may find losing their belief to be a benefit, and I don’t fault them for it) must actively help out Dalits by speaking to others within society about the plight of the Dalits and by speaking about caste privilege and its necessary destruction. I cannot know where the struggle for Dalit rights will head since I am an outsider but I do know that as Dalits take charge (as they have for many decades now) and as fellow Hindus continue to use their religion in a liberating manner (and to attack those aspects of Hinduism that are oppressive) there can be a strong liberating voice that will demand, and get, revolutionary change in the system. As an outsider I will wait and see how this continues to unfold.

Notes

1. Ghose, Sagarika. “The Dalit in India.” Social Research 70, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 85.
2. Communist Party of India (Marxist). “Resolution Adopted At The All India Convention On
Problems of Dalits” (New Delhi: February 22, 2006), 1. See also part II of this series in my blog post http://mustardkernal.blogspot.com/2006/09/opression-of-shudras-in-india-part-ii.html.
3. Ghose, “The Dalit in India,” 84.
4. See http://mustardkernal.blogspot.com/2006/08/oppression-of-shudras-in-india-marxist.html.
5.Ghose, “The Dalit in India,” 84.
6. Communist Party India (Marxist), “Problems of Dalits,” 5.
7. Ghose, “The Dalit in India,” 97-98.
8. Grey, Mary. “Dalit Women and the Struggle for Justice in a World of Global Capitalism.”
Feminist Theology: The Journal of Britain & Ireland School of Feminist Theology 14, no. 1
(Sept. 2005): 135-136.
9. Communist Party India (Marxist), “Problems of Dalits,” 5.
10. Encyclopedia Britannica, 2006, “Vivekananda,” available at Encyclopedia Britannica Online
http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-9075594.
11. Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia. “Vedanta,” available at FirstSearch
http://firstsearch.oclc.org.ezproxy (accessed Nov. 25, 2006).
12. Encyclopedia Britannica, “Vivekananda.”
13. Ghose, “The Dalit in India,” 92.
14. Encyclopedia Britannica, “Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand,” available at Encyclopedia
Britannica Online http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-9109421.
15. Ibid., http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-22634.
16. Ibid., http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-22636.
17. Prakash, Madhu Suri. “Remaking Our Soil: Gandhi’s Revolution for the 21st Century.”
Encounter 15, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 23-24.
18. Meera, Nanda. “A ‘Broken People’ Defend Science: Reconstructing the Deweyan Buddha of
India’s Dalits.” Social Epistemology 15, no. 4 (Oct. 2001): 348.
19. Encyclopedia Britannica, “Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji,” available at Encyclopedia Britannica
Online http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-9006040.
20. Meera, “A ‘Broken People’ Defend Science,” 336-337.
21. Ibid., 349.
22. Ibid., 350.
23. Ghose, “The Dalit in India,” 94.
24. Ibid., 95.
25. Meera, “A ‘Broken People’ Defend Science,” 351.
26. Ghose, “The Dalit in India,” 96.
27. Ambedkar, B. R. Annihilation of Caste (Jalandhar: Bhim Patrika Publications, 1936), 111.
28. Encyclopedia Britannica, “Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji,”; and Meera, “A ‘Broken People’
Defend Science,” 348.
29. Ghose, “The Dalit in India,” 96.
30. Omvedt, Gail. “Caste, Race and Sociologists.” The Hindu, 14 March 2001.
31. Ghose, “The Dalit in India,” 100-101.

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Announcement: A New Blog

Just a short announcement. I've started a new blog project with my good friend Carlo Montemayor. The blog is called "Double Consciousness" and its purpose is towards the study and refutation of white supremacy and white privilege in American society and the study of contemporary racist thought and how it effects people of color and whites. This is a political blog meant more for personal comment than in depth political analysis (so, basically the opposite of this blog that is more focused on in depth political and theological analysis), although we will occasionally have blogs with in depth political analysis.

Double Consciousness is a term that comes from the pen of W. E. B. Du Bois which was made popular in his book The Souls of Black Folk. For Du Bois it meant “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” and of having two identities, one being American and the other being a person of color. “Two warring ideals in one dark body.” The title is also a pun on the fact that the Carlo and I, are of different ethnicities which obviously effects the way we perceive the world. I'm white (three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Guatemalan) and Carlo is Pilipino. Despite this fact we are both unified in our thought on critiquing white privilege in American society and in combating its effects on people of color.

Muslims and Sharia: The Real Sharia, Democracy, and Patriarchy

By Mona Eltahawy

This essay first appeared on Saudi Debate and then on Muslim WakeUp!, a Muslim blog which “seeks to bring together Muslims and non-Muslims in American and around the globe in efforts that celebrate cultural and spiritual diversity, tolerance, and understanding." On Muslim WakeUp! it was titled “Copenhagen Sharia Conference Celebrates ‘Heresy.’” Mona Eltahawy has worked for Reuters and is a commentator and an internaitonl lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues who is based in New York.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

This summer at the end of a day-long conference in Copenhagen on freedom of expression in the Arab world a young man with slightly faltering Arabic asked to speak to me.

“Would you give me one example of why freedom of expression and democracy are good things?” he asked after introducing himself as Abdel-Hamid. He apologized for what he described as his basic Arabic, explaining that he was born and raised in Denmark to Arab parents.

At first I thought his question was a joke. The other conference speakers and I had spent hours explaining how the sorry lack of freedom of expression had harmed Arab civil society. And surely as a Dane he appreciated the democracy and freedoms he enjoyed?

“No, really, tell me,” he persisted. “Democracy is the rule of the people. Islam is the rule of the Sharia. So what’s good about democracy and freedom of expression?”

When I realized he was serious – and when I began to see the direction his argument was heading – I dragged out my usual defense to his line of thinking: whose version of Sharia, I asked him? Iran? Turkey? Saudi Arabia? Egypt, my country of birth?

“The Sharia of God,” he adamantly replied.

“There is no such thing,” I told Abdel-Hamid.

That was essentially the message at another conference that took me back to Copenhagen in November at which speaker after speaker bemoaned the Muslim fundamentalist reduction of Sharia to a set of laws.

It has become fashionable among radical Muslims in the West to long for the application of Sharia. Abdel-Hamid, my summer Copenhagen interlocutor and adherent to the idea that there was only one kind of Sharia – that of God -, identified himself as a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the radical Islamist group that wants to reestablish the Caliphate and does not believe Islam is compatible with democracy.

In many parts of the Muslim world, what the State has deemed Islamic is slapped with the label “Sharia”. So when a murderer or a drug dealer is beheaded in Saudi Arabia, it is ostensibly out of adherence to Sharia.

When a dictator or a regime feels the need to burnish their Islamic credentials – often at a time of growing radical Muslim opposition – they make their country’s legislation “more Islamic”. Take Pakistan’s late President General. Zia ul-Haq who in 1979 introduced the Hudood Ordinances, notorious not so much for making Pakistan “more Islamic” but for punishing rather than protecting women who have been raped.

Under the Hudood Ordinances, a rape victim had to produce four male witnesses to prove the crime or face the possibility of prosecution for adultery. President Gen. Pervez Musharraf on Dec. 1 signed into law an amendment to the controversial rape statute to make it easier to prosecute sexual assault cases. Thousands of Islamists gathered at separate events throughout Pakistan to protest the changes.

One has to wonder what kind of Islam those protestors follow and how it came to be so shamefully reduced to an obsession over sex and women.

As the Associated Press reported, under the new law, called the Protection of Women Bill, judges can choose whether a rape case should be tried in a criminal court - where the four-witness rule would not apply - or under the old Islamic law, i.e. the Hudood Ordinance.

And that is exactly the lie at the heart of the calls for Sharia. Why are there criminal courts in which the old Islamic law does not apply? In many Muslim countries, the justice system has been modernized and has adopted either Roman or Napoleonic law, with the exception of one area which stubbornly remains caught in the cobweb of edicts issued by Muslim scholars who lived centuries ago – family law. In other words, in many Muslim countries Sharia is used only to govern the lives of women and children with regards to marriage, divorce and custody of children.

How refreshing therefore it was to hear Emory University law professor Abdullahi An-Nai’m point out that lie at the heart of the calls for Sharia by saying it was essentially an attempt to “protect a patriarchal system by calling it Sharia”.

“I need a secular state to be the kind of Muslim I need to be,” he told the conference.

As Egyptian liberal Muslim scholar Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid noted, “Sharia” these days means nothing more than the “haram” (forbidden) and the “halal” (permissible).

The definition of Sharia as law is based on 500 verses of the Quran, Abu Zeid reminded us – that is just 16 percent of the Quran.

It was a relief to hear Abdel-Hamid’s adamant theory debunked in his own city – and how I wish he was there to hear. But more importantly, Abu Zeid, An-Nai’m and their fellow speakers were crafting the instruments by which all of the Muslims who were present could take the Sharia argument apart.

In a climate of growing right-wing anti-Muslim rhetoric, particularly in Europe, some in the Muslim community find it difficult to stand up to radical Islamist posturing on Sharia. Such hesitation is often based on a mix of reluctance to openly criticize fellow Muslims – so as to not contribute to a further demonization of Muslims – and ignorance as to exactly what the word Sharia means and what the concept entails.

The conference, called “Sharia in a modern context”, was organized by Democratic Muslims, a liberal Muslim group that was launched as an alternative to the voices of radical imams in Denmark during the controversy that surrounded publication of cartoons featuring Prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten.

If the talks given by each speaker represented the tools which we could use to dismantle the Sharia argument, then the lives of the speakers themselves were the starkest examples of the danger of Islamist ideology run amok.

None of the speakers lives in his country of birth. That is a sad testament to the dangerously conservative environment in many Muslim countries today. But the speakers’ presence at the conference and at the various western universities where they teach were testaments to their courage and determination to continue their fearless work.

Abu Zeid, Ibn Rushd Chair of Humanism and Islam at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands, is former Professor of Arabic literature at Cairo University. In 1995 a Cairo appeals court sided with Muslim fundamentalists who raised a case to demand Abu Zeid divorce his wife on the ground of his alleged apostasy. The fundamentalists accused Abu Zeid of apostasy because of his liberal theories on Islam.
The day the appeals court issued its verdict, I was a correspondent with Reuters News Agency in Cairo. I clearly remember typing an urgent bulletin announcing the verdict while thinking it was time to buy a one-way ticket out of my country.

After the court’s verdict against Abu Zeid, Ayman al-Zawahri – who is today al-Qaeda’s number two but in 1995 was head of the Egyptian terrorist group Islamic Jihad – called for the scholar’s murder. Abu Zeid and his wife, fellow academic Ibtihal Younes, left for The Netherlands where they have lived and taught since.
An-Nai’m, an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights, and Mohamed Mahmoud, who teaches comparative religion at Tufts University in Boston, were both students of Sudanese Muslim reformer Mahmoud Taha who was publicly executed for his liberal views by then President Jaafar Nimeri whose introduction of Sharia was opposed by Taha.

Bassam Tibi, a Syrian-born German political scientist who is Professor of International Relations in Goettingen, received a death threat in Karachi when he told a conference that Sharia was not divine.

His points were particularly pertinent to a Europe increasingly struggling with ways to react to radical Islamists. While lamenting European governments’ habit of turning to the most conservative in the Muslim community to speak on its behalf he vowed “In the name of multiculturalism I will not accept cultural rights as a cover for Sharia”.

“I believe in Sharia as morality not as state law,” he said. “I am not willing to shut up about human rights abuses by Islamists just because of the right wing. They are my enemy too.”

“Islamophobia is the weapon of Islamists to silence critics. I do not believe Europe will become Islamist – that is the fantasy of both Islamists and the right wing,” Tibi said. “Are European Muslims committed to democracy or political Islam and Sharia? The debate should take place in Europe.”

One of the best ways to stimulate such a debate is to highlight the views of the scholars who spoke at the conference both within the Muslim community and outside it.

It is imperative that non-Muslims hear the vigorous debates that are taking place between Muslims over controversial issues such as Sharia. The argument between Abdel-Hamid and me is the best proof that Muslim thought is not monolithic.

How representative are we? That is the question most often asked of those of us who call ourselves liberal Muslims. I will let An-Nai’m and Abu Zeid reply:

“Is my voice the minority or the majority? That is a value judgment,”An-Nai’m said. “The question instead should be is my voice loud enough? Islamists blow themselves up and they make the news. My lecture on human rights doesn’t make the news.”

“Islamic transformation is underway,” he added. “My view is demographically representative of the majority of Muslims but it is not very loud……Who defines what Islam is? Islam is what Muslims make of it. Heresy? I celebrate heresy.”

Abu Zeid simply asked “Who said reformation comes out of the majority?”

“We shouldn’t be ashamed of being the minority,” he added. “Mohammed and his people were a minority at first.”

And if you’re wondering what example I gave to prove to Abdel-Hamid that democracy and freedom of expression were good things, all I had to do was point to him and say “you are my proof”.

Hizb-ut-Tahrir is banned in most Muslims countries whereas in Denmark the organization is legal and operates openly.

Image From:
Middle East Institute

Iraq In Reverse

By Rorik Strindberg

Rorik Strindberg, a regular contributor to this blog, is a junior at San Diego State University and studies history. This is an opinion piece on the justificaiton of the invasion of Iraq and how American foreign policy can be a force for positive change in the world. I will be continuing my blog series “Mesopotamia Burning,” within the next week. Part I was an overview of my ten part series and part II was on the coup in Iran and the Iran-Iraq War leading up to the invasion of Kuwait. The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

In Kurt Vonnegut's slaughter house 9 there is an interesting section where the main character watches the bombing of Dresden in reverse. Thought Vonnegut incorrectly identifies the British action for an American one the message is still the same. Bomber send out metal objects that vacuumed up the fire on the city, take the fire home and store them deep in the mountains, never to harm any one again. All the while forgetting the fact that the reverse would include, a dead Hitler pulling a strange object out of his head, and siring to life, and a return of the Jews and gypsies to the constriction camps and death camps.

The "reverse" Iraq would be much the same; a bearded Saddam would be taken from his court room and jail cell, and escorted by American troops to a hole in the ground. F-16 would fly over the burning Mr. Zarqawi, and again he would live to torture, later Zarqawi would return to Northern Iraq, to assassinate Kurdish leaders. A-10 warthogs would suck the lead out of Saddam's demonic sons, and they would spring to life. The new parliamentarians would leave the capital, some returning to exile in foreign nation, others to torture chambers. Vote would be taken out of the hand of the civil servants who counted them, returned to the Iraqi citizens where they would wipe out their votes. Slowly Saddam would make his triumphant return to Baghdad. The mass graves for Iraqi decedents would be covered again, for no one to find again. The first elections in Egypt and Saudi Arabia would fallow the same pattern as the Iraqi ones. Moammar Qaddafi would take back the information on the Khan nuclear Wall-Mart. American troops would amass in the streets of Baghdad to erect the statue of Saddam. Finally silencing the cheers of the Iraqi masses as an American flag is used to polish the face of Saddam. Side by side Saddam and his sons would reign over the Iraqi people as the American troops left.

This is not a reality that I want to see, thank god that this is not possible for many would like to see it. War is bad but the alternative is often worse. True many valiant young boys died fighting the destruction of Hitler, but how many would have died if we did not fight Hitler?

Image From:
Kurdistan Democratic Party