Egypt...How do we move? In what direction? How do we do this? There is a consensus of urgency, of impending catastrophes, but what action do we take? Many of us think that if the operators of the system are changed that the situation will be resolved, but that is an illusion. We need to come together immediately and move to create a society that is beyond our current reality. A start would be that we exchange our nouns for verbs. If we say 'education', we submit ourselves to someone educating us, but if we change to the verb 'learn', we recover the ability for ourselves to learn; for it is we who learn, we who teach ourselves, by reading and experimenting, learning from others who before us have sought different worlds, sending us messages from other worlds, as those Indigenous Rebels who call themselves the Zapatistas, deep inside the Lacandon jungle, before we had even heard of them. We need to find a way that we can all partake in learning, and give away our dependency. So, health becomes healing; how do we heal ourselves? The next action is clear. How do we dismantle the State apparatus of repression? By making this apparatus irrelevant. Capitalist production, extraction, and exploitation – how do we eliminate these? By minimizing their need to exist. We are in a structure of domination but how do we urgently dissolve this structure? By making it unnecessary, so that then everything will come into place. After all, just saying ‘no’ is not enough. This ‘no’ has to be accompanied by the creation of alternatives.
But
before all else let’s analyze our current circumstances and situation, and
allow me to say that as a Muslim anarchist I’m against any
form of institutionalized or hierarchical organization of religion, let alone
any such thing as a capitalist nation-State, regardless of its nature,
theocratic, secular, or otherwise. Our only hope is popular self-organization[i]
and nothing short of this in its goals. Why do I say this? Because of our
delusions and misunderstood analysis regarding the Egyptian military, The
Brotherhood, Tamarod and our own crisis of identity. Therefore, certain things
need to be clear and understood given the stakes involved, and so in moving
forth:
Issue 1: Who is Abdul
Fatah Al-Sisi?
Abdul
Fatah Al-Sisi, is head of the Egyptian Army and Supreme Council of Armed Forces
(SCAF) in Egypt, and was ordered to power by president elect Mohammed Morsi on
August, 12th, 2012, replacing SCAF’s former head Mohamed Hussein
Tantawi, one of Hosni Mubarak’s henchmen, following the “deaths of 16 Egyptian
soldiers and the injury of 7 others”[ii]
in Sinai by militant ‘Islamists’; an opportune event that Morsi seized, less
than a year ago, to ‘honorably’ excuse/dismiss Tantawi. Al-Sisi, Tantawi’s
student, has been described as quiet and religious (whatever these two terms
indicate of ‘Islamist’ inclining), but more importantly he’s known for having
recently opposed Morsi’s move to sever relations with Syria for reasons of
Egyptian national security; Egypt & Syria having lived a short-termed union
as one country between 1958-1961, under Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, in what
was then referred to as ‘The United Arab Republic’. More importantly
(particularly for Egyptians, Arabs, and Muslims who are committed to Palestine)
Al-Sisi, as As’ad Abu Khalil writes, is
responsible for the tightening of “the siege on Gaza and… serviced Israel more
than it was serviced in Mubarak's days”[iii].
As the following article titled Egyptian
army demolishes tunnels with Gaza (2013) released today, July 4th,
2013, states: While Egyptians were celebrating Morsi’s ousting, Egyptian army bulldozers, at Al-Sisi’s orders, were “demolishing the
tunnels between Egypt and the Gaza Strip which have functioned as the life-line
to the besieged Gaza Strip since the beginning of the Israeli siege in 2006”[iv].
Moreover, it’s worth noting that Al-Sisi is amongst
the generals who advocated for the implementation of virginity tests as:
“soldiers violently cleared Tahrir square on 9 March, 2011 [and] 17 women were
detained, beaten, prodded with electric shock batons, subjected to strip
searches, forced to submit to ‘virginity tests’ and threatened with
prostitution charges”[v]
(BBC, 2013). According to Al-Ahram newspaper in Egypt, as cited by the BBC, General
Al-Sisi said: “the virginity-test procedure was done to protect the girls from
rape as well as to protect the soldiers and officers from rape accusations”[vi]
(2013). And it is Al-Sisi that still presides over 12,000 known, if not more,
military trials and tribunals of civilians in Egypt, since the January 25th,
2011 uprisings. Egypt is a deep state with oppressive apparatuses that
are bureaucratic, militarized, functioning upon the business model of
conglomerate control by neoliberal elites, across a wide political spectrum,
from Muslim brotherhood members as Khairat El-Shater[vii]
to members of Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (the NDP) yet free. Make
no mistake, Egypt is a security state, and remains guarded by an unrelenting
vicious interior ministry, police force and a corrupt, un-cleansed, judiciary,
from the Mubarak era, since the 2011 uprisings.
Issue 2: Is it a Coup
or not? It was and it wasn’t…’A People’ & the Military
The whole obsessive debate raging on
...is it a coup...is it not...is absurd, when in all honesty attention could’ve
been better paid to monumentally far more critical issues as the prevalent
disease that is sexual harassment[viii]
of women in a hetero-patriarchal society as Egypts’? Still…
Let’s be clear:
It is and it isn't a coup.
It
isn't because of the traditional/classical understanding of what a coup d’etat is,
and that involves: A small but critical segment of the state establishment and
apparatus (usually the army) deciding on their own to take control without the
‘will of the people’ mattering and then deposing the existent government and
replacing it with a ‘civil or military body’ instead of whatever old vanguard
government that existed before a coup occurred. In this sense there was no coup
because ‘the people’ (or at least 33 million according to high estimations and
17 million by low estimations out of a population of over 90 million, of which approximately
50 million are registered voters) willed the removal of Morsi on the street
through the Tamarod[ix]
campaign. It isn’t a coup in the sense that the military didn’t decide to wake
up and conduct a coup that would sacrifice Morsi. It took Tamarod, workers’
general strikes over the past year, along with agreements between opposition
leaders to facilitate for the army to do what it did; that is, a pretext to intervene.
Tamarod (or the 'Mutiny' Campaign), consists of a broad coalition of: the Kefaya Movement, the April 6th Movement, and The
National Salvation Front (itself consisting of approximately 35 parties).
Tamarod even includes members of the former regime, the National Democratic
Party (NDP), ‘so long as they supposedly haven’t been convicted of crimes
against the 2011 uprising’, despite the fact that members of the NDP like Ahmed
Shafiq (who remains a fugitive in the United Arab Emirates, is wanted for
crimes committed during the January 25th, 2011 uprisings, with many
cases pending against him for being prime minster then) have signed on to
Tamarod, with their membership accepted. Tamarod also includes Nasserites like
Hamdeen Sabahi and his supporters, Mohamed El-Baradei and his supporters, along
with those involved with shayfeen.com,
and indeed the Strong Egypt Party (spearheaded by Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh ---
who is a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, having left the movement and
started his own party) and ample more factions and groups mentioned later on.
All
this stated therefore what happened in Egypt recently wasn’t a coup
in the traditional sense. However, seemingly paradoxically, it also was i.e. ‘a
soft coup’, but, again, why? This is because of the very definition itself of a
coup d’etat.
After all:
General
Al-Sisi did state that if Morsi did not respect the ultimatum and the ‘will of
the people’ that the army had already prepared a “blueprint” and a “roadmap”[x]
to carry the nation, Egypt, forward, as Egyptians became the queue and
green-light for the army to go on ahead and maintain itself as the uncontested
red line of the Egyptian nation. The fact is that the Egyptian military is as
any modern military a Military
Industrial Complex[xi],
and regardless of the naiveté of Egyptians who would disagree. The Egyptian
military is a political AND economic institution as any other in the world. It
has been receiving funds from the US, second only to Israel, since Anwar
Al-Sadat signed the Camp David peace accord with Israel, the first Arab and
Muslim treaty that sold our brothers and sisters in Palestine to Zionism. The
Egyptian Military as many already
ought know controls an unknown percentage of the Egyptian economy, estimated
between 15-40% and has its own secret budget that since the 2011 uprising it
has refused to disclose[xii]
to its own people and who the military claims to protect; ironic, given 2011
represented a people’s revolt that the people launched for their right to
dictate to all institutions and people in power how their lives and affairs are
run and in the way the people themselves saw fit. It must be understood that the
Egyptian Military is without question a military caring for its own interests and the
interests of those outside the Egyptian nation. Its loyalty is to the United
States given the disclosed $1.3-$1.5 billion dollars it receives from them (which the military CANNOT
function without), the cost of which is the military’s promise to safeguard American, Western, and Israeli security interests. Indeed, the Egyptian Military is responsible for
the massacre of Coptic Egyptian Christians at Maspero[xiii],
for which none of the military’s members to this moment have been charged or been
held accountable for. Let’s be clear, the reason a majority of Egyptian people feel
a great sense of affinity with the Egyptian army is because of the prevalent
role Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers Movement played in the 1950’s in the
anti-colonial overthrow of King Farouk, along with the British who at the time had
been occupying Egypt as a colonial superpower, since 1801, and before them the
French, when Napolean invaded Egypt in 1798. This affinity with the Egyptian
army predominantly exists too because of the four Arab-Israeli wars, 1948, 1956,
1967, and 1973, that Egyptians partook in. This pride in the military is engrained
in the minds and hearts of many Egyptians because we, the youth, have been
raised by a generation of elders who’ve witnessed and spoon-fed us memories of
an army that no longer exists except in history books, a tale told to us, yet
that nevertheless is an illusion and a phantasy far fetched from an ongoing
reality. But it’s one thing to be infatuated with an army that is no longer
akin to what euphoric memories of it that no longer exist, and another thing
all together to realize that this ‘honorable’ army has undergone structural and
‘ideological’ overhauls since its modern inception and the reigns of Nasser,
Sadat, Mubarak till this very moment. It's sickening when political pundits and
supposedly ‘experts’ were on Arab radio and television stations, Egyptian and
otherwise, filling the airwaves, the past few days, with ignorant propaganda as
they ridiculously claimed that the Egyptian army we see now is the ‘proud army
that has existed, (apparently) throughout the days of the Umayyads, Abbasids,
& Ottomans, and for 1000s of years before’, protecting Egypt’s borders and
Egyptians for millennia, as if Egypt’s geography and political and social
identity has remained unchanged ever since the time of the Pharaohs. To these
pundits, I suggest they read Dr. Khaled Fahmy’s All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed
Ali Pasha, His Army and the Founding of Modern Egypt (1997) for further reference to support my argument regarding
the absurdity of such claims and to highlight how modernity, at the very least,
altered the dynamics of what it is to have and be a part of the military, indeed
to institute it as a military industrial complex. Briefly, Fahmy, in line with
Timothy Mitchel’s Colonizing Egypt (1988),
argues how the advent of Mehmed Ali Pasha ushered in systems of:
“Ordering,
labeling, and surveillance required to control the resistant recruits [of the
military]…as a ‘subtle’ projection of power… [The military] increased [its] need
to control the recruits: giving them each a number, demanding they have passes
(teskere) to leave the camp, and printing papers for roll-call on which
‘missing’ was an established category…[Prevalent became] the great need for
scribes able to handle all this new ordering of men… that the training of
troops conjured up the idea of order, that life was no longer random and that
precise punishments followed precise misconduct”[xiv]
(Ufford, 2003; Fahmy, 1997).
Alternatively, and too in support of my
argument regarding the evolution of modern military structures as part and
parcel of the apparatus of modern nation-States, see Manuel De Landa’s essay Economic, Computers & the War Machine,
in which he writes:
“It has been
Michel Foucault who has most forcefully articulated this view. For him this
intertwining of military and civilian institutions is constitutive of the
modern European capitalist nation-State [with what it entailed in governance
and governing procedures that were transplanted to ‘post-colonial’ nations]. On
one hand, the project of nation building was an integrative movement, forging
bonds that went beyond the primordial ties of family and locality, linking
urban and rural populations under a new social contract. On the other, and
complementing this process of unification, there was the less conscious
project of uniformation, of submitting the new population of free
citizens to intense and continuous training, testing and exercise to yield a
more or less uniform mass of obedient individuals”[xv].
Indeed, in Foucault’s own words in his
seminal text Discipline & Punishment, he writes:
“Historians of
ideas usually attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and
jurists of the eighteenth century; but there was also a military dream of
society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the
meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract,
but to permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights, but to indefinitely
progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic
docility... The Napoleonic regime was not far off and with it the form of state
that was to survive it and, we must not forget, the foundations of which were
laid not only by jurists, but also by soldiers, not only counselors of state,
but also junior officers, not only the men of the courts, but also the men of
the camps. The Roman reference that accompanied this formation certainly bears
with it this double index: citizens and legionnaires, law and maneuvers. While
jurists or philosophers were seeking in the pact a primal model for the
construction or reconstruction of the social body, the soldiers and with them
the technicians of discipline were elaborating procedures for the individual
and collective coercion of bodies”[xvi].
In
sum, it is Napolean’s introduction of the idea of institutionalized
conscription when it comes to modern militaries and that’s very much applied
and ongoing in Egypt to this day that formulates the premise that we, as Arabs,
Muslims and Egyptians, have constructed our militarized societies, politically
and economically, on colonial and imperial European models. It is no secret the
Egyptian military manufactures everything from knives, forks, spoons, to dishwashers and
refrigerators, and even has its own construction companies and projects let alone tourist
resorts. Of course, here I must and have to distinguish between the military elite
(i.e. the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces – SCAF) and the poor and
impoverished soldiers who constitute the military itself. Nevertheless, that
changes nothing in terms of the military being a hetero-patriarchal top-down hierarchical
structure and that it represents the strong-arm of what is still a colonized
Egyptian State.
Issue 3: The
Imperial U.S. and Mainstream Western Media
Without
a doubt then, what happened yesterday, July 3rd, 2013, couldn’t have
happened without the will of the Egyptians masses, or at least a fair majority
of them who partook in direct action and public protest. But what happened also
COULDN’T have happened without the American government ultimately approving the
Egyptian military’s blueprint, including having a say in whoever will rise next
from the opposition into the position of becoming the next Pharaoh, and inspite of Tamarod’s disparaging ethical and political composition. Let’s
not be fooled, America may have been surprised, yes, but they are always
prepared for alternate scenarios; you don’t become a colonial and imperial superpower for over a century
without diabolically planning far, far, ahead in advance, and in anticipation of
‘impossible’ scenarios, especially after the events of 2011. The United States,
rather obviously, never cared who sits at the top of Egypt’s pyramid and throne,
or becomes the next temporary Pharaoh, given they already have the military in
their pockets, the military brought and sold long ago; ultimately, the military’s loyalty
in practice is to the world’s hegemonic superpower, even if in rhetoric, lip
service is paid to Egyptians; so much for the myth of ‘the people’s army’. No
one sits on the throne without the American government and the Egyptian
military’s political-economic approval in the midst of backdoor deals and
ongoing proxy wars in a region fraught across from Iraq, to Syria, to Lebanon,
the Arabian Peninsula, and Northern Africa. The policies that would have to be
implemented by whoever is in power in Egypt, undoubtedly, would have to remain
neoliberal in nature and as always Israel’s security is to be safeguarded and
protected at any and all cost, even if the price is Egyptian, Arab and Muslim
blood itself, already rather cheap as it is all over the world. Today, the U.S.
Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and U.S.
Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), the Committee’s Ranking Member, released the following
statement in response to ongoing events in Egypt:
“It is now up to the Egyptian
military to demonstrate that the new transitional government can and will
govern in a transparent manner and work to return the country to democratic
rule. We are encouraged that a broad cross-section of Egyptians will
gather to rewrite the constitution. All parties in Egypt must show
restraint, prevent violence, and prepare to be productive players in the future
democratic Egypt. We encourage the military to exercise extreme caution
moving forward and support sound democratic institutions through which the
people and future governments can flourish.”[xvii]
Moving
forth, the fact that Western and specifically U.S. media outlets, were frazzled,
and supposedly proclaimed ‘solidarity’ with Morsi, is beside the point; the
U.S. is always at a loss for vocabulary when it comes to issues outside the
purview of its own narcissistic affairs. The West’s surprise is only a
consequence of the fact that they want and expect stability in the Middle East,
given the events ongoing regionally these past 2 years. The United States in particular
isn’t keen on headaches beyond the spinning plates they’re already juggling
(between economic reforms, health care debates, and immigration crises to the fiasco over
intelligence leaks, Guantanamo force-feedings and drone controversies etc etc). In sum, the United States
government and the Obama administration are hardly interested in preoccupying themselves with seductively
selecting from the alternative factions composing Tamarod and that soon
enough will be too divided and factional on their own; that is, given Tamarod’s
hodge-podge composition, even if they’ve temporarily formed a united front and
uneasy alliance for a short-sighted particular objective i.e. the removal of
Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, that there was a complete media
blackout in the U.S. as such shouldn’t be a surprise (besides of course it being
close to the 4rth of July, a day for America to self-obsess over how much of a divine
wonder it is to the world, at the expense of the genocide and enslavement of
indigenous peoples, people of color, and minorities of all kinds, as if America
needs to obsess more than it already does the rest of the 364 days of the year).
The American media’s hesitancy to shift from ‘supporting’ Morsi and their
insistence on calling it a coup is no less surprising given the colonial and
imperial orientalist and blind reportage these same corporate outlets took when
Hosni Mubarak was first being ousted and whom the American government had
supported for 30 or so odd years. Indeed, this hypocritical stance shouldn’t be
strange and is in line with Hillary Clinton and the American government’s
hesitant position, at first, to support the Egyptian uprising of 2011 only then
to hail the advent of the colonially dubbed ‘Arab Spring’ and the will of the people that led it when there was no stopping these revolts. The first, second,
third, and infinite interest of the United States, Europe and the West will
always be Israel's security and their own economic interests, indeed the resource
exploitation[xviii]
of the Global South, but particularly the Middle East beginning with Egypt,
guaranteed by the Egyptian military itself.
I
detest, no less, than As’ad Abu Khalil the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, but
also agree with him when he writes:
“But Al-Sisi and his other henchmen have less legitimacy
than even the lousy Morsi. Any popular legitimacy that is lent to Sisi can
permit him in the future to overthrow a different elected government, perhaps a
progressive government. The battle against the Ikhwan should proceed
side-by-side with a battle against the military dictators of Egypt who serve
US-Israeli alliance. Lastly, I wish to point out that the Likudnik House
of Saud media, like Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat (mouthpiece of Prince Salman and his
sons) are very pleased with Al-Sisi. That should be indicative”[xix]
(2013).
Indeed,
the Petro-monarchs of the Gulf must be pleased, if not thrilled, with these
ongoing events, being the first to congratulate Egyptians, Al-Sisi, and the new
interim president, Adly Mansour, who in 1992 was
appointed vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court by the now ousted
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. I am speaking of Petro-monarchs, who at the very discovery of black gold sold their traditions and souls, becoming brown men
who’ve embraced white values and masks, building phallic skyscrapers to no end, piercing heavenly clouds, skies and sun, in an attempt at attaining divine, as if in a wish to dethrone God himself. Meanwhile, the satire was that while the U.S.
media turned a blind eye to the events in Egypt, Arab and Egyptian media
outlets were interviewing police and interior
ministry personal on the ground in Tahrir who were encouraging people further
to get the military involved as if what happened during the events of Mohammad
Mahmoud[xx],
Itahidiya, indeed the massacre of our martyrs at the hands of police and interior
ministry forces on January the 25th, 2011, onwards, was forgotten; and, again, the
media did this when hardly anyone belonging to these government apparatuses has
been prosecuted throughout these 2 years following a ‘revolution’ still
ongoing! Yet Egyptian and Arab reporters, more or less and bar none, were keen and quick to proclaim on air: ‘the police and people are one; we’re glad we’ve reconciled’.
No
the blood of our martyrs will not be forgotten, till those accountable are
brought to justice to us, and by us, the people, not by politicians for them to
score political points for their reelections. And certainly not by a judiciary,
that isn’t just in need of cleansing, but rather in need of purging, given the
judiciary’s complete ineptness, also unsurprising, given the judiciary’s lack of
concern with ethical and political commitments that would serve as foundations and a guide for
any society striving towards social justice and upon which jurisprudence would
be applied! Let’s then not forget that there was an alliance
signed off on by the United States, between the Muslim Brotherhood & SCAF, and
that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power; a Muslim brotherhood that initially
in its inception and in practice, through the social services it provided to
the disenfranchised (when the Egyptian state could care less for the better
part of a century), was guided by concerns for social justice, even if the MB
ultimately strayed from this trajectory. Of course, ample literature exists to
confirm the Brotherhood’s services to the disenfranchised (one of the most
recent being Leila Ahmed’s book A Quiet
Revolution (2011)) but who hardly reads beyond what they think and what
they know anymore! After all, all we like to do is point fingers, without
reflecting critically and dealing with our own history, as we continue to
escape looking at ourselves in the mirror out of disgust for what we might
discover and see! Let’s not forget that Qatar might be disappointed with the
current situation in Egypt but certainly not Saudi Arabia and that has been
supporting the even more conservative ‘Islamist’ Salafis in Egypt and their
Noor party. Let’s not forget, Let’s not forget…let’s never forget!
Issue 4: The Muslim
Brotherhood, Tamarod and the Alternatives
Yes,
the elite of the Muslim Brotherhood and ample of its indoctrinated
blind-followers and members, were exclusionary, barbarically sectarian, and too
zealous to get to power, but it must be acknowledged that the Muslim
Brotherhood have been the most organized faction in Egypt given they’ve been
building their own ‘autonomous’ zones and institutions (schools, hospitals etc)
for the better part of a century and since their establishment in 1928, and
without one needing to regurgitate the legacy of their indiscriminate torture and imprisonment at
the behest of each and every former regime.
But
then we need to ask ourselves the following question if there’s any hope for us
as Arabs and as Muslims to reconcile, indeed to engage in conflict resolution, Usul Al-Ikhtilaf or what I refer to, in
my work, as an Ethics of Disagreements[xxi]:
Where did this heightened sense of the fascistic tendencies of theirs (patriarchy,
sexism, let alone queerphobia, ageism, ableism, classism, and let’s be honest, that
isn’t exclusive to the Muslim Brotherhood) come from? And let those of us
immune from such fascism, and its sins, be the first to cast the first stone if
we’re indeed self-righteous enough to proclaim as a patriarchal and homophobic
society our immunity from the aforementioned fascistic tendencies ourselves! We’re
all fascists given that fascism has already won through the privileges we enjoy
in relation to one another and our blindness and deafness to the power relations
between us as a society, and that we do little about. After all, all one learns
from oppression (in Arabic zhulm), is
oppression, zhulm; along with what feelings of betrayal, despicable envy and
vengeance accompany this oppression felt and that always finds a way out
and an outlet; in other words, oppression and what visceral emotions it entails are always passed onto someone else, or else it’ll make the individual implode if
not explode. The Muslim Brotherhood, whether they realize it or not, were set
up to fail; to fail themselves, and fail the core essence of what they could’ve
represented and could’ve been in terms of ideals. The Muslim
Brotherhood failed because they sought the same position of power they once
despised instead of orienting themselves and the socially just pillars of Islamic
beliefs (they supposedly believe in) correctly and appropriately towards far more different and radically anarchic
and horizontalist horizons that encapsulate anti-statist and anti-capitalist
spirits and alternatives (for what exactly I mean by this spirit and the
political and ethical orientations that could guide Islam and Muslims towards
anarchistic politics and ethics, and that in fact exist within Islam itself, please
see what I refer to as Islamatismo or
anarca-Islam[xxii]).
If
we (those of us who oppose the Muslim Brotherhood’s particular ‘style’ of
politics) think that the indiscriminate clampdown on the Muslim brotherhood,
irrespective of whether they’re in positions of leadership or not, is the
solution then we need to wake up, because secular (neo)liberals as El-Baradei
aren’t the solution either! If we (those of us who oppose the Muslim
Brotherhood’s particular brand of ‘political Islam’) accept the prevalent
absence of media coverage of pro-Morsi rallies and supporters, let alone accept the shutting down of their news channels, as bearded men mistakenly get
taken to be brotherhood members are harassed, then we are no less fascist than the Muslim Brotherhood ourselves! I expect nothing short of the
Muslim Brotherhood being blamed for all the atrocities and injustices that have
gone on since January 25th, 2011, over the next period in Egypt, the
Middle East, and beyond; indeed, that’s proven to be the case since this
‘article’ was first written. One always needs to construct an enemy to overcome
one’s sense of insecurities, or at least the insecurities that emerge out of
being unable or incapable of knowing how to deal with ‘the Other’; indeed, ‘an
Other’ that in reality composes our own sense of identity and belonging, after all there is
no black race without 'white' (Fanon, 1952). And we, as Arabs and Muslims, have
certainly been caught in a crisis of identity, having to choose between our
identification as secular Arab or Muslim with the advent of modernity. We, as
Arabs and Muslims, unfortunately, have brought into the false colonial binary
of ‘secular/Islamist’ with all the mirroring it entails in demarcating the
difference between ‘civilized/savage’.
As
I said and reiterate the Muslim brotherhood without a doubt are complicit in
terms of what happened and what is happening to them but there are 2 things
Egyptians, Arabs, and Muslims need to be paying attention to:
a)
The now further
heightened fervor to eradicate what’s so wantonly and easily referred to as 'political
Islam' and the desire to side line it as a political force. However, it bears consideration that if by
political Islam (what is meant is 'Islamism') --- then it needs to be clear
that this is not a monolithic, homogenous, category, and is a colonial
construct, appearing first, early 17th and 18th century, in works like Voltaire's play 'Fanatisme' as a synonym --Islamismus-- for Islam, like other
European constructs as Mohammadanism, & what followed of Enlightenment rationales,
& attempts at imposing these terms and forcing those colonized to follow a
'secularized modernity'. Indeed, the same ‘secular modernity’ that operated
under the auspices of doctrines of Manifest
Destiny[xxiii]
and that was responsible for the genocide of Indigenous Peoples of the
Americas, giving us modern concepts and practices as: capitalism, the
nation-State, the prison and military industrial complexes that we've built our
'post-colonial' nations on. On the other hand, in my work, I argue that Islam is inherently political and those who
use this term without understanding what it means, its etymology, and whether
they self-identify as Muslim or not, have brought into the whitewashed false binary
of ‘Islamism/secularism’ and all it entails in reifications when it comes to
the ‘War on Terror’ and Samuel Huntington’s Clash
of Civilizations[xxiv]
thesis; in other words, that ‘Islam is against the West and is incompatible
with liberal modernity and its values of freedom, democracy and liberty’ . Let
us not conflate then the term ‘Islamist’ or ‘political Islam’ with the Muslim Brotherhood
(also not a homogenous group) when the Noor Party consisting of Salafis, and who
practice an even more orthodox breed of Islamism are also present on the
Egyptian, Arab, and Muslim landscape and scene. If anything, such calls for the
eradication of ‘political Islam’ or misunderstanding what it is, is an
indication of an internalized ‘Islamphobia’ by Arabs, Muslims, and others, heightened
post-9/11.
Islamism aside then, if by 'political Islam' what is
being suggested is that Islam is NOT inherently political and gets politicized
by 'fanatics' then that is also a problematic assumption, as any faith based
movement is, arguably, inherently political through the socially just pillars
it establishes in relations to issues of social justice (think of the
forbiddance of interest in Islam, let alone the concept of Khalifahs used in
the plural form in the Quran as opposed to its singular authoritarian form, let
alone the function of Ramadan, & hadeeths of the Prophet advocating for
racial equality, let alone the Quranic verses addressing gender
rights/relations and I certainly don't mean to homogenize Islam here, as many
do, with its 73 or so odd interpretations). There is no getting rid of Islam's
cultural and religious influence in the Middle East; indeed, there is no
getting rid of Islam’s political and ethical existence, in a society as Egypts’.
What needs to happen is that Islam needs to be redefined in terms of its
ethical and political contours and orientations by its practitioners, in my
opinion towards anarchism. Muslims and Arabs need to decolonize their
identities, discourses, and traditions. Besides which it’s impossible to make
people 'forget' this spiritual component that informs a central part of their identity
and that certainly exceeds culture when it comes to issues as gender relations,
queerness etc. Therefore, there is NO sidelining
'political Islam', and that arguably will remain a palpable force to be
reckoned with globally.
b)
To clarify further, what I mean by saying that the Muslim Brotherhood was
'set-up' is the fact that the fulool (members of Mubarak’s ex-regime) have continued
to exist, and given the way the Muslim Brotherhood was organized more than any
portion of the Egyptian masses prior to the uprising, the Muslim Brotherhood
represented the biggest obstacle for the fulool's ongoing agenda to return,
whatever shape or form that attempt at a return takes. The fulool must be
reveling in this scenario where everyone (from the Muslim Brotherhood to the
Military to Tamarod) is being played for a fool as we all partake in proxy and
asymmetric wars against members of our own society and communities, these splits
even causing divisions and rifts within our own families. As for what hope lies with Tamarod, this broad coalition
of a Rebel Campaign (that truly has yet to become rebellious) and that, as
stated, consists of everything from police officers to the army, to
(neo)liberals, to Nasserites, to revolutionary socialists, to anarchists, to
the un-politically oriented, even disenfranchised Muslim brotherhood members
themselves, well, Tamarod will be subject to infighting soon enough. Of course,
the Salafis of the Noor party, more neo-orthodox ‘Islamists’ than even the
brotherhood, too are on the playground, towing the line between the Muslim
Brotherhood and Tamarod, as everybody tries to bed Al-Sisi and the military in
this over-zealousness to attain and reach power. Each group has their own particular interests and
schemes, given that we as Egyptians, Arabs and Muslims have internalized the
colonial Manichean/Machiavellian logic of ‘divide and conquer’ and have not, as
stated, partaken in the decolonization and re-indigenization of ourselves, our
societies and our communities, choosing instead to model ourselves socially,
politically, economically on Western societies as we try and prove to ourselves
and the rest of the world that we’re not savages but rather civilized beings.
To
this end, how can Tamarod not fragment when it rallies around a ‘single-issue’
cause (of getting Morsi and the Muslim brotherhood out) at a time when politics
has never been more fluid? For even when Tamarod claims[xxv]
what they’re against, they hardly claim the ethical and political framework for
which they stand for, let alone the means to concretely achieve those objectives
at the grassroots (referring merely to the buzz words ‘social justice’,
‘freedom’, 'bread', and ‘democracy’ that have become nothing more than empty rhetoric,
impossible to reconcile amongst the broad coalition spectrum established). Tamarod has yet to truly become rebellious in the radical sense of the word. After all,
a ‘revolution’[xxvi]
is not about seizing power but rather knowing what to do with the power seized
after; how will you organize socially, politically, economically, your
communities and how will you do so autonomously; what will you do with a
nuclear power plant, let alone how will you deal with issues as recycling and garbage; how will you
deal with your crises of identity; how will you build a movement that centers
on more than just a ‘superficial’ collectivity of people engaging in direct
action or is that all we Egyptians, Arabs, and Muslims are capable of and have mastered now? No wonder the simulacrum of images of millions to Westerners have become too
old and no longer eye-catching enough to warrant attention in comparison to two years ago; indeed, where’s the
substance that sustains and exceeds such mass gatherings in ethics and politics,
needed to truly dazzle the eyes? You do not kill
God as Friedrich Nietzsche teaches without a thousand upon a thousand demagogues
rising, fighting amongst each other! Those directly involved with Tamarod will sell out or will be
brought out, radical or not, young and old, enticed and given posts and
positions with whatever vertical social order is reestablished after this
tumultuous period in our history, as the pyramid and Egypt’s hierarchical political-economic structures are rearranged and reorganized. The crackdown on 'Islamists'
will begin yet again, indeed they will become worse than during Mubarak’s time,
given the legitimacy members of the Muslim Brotherhood feel they had and were
robbed of despite the narrow vision of democracy being applied, as defined
through the ballot box.
It is unfortunate, but I expect the Muslim Brotherhood
to become even more essentialist, more hegemonic and aggressive, as vengeful attempts
are made by state apparatuses to drive them underground. Indeed, I wouldn't be
surprised if 'terrorist' attacks started again, sadly enough. In fact, if one were
following one would notice the initial security reports of the retaliatory acts
that have already begun against Churches, with Sinai yet again burning and on
high alert, as regular Palestinians and Gazans are used by almost everyone as scapegoats for the
ongoing events in Egypt. Muslim brotherhood members have already begun throwing[xxvii] people off rooftops in Alexandria, Egypt, as a Military responds with
disproportionate force towards Muslim brotherhood protestors killing[xxviii]
at least 51 of them.
All
these events are, in part, a distractive war from what's going on externally outside Egypt.
Indeed, these events are built on the colonial and imperial desire to see Egypt
constantly unstable at least internally; that is, to see Egypt too preoccupied to get involved in anything except its own affairs. This is a continuing war of
all against all in the Middle East, a war that will pre-occupy
the Egyptian military, a war that will take place on Egypt’s streets, and that
will result in nothing less – irrespective of the calls for compassion, dialogue,
reconciliation and calm – than further schisms amongst Egyptians, Arabs and
Muslims. I expect splits amongst Islamists themselves (across their broad
spectrum), only for that to produce fundamentalist extremes on all sides. The
ultimate colonial and imperial entrapment that we have brought into is what’s
been stated above given that we have not undergone decolonization and
re-indigenization. We need to move beyond the logic of a capitalist
nation-State as a mode by which we as Arabs, Muslims and Egyptians socially,
politically and economically organize.
This
is important, after all, given that what happens in Egypt ripples across the
region and subsequently across the world --- not only because it’s the largest
Arab-Muslim society in the Middle East but also because of its geopolitical cartographic
evolution and as such its historical influence and significance. Tamarood will
tear each other apart despite being an exemplary example of a people’s power
given 'this people’s power’ is and was only held together, as were the 18 days
of January 25th, 2011, by colonial understandings of nationalism,
(in Arabic, Wattaniyyah[xxix])
as opposed to ethical and political commitments that are clear in their
orientation and that should be what binds people together. Of course, it’s not
possible to understand these ethical and political commitments without
decolonization and re-indigenization, as I discussed in my previous work titled
Arab and Muslim Crises of Identity[xxx]
as we, Arabs and Muslim, are caught between two sets of identifications and loyalties
i.e. identifying as being pan-Arab and pan-Muslim. And so, where to go from here?
As Gustavo
Esteva teaches:
We need to
overcome our need for and dependency on the health and education systems. We
must take these into our own hands, autonomously, without waiting for
corporations and the State to do it for us. We need to escape the medical-pharmaceutical industrial
system, where doctors and hospitals create more diseases than they cure.
We need to
realize that we are: a network of relations, not individuals. This is the way
to develop wisdom. We cannot in one day invent autonomous schools and hospitals,
but we have to think about what it is to heal and live in health. 'I want to
live with dignity in my house and not with tubes that are uselessly prolonging
my life'. Some technologies are necessary, but we need a collective redefinition
about living healthily. For us to indeed
heal ourselves, we need to redefine the
body and soul: it is about becoming well, physically, emotionally, and mentally
so that we may ourselves renew the nourished
capacity to rebel every moment and every day. Millions of people go to bed with
empty stomachs. The rest of us know that our bodies are full of toxic agro-chemicals,
which have come from our food. We are either afraid of hunger or afraid of
eating.
We must propose
how we will challenge the institutional production of truth. Will we wait for the
government to change things? We need to define for ourselves what we eat, not
have the market or the State define these things for us.
We need to produce our food ourselves, by
ourselves. We must recuperate our food autonomy, and realize its importance in
the construction of another world. We need to produce our own food, to decide
what we eat, and how we can organize to define our own food. Each of us
needs to ask every day, what did I do to begin to advance the production of my
own food, to define what I eat?
The
corporations, the market, and the State will do everything possible to impede
transformation and autonomy. As for labor, for the Left, heir to the protestant
work ethic, work has become an idol. The word labor comes from torture. They
torture us with work. We need to stop working and reactivate our lives and
engage in activities that reproduce our ability to live.
We are the words
that we use. Words have been placed in our heads without our permission being
asked and we use these words without knowing what these words mean; we have to reclaim the words we use through decolonization and
re-indigenization. We have to recover the ‘we’, and in every ‘we’, we are not
individuals, we are relations, we are part of different communities. We need to
define what our ethical and political commitments are, and to define these
commitments, we must know them, and we must understand and have a
conviction in them. We can recreate community relations starting with a few
friends, to create a new society, like the inverted roots of a tree that germinate and spread in all directions and to no ends without a center; a rhizome. One of the sins of the Left was an inability
to work together because of schisms and disagreements. If we are boiling with
horror and rage, and confusion, feeling that we can't connect with others, we
must get past that misconception and re-conceptualize our struggle,
understanding how we can ethically disagree amongst ourselves and others.
Moreover, we
need to recognize that anti-capitalism today must also mean anti-patriarchy. We
need to recognize that capitalism is patriarchal. We need to re-invent new worlds, creating new types of societies to liquidate the sexist and patriarchal regimes that already fester deep within us. Gender is a fundamental site of struggle that we
need to center our societies around. With the feminization of politics, women can
recover the histories of our peoples, indeed our sense of being people still
learning what it is to become human and for us to commit ourselves as such to this task is pivotal. It
is women who will take us forward into the new world (Esteva, 2013) [xxxi].
To
conclude on a positive note, it is the constant Bakhtian “carnivalesque”[xxxii]
element of this people’s power nonetheless, indeed its ability to oust anyone
seated in an impatient moment’s notice, even with a few days over a year in
power, that I see hope. Indeed, I see hope that a people are able to this day,
still, to organize themselves horizontally and without a leader (even if most
of them are yet searching for one, not realizing that all power is to the
people and that we are all leaders, rulers and ruled by the laws that we determine
on the street between us ourselves and not through a hierarchical capitalist-State
or its apparatuses’ interventions between us). That is what offers promise, us,
the people, and no one else. The ‘revolution’ will not arrive today, or
tomorrow, but rather the day after if and only if people choose to remain
honest, critical and conscious, indeed if they/we are willing to learn through
reading and experimentation, always already mobilized with a cause, not in need
of waiting for one to appear, or harkening to party and vanguard politics for that matter.
In the end, we need to recognize that resisting
is like breathing, so let us look to new horizons, beyond our own conception,
of what radical, hopeful, ‘revolutions’ could mean, and let us learn from
examples as that set by the Zapatistas[xxxiii].
Indeed, let’s exercise direct democracy not for a day or two or three but
everyday of our lives, no longer harkening to build the Egyptian State, or its
institutions, with what endless bureaucratic laws they bring, but rather
alternatives to them, as we exercise non-hierarchical forms of horizontalist
economic-political-and social organizing, where no one is in power and where
everybody is in power to see through a true people’s power rising. Let’s
refrain from vanguard practices and their associated party politics because
political factions will never benefit us nor will they look to causes beyond
their own! Let’s take control of our own lives together, holding each other’s
hands, outside the dominant orders of capitalism and the nation-State, asking
each other what each of us knows, so that we can walk together, leaving no one
behind, and so we can build together with compassion, love and humility,
becoming forever radical rebels in rebellion and revolt!
[i] For further details see:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0LWdJytXEuwb0VRMmhKN3NXSDA/edit
[ii] For further details see:
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/49785/Egypt/Politics-/Morsi,-Tantawi-return-to-Cairo-from-Sinai-after-fl.aspx
[iii] See Abu Khalil’s
commentary here:~ http://angryarab.blogspot.ca/2013/07/a-coup-not-revolution.html?spref=fb.
[iv] For further
details see:
http://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/africa/6460-egyptian-army-demolishes-tunnels-with-gaza#sthash.lZq70wVy.TwGmtgm3.dpuf).
[v] For further details see:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19256730
[vi] For further details see:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19256730
[vii] For further details see:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/201232784226830522.html
[viii] For further details see: https://www.facebook.com/opantish?hc_location=timeline
And see: http://tahrirsquared.com/node/1929
[ix] For further details see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_(movement)
And see: http://tamarod.com/index.php?page=english
[x] For further details see: http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/egypts-army-may-dissolve-parliament-scrap-constitution.
[xi] For further details on what a Military Industrial Complex is see Andrea Smith’s Hetero-patriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy http://loveharder.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/andrea-smith.pdf
Also Dwight D.
Eisenhower’s speech warning against the military industrial complex’s political
and economic influences here:
http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html
[xii] For further details see: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/02/2012215195912519142.html.
[xiii] For further details see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maspero_demonstrations
[xiv] For further details see Fahmy’s text and Ufford’s review titled ‘Modern
Army? Modern State’ available here: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=7489
[xv] For further
details see: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/netwar.htm.
[xvi] Excerpt is from Michel Foucault’s Discipline
& Punishment (1979: 169). “Napoleon had changed the paradigm from battles of attrition to battles
of annihilation with warfare changing from the dynastic duels of the eighteenth
century to the total warfare with which we are familiar in this century. War
itself has come to rely on the complete mobilization of a society's industrial
and human resources. While the armies of Frederick the Great were composed
mostly of expensive mercenaries, who had to be carefully used in the
battlefield, the Napoleonic armies benefited from the invention of new
institutional means of converting the entire population of a country into a
vast reservoir of human resources. Although technically speaking the French
revolution did not invent compulsory military service, its institutional
innovations did allow its leaders to perform the first modern mass
conscription, involving the conversion of all men into soldiers, and of all
women into cheap laborers. As the famous proclamation of 1793 reads: ‘..all Frenchmen are permanently
requisitioned for service into the armies. Young men will go forth to battle;
married men will forge weapons and transport munitions; women will make tents
and clothing and serve in hospitals; children will make lint from old linen;
and old men will be brought to the public squares to arouse the courage of the
soldiers, while preaching the unity of the Republic and hatred against Kings’…
Even before that, in the Dutch armies of the sixteenth century, this process
had already begun. Civilians tend to think of Frederick Taylor, the late
nineteenth century creator of socalled "scientific management"
techniques, as the pioneer of labor process analysis, that is, the breaking
down of a given factory practice into micromovements and the streamlining of
these movements for greater efficiency and centralized management control. But
Dutch commander Maurice of Nassau had already applied these
methods to the training of his soldiers beginning in the 1560's. Maurice analyzed the motion needed to
load, aim and fire a weapon into its micromovements, redesigned them for
maximum efficiency and then imposed them on his soldiers via continuous drill
and discipline… This is but one example of the idea of militarisation of
society. Recent historians have rediscovered several other cases of the
military origins of what was once thought to be civilian innovations. In recent
times it has been Michel Foucault who has most forcefully articulated this
view.
[xvii] For further details see:
http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/chairman-royce-and-ranking-member-engel-release-joint-statement-ongoing-events-egypt
[xviii] Indeed, how are we
to ever forget “the link between [an ongoing] colonialism and the conversion of
many world areas into food supply zones for Europe (from the creation of sugar
plantations to the taking over of the photosynthetically most active areas of
the world by Europe's ex-colonies) we can realize that this state of affairs
does have consequences for equity and justice” (De Landa).For further details see: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=383). The key point as Manuel De Landa says is
“not to oversimplify: the Green Revolution, for example, failed not because of
the biological aspect, but because of the economic one: the very real
biological benefits (plants bred to have more edible biomass) could only be realized
under economies of scale and these have many hidden costs (power concentration,
deskilling of workforce) which can offset the purely technical benefits”. In
the end, it’s corporate conglomerates that “are encroaching around the most
sensitive points of the food chain [and which] is dangerous: they direct the
evolution of new crops from the processing end, disregarding nutritional
properties if they conflict with industrial ones; the same corporations which
own oil (and hence fertilizers and herbicides) also own seed companies and
other key inputs to farming; and those same corporations are now transferring
genes from one species to another in perverse ways (genes for herbicide
resistance transferred from weeds to crops)”.
[xix] For further details see: http://angryarab.blogspot.ca/2013/07/a-coup-not-revolution.html?spref=fb
[xx] For further details see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20395260
[xx] For further details see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20395260
[xxi] For further details see the blog entry On Usul
al’Ikhtilaf & Usul al’Dhiyafa (otherwise known as an Ethics of
Disagreements & an Ethics of Hospitality) & Epithets on Love here: http://mohamedjeanveneuse.blogspot.ca/2013/06/on-usul-alikhtilaf-usul-aldhiyafa.html
[xxii] See the blog entry titled: Arab and Muslim Crises & Other Vexations: From Zapatismo to
Islamatismo/anarca-Islam
Also see the thesis titled Anarca-Islam here: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mohamed-jean-veneuse-anarca-islam
[xxiii] Briefly, the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny is the Christian religious fervour spawning “the
Second Great Awakening”, and that led many European settlers to believe that
“God himself blessed the growth of the American nation” at the expense of the
genocide of Indigenous peoples of the Americas. In other words, “Native
Americans were considered heathens. By Christianizing the tribes, American
missionaries believed they could save souls and they became among the first to
cross the Mississippi River” and build their new world. For more details, see: ~ http://www.ushistory.org/us/29.asp
[xxiv] For further details see: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Acrobat/Huntington_Clash.pdf
[xxiv] For further details see: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Acrobat/Huntington_Clash.pdf
[xxv] Please see: http://tamarod.com/index.php?page=english
[xxvi] As I’ve written before: I believe revolutions require a double movement (internal
and external transformations of individual-communitarian-societal character).
Revolutions will always remain indefinitely incomplete because of the power
dynamics, differentials and relations that will forever undermine/underpin
them, and that sustain oppression while also providing liberatory potentials
with them. All one hopes for in the end is delineating power differentials
between us, as individuals and communities, not getting rid of them. I
therefore don't believe Egypt nor the Middle East has undergone a revolution
yet, preferring instead terms/concepts like 'revolt', or 'uprising', even
‘insurrection’, but certainly not revolutions. This is because I believe in the
need to differentiate and distinguish between the way revolutions are
documented (or written about historically) and people's revolutionary becomings
(i.e. what ontologically and epistemologically changes/takes place/happens when
a people rise – physically, emotionally, mentally, individually, collectively
and that leads to certain transformations of consciousness individually and
collectively). The two, the way revolutions are documented and people’s
revolutionary becomings, are two different things, because they relate to two
different sets of people in the process of casting off a shame or responding to
that which is intolerable. ’Revolutions’ ought be premised on dealing with
practical questions – how are you going to deal with recycling, garbage, what
are you going to do with a nuclear plant, the army, indeed how are you going to
reconceive your relationship to land through decolonization and
reindigenization & beyond the individualist sense of self and land, indeed
this earth’s utilitarian use.
[xxvii] For further details see:
http://shoebat.com/2013/07/06/video-mursi-supporters-murder-teens-throw-from-roof/
[xxviii] For further details see: http://madamasr.com/content/sheep-and-infidels
[xxviii] For further details see: http://madamasr.com/content/sheep-and-infidels
Also see:
http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_268777/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=abdWS7nV
[xxix] I take Wattaniyah as ‘patriotism’ and not strictly ‘nationalism’ not
solely because of the term’s connection with a certain territory, but rather a
statist logic, that assumes a homogenous populous, even if the term also
signifies that that populous, as Al-Barghouti notes, opposes “foreign invasion”
and do “not hold much content regarding the political identity of the form of
government” they share (2008: 179). The term in fact only refers in reality to
the bond “among different groups of people that have little in common other
than being against colonial domination” and living on what’s constructed and perceived
to be a common territory (Al-Barghouti, 2008: 179). Make no mistake about it,
only the most politically naïve and trusting would wager that nationalism
nowadays carries coherence, and isn’t philosophically bankrupt, when even its
avid and most sympathetic of students, Tom Nairn, acknowledges that
’Nationalism’ is a: “Pathology of modern development history, as inescapable as
‘neurosis’ in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching
to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the
delimmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world (the equivalent of
infantilism for societies) and largely incurable” (2003: 347; Anderson, 2006;
Hobsbawm, 1983). Nations are invented, imagined, enmeshed in contradictions no less
than ‘tradition’. Indeed, imagined as political communities and as “both
inherently limited and sovereign”, for “even the smallest nation will never
know most of its fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the
minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson, 2006; Hobsbawm,
1983). Nationalism “is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it
invents nations where they do not exist” (Gellner, 1964: 169, Anderson, 2006;
Hobsbawm, 1983). This concoction isn’t to be thought of as “‘fabrication’ and
‘falsity’, rather than ‘imagination’ and ‘creation’”, even if it exudes
elements of both, because in imagining – what is fabricated or ‘the narrative’
established – ‘falsities’ and ‘truths’
are recreated and re-envisioned (Anderson, 2006: 6; Hobsbawm, 1983). In the
words of the wise Bell Hooks writes: “I have been thinking about the notion of
perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world
that's becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and
nationalism”. As I have previously argued, the territorial concept and
post-colonial Arabic notion is a problem as it plays upon sentimentalist
hearts, as it always acknowledges an absent consensus on the legitimacy of the
colonial and imperial European idea of modern States, the most active
contributors, and agents of hetero-patriarchy, for they legalize it through law
(Piscatori, 1986: 77; Habeeb, 2011, emphasis added). For as Al-Barghouti writes, “just as ‘Ummah’ was mistranslated into
‘nation’ by Europeans, Arabs have had problems with translating the term
‘nationalism’ into Arabic” (2008: 178). And thus though presently, the word for
‘nation’, “has two Arabic translations that are sometimes seen as mutually
exclusive: ‘Qawmiyyah’ and ‘Wataniyyah’”, this book defers and
distinguishes between the two, with Qawmiyyah referring to belonging to “a
certain group of people, ‘qawm’” whereas “Wataniyyah,
on the other hand, means belonging to the homeland, to a certain territory:
‘watan’” (2008: 178). It’s modern
States that manipulate nationalistic sentiments, imprison their imaginings,
when it is possible to imagine nations, but more so peoples, no longer
obsessively bound by statist imaginaries that facilitate the evocation and
morphing of nationalism through the shameless conformist promotion of loyalty
and devotion, to create exclusionary territories while producing the
commoditized patriotic rhetoric and phantasies that accompanies it.
[xxx] On what I call the Arab and
Muslim Crises of Identity please refer to:
http://mohamedjeanveneuse.blogspot.ca/2013/06/arab-muslim-crises-other-vexations.html
[xxxi] For further details see:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4068-gustavo-esteva-recovering-hope-the-zapatista-example
[xxxii] Mikhail Bakhtin's
famous ‘Carnival and Carnivalesque’ offers four categories of what he calls the
"carnivalistic sense of the world: 1. Free and familiar interaction
between people: in the carnival normally separated people can interact and
freely express themselves to one another. 2. Eccentric behavior: behavior that
was otherwise unacceptable is legitimate in carnival, and human nature's hidden
sides are revealed. 3.carnivalistic misalliances: the free and familiar
attitude of the carnival enables everything which is normally separated to
connect – the sacred with the profane, the new and old, the high and low etc.
4. Sacrilegious: the carnival for Bakhtin is a site of ungodliness, of
blasphemy, profanity and parodies on things that are sacred. For Bakhtin, these
categories are abstract notions of freedom and equality, but rather a lived
experience of the world manifested in sensual forms of ritualistic acts that
are played out as if they were a part of life itself”. See:
http://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.ca/2011/07/mikhail-bakhtin-carnival-and.html
[xxxiii] For a brief introduction to the Zapatistas see: http://www.zapatistarevolution.com
Also see John Holloway’s essay Urban Zapatismo here:
http://www.squiggyrubio.net/documents/hjsr/HollowayZapatismoUrbano.pdf
