Bahrain, smoking gun of American imperialism

Faced with the task of nominating the most dispiriting thing about American politics today, one finds oneself in the predicament of the man handed a cocktail menu at an open bar; his thoughts unable to organise themselves as the sheer breadth and richness of the selection overwhelms him. Is it the charade of the ‘Democrat’-‘Republican’ dichotomy, opposed to one another in theory but so uncannily similar in practice? Is it the way this dialectic - tenuous enough to begin with - is further diluted and decaffeinated by a culture that prizes the path of least resistance, and least ‘offense’, and precludes all real progress by its dogmas of ‘consensus politics’ and ‘bipartisanship’? Might it be the banana-republic populism that can disqualify a presidential candidate for being too educated, and is ready to forgive a man any transgression, and overlook any shortcoming, so long as he loudly proclaims his faith in the Almighty? These defects have a long history, and are probably systemic and ineradicable. What I would say is worst today, however, is the gargantuan foreign policy opportunity slipping through the fumbling fingers of a political class whose understanding of the Middle East increasingly appears to be less sophisticated than even its cretinous predecessor’s. For while Republican candidates bicker among themselves over whose fealty to Israel is the more fanatical, what they ought to be paying far closer attention to are the events that have unfolded in Bahrain. It is here, more than anywhere else in the region, that the Arab people are seeing in broad daylight exactly how much substance and integrity there were in Obama’s promise in Cairo in 2009 of a “new beginning” for American-Arab relations, and a “commitment [...] to governments that reflect the will of the people”.

At first glance, Bahrain might not look so bad. ‘Only’ around 35 people have been killed: nothing like the more than 5,000 dead in Syria. While live ammunition has been fired from the beginning; when one Ali Almeshaima was killed by a shotgun to the back on 14 February; for the most part, the state has ‘merely’ used rubber bullets and tear gas – not quite the fighter jets deployed by Qaddafi. Unlike their Libyan and Syrian counterparts, the Bahraini opposition does not appear to be armed. And no psychopathic pledges to ‘die a martyr’ or references to demonstrators as ‘rats’ have been heard from King Hamad al-Khalifa, who has at least gone through the motions of contrition and reform – apologising for deaths; pardoning a few prisoners; pledging legislative amendments; and commissioning the independent 500-page ‘Bassiouni’ report on the events since February.

However, this kind of bookkeeping ignores the much larger moral and geopolitical point, which is that unlike Qaddafi or Mubarak, who were – eventually – abandoned by Washington, al-Khalifa remains a treasured American ally and business partner (Bahrain being, of course, the home of the Fifth Fleet, the largest American naval base outside its own waters). Worse, al-Khalifa’s fellow American allies, the mirthless monarchs of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have sent as many as 5,000 troops from their joint ‘Peninsula Shield’ coalition to lend a helping hand to the crackdown. All of a sudden, in other words, and for all the world to see, it is precisely those regimes with which the Americans are most friendly that are the ones ruthlessly trampling the budding sprouts of democracy. This is a betrayal that the Arab people are unlikely to forget in a hurry.  

The consequences of this sordid business are difficult to overstate, and will be making themselves known and felt for years to come. Most immediately there is, of course, the human cost. Yes, ‘only’ thirty-five have been killed. But this is merely the extreme end of a much broader spectrum of state-sponsored violence, including but not limited to torture, beatings, gassings and a plethora of other heavy-handed ‘punishments’ documented in cold print in the Bassiouni report. It tells us quite a lot, does it not, that five of the thirty-five deaths have been directly attributed to torture - the forms of which have ranged from sleep deprivation and stress positions to sexual assaults and enforced eating of faeces to good old-fashioned kickings and beatings to the pornographic stuff of lashings, burnings and electrocutions. And of course for each of the more than 500 victims of this mediaeval savagery there is a family without a child or parent, typically denied all contact with the relative or any knowledge of their whereabouts in what are just two of many instances of what the report calls “violation of due process”. 

And then, what is potentially far worse, there is the exacerbation of the Middle East’s most ancient malady: sectarian enmity. It would be an incurious mind that failed to notice that the Bahraini, Saudi, Emirati and Qatari leaders share a common interpretation of Islam, while a different set of politicians – the Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian potentates – profess belief in rival strains of the faith. Similarly, it would take a witless observer to miss that Washington is on better terms with the former bunch than the latter. Not unlike the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, the Bahraini monarchy welds the twin bigotries of sectarianism and ethnic chauvinism; being an exclusively Sunni tribe of Saudi descent ruling over a mix of Sunni and Shia, variously of Ajam, Baharna and Howala ethnicity. It’s no secret that the Bahraini Shia majority have long been de facto second-class citizens in their own country. One of the least encouraging findings of the Bassiouni report was that every Shia detained by the government without exception “made allegations of routine sectarian insults, which included insults relating to Shia religious practices and their religious and political leader”. Not that the attacks were merely verbal – astoundingly, the report documents the state-sponsored demolition of more than forty Shia mosques and shrines in recent months. For the Americans to side with this rabidly sectarian regime – a relic, like so many others, of the British empire – is not only plainly unjust but reckless to the point of lunacy. Good grief, is it any wonder that Muqtada al-Sadr and Hassan Nasrallah are popular?! Surely the dimmest intelligence can see what this perceived American bias toward Sunni populations will do to the country, and one groans with the familiarity of it all when one reads in the Bassiouni report of random Shia reprisal attacks against Sunni civilians. Nor do the prospects appear more promising anywhere else in the region, what with the fatal clashes last month in the Shia eastern province of Saudi Arabia. God help us all if and when this spreads to the powder kegs of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. 

Consider now Nicholas Kristof’s article in the New York Times last week, ‘Repressing Democracy, With American Arms’, in which he cites the astonishing information that Obama may soon be approving a $53 million arms sale to the al-Khalifa regime. The writer and photographer Matthew Cassel, who has kept up a fine campaign on Bahrain at Al Jazeera and the Lebanese Al-Akhbar, has several times remarked on the ‘Made in USA’ inscriptions on the tear gas canisters lining the streets. What a very ugly footnote to Obama’s worthless legacy. To be propping up and arming a British-installed client dictator in protection of naval and energy interests is not something that may be brushed aside as realpolitik – it is nothing less than naked imperialism. What other word is there for it? How else can the hard facts be explained? This is naked imperialism, of a sort that invites dark comparisons with the Pahlavis and Farouks of yesteryear. Any lingering goodwill on the Arab ‘street’ that Obama might have been able to salvage, after three years of supine subservience to an outrageously hostile Israeli government, has met a bloody death in Bahrain. How bitter it is to think how different it could have been, and how very hard it will be to undo the damage and dishonour this time.

Farewell to the least boring man of a generation

The news that Christopher Hitchens has died may have come as many things to many people, but the one description one may not ascribe to it is that it has come as a ‘shock’. He had, after all, been telling us quite plainly that it was going to happen any day now. This was of course characteristic of a man who preferred to deal in unwelcome truths than soothing falsehoods.

Not since the demise of Steve Jobs in October has a death been so immediately and fervently talked about. Facebook and Twitter contacts whom I had no idea were even aware of Hitchens have deluged the internet with messages of bereavement. “Only yesterday”, a friend of mine from London just informed me on WhatsApp, “I was explaining his theory on drinking at lunch – half a bottle of red, not always more, never less”. I myself had been showing a video clip of him on Jesus to a Christian friend over drinks last night. But speaking of unwelcome truths, it occurs to me that since Hitchens had to die some time, it may be for the best that it was sooner rather than later. As he revealed in his magnificent series of Vanity Fair articles, his cancer had already taken away his voice – that gorgeous, Burtonian double bass that could once “stop a New York cab at 30 paces” – without which he would never again appear at the podium. And he wrote repeatedly of his awful fear that he would go on to lose the ability to write, which he believed would render him as good as dead to all but his friends and family. On BBC radio this morning, Ian McEwan, his friend and the dedicatee of God Is Not Great, described a piercing example of his determination to keep writing literally to the very end:

Right at the very end when he was at his most feeble, and his cancer began to overwhelm him, he insisted on a desk by the window away from his bed in the ICU – it took myself and his son to get him into that chair with a pole and eight lines going into his body – and there he was, a man with only a few days to live, turning out three thousand words to meet a deadline. And then finishing it and thinking, Well I’ve got maybe an hour or two, I’ll write something on memorial day and English poetry. And he was dozing off between sentences; the morphine would overwhelm him; and then I’d watch him just jerk himself awake and get down another sentence. He would never give up.

As far as the debates on religion are concerned, there isn’t much to say except that he was the very best; the ‘champion’ of atheism in every sense of the word, who made everyone on stage alongside him look laughable; friends as much as foes. Martin Amis wrote of him that, “In debate, no matter what the motion, I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes”, and indeed, I defy anyone to show me an instance of his losing an argument with a religious man.

But religion, of course, was only one of the causes that agitated him. He had been, ever since his teens, a political animal to the core. ‘Late’ Hitchens, as it were, is somewhat divorced from ‘early’ Hitchens, as an aged whisky takes on qualities unavailable to its younger counterpart (for the details of this – as well as learned advice on drinking whisky – see his memoir, Hitch-22). I have had my political disagreements with him (see e.g. here and here). But let’s just say that a dogged commitment to the freedom of abused peoples was for him a constant and an absolute. His opposition to ‘Vietnam’ was of course shared by millions at the time, but far fewer of his supposed comrades were able to muster quite the same outrage when it came to the Balkans, where Hitchens was among the first to call for international intervention to prevent the Christian Serbian fascists from committing a genocide against the mainly Muslim Bosnians. His later advocacy for the use of force in Iraq was in large part with the emancipation of Iraqi Kurds in mind, some 180,000 of whom had been murdered by Saddam, and whose quasi-national flag he would often wear pinned to his lapel in public. And while he never made it his raison d’être, his dedication to a sovereign (and secular) Palestine was total, going as far as to say in his memoirs that if the Palestinians wanted a state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, “then I have to concede that that is their right”¹. Accepting the Richard Dawkins award earlier this year, he made a point of denouncing “the millennial settlers in Palestine who believe that by bringing in as many fanatics of Jewish origin as they can, and forcing out as many Palestinian Arabs as they can, they may bring on the messiah, and indeed the Apocalypse, and look forward to the common destruction of our species with relish” – rightly drawing attention to what is arguably the most alarming manifestation of religious faith today (a distinction challenged only by the coterminous rise of its militant Islamic counterpart). 

I never knew him or so much as corresponded with him – the one email address I managed to get hold of had been deactivated – so, for me, the loss is not personal. And yet, the man’s death will change my life. As someone for whom reading is as precious as breathing, the pleasure with which I open my laptop in the morning will be marginally but permanently diminished. Never again will that ‘Daily Hitchens’ button on my browser bring new words of his to my attention. He has written everything he is ever going to write, and every event henceforth will have to be faced without the advantage of his ‘take’ on it. 

But in a crucial respect, this may be how he would have wanted it. Surely, few things would have more displeased this titanic adversary of the blindly worshipped and deified leader than the prospect of his becoming one himself. As he tirelessly emphasised, the point is not what to think, but how to think, and how to think for oneself. In his extraordinary body of work and his no less extraordinary life, Hitchens has offered us a masterclass in this art. The challenge will lie in remembering this education, and attempting to live up to the standard he has set. 

¹ Hitchens, C., Hitch-22 (2010), p. 396

A Novel Solution: The intellectual necessity of fiction

Picture the scene: you’re in the company of a new acquaintance whose intelligence and humour have been made evident to you, but whom you do not yet know well. Navigating the climbs and declensions of conversation in the hope of expanding on established common ground, you hazard to bring up the subject of novels. Nothing pretentious – no need here for page-length recitations of Proust or Pride and Prejudice – but perhaps “Did you happen to catch Martin Amis’ latest?” or whatever it might be. And then that sinking sensation as your mystified companion shakes their head and politely asks who that is, explaining that they “only really read non-fiction”. If he’s a man, this statement might even be made with a hint of pride, as though to imply that reading anything less would be a frivolous, infantile and basically effeminate waste of time. I hope at least some of you will know what I’m talking about.

The belief that non-fiction is the terrain of the serious thinker, whilst fiction is little but fairytales for adults is an all-too-common one, I fear, and one which is long overdue repudiation. This is not just because of its essential philistinism, or for any sentimental notion of the ‘transcendence’ of art. On the contrary, the assiduous study of literature offers a practical and tangible education to even the most hard-headed utilitarian. In no sphere is this truer than in politics. 

As an example, I have just finished Palace Walk, the first instalment in the famous ‘Cairo Trilogy’ by the brilliant Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz. I couldn’t have known when I started the book that its author would make a posthumous appearance in the three-way contest between secularists, Islamists and the military that is defining the quagmire of post-Mubarak politics, but I’m very glad that he has, for it’s given me the chance to build on a loathing for religious extremism that I never thought could get any greater. For those who missed the news from last week’s parliamentary elections in Alexandria, the candidate representing the Salafi coalition – that is, the ultra-orthodox Islamists who denounce even the Muslim Brotherhood as infidels, and yearn to replicate the system of government of 7^th century Medina – decried the works of the Nobel Laureate as “inciting promiscuity, prostitution and atheism”. (Well yes, one wants to reply, but what of the books’ faults?) Happily, the sexless fanatic was defeated – albeit by a Brotherhood man...

Palace Walk itself is an irreverent yet humane satire on piety from start to finish. When Mahfouz writes of Amina, the luckless mother of the tyrannically patriarchal al-Jawad household, that “[s]he knew far more about the world of the jinn than that of mankind”, he manages in fourteen words to summarise the entirety of the pity of Islamic fundamentalism. And when the father, al-Sayyid Ahmad, is confronted by a cleric on his notorious extra-marital indulgences, his reply is an unimprovable indictment of religious double standards: “Don’t forget, Shaykh Mutawalli, that the professional women entertainers of today are the slave girls of yesterday, whose purchase and sale God made legal. More than anything else, God is forgiving and merciful.”

It was for these and other moral victories over the faithful that Mahfouz was eventually stabbed in the neck at the age of eighty-two; left debilitated but not dead by a knife belonging to just the sort of person who might vote for a Salafi today. Thus to the ignorant question – ‘why read fiction?’ – one of many possible answers is that fiction and politics are inseparable, and an understanding of one without the other is impossible¹. For who could fully grasp the danger and derangement of the Salafis without first understanding Mahfouz’s novels? Equally, who, without having read The Satanic Verses, could know how insane it was for Ayatollah Khomeini to demand the murder of its author? Incidentally, those who saw the 1989 fatwa as the first shot fired by a newly militant Islamism are overlooking the banning in 1959 of Mahfouz’s Children of Gebelawi, which, like the Verses, included the Prophet Muhammad and his contemporaries amongst its dramatis personae. (It was no coincidence that Mahfouz joined dozens of distinguished Middle Eastern men of letters such as the poets Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish and the intellectuals Edward Said and Amin Maalouf in expressing unconditional solidarity with Salman Rushdie in a dedicated collection of essays published in 1994, in which Mahfouz wrote, “The veritable terrorism of which he is a target is unjustifiable, indefensible [...] One idea can only be opposed by other ideas. Even if the punishment is carried out, the idea as well as the book will remain.” Contrast this with the condemnation Rushdie faced in the Anglophone world from people like Jimmy Carter, Roald Dahl and John le Carré, and you arrive at one of the bleaker ironies of the term ‘Western civilisation’.)

Speaking of Edward Said – that Columbia Professor of English and Comparative Literature, who, like Palace Walk’s Kamal, also grew up in inter-war Cairo in the shadow of a disciplinarian father – did he not make his name in 1978 by saying that it was the fiction of ‘Occidental’ writers, from Homer through Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe and Flaubert to Conrad and Kipling, that reinforced the notion of an untamed ‘Orient’, and thus paved the path for European imperialism? That book, along with its 1993 sequel, Culture and Imperialism, would be a locked door to the strict non-fictioner. 

There are more additional examples than I would care to list or you would care to hear about, but I will mention just three if I may. One probably doesn’t have to have read Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four to understand dictatorship and totalitarianism, but his concepts of ‘Big Brother’, ‘doublethink’, ‘thoughtcrime’ and ‘Newspeak’ have acquired so universal and versatile a currency that it would save one a lot of time and effort to do so (responding to le Carré’s philistine reduction of the Verses to an “insult” of a “great religion”, the expression Rushdie chose in his letter to the Guardian was that he had been “accused of thought crimes”). Orwell’s almost preternatural instinct for the relationship between language and politics (cf. his 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’) enabled him, in the words of Christopher Hitchens, to conclude that the 1938 Moscow trials were fraudulent “on internal literary evidence”² alone, at a time when many more intellectuals than it is polite to remember were celebrating the justice served on the enemies of the Party. And even – if not especially – to those for whom English was not a first language, Orwell’s novels commanded respect among the dissident and endangered: here is the Polish anti-Stalinist Czesław Miłosz in his 1953 classic, The Captive Mind:

A few [of us] have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.³

All that remains to be said here is that if oppositionists living under the Stalin regime thought it worth their while to read the fiction of Orwell (and Swift), then very few of us indeed have valid reason not to.

Moving closer to the present, the conflict in Israel and Occupied Palestine has tended to produce more poetry than prose, though there are a few fine novels to be found. The Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani had already published his masterpiece, Men in the Sun, by the time he was assassinated in 1972, while his contemporary Emile Habibi was even to win an Israeli literary prize in 1992. David Grossman’s has probably been the most powerful Jewish Israeli voice, while Philip Roth’s 1987 tour de force, The Counterlife, captured in just five words the terrifying absolutism of the West Bank settlers: “The Bible is their bible.” Perhaps the most striking scene I’ve yet read, however, appears in the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun. The book centres around Yunis, an aged former Palestinian fida’i, as he lies comatose in an improvised hospital in Shatila, the refugee camp south of Beirut, while the equally improvised ‘Doctor’ Khaleel regales him with an epic repertory of stories of the villages, valleys and violence that make up the collective Palestinian memory (Khoury was himself a member of Fatah in Jordan in the 1960s, before siding with them against the Israelis – and most of his Christian co-religionists – in the Lebanese civil war. He’s been involved with the refugees one way or another ever since). 

To the scene, then: we know in advance to expect something eventful, because Umm Hassan, a Shatila refugee, has managed to get herself back to El Kweikat, the Galilean village of her youth, where after 1948 the Jews “demolished every single house [...] and built the settlement of Beyt ha-Emek – all except for what had been new houses on the hill”, of which Umm Hassan’s had been one. Finally summoning the courage to knock on the door, a Jewish woman answers in surprisingly fluent Arabic, and ushers Umm Hassan and her brother inside. They follow her in and have a seat as the woman fetches them a drink.

The Israeli woman left her in front of the water jug and returned with a pot of Turkish coffee. She poured three cups and sat calmly watching these strangers whose hands shook as they held their coffees. Before Umm Hassan could open her mouth, the Israeli woman asked, “It’s your house, isn’t it?”

“How did you know?” asked Umm Hassan.

“I’ve been waiting for you for a long time. Welcome.”

Umm Hassan took a sip from her cup, the aroma of the coffee overwhelmed her, and she burst into tears.

The women talk about a jug of Umm Hassan’s that’s still on the kitchen counter, decades later. They walk into the garden and discuss the orange orchards, or ‘groves’, as the Jewish woman calls them. Umm Hassan eventually explores the entire house. And then she’s telling her about her life today; how she now lives in a camp on the outskirts of Beirut:

When the Jewish woman heard the word Beirut, she jumped up and changed completely.

“You’re from Beirut?” she cried, the words tumbling out of her mouth and her eyes filling with tears.

“Listen, sister,” the Jewish woman said. “I’m from Beirut too, from Wadi Abu Jmeel. You know Wadi Abu Jmeel, the Jewish district in the centre? They brought me from there when I was twelve years old. I left Beirut and came to this dreary, bleak land. Do you know the Ecole de l’Alliance Israélite? To the right of the school there’s a three-storey building that used to be owned by a Polish Jew called Elie Baron. I’m from there.”

“You’re from Beirut?” Umm Hassan asked in amazement.

“Yes, from Beirut.”

“How did that happen?”

“What do you mean, how did that happen? I’ve no idea. You’re living in Beirut and you’ve come here to cry? I’m the one who should be crying. Get up and go. Get up, sister, and go. Send me to Beirut and take this wretched land back."

Now, a history book can tell you that there were once as many as 20,000 Lebanese Jews, all but a couple of hundred of whom are now in Israel. It can also tell you that perhaps 100,000 Palestinians took refuge in Lebanon after the nakba of ’48. But no historian can tell you what would happen if two such exiles were actually to meet: that task is left to the novelist alone.

Of course, this symbiosis between letters and politics ceases to work the moment one trespasses on the other’s domain. A review of Azar Nafisi’s 2003 memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Hamid Dabashi provides a cautionary tale. The book tells the story of how Nafisi – a Professor at the University of Tehran until her expulsion for refusing to veil herself, after which she moved to America – would invite her brightest female students to her home in Tehran once a week for informal discussions on four staples of the modern Anglophone canon: Lolita, naturally enough, along with The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller and Pride and Prejudice. These symposia, which were intended as relief from the alternating tedium and terror of life under Khomeini as much as anything else, eventually cultivated rich and entirely original interpretations of the works, with whose heroines the girls identified far more personally than Nafisi had imagined they could have. 

For this modest but perhaps symbolic achievement, Nafisi receives a tirade of venomous, hysterical abuse from Dabashi, who calls her a “native informer”, a “colonial agent”, a “comprador intellectual” (his most irritating phrase, used twelve times in the review), a “servant of a white-identified, imperial design” and even an “ideologue in George W Bush’s empire-building project”. Her thoughtcrime – sorry, crime, it appears, was to have Betrayed The Cause by disseminating works of doctrinal impropriety:

[The book] promotes the cause of “Western Classics” at a time when decades of struggle by postcolonial, black and Third World feminists, scholars and activists has [sic] finally succeeded to introduce a modicum of attention to world literatures [...]

Decades into a sustained struggle against the domination of Eurocentric curriculum [sic] in the US academy, fighting to restore democratic dignity to the world literary scene, Nafisi once again pushes the clock back for about half a century by a singular and exclusive praise for the Eurocentricity of the literary imagination.

This sheer Stalinism – appraising books solely on the basis of their ideological purity – seems to form the core of Dabashi’s critical approach. The primary achievement of Nafisi’s book, he says, is to have:

[S]ystematically and unfailingly denigrat[ed] an entire culture of revolutionary resistance to a history of savage colonialism

Apparently, then, literature is not about things like art or beauty or language: it’s actually about revolutionary resistance. Oh sure, Nabokov might have written good novels, but what the hell did he ever do for the struggle? 

In fact, Dabashi’s spittle-flecked and bloated review gets a great deal worse, to the point of telling outright lies⁴ (that the man is a Professor of Literature at Columbia is surely a disgrace to the institution). But his most laughably philistine moment is this:

[O]ne reads this book in vain in search of even a single conversation with any relevant literary theory amassed for generations about and around the works of the [four] authors

Of course – because one may not simply enjoy literature: one has to anaesthetise and sterilise and dissect and analyse it, in “conversation” with “relevant literary theory”! Never mind what the readers think - what do the literary theorists have to say? I shall leave the last word on this sorry subject to Kingsley Amis, who once reproached some comparable mediocrity for his suggestion that a certain novel of somebody else’s was not “important” enough to have merited inclusion in some now-forgotten literary shortlist:

Important! Fearful contemporary word, smacking of the textbook, the lecture-hall, the ‘balanced appraisal’. So-and-so may be readable, interesting, entertaining, but is he important? Ezra Pound may be pretentious and dull, but you’ve got to admit he’s ever so important. What? You haven’t read Primo Levi (in translation, of course)? But he’s important. As the philosopher J. L. Austin remarked in another context, importance isn’t important. Good writing is.⁵

And there it is. Literature is not to be conscripted into the service of academia, or any other ‘sphere’ or ‘discourse’, least of all politics. While it might make contributions in each of these respects, to read it solely as a means to these ends would be like gulping down a glass of wine just for the cardiovascular benefit: it can be done, but it would rather miss the point... Instead, both fiction and wine ought to be enjoyed for their own sake, and to forgo the former is every bit as joyless and puritanical as abstaining from the latter. Ultimately we should all be with that Persian genius, Omar Khayyam, who warned us a thousand years ago that:

Since neither truth nor certainty is granted

You cannot sit in doubtful hope all your life;

Let us be careful not to set the wine-cup aside,

Since a man is in ignorance, drunk or sober.⁶

¹ The same answer can be given, of course, to the no-less-ignorant question, ‘why read politics?’ 
² See Hitchens, C., Why Orwell Matters (2002), pp. 59-62 
³ As quoted in Ibid., pp. 54-55 
⁴ “No one will ever know, reading Reading Lolita in Tehran, that Iranians, like all other nations, have a literature of their own”, writes Dabashi. I cite the following quotes from the 2008 Harper Perennial paperback edition (this list is by no means exhaustive): “We read Persian classical literature, such as the tales of our own lady of fiction, Scheherazade, from A Thousand and One Nights” (p. 4); “Like a group of conspirators, we would gather around the dining room table and ready poetry and prose from Rumi, Hafez, Sa’adi, Khayyam, Nezami, Ferdowsi, Attar, Beyhaghi” (p. 172); “Our great epic poet Ferdowsi had rewritten the confiscated myths of Persian kings and heroes in a pure and sacred language. My father, who all through my childhood would read me Ferdowsi and Rumi, sometimes used to say to me that our true home, our true history, was in our poetry” (p. 172). 
⁵ Amis, K., Memoirs (1991), p. 297
⁶ Avery, P. & Heath-Stubbs, J., The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam (1979), p. 89

No, we absolutely must not 'embrace' Islamism

"[The] general enemy, of course, is extremism. What has extremism ever done for anyone? Where are its gifts to humanity? Where are its works?" – Martin Amis¹

"Question to several white, secular liberal friends in the West: why are you so keen on a #MuslimBrotherhood victory in #Egypt?" – Mohammed ‘Ed’ Husain, author of The Islamist, on twitter

Last Thursday, Reuters ran the headline, ‘West should embrace “Arab Spring” Islamists – Qatar’, citing a Financial Times interview with the Qatari Prime Minister Hamad al-Thani in which he voiced this opinion. As suggested by the above quote of Ed Husain’s, al-Thani may have been pushing an open door. So now that the ‘Arab Spring’ (if we’re still calling it that) has brought us the incredible spectacle of secular Westerners applauding the electoral successes of Islamist parties from Casablanca to Cairo, it might be worth recalling what we all knew, or ought to have known, twelve months ago.

Which is that Islamism – the politicisation of Islam, or, if you prefer, the Islamisation of politics – is extremism by definition. As much as the phrase has been allowed to infiltrate our language, there is no such thing as a ‘moderate Islamist’. From the outset, Islamism says that the practice of religion may not be left to the private domain; that the relationship between man and God is not allowed to be a merely personal one. Instead, you, the citizen, are to be given no say in your spiritual and metaphysical beliefs: the state has made up your mind for you, and is going to make certain that you obey the compulsory pieties and strictures while it’s at it. All questions of interpretation, nuance, allegory, etc., are out: the state knows best, and there is no court of appeal. By this intrusion into the innermost realm of the individual, Islamism combines totalitarianism and tyranny with the basest insult to the intelligence – the manifestation of Orwell’s Big Brother who can tell you that two plus two makes five, and make you very sorry if you dare to disagree.

And what, indeed, has Islamism ever done for anyone? Where are its gifts to humanity? Where are its works? Are they perhaps to be found in Yemen, ranked dead last in the World Economic Forum’s 2011 Gender Gap report, where more than a quarter of the female child population is sold into marriage (and therefore rape) by the age of fifteen? Or how about the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which came in third-last on the same index, while topping the Committee to Protect Journalists’ ‘Deadliest Countries in 2011’ list? The sterile world of statistics cannot adequately capture the pure hell of this failed state, unforgettably described by Christopher Hitchens as follows:

Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. In such an obscenely distorted context, the counterpart term to shame—which is the noble word “honor”—becomes most commonly associated with the word “killing.” Moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter.

Nor is the picture much brighter in Saudi Arabia or Iran – the powerhouses of Sunni and Shia theocracy, respectively – where all social and cultural development is vetoed, and the people are harassed and humiliated daily by the secret police. Things are rapidly tending this way in the ‘Holy Land’, where the most admirable political cause of the modern era – the liberation of Palestine – has been hijacked by the fanatics of Hamas and Hizbullah, who want to kick out the Zionist empire only to install their own Islamic one in its place. True, life is bearable enough in comparatively relaxed Gulf dictatorships such as the UAE, so long as one is mindful not to ‘insult Islam’ by, say, criticising the Taliban. And then there is the purported ‘model’ of Turkey, where the advances made by Prime Minister Erdoğan’s party in economic and other respects have come at the price of an encroaching muscular reactionism in which a growing list of ‘vices’ from adultery to alcohol are falling under the stifling scrutiny of the state.

And now we suddenly have Tunisia, Libya, Morocco and Egypt to add to the list. Only time will tell how fascistic each turns out to be, although the Tunisian ‘Ennahda’ party may have given us an early indication last month when its secretary-general, Hamadi Jbeli, proclaimed that, “We are in the sixth caliphate, God willing”. That as many as a quarter of Egyptians appear to have voted for the Salafi 'al-Nour' party – a spawn of the same sewage that nearly murdered the greatest novelist of the Arab world, Naguib Mahfouz – is also less than comforting. Of course, one must presume innocence until guilt is proven, and democratic nations should at least tolerate Islamists to the extent that they adhere to international law. But to ‘embrace’ them would be to abandon every principle – and every friend within each of these countries – to which the secular world owes its unconditional allegiance. Over. My. Dead. Body.

¹ Amis, M., The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007 (2008), Author’s Note

Hizbullah brings Lebanon once more to the brink of collapse

The Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati announced on Thursday that he will resign next week if a Cabinet meeting scheduled for November 30^th fails to agree to fund the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the UN-backed court investigating the 2005 assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Other ministers, such as those of the National Struggle Front, loyal to Walid Jumblatt, now say that they will follow Mikati in that event. These are honourable decisions, not only in their commitment to international law (Article 5.1 of Security Council Resolution 1757, signed and agreed by the Lebanese government in 2007, makes it unequivocal that Lebanon will provide 49 percent of the funding of the STL), but in their obvious justice – how, after all, can one Prime Minister of Lebanon be expected not to endorse the punishment of the murderers of a previous Prime Minister?  

As things stand, twelve of the thirty Cabinet ministers have confirmed they will vote for the funding – six on Mikati’s behalf; three on President Michel Suleiman’s behalf and three on behalf of PSP leader, Walid Jumblatt. Mikati’s task, therefore, is to persuade four more to join his side. This may not be impossible – indeed, An-Nahar has cited “informed sources” as saying that as many as five more will “most likely” vote with him (from the Tashnag, Marada and Lebanese Democratic Party seats) – but there are reasons to be pessimistic. Hizbullah, the most powerful faction in Lebanese politics despite having only two official seats in the Cabinet, has repeatedly denounced the entire tribunal as an American-Zionist conspiracy, a position that its Minister of State, Mohammad Fneish, described on Thursday as unchanged. And Michael Aoun, whose Free Patriotic Movement commands seven seats, has promulgated the absurd falsehood that Lebanon isn’t even legally bound to pay its share of the funding in the first place. These are forces against which the undecided members of Cabinet will not act without reluctance. 

If, then, the majority votes against funding, and Mikati keeps his word and resigns, the Lebanese government will once again cease to exist, and once again it will be the people who pay the price. According to “ministerial sources” quoted in the Daily Star, “it will be difficult if not impossible to form a new government” after this one, meaning that that price could be very extortionate indeed. The irony that this ‘March 8’ coalition was brought down for the same reason, by the same party, that felled its ‘March 14’ predecessor is one that should not be missed by the Lebanese people, who will have to suffer all over again for that party’s arrogant intransigence. For if the Cabinet puts its interests before the country’s and votes ‘no’, will it ever have been plainer that there cannot be a Lebanese government so long as there is a boneheaded gang called Hizbullah pulling the strings? A militia that exploits its illegal arsenal to negate the country’s obligations under international law; to insult the sovereignty of the national army; to recklessly endanger the lives of Lebanese civilians with its unilateral attacks on Israel; to force Islamic law on drink merchants in the south; and to show nothing but loathing and contempt for the democratic process in general? In a week that has seen their brothers and sisters in Egypt, Syria and Bahrain escalate their courageous struggle for liberation, it’s high time the Lebanese reassessed their devotion to the Mubaraks, Assads and Khalifas amongst their own purported ‘leadership’.

Jeffrey Goldberg enables extremists by denial of Israel's theocracy

Reviewing the Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg’s new book, The Unmaking of Israel, in last week’s New York Times, the Atlantic columnist and author Jeffrey Goldberg took care to get his apology in early for the mild criticism he was about to make of the Israeli settler movement, beginning by saying:

Let me list, at the outset, the many things that the diminutive but disproportionately interesting state of Israel is not [...] Israel is not a fascist state, nor is it a theocracy nor, for that matter, is it a fascist theocracy.

Leave to one side the redundancy of those last nine words, and put off for another day the question of Israeli fascism, which is in any case not an easy term to define. What is most inadmissible about this sentence is the way it denies the perennial and impermeable divide within Israeli society about the religious character of the state, and by extension undermines the millions of secular Israelis who have to fight every day – not always with much success – to repel the swelling tides of the ultra-Orthodox right wing. As Goldberg knows well, having lived in Israel himself, the suggestion that the Israeli legem terrae is free from religious interference might assuage the anxieties of Zionists in America, but it would meet with ridicule from Israeli Jews – to say nothing, of course, about Israeli Arabs.

The briefest glance at the headlines of Haaretz, Israel’s best-known Anglophone newspaper, suffices to make the point. ‘New rabbinical courts will lead to oppression of women’, read an editorial this week, condemning a move to reduce women’s rights in the country’s powerful religious courts (the mere existence of which provokes some curiosity, does it not?). ‘Fighting to make Israel into a military theocracy’ went another one earlier in the month, explaining how “the hesder yeshivas, which combine army service with Torah study, were making a concerted effort – in conjunction with the IDF rabbinate – to create a theocratic military culture”. Just substitute the words ‘Torah’ and ‘IDF rabbinate’ with ‘Qur’an’ and ‘Ayatollahs’, and try to imagine Goldberg coolly assuring New York liberals that this was a secular state of affairs. A similar editorial in June, ‘Israel needs to keep religion out of the army’, lamented that Israel was “turning from a secular country into a theocracy in which the rabbis set the rules”. 

Lengthy indeed would be the task of listing all the ways in which this phenomenon is occurring. I shall restrict myself, therefore, to just three examples of what are unequivocally theocratic characteristics of the Israeli state. 

Firstly, there are separate courts for religious and secular matters. Arbiters in the battei din, or religious courts, are rabbis, and the law applied is the halakha, or Jewish law, derived from the Torah and the Talmud. This is no different in principle from the situation in Saudi Arabia, which also divides jurisdiction between civil and religious courts, the latter of which uphold the shari’a, or Islamic law, derived from the Qur’an and the Hadith. (If Goldberg believes the Kingdom to be a secular country, I’m not aware of his having said so.) In Israel, the battei din are invested with substantial power, including total control over marriage – as in Saudi, there is no civil marriage in Israel, meaning that non-believing citizens must travel abroad to tie the knot – and divorce. In addition, there exist in Israel de facto supplementary religious courts, such as the Takana, which handles crimes committed by the clergy and, not unlike the Vatican, tends to prefer to keep things ‘within the family’ where possible. As the Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy put it:

A high school teacher at a secular school who sexually assaults his students would be turned over to the police. A rabbi at a yeshiva [religious school] suspected of the same thing would be turned over to Takana. Perish any connection between them, but the criminal underworld also has its own judicial system with the means to investigate and punish. In that respect, there is no difference between the underworld and Takana.

Secondly, the laws concerning immigration are explicitly religious in both letter and spirit. The text of the amended ‘Law of Return 5730-1970’ defines a “Jew” as “a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion”, and grants any such person the automatic right to citizenship. This definition, as the great Israeli polymath Israel Shahak noted in his seminal Jewish History, Jewish Religion, comes directly from the halakha, being:

[T]he Talmudic definition of ‘who is a Jew’, a definition followed by Jewish Orthodoxy. The Talmud and post-Talmudic rabbinic law also recognise the conversion of a non-Jew to Judaism (as well as the purchase of a non-Jewish slave by a Jew followed by a different kind of conversion) as a method of becoming Jewish, provided that the conversion is performed by authorised rabbis in a proper manner. This ‘proper manner’ entails, for females, their inspection by three rabbis while naked in a ‘bath of purification’, a ritual which, although notorious to all readers of the Hebrew press, is not often mentioned by the English media in spite of its undoubted interest for certain readers.¹

One assumes that Goldberg would be less than thrilled if Congress passed a law granting instant green cards for all Jewish converts to Christianity, and indeed Levy has argued that the Israeli legislation amounts not only to theocracy but to racism as well:

It's time to admit that this approach can only be called racist. Yes, that hackneyed term. That's what it is when it is the blood flowing through the veins that determines your status. If the grandson of a woman whose Judaism is doubtful has the right to automatic citizenship when he arrives here from the ends of the earth, and a non-Jewish soldier who chose to fight and live here runs into rabbinic obstacles, then this is not just judgment by religious law, but judgment by racist law. If the Arab native is an outcast, but a member of the "Tribe of Menasseh" from Burma is welcomed with full rights simply because a rabbi said he was Jewish, then this is a benighted theocracy.

Thirdly, and most gravely, as Goldberg no doubt recalls from his own stint in the IDF, the laws concerning military service are different for secular and religious Israelis. In their indispensable book, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky draw attention to the frightening world of the hesder yeshivot, the religious corps, who serve not for three years, as do other soldiers, but for eighteen months, divided into three six-month periods, in between which they “leave the army for a six-month period of talmudic study in a yeshiva wherein the presumably negative influences of having met secular Jewish soldiers are supposedly countered”². As might be expected, the scheme of training religious fanatics in the use of state-of-the-art military equipment is not without its demerits. They elucidate:

Soldiers in Hesder Yeshivot units [...] distinguished themselves during the suppression of the Intifada; they were noted for their cruelty to Palestinians, which was from many perspectives much more severe than the Israeli army average [...] When the army commanding officers have wanted to inflict especially cruel punishment upon Palestinians or others, they have most often relied upon and used religious soldiers. In more ordinary companies, consisting of soldiers holding varying political views, some members might object to illegal cruelty and even inform media people of its use. In Hesder Yeshivot units the religious soldiers, who are anyway more cruel than most secular Jews, will not object to the orders.³

A perpetually baffling fact of American writing on Israel is how markedly it differs from its Israeli counterpart. The works of Israelis like Shahak and Levy are infused with everything the intellectual descendents of Thomas Jefferson should celebrate: unswerving commitment to reason, democracy and secularism, undergirded by a visceral contempt for injustice. Why then is their voice so persistently ignored? One of the things that has to happen in order for there to be peace in Israel is that, in the battle for the national identity, the secularists must win and the theocrats must lose (the same must happen, incidentally, on the eastern side of Jerusalem). By denying that such a battle is being waged in the first place, Goldberg only further isolates the secular camp and clears the path for the Liebermans and Lubavitchers. Let us hope that Israelis – and their sponsors in America – have more sense than to listen to him.

¹ Shahak, I., Jewish History, Jewish Religion (4^th edition, 2008), p. 5

² Shahak, I., and Mezvinsky, N., Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (2^nd edition, 2004), p. 91

³ Ibid.

Istanbul, graveyard of empires

That the description of being ‘where east meets west’ is applied to so many cities – ranging as vastly in look and location as from Sarajevo to Singapore – is of course an indictment of its essential vapidity. But to the extent that it's true of any city, it is surely truest of Istanbul, that ancient imperial capital with its spinal Bosphorus river across which the lands of Europe and Asia are quite literally ‘bridged’. In this distinction – of being a single city adjoining two continents – Istanbul is unique. Less trivially, and not coincidentally, it has the further unique distinction of being the former seat of four epochal empires – Roman; Byzantine; Latin; and Ottoman – making it in effect the global centre of power for more than 1,500 consecutive years. That these empires (as we sometimes forget) were officially faith-based gives the city the additional distinction of being the only former capital of both Christendom and the Islamic caliphate. And finally, in its latest form within the borders of modern Turkey, its people were the first in history to have thrown out the Islamic shari’a in favour of a secular constitution. 

The city today bears the stamp of each of these origins, if in different ways and to uncertain extents. To take them broadly in order, the ‘European’ cloth of the tapestry is evident from the moment one steps into Atatürk International, which flexes the bulk and polish of a Schiphol or a Gatwick without the gilded glitz of, say, a Dubai. On the roads, the restraint and consideration shown to fellow drivers are truly foreign to anyone accustomed to the Middle East, as is the thoughtfully built and efficiently run public transportation system. The food, on the other hand, is unmistakeably ‘Asian’, as the faintest whiff of the Eminönü Spice Bazaar will confirm. Indeed, much of what is now eaten in the Arab world descends from traditional Ottoman cuisine: from the döner (shawarma in Arabic) and the şiş kebap (shish kabab) to the baklava sweets (baqlawa) and more (the Arabs were able to return the favour with their lahm b’ajin, the meat pastry now rendered in Turkish as lahmacun). In terms of dress, there’s been a good deal of cross-pollination, with about as many heels and skirts as headscarves and skull caps (on which more later). Perhaps above all else, it’s in the language that the cultural DNA is most nakedly revealed: distinctly Balkan to the ear, the vocabulary is nevertheless replete with loanwords not only from Arabic and Persian (including the most basic of all, merhaba, from the Arabic marhaba) but also from the West (one purchases a jeton to ride the tram, for instance). These adopted words persist despite attempts since the formation of the Republic in the 1920s to replace them with ‘purer’ Turkish equivalents – an initiative that also brought about the enforced Latinisation of the old Ottoman script. As we shall see, this is not the only way in which the Turks have not entirely taken to the ‘Reforms’ imposed by Atatürk. 

In the 4^th century AD, around the same time that Constantine ‘The Great’ was making Christianity the state religion of the Roman empire, the need was felt for a new capital east of Rome to address the vast territorial gains made in that direction. It was decided that the strategically-located city then known as Byzantion best met the requirements, and what was to become Constantinople was in fact briefly named Nea Roma, or ‘New Rome’. Much of the city as it was then remains visible in the Sultanahmet district of Istanbul today, from the Hippodrome with the surviving section of the Serpent Column to the Basilica Cistern now lying beneath Yerebatan Street. But the most striking creation of what became the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, empire was the Hagia Sophia cathedral completed in the 6^th century during the reign of the emperor Justinian. 

Egyptian obelisk in the Hippodrome

Basilica Cistern

Hagia Sophia/Ayasofya 'Museum'

This magnificent building - whose signature dome would inspire the Sultanahmet and Süleymaniye mosques a thousand years later, and which was in fact itself later converted into a mosque by Sultan Mehmet II - was by far the largest of its kind worldwide; a record it held for nine centuries until the building of the Saint Mary cathedral in Seville. After five hundred years as the ‘Ayasofya’ mosque, it was eventually stripped of its religious status by Atatürk and is today strictly referred to as a ‘museum’, much to the fury of fundamentalist Christians and Muslims alike.

Indeed, the ‘museum’ is nothing if not a damning testament to religious hatred and tyranny. Repeatedly sacked and pillaged throughout its existence – by the Islamic invaders but more devastatingly by the Catholic Crusaders (whose loathing of the Orthodox Church is still very much alive in eastern Europe today) – it’s a wonder the thing still stands at all. In addition to the four minarets added to the exterior by the Ottomans, inside one finds Islamic calligraphy on great black discs crudely affixed like cheap stickers to the walls, in places just metres from the original Christian mosaics. And the mosaics themselves tell a sordid story of their own; many of them depicting Christ and Mary shoulder to shoulder with Constantine and Justinian – brazen attempts to deify the emperors and thus render themselves, and their authority, infallible. That the Byzantine empire turned out to be very much fallible, and that it was an orgy of violence and despotism while it lasted, is a lesson in humility that far too few religions appear to have learned (not least of them Catholicism, which actually does still use the word ‘infallible’ in official descriptions of the pope).

Inside the Hagia Sophia/Ayasofya

Christian mosaics behind Islamic calligraphy

From left to right: Constantine, Mary, Jesus, Justinian

Of course, Atatürk couldn’t convert every house of worship into a museum, and the two most marvellous mosques still in use – the Sultanahmet, or ‘Blue’ one to the east of the Hippodrome; and the Süleymaniye one further to the west – have generously been made open to the public free of charge (entrance to the Hagia Sophia/Ayasofya costs 20 TL, or $11). These skyline-defining structures, exquisitely sculpted of marble and granite, are examples not only of the egos of the Sultans Ahmet and Süleyman (‘The Magnificent’) but also of the genius of the architect Mimar Sinan, the ‘Michelangelo of the East’, whose legacy extends from the Tekkiye Mosque in Damascus to the Sokolović Bridge in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Yet perhaps the most interesting relic of the Islamic period is the colossal Topkapi Palace, personal residence of the Sultan and seat of the Ottoman government from the 15^th to the 19^th centuries. 

Sultanahmet Mosque

Süleymaniye Mosque

Entrance to Topkapi Palace

Built on the ruins of the ancient Great Palace of Constantinople, the grounds of what we now call the Topkapi Palace Museum - which effectively comprise an entire borough of the city – are the very height of Ottoman glory and greed; containing not just the old living quarters of the Sultan and his 4,000-strong support staff, but a mosque, a Byzantine church, a library, a treasury, a hospital, a mint, and over a hundred acres of gardens and courtyards. Within these walls can be found an 86-carat diamond; thrones made of solid gold and ebony; emeralds and rubies the size of golf balls; and the most exquisite porcelain of China. One can also find several purported belongings of the Prophet Muhammad, including his swords; his cloak; a tooth and even the individual hairs of his beard (why anyone should want to see these, I couldn’t say). Most famously, one can also find the Harem; the private quarters where the Sultan lived in the company of his hundreds of concubines. These often very young women were bought, donated or simply stolen into slavery and put to whatever use the Sultan desired. A New York Times article elucidates the grotesque way in which the girls were forced to feign interest in their owner and master:

At times up to 300 young women lived here, most of them in tiny cubicles, including four wives, the favorite concubines, the young up-and-coming odalisques. Harem girls were captured in wars or bought as slaves; some were offered by their parents. Russian and Georgian girls were considered great beauties and much in demand. [The Sultan’s] Mother apparently had the first choice and alloted the girls different tasks so that they might or might not be noticed. If you were an odalisque you could try to catch the sultan's eye when you served his coffee or when he called for the girls to parade and perform dances for him. If he offered you his handkerchief, you knew.

One must never forget that this monstrous combination of slavery and rape is wholly licensed by the tenets of Islam. The Qur’an makes repeated reference to slaves as ma malakat aymankum, or ‘what your right hands possess’, e.g., Suras 4:24; 23:5-6; 70:29-35:

And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess.

[The believers are those] who guard their modesty, save from their wives or the (slaves) that their right hands possess, for then they are not blameworthy.

And those who preserve their chastity, save with their wives and those whom their right hands possess [...] These will dwell in Gardens, honoured.

Muhammad himself had a number of concubines – indeed, the canonical tafsir, or exegesis, of Ibn Kathir tells the illuminating tale of Maria the Copt, the concubine whom Muhammad swore never again to see after his wife Hafsa found the pair of them in bed. “Why bannest thou that which Allah hath made lawful for thee, seeking to please thy wives”? was the Almighty’s contemptuous response (Sura 66:1). Thus the Ottoman Sultans, in consigning thousands of girls to lives of abuse and abjection, were in fact only following the example of their moral and spiritual tutor. 

Which seems as good a reason as any to celebrate the day in 1924 when the inaugural President of the Republic of Turkey put a stop to all that forever, abolishing the caliphate and establishing the first secular country of the former Muslim world. That state would quickly go on to grant equal rights to women in things like education and marriage; outlaw the degrading practice of polygamy; and give its female population the vote long before supposedly enlightened nations such as France and Canada would do the same. The social and economic dividends of these revolutionary steps were suggested by Turkey’s joining of NATO in 1952 (it remains the only Muslim-majority country in the organisation) and its candidacy – recognised in 1999 - for membership of the European Union. 

Today, however, these hard-won gains face a threat that cannot easily be exaggerated. Never entirely accepted by the Turks from the start, over the years Atatürk’s constitution has had to be upheld by a powerful military establishment that can be as ruthless as it needs to be against its enemies, perceived or actual. Or at least that was the case until July of this year, when in an event that went largely unnoticed outside the country – and is still not nearly well enough appreciated - the entire leadership of the armed forces simultaneously resigned. This major and unprecedented move, described by the Milliyet columnist Asli Aydintasbas as “the symbolic moment when the first Turkish republic ends and the second republic begins”, was in response to the arrests of dozens of generals on what may or may not be fabricated charges of plotting to overthrow the government. The man behind all this, of course, is the Prime Minister and top Atatürk-despiser, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. 

An incredible amount of loose talk has it that Turkey strikes the ideal balance between the secular and the Islamic (when Rachid Ghannouchi’s Ennahda party won last month’s elections in Tunisia, for example, he cited the Turkish “reconciliation between Islam and modernity” as though to negate fears about his own non-secular proclivities). Yet Erdoğan’s entire political career, from the day he joined the now-banned Islamist ‘National Salvation Party’ as a teenager, has been focused on advancing the former at the expense of the latter. 

As the Mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s, elected on the Islamist ‘Welfare Party’ ticket (also now banned), Erdoğan illegalised the sale of alcohol in city-owned establishments. Having presumably been on the military’s hit list for some time, the man describing himself as a “servant of the shari’a” was eventually arrested and imprisoned in 1998 for the somewhat ridiculous crime of ‘inciting religious hatred’ for reading a poem at a rally that contained the lines:

The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the believers our soldiers.

Since coming to high office in 2003, Erdoğan has, to borrow a phrase used by Patrick Cockburn in another context, done as much harm as he can and as much good as he must. His ‘Justice and Development’ party attempted to criminalise adultery in 2004, a blatantly Islamist move defended by Erdoğan as a question of “human honour”. At a NATO summit in 2009, the Turkish delegation made enemies of everyone in the room when it threatened to veto the appointment of the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Rasmussen, to the post of Secretary-General, on the preposterous and fascistic grounds that he had not censored the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in the Danish media – something the Danish constitution would not have allowed him to do even if he had wanted to. This sinister piece of galling impertinence led the French Foreign Minister to publicly withdraw his support for Turkey’s EU bid. And while Erdoğan has become something of a hero in the Arab world for (rightly) standing up to the Israelis, his defence of Palestine rests on the insulting notion of it as an ‘Islamic’ territory. Certainly, he seems to mind much less about slaughter and military occupation when the subjects of Armenia, Cyprus or Kurdistan are brought up – not to mention that he’s happy enough in the company of mass-murderers such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (“my good friend”) and Omar al-Bashir, whom he defended from the charges brought against him by the International Criminal Court by saying it was “not possible for a Muslim to commit genocide”. 

And then of course there is the drink question. Happily, the ban from the ‘90s has been repealed, but Erdoğan has never been one to give up easily on the imperatives of moral policing. Indeed, for the fruits of the grape and grain he appears to reserve especial distaste. After yet again raising taxes on alcohol in October, his advice for disgruntled drinkers was to “consume less alcohol”, echoing the call he made last year for Turks to eat grapes rather than drink wine. The courts had to get involved in 2007 to block a proposal to create designated “red zones” outside the cities in which alcoholic venues could be quarantined. While I was able to get a glass of raki easily enough in the famously convivial Beyoğlu district, the atmosphere was slightly but perceptibly diminished by the brand new law banning outdoor seating. This of course came after a series of restrictions introduced in January on things like advertising alcohol and the way in which it may be served at events (not for free, and not to anyone younger than 24). That package was to spark one of the most heartening sights of the year: crowds of protesters gathered in city centres across the country, each man and woman equipped with a brimming tumbler of tipple, in what they called a “drinking action” demonstration. To irk the forces of clerical fascism and get jolly drunk in the process is as fine a day’s work as any. 

There are still a lot of Turks, in other words, for whom secularism and individual liberties mean a great deal (there had, after all, been a number of rather larger rallies in 2007, when over a million people took to the streets to protest the presidential nomination of Erdoğan’s ally, Abdullah Gül). Whether they outnumber their more pious compatriots, however, is unclear. Peter Hitchens – a man with whom I very often disagree – made the interesting observation that while in the seriously Islamist country of Iran, the young women have a healthy contempt for the veil, in Turkey a very ugly kind of zealous conservatism appears to have become the fashion:

The Iranian women mock the headscarf as they wear it, pushed as far back as possible on the head, revealing as much bleached-blonde, teased hair as the piety police will allow. 

Their message is: 'The law can make me wear this, but it cannot make me look as if I want to.' The young Turks, by contrast, are saying: 'This is how I want to look, even if the law says I cannot.' For the scarf is banned by law in many universities and in government offices, and they view this ban as a challenge they must defy. 

There is no simpler way of making the point that, while Iran is a secular country with a Muslim government, Turkey is a Muslim country with a secular government. 

If Turkey truly hopes to be a First World nation, it would do well to start taking large strides away from, rather than toward the ideals that have turned life in the great Persian nation into a waking nightmare. And unless it wishes to lose its few remaining secular friends, it will have to come to terms with being the graveyard of the Islamic empire, and not the soil of its rebirth.