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Jay Fraser interviews an anti-Piracy expert (not the IP kind, either) at Gunpowder& Lead:

[ by Charles Cameron — against either / or thinking — a graphic reminder? ]
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Islam is “a mosaic, not a monolith”.

Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation, offered us a 177-page exposition of that theme in a book of that title published by the Brookings Institution (2003), expanding on an earlier and shorter essay of the same title. Of the book-length version, he writes:

Presenting such a wide-angle view in a relatively small space requires the free use of generalizations, summaries, and categorizations that must leave out many nuances of history.

1.

There’s no doubt that some currents within Islam preach a continuing war against “Crusaders and Zionists” — and make no mistake about it, this is a religious movement, claiming its sanction in scripture and its path as submission to the will of God, as indicated by David Martin Jones and MLR Smith in Whose Hearts and Whose Minds? The Curious Case of Global Counter-Insurgency [see Zen’s comments here]:

The process of radicalisation is obviously a complex one. Certainly, the passage to the act of terrorism cannot be reduced solely to religion. Nevertheless, it is somewhat naive, if not perverse, to dismiss it completely. The bombings of the Madrid and London transport systems in March 2004 and July 2005 respectively, and even the 9/11 assaults, are, whatever else, Islamist acts in a Western setting. The view that religion is at best a secondary motive defies the evidence. All the groups that have undertaken high-profile terrorist acts dating from 9/11 and stretching from Bali to Madrid, London and Mumbai have acted in the name of a militant understanding of Islam. Such a pattern of worldwide attacks, exhibiting a profound devotion to a politically religious cause intimates, if nothing else, a religious dimension to jihadism. In fact, to reduce jihadism to individual social pathology attempts to explain away political religion as a social fact. Rather worryingly, it assumes that when a highly motivated jihadist claims to undertake an operation to advance a doctrine, he does not really mean it.

This might seem so obvious as to require no comment — yet Jones and Smith follow this paragraph with a question:

we need to resolve this paradox: why do counterinsurgency theorists exhibit this reluctance to confront the ideological or politically religious dimension of modern insurgency?

— and there are no doubt other segments of the media, intelligence and policy communities of which the same question might be asked.

One aspect of the answer, I believe, lies in the general tendency of post-enlightenment thinkers to “push religion into the background of their story” (Richard Landes‘ words, which I quoted here in a different context a week ago).

2.

The young man pointing a gun at the viewer on a Facebook page (h/t Internet Hagganah) is the avatar of a net-salafi in Germany whose sequence of avatars looks like this:

Quintan Wiktorowicz defines a salafi thus:

The term “salafi” is used to denote those who follow the example of the companions (salaf) of the Prophet Mohammed. Salafis believe that because the companions learned about Islam directly from the Prophet, they commanded a pure understanding of the faith.

As he notes in another article:

The Salafi movement (often referred to as the Wahhabis)1 represents a diverse community. All Salafis share a puritanical approach to the religion intended to eschew religious innovation by strictly replicating the model of the Prophet Muhammad. Yet the community is broad enough to include such diverse figures as Osama bin Laden and the Mufti of Saudi Arabia. Individuals and groups within the community reflect varied positions on such important topics as jihad, apostasy, and the priorities of activism. In many cases, scholars claiming the Salafi mantel formulate antipodal juristic positions, leading one to question whether they can even be considered part of the same religious tradition.

The avatar-salafi depicted above sums up his own existence and “aim in life” by pointing a gun at you.

3.

Not so the lady leading a child by the hand in the lower of the two images, from a photo taken in India.

She offers us, in fact, a vividly contrasting picture of Islam to that of the salafi. She, a woman who is clearly observant of the demure dress code given in Qur’an 33.59 and wearing a niqab, is leading by the hand a joyful child arrayed in the finery of Krishna — beloved flute-playing avatar of Vishnu (avatar in its original sense) among her Hindu neighbors.

You might consider the pair of them together as monotheism hand-in-hand with polytheism. But then again, you might see them as peace and delight together, walking hand-in-hand.

You might see them as expressive of the Quranic proclamation (49.13 ):

O people, We have created you from a male and a female and made you into races and tribes so that you may know each other. Surely the most honored of you in the sight of God is the one who is the most righteous of you.

4.

To bring this back to contemporary politics, we may have our views about Islamist politics, and in the context of the changing scene across the Arab world it is worth pondering this recent quote from Rachid Ghannouchi, founder of the Ennahda Party in Tunisia, indicating another significant aspect of the contemporary evolution of Islamist thought:

Freedom is a fundamental principle in Islam, religion can not be forced on believers … Religion is not meant to give us guidance in all areas of industrial management, agricultural innovation, and governance, those subjects require human reason. Religion, however, gives us a code of values and principles.

Islam is not merely diverse, it is self-renewing.

5.

In light of all this, we need a far richer awareness of the mosaic that is Islam that our tendency towards black and white, war or peace, either / or thinking easily allows.

Consider these Quranic verses (35.27-28):

See you not that Allah sends down rain from the sky? With it We then bring out produce of various colors. And in the mountains are tracts white and red, of various shades of color, and black intense in hue. And so amongst men and crawling creatures and cattle, are they of various colors.

Again, the delight in diversity!

Now take another, closer look at those two folks from India:

Beautiful.

[ by Charles Cameron — i have a major post, possibly two, on Ezekiel and Esther, Israel and Iran in prep, and zen just posted a major piece on the era of the creepy-state — so don’t mind me, this is just a brief aside on religious devotion, relics, the heart, the skull, the breath ]
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There’s an eerie beauty to relics — and when I read a BBC news piece today titled Dublin patron saint’s heart stolen, about the theft of a relic of St Laurence from Dublin’s Christ Church cathedral (upper image), while the “contemporary” part of me found it perhaps worth a chuckle and certainly paradoxical —

The thief would have needed metal cutters to prise open the iron bars protecting the wooden heart-shaped box holding St Laurence O’Toole’s heart.

— another part of me was saddened, much as I was saddened some years back by the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

I hope Dublin gets its spiritual heart back.

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And so my mind went back to another relic, and another recent encounter with that eerie beauty — the relic of St Valentine, martyr, which I ran across in a photo by Fr. Lawrence Lew OP (lower image), posted on the saint’s day, February 14th, by Shawn Tribe in the New Liturgical Movement blog, a regular read of mine.

St Valentine, memorialized not by silly cupids (silli putti?) and plump, winged hearts, but by the fellow’s skull…

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There’s something there about dust — that we are dust, animated by breath until the dust settles…

There’s an eerie beauty to that thought.

George Orwell was more right than he knew….

Congress passed a law – by unanimous consent in the Senate and by a suspension of rules in the House – to permit the Federal government to arbitrarily arrest and imprison for up to ten years members of the serf class (formerly known as “American citizens”) whose presence annoys or offends specally designated members of the elite and foreign dignitaries. A list that will no doubt expand greatly in future legislation to include very “special” private citizens.

Think about that, future “Joe the Plumbers” or Cindy Sheehans, before you ask an impertinent question of your betters or wave your handmade cardboard sign. Is ten seconds of glory on your local ABC affiliate news at 5 o’clock worth that felony arrest record and federally funded anal exam?

No? Then kindly shut your mouth, sir. Learn your place.

Two nebbish Representatives, one Republican and one Democrat, distinguished only by their lack of legislative or political importance, sponsored the bill on behalf of the big boys who fast-tracked it under the radar (they learned from the SOPA debacle). Forget ideology or boasts about carrying a copy of the Constitution in the breast pocket of their suit, whether you are in an archconservative Congressional district or an ultraliberal one, almost every member of Congress voted “aye” to trash multiple amendments in the Bill of Rights.

Almost every one.

This is an accelerating trend in recent years and in particular, a bipartisan theme of the 112th Congress, which views Constitutional rights of nobodies as an anachronistic hindrance to the interests (or convenience) of their powerful and wealthy political supporters. Our elected officials and their backers increasingly share an oligarchic class interest that in important matters, trumps the Kabuki partisanship of  FOXnews and MSNBC and inculcates a technocratic admiration for the “efficiency” of select police states.

It is from this demographic-cultural root of incestuous corruption that our creeping – and increasingly creepy – manifestations of authoritarianism in American life springs. The SOPA/PIPA internet censorship bills, naked scanners at airports, Stasi-like expansion of expensively wasteful TSA security theater, proposed 24/7 monitoring of  every American’s online activities, migration of police powers to unaccountable private firms, replacement of elected municipal governments with “emergency managers” (favoring financiers over taxpayers), Federal agencies monitoring political critics , the Department of Justice retro-legalizing corporate racketeering, fraud, perjury and conspiracy on a national scale, plus other infringements of liberty or gross corruption that I could list, ad nauseum.

We have reached the point where we as Americans need to stop, step back from moment by moment fixation on nonsensical, “white noise” fake political issues like “contraception” ginned up to keep the partisans distracted and become seriously involved in determining the direction in which our nation is headed. Our elite are telegraphing their strong preference for a “soft dictatorship” but we still have time to check their ambitions and rein in their looting.

It is almost quaint these days to pick up Friedrich von Hayek’s classic,  The Road to Serfdom and thumb through it. The libertarian antistatists of the 20th century were so focused on the clear and present dangers of totalitarianism that the idea of a weak state that endangered liberty through a mixture of corruption and regulatory capture eluded them. The Westphalian state at it’s apex was so overweening that the enemy of free societies, after foreign monsters like Hitler and Stalin, could be ambitious intellectual pygmies like Harold Laski or Tom Hayden. The state was so omnipotent that even it’s efforts at benevolence, to build a “Great Society” of the Welfare State were injurious to individual freedom because the expanse of statism crowded and weakened civil society , the market and private life. The argument gained political traction because, to varying degrees, it was true and looked prophetic when the Welfare-state began to crash economically in the 1970’s on stagflation.

Give the Welfare-state liberals and Social Democrats of the past their due though, their intentions by their own lights were benign. They wanted to make a safer, more secure, more equal, more just life through a more powerful state (whether that was a good idea or a realistic endeavor was the central political question between right and left). The current elite in comparison is so inferior in moral character and overconfident in their abilities that they may soon make us yearn for the former’s return.

What have now in our ruling class,  are the  builders of a Creepy-state and their intentions are not benign, except toward themselves, for as long as the looting of the American economy can last.

Unlike the Welfare-state, the Creepy-state, shot through with corruption, is  not omnipotent  because it is to be the servant and gendarme of the emerging oligarchy and not their master – but it is to be omniscient and omnipresent, constantly watching, monitoring, investigating, recording, interrogating, coercing, sorting, muzzling, gatekeeping and shearing the sheep on behalf of the shepherds.

Or the wolves.

The Creepy-state is not there to protect you or give you a higher standard of living or ensure justice or democracy, but to maintain a hierarchical public order from “disruption” (formerly known as “politics” or “democracy”). If the classical liberal ideal was the night watchman state, this state is the shadowy and ill-disposed watcher in the night.

The American political elite, Democrat and Republican, Conservative and Liberal, are in are largely in consensus that the government should, in regard to the American people:

Read your email
Listen to your phone calls
Track your movements on GPS
Track your online activity
Track your spending
Track your political activity
Read your medical records
Read your financial records
Scan your body
Scan your house
Scan your DNA
Keep you under video surveillance in public
Detain you at random in public places for security checks
Close off public spaces for private use
Seize private property for private use
Censor your speech
Block your access to judicial relief
Determine your educational and career path
Regulate your diet, place of residence, lifestyle and living standards (ever downwards)
Charge you with secret crimes for breaking secret regulations
Share or leak information about you at will

Is this the America we wish for our children or grandchildren? One that epitomizes the values of our Constitution or Declaration of Independence, or is it some kind of tawdry and shameful dime store fascism of a small Latin American country? Perhaps life is finally imitating fiction?

Fortunately, it is not too late. Irrevocable changes in the constitutional order have yet to be engineered. Our politicians are followers, not leaders here. They are a small and cowardly lot for the most part and will recoil in fear from this authoritarian ethos if a sufficiently large number of elected officials are thrown out of office at once. We can still roll this back – at least the most egregiously anti-American aspects – if we get sufficiently angry come November.

Self-interest is their only lodestone.

[ by Charles Cameron – places, people, neurons, ideas, with Kabul and Khost providing illustrations ]
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[ illus: Starlight, from PNL ]

I was just reading Matthieu Aikins‘ GQ account of The Siege of September 13 in Kabul, when a couple of sentences caught my eye, not because of the attack itself, but because they reminded me of a point I want to make about the way we think these days about networks, nodes and linkages:

Salangi’s SUV was passing down the main road north of the embassy when the sound of gunshots and his police radio simultaneously erupted. He told his driver to turn around and head toward the sounds.

At Massoud Circle, the next roundabout down from Abdul Haq, they encountered a bottleneck of police vehicles, and so Salangi continued on foot, ducking as he heard the crack and whine of bullets passing close by…

What specifically caught and rerouted my attention was that phrase, “Massoud Circle, the next roundabout down from Abdul Haq” — Abdul Haq Circle, I’d read earlier in the article, “is a wide traffic roundabout named for a deceased mujahideen commander”, as presumably is the circle named for Massoud.

So we have two roundabouts connected by a road… and two deceased mujahideen commanders.

Or to put that another way, we have two nodes and a connection between them, twice over — in once case the nodes are places, and in the other the nodes are people.

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Further into the article, I found a graphic showing the two places and the road connecting them — and an image of two people in Kabul that day, one extending an arm of care to the other. These two men weren’t Abdul Haq and Massoud, of course, but two people nonetheless. So in each graphic, we have two nodes and a connection:

A great deal of time and treasure goes into the analysis of networks of communication — cellphone to cellphone, person to person — or travel — place to place — (a) because the patterns can be revealing, and (b) because the data (what number called what number, e.g., how often Nidal Hassan emailed al-Awlaki, or what route bought Abu Dujanah from Amman to Khost) is unambiguous when obtained.

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We’re also fond of neural nets, eh? — whether the “artificial” nets of AI or the “biological” nets of the brain — and again, these are unambiguous, scientists and technicians love them, and software developed with Congress-friendly budgeting implications is required to process them.

But what about ideas?

What about minds, what about the subjective side of persons and travels and communications and contacts and brains — what about thoughts, what about admiration?

That’s the node-link-node mapping that I find most interesting: it utilizes the most complex software (human intelligence), and demands the least complex support system (cappucino, napkin and pencil) — and some of its nodes and their linkages (beliefs, e.g., leading to actions) are among the richest features of the human behavioral landscape.

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The idea that jihad is an individual obligation, for instance, is a staple of AQ-style theology. It is my contention, indeed, that acceptance of that idea is the religious foundation on which acts of jihadist suicide are based.

And by the same token, these suicide acts are then viewed in terms of martyrdom, since they were enacted in the cause of Allah, giving rise to such eulogies as this one, offered by AQ to Abu Dujanah after the Khost event:

May Allah have mercy on you, our dear Abu Dujanah, and may He raise your ranks in register of the inhabitants of Paradise. By the Lord of the Ka’bah, indeed you have succeeded, our dear Abu Lailah, Allah willing. You were truthful, and you became known. You set an example, and you were truthful in word and deed. You followed the speakers and writers before you. May Allah be pleased with you . Your patience, Jihad, and tolerance of hardships were in Allah’s Cause. Your prayers and insistency was for Allah, and was your solitude and secret conversation. Thus, your reward is with Allah. Allah is your Lord and Protector, and Allah willing, our next meeting will be in Al-Firdaws Al-A’la, our dear beloved brother.

Such logic, such rhetoric, and such devotion are of the essence of what we confront in the jihad…

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And richest of all for us to come to terms with: the person to person transmission of such ideas…