Friday, November 8, 2002

Will the U.S. Get a Single Thing Right in the Middle East? The New York Times has a review of Steven Schwartz's The Two Faces of Islam, a book that seems to offer a persuasive picture of Saudi Arabia as the root of many of the U.S.'s problems in the Middle East: When, for example, Mr. Schwartz turns to the powerful influence of Wahhabism during the years of the anti-Soviet "holy war" in Afghanistan, he not only shows that he understands Afghan politics, but he also makes a strong case that the American failure to understand the complexities of global Islam are one of the main reasons that Afghanistan fell into the Taliban-bin Laden camp. In Mr. Schwartz's version of events, the Americans failed to understand that "two faces of Islam" were present in Afghanistan from the beginning. "On one side, there was the bright aspect of Sufi traditionalism, ever renewed, happy, filled with love of God and humanity," he writes. "On the other was the ugly visage of Wahhabi fundamentalism, narrow, rigid, tyrannical, separatist, supremacist and violent." The Taliban, the products of Saudi-financed Wahhabi schools in Pakistan, clearly represented this second visage, and Mr. Schwartz contends that they could have been avoided altogether had American policymakers only understood that. But Mr. Schwartz argues that "Islam, especially in the days of Khomeini, remained too alien and frightening" for the State Department to make such distinctions. Or, if American policymakers did make distinctions, he says, they made the wrong ones, preferring the Saudi-backed guerrillas to anyone who echoed Khomeinism. Still, Mr. Schwartz writes, "The real exporters of international Islamic extremism were the Saudis," though "the Saudis did not miss the opportunity to stoke the Western fear of Iran in order to bolster their false image as Arab 'moderates.'" Thus far, Al Qaeda, which seems to have its financial, cultural, and ideological roots in Saudi Arabia, is the only group or nation to have struck U.S. targets in the last couple of decades. And it was a Saudi cleric who accompanied Crown Prince Abdullah during his visit to President Bush in Crawford, Texas who said: "Do not have mercy or compassion toward the Jews. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours." Yet the U.S. is spending all sorts of time and energy preparing to attack Iraq. 11:40:02 PM     What do you think? ()

Does Everyone Find Writing Frustrating? Last night, I came across this passage in Proust's In Search of Lost Time: When I wrote them, the sentences of my article were so weak compared to my thought, so complicated and opaque compared to my harmonious and transparent vision, so full of gaps which I had not managed to fill, that reading them caused me to suffer, they had only accentuated my feelings of impotence and an incurable lack of talent. This precisely describes the frustrations I feel whenever I attempt to write something. I have in my head a whole thought, idea, image, whatever, and it's always horribly mangled whenever I attempt to lay it out linearly in writing. Despite efforts like John Ashbery's As We Know, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, or William S. Burroughs's cut-up technique, incredibly innovative though they may be, a reader still reads one word after another, so all writing must ultimately become physically linear. Yet thoughts are not by their nature linear. 7:59:08 AM     What do you think? ()

© Copyright 2003 Morgan N. Sandquist. Last update: 11/2/03; 10:30:46 AM.

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