Specters of the Past, Keys to the Future

With most of the OSP students away this weekend on a camping excursion to the Golan, few of us remain in the dorms. I elected to stay behind in order to catch up on my readings and to ensure some extra attention to both Arabic and Hebrew. This has made for a quiet and studious weekend absent the typical noise and pablum encouraged by the undergraduates.

A few of the Master's students, like Dustin and Ryan, joined the trip to the north after finishing most of their homework on Thursday. I've been a bit behind on my seminars and thus made the uncharacteristically responsible decision to contain myself to studying and the gym. Fortunately Dominique and Stefan stayed around to provide a much-needed respite from the grind.

In Modern Middle East History, we're currently discussing the Islamic responses to encounters with the West. This is honestly the most interesting class I've taken in years. Dr. Litvak is an amazing professor. The first day he greeted us with this priceless quip:

"I am Dr. Litvak. I'll be your professor for Selected Topics in Modern Middle East History. I am like most Israelis in that I think I'm right. I am not like most Israelis in that I know I'm right."

His teaching style is half-lecture, half-discussion. Despite the obvious fact that he is confident in his conclusions and his analysis, he never discourages other points of view. He is just as quick to tell you that he likes what you have to say as he is to rebuff you. However, he never rebuffs a student without explaining why and providing a litany of historical examples and evidence to bolster his reasoning.

We're currently reading about figures like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, an Islamic thinker from the 19th Century who traveled through the Middle East espousing the need for the Muslim people to unite against the West. One of the interesting things about Afghani is that he wasn't one. He was actually born in Iran and was a Shi'ite. But he knew that should this ever be discovered then his message of unification would not be well received throughout the mostly Sunni Middle East. So he crafted an entirely false background and set out on his mission.

The scurrilous part about al-Afghani is that there is a mountain of evidence to suggest that he was actually secular--that he didn't actually believe in the tenets of Islam, but rather believed Islam to be a tool (the perfect tool) to be used for the Muslim people to defeat the West.

The reason why I mention this is because one can draw a direct line from al-Afghani to his disciple Mohammed Abduh (who was a true Islamist believer) to Rashid Rida to Hasan al-Banna. Banna might be a familiar name. He created the infamous Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the early 1930's. The same Muslim Brotherhood that assassinated Anwar Sadat and spawned radical ideologies and terrorist organizations throughout the globe during the last century. The same Muslim Brotherhood that is still very much active in Egypt, Europe, and the United States to this day. The same Muslim Brotherhood with intricate ties to the controversial Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The alumni of the Muslim Brotherhood include a veritable Who's Who of Islamic radicals, such as Sayyid Qutb, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Osama bin Laden. So one can extrapolate why studying figures such as Afghani and figuring out his motives is of utmost importance if one is to have any hope of finding answers and coming to conclusions.

This is part of the weekend task--to familiarize myself with all of these various men and figure out why they did what they did, why they said what they said, and what impact it has had on the current state of the Middle East.

Following the massacre at Fort Hood by an Islamic radical within our own military ranks and the subsequent affliction of denial and political correctness that has so enraptured our media and society, there is ever more a sense of urgency.

Fort Hood revealed the greatest danger of all: ourselves. By refusing to call a spade a spade, we invite disaster.

Fort Hood was not a crime. It was an act of terrorism--another declaration of war on the West by a fanatical Islamist. The scandalous attempt by our media to avoid using Major Hasan's name, to ascribe obviously erroneous motivations like PTSD (Hasan had never even been deployed), and to preemptively warn the masses against "rushing to judgment," was nothing less than a premeditated, calculated attempt to hide the truth from an outraged and worried public.

It's like a doctor wanting to enjoy his weekend off by telling his patient that he doesn't have a disease (more like a...biological anomaly) despite the fact that the patient is clearly bleeding from his eye sockets. The nice doctor proscribes a little aspirin and tells his patient to go get some rest because there's nothing more annoying than having a clearly inconsiderate patient interrupting the big fishing excursion. And what's a little hemorrhaging anyway?

And the problem is when we (America and the West) finally come to it, because we obfuscated the truth from the very beginning, we will find our task at applying the right proscription all the more difficult because of our fatally inaccurate diagnosis.

This, of course, is the point of the MAMEH program. One has to learn about the past to understand the present and thus better the future. Hopefully whatever we learn here will help us provide a more accurate diagnosis in the future--one free from the shackles of a misanthropic mindset of misplaced tolerance purveyed by our culturally-misinformed "multicultural" elites. ( <-- Three cheers for academically accentuated alliteration!)



Jamal al-Din al-Afghani: The architect of Modern Islamism or just another snappy dresser?

להתראות

-Drew