A very interesting review, seemingly off the beaten path, pays high rewards.Extensive quotes from
Theodor Herzl, founding father of the Zionist movtment..his novel, Altneuland (Old-New Land) is a blueprint of the perfect Jewish state, a technocratic Utopia, a socialist dream with all the advantages of capitalism, an idealistic colonial enterprise, ....blinkered faith in economic progress; trust in social engineering by the state; a fetishistic taste for power plants and big dams....
This is all most gratifying, but what do the Arabs make of it all? What about their traditions, beliefs, and aspirations to be proud and free? Not to mention their "identity." The question does in fact come up. Kingscourt, impressed as he is by the Zionists' great achievements, asks an Arab named Reschid Bey whether his people resent the new interlopers on their tribal lands. "What a question!" he replies. "It was a great blessing for all of us." The landowners sold their land to the Jews at high prices, and "those who had nothing stood to lose nothing, and could only gain." Nothing, he continued, was more wretched than an Arab village in the late nineteenth century. "The peasants' clay hovels were unfit for stables. The children lay naked and neglected in the streets, and grew up like dumb beasts." But now everything was different. For everyone "benefitted from the progressive measures of the New Society, whether they wanted to or not, whether they joined it or not." The s*wamps were drained, canals dug, trees planted. And there was plenty of work for everyone. Only begging was now strictly forbidden. ...
Altneuland is worth reading because it contains so much that is grand and hopeful about Western thought since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. From this kind of thinking came the Industrial Revolution, liberal democracy, scientific discovery, and civil rights. But the same Promethean dreams of European rationalists, taken to logical extremes and brutally implemented, often by nonEuropeans who wanted to catch up with Western progress, have ended in the mass graves of the gulag and the killing fields of China and Cambodia. Europeans justified their imperial conquests with claims of progress and enlightenment. Asian tyrants murdered millions with the same justifications. Reactions to the rationalist dreams of Eastern tyrants or Western empires have been just as bloody. The Islamist revolutionary movement that currently stalks the world, from Kabul to Java, would not have existed without the harsh secularism of Reza Shah or the failed experiments in state socialism in Egypt, Syria, and Algeria. This is why it was such a misfortune, in many ways, for the Middle East to have encountered the modern West for the first time through echoes of the French Revolution. Robespierre and the Jacobins were inspiring heroes for Arab radicals: •ogressive, egalitarian, and opposed to the Christian Church. Later models for Arab •ogress— Mussolini's Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union—were even more disastrous. But to see the upheavals of the twentieth century as a pendulum, winging from Western rationalism to Oriental religious zeal, would be a mistake, for the two extremes are dangerously entangled.
The furnace for such syntheses is often located in the West itself. Pol Pot melded revolutionary Marxism with Khmer nationalism as a student of radio technology in Paris. The Iranian revolutionary scholar Ali Shari'ati was only a few years younger than Pol Pot, and like him spent some years studying in Paris, where he translated the works of Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara. Shari'ati's views on "Islam as practical socialism" were a conscious fusion of secular and religious dogmas. His faith was turned into the vehicle of armed struggle. Martyrdom ("red death") was promoted as the highest form of existence—not just an end, but a goal in itself. He had turned from Marxism to a purist version of Islam. And yet he used the political terminology of freedom and equality.
Sati' al-Husri (1880-1968) was a secular thinker whose concept of Arab unity was based less on Islam than on blood ties, history, and language. An activist in Damascus when the French ruled Syria in the 1920s, he was a keen student of German Romantic thinkers, such as Fichte and Herder, who countered the French Enlightenment by promoting the notion of an organic, volkisch nation, rooted in blood and soil. His ideal of pulling the Arab world together in a huge organic community was directly inspired by pan-German theories that held sway in fascist circles in Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s. An Arab Volksgemeinschaft, bound by military discipline and heroic individual sacrifice, was what he dreamed of. And, by the way, some of the early Zionists were just as much in thrall of the same German ideas. In his memoirs, one such figure, Hans Kohn, writes that young Jews "transferred Fichte's teaching" into the "context of our own situation...we accepted his appeal to bring forth the ideal community by placing all the power of the rationally and ethically mature individual at the service of his own nation." .... The aim, in any case, was to overcome "abstract Western thinking" and free the Arab people from feudalism, colonialism, imperialism, and Zionism. This, along with a version of totalitarian socialism, is still the official ideology of the Baathists today.
k Although Christian fundamentalists speak of a crusade, the West is not at war with slam. Indeed, the fiercest battles will be fought inside the Muslim world, not strictly between religionists and secularists, but between those who favor civil liberties and freedom of thought and those who wish to impose a theocracy. The religious revolution will have to be halted preferably not by outside intervention but by Muslims themselves. In fact, Western intervention often makes things harder for non-Western liberals, ..Where political, religious, and intellectual freedom has already been established, it must be defended against its enemies, with force, if need be, but also with conviction. What should be clear is that we have not been witnessing the Manichaean history of one civilization at war with another. On the contrary, it is a tale of crosscontamination, the spread of bad ideas. This could happen to us now if we fall for the temptation to fight fire with fire, Islamism with our own forms of intolerance. Religious authority, especially in the United States, is already having a dangerous influence on political governance. We cannot afford to close our societies as a defense against those who have closed theirs. For then we would all become Occidentalists, bent on the destruction of an ill-defined, less than human, alien enemy, and there would be nothing left to defend.
