Few people, both in the US and in the rest of the world, may know that the US has had its own Nazi Party, which under other different names (such as the Social Revolutionary Party) is still very active. I do not have statistics about how many Americans read or have read Mein Kampf, and even less knowledge about how many may have been influenced directly or indirectly by its ideas. Often I have heard the argument that Hitler, despite his charisma, would have never succeed in reproducing in the US what he created in Germany. This argument, in other words, suggests that something exquisitely German existed in the formation and ascension of the Nazi delirium. As an anthropologist, I have my strong reservations about this suggestion.

I tend to think that Nazism achieved such an appeal because it is ‘natural’: it applies to the very basic emotions and instincts of human-primates. The rationale is the ‘extermination’ of the different, of the intruder, of the alien, seen as a monster and a barbaric deformation of the real prototype. In the case of Hitler, the Jews became the target.

They profiled well in the alienating Post-WWI Germany. People from a different religion, with a strong sense of community, who rejected assimilation or tried to maintain a community identity, spoke a different language or used a different language to pray, Jews fitted the increasingly collective imaginary not only of the enemy but of the uncivilised inhuman monstrosity, the aberrant barbaric urban savage.

I do not need to demonstrate the powerful rhetoric used by the German Nazi propaganda to represent the Jews as weak, vicious, terrorists who were monstrous creatures devoted to mysterious, uncivilised and demonic since anti-Christian rituals. We need just to mention the ‘blood libel’ among the many other imaginary chimeras.

According to Nazi propaganda, the uncivilised, the un-assimilated, the isolationists and arrogant monsters (Judaism claims an inherent superiority of Jews towards not only other religious people but all humanity) threatening German society had to be controlled, checked, marked, to guarantee the security of the nation, of the civilised people, of the state. Public safety was the main priority of the Nazi state. If this meant abusing human life and using torture and extermination, Nazi Germany had no soft heart: everything should be done for ‘public safety’. It is not just an old rhetoric; today the ‘public safety to all costs’ (even the cost of torture and arbitrary killing by proxy) is again here to stay probably for quite a long time. Only that this time is not the subversive, terrorist, communist, Jew from which the civilised have to defend themselves, but the Muslim (often seen as an undetermined category).

Today we know how the German Nazi dream of a civilised, secure, strong, nationalistic, and national value-based, Germany, which did not want to ‘give up’ its identity to the ‘degenerated’ influences of ‘alien’ cultures ended. We also know that from the ashes of the millions of Jews whom died during the Holocaust, Israel, sixty years ago, was born (and Palestinians started the sufferance of their nakba still enduring). Blood called for blood, and in the alchemy of desperation, a sort of genome of the Holy Land, the hopes and tears of joy of the new Jewish state translate into the agony and tears of the endless bereavement of the denied Palestinian state.

America today is a super power full of contradictions. Strong in its foreign policy, marked by preemptive wars for imposing ever-postponed democracies, the Goliath of the Atlantic has fragile feet of clay. Suffering only though dramatic terrorist attacks, Goliath seems trapped in an eternal fear. A fear which has changed: from the external foreign enemy, the international Islamic terrorist, to a generalised fear of Muslims, even the star-spangled banner waving Muslims.

If Hitler were born in the US in 1964, and had the same successful political career thanks to his political solutions, would Hitler’s solutions for the ‘Muslims issue’ be popular with Americans? Check this video below

I am not naïve. I know that, methodologically speaking, these interviews are very much MacEoin style, and we do not know where, when, in which US state, or on what occasion the interviewer collected them. Yet this may suggest that it is time that academics (me included) start to shift their over-focused research on Muslims to understand how Muslims are perceived by non-Muslims in the West and if 1930s solutions could appeal to the twenty-first-century human-primate as the final solution to our fear of Muslims: another possible Holocaust, this time crescent moon instead of Star of David badge wearing?

Hegel has suggested that historical facts never happen just once; Marx added, ‘history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second
as farce’. Yet to those Americans (or Europeans or whomever) who dream of a Hitlerian solution to the increasing fear of Muslims, I have to remind them that, if Hegel is right and Marx convincing, this time, the conclusion of the new-old ‘final solution’ cannot be other than the Caliphate!

Gabriele

No stereotype seems harder to die than the idea that Buddhists are peaceful and non-violent by default, as if they possessed a kind of genetic resistance to an illness affecting the majority of humanity: hate. Since the revolt in Tibet, the majority of the mass media (with few exceptions) have based their reports of the Tibetan uprising through the lens of such a stereotype and their myopia of the reality of Tibet. The stories report the revolt principally as a struggle for independence from the oppressive power of China which started in October 1950. Surely, there is some truth in this. But the mass media, as unfortunately academics, and even anthropologists specialised in Tibetan Buddhism, have hidden what I call the ‘dark ethnic side’ of the revolt. The reasons are multiple and I will not discuss them here, as I will not discuss here the figure of the Dalai Lama, who surely emanates lots of ‘enlightening wisdom’, but also many, often totally unreported and answered, shadows.

Tibet is neither a mono-cultural geopolitical entity, nor a one-hundred percent Buddhist country, even though the BBC appears to believe so (misleading, as frequently they do, their readers). In this short article, I shall first summarise the complex multi-cultural reality of Tibet, and then focus on the ethnic issues affecting it, which see Buddhist Tibetans rejecting, through racism and violence, the Muslim Tibetan minorities (not so differently from the Burmese case I have reported).

Yet, as we shall see, even in this case, religion has nothing to do with Tibetan racism, even though it is fostered and provoked by Buddhist monks, probably ready to accumulate Karma and forfeit Nirvana in favour of their ethno-nationalistic dreams. I can only provide little information here, so if you wish to know more both abut Muslims in Tibet and the discrimination they face, I suggest reading, as interlocution, Dr Andrew Martin Fischer, whose work Close Encounters of an Inner Asian Kind: Tibetan-Muslim co-existence and conflict past and present, is freely available.

In Tibet there are Muslims: the Hui Tibetan Chinese community, and also more recent immigrants. The Tibetan Hui, despite being linked to the Hui Muslim Chinese, are proudly Tibetan, and indeed prefer to marry Tibetan women even when they were Buddhist, rather than other Muslim Hui from different Chinese areas. Muslims arrived in Tibet possibly during the eighth century EC, but documents start to mention them after the tenth century. It is still unclear, however, when the first mosque in Lhasa was built.

A famous legend has that the Great Fifth Dalai Lama, while observing the surrounding mountains saw a man prostrating towards west on the top of the Genpei Wuzi mountain. Surprised, the Dalai Lama observed the man performing the mysterious ritual for several days at clear fixed times. The Dalai Lama was then informed that the strange man was a Muslim praying to Allah. The pious behaviour of the praying man impressed the Dalai Lama who decided to gift him with some land on which the Muslim built the first mosque. The place, because of the legend, is now called rGyang-mdav-gang, which means ‘agrarian scope within the distance of arrow’s shot from the Dalai Lama’.

We could have expected that this beautiful example of religious tolerance could have been the start for future harmonious relations. Despite the propagandistic claims provided by the Dalai Lama’s government which advertise how well the Muslims were treated under Buddhist leadership and how the struggle against the ‘evil’ Chinese see Muslims and Buddhists together, the reality is pretty grim in particular after the beginning of the ‘War on Terror’.

Dr Andrew Martin Fischer (who whoever has not discussed further the topic of Muslim discrimination in Tibet during the present revolt) has highlighted the tensions between the two communities, which are primarily the cause of ‘economic’ differences and opportunities. He has confirmed that the ‘official’ version of the relationships between the Tibetan Muslims and Buddhists provided by the Tibetan Government in exile is, at its best, affected by historical amnesia,

[They] completely ignore the military confrontations that took place between Tibetans and certain Chinese Muslim warlords in Amdo as recently as the 1930s and 1940s. They also sidestep the fact that during the reforms of the last two decades, Tibetan aggression has come to be increasingly directed against the Muslim minority in Tibet, despite the fact that Han Chinese present by far the strongest exclusionary force in the local economy. In addition, despite popular perceptions of Tibetans as pacifists, the racist and violent backlash against the Nepali Bhutanese minority in Bhutan in the late 1980s and 1990s serves as a poignant reminder of the potential for violent ethnic conflict that lies within even these idealised Himalayan Tibetan Buddhist cultures, particularly towards other vulnerable and stigmatised ethnic minorities” (Fischer 2005: 2)

As I was saying, anti-Muslim sentiments increased during the War on Terror, which the Lamas and Tibetan Buddhists very much supported and used as an excuse to increase the discrimination and sufferance of, in particular the Hui minority. Through this discrimination, the Tibetan Buddhists did not understand that they were actually reinforcing the Chinese government which was seriously concerned about the secessionist attempts of the Chinese Muslim regions (such as the Xingjian). As we shall see, exactly because of these anti-Muslim sentiments, the Buddhist Tibetans have failed in coordinating the recent Muslim protests in a unique front for independence and freedom.

During the 1990s Ethnic Tibetan Buddhist started to fear that the economic success of Muslim Tibetans (particularly their restaurants and shops), would have undermined the economic, and so social, status of the Buddhist Tibetans. The Buddhist monks began a campaign against the economic activities of Tibetan Muslims, which epitomised in the 2003 boycott of Muslims’ businesses and saw also violent actions against innocent Muslim Hui families,

The clash in Chentsa Town in January 2003 served as a call to action for Tibetans, an incitement to take matters into their own hands, especially considering the widespread Tibetan belief that the state-imposed resolution of this episode was biased in favour of the Muslims. Interestingly, it seems that the bravado of Tibetans had also been stoked up by the events of 9/11, the Afghan war and the lead up to the Iraq war, the latter two of which appear to have been overwhelmingly supported by Tibetans in Tibet.

A regional boycott of Muslim businesses therefore quickly gained momentum soon after the Chentsa clash and even extended into areas of Kham in Sichuan that had little Muslim presence. Although the Tibetans in Lhasa that I interviewed were hesitant to talk about it, the boycott had evidently reached Central Tibet as well, finding an accord with the anti-Muslim sentiment already built up over the last decade. While the boycott was meant to target all types of Muslim businesses and trade interactions, including Muslim-owned buses, the main symbolic focus became the Muslim restaurants that dominate catering throughout Amdo. (Fischer 2005: 17)

During these clashes and anti-Muslim actions, the Buddhist Tibetans started to reinforce existing stereotypes against the Muslim populations as well as real myths, which show how little they knew about their fellow Tibetan ethnic minority, among those reported, I think the story of the ‘Imam ashes’ offered a clear example,

It is said that passing Muslim motorists throw the ashes of cremated imams in the air, which then lands on or is inhaled by hapless Tibetan pedestrians and has the same effect as eating a tasty noodle soup. It does not seem to perturb these story tellers that Muslims in fact do not cremate the bodies of their dead, but bury them according to prescriptions given by the Koran. Indeed, Rebgong County itself has been the scene of several well known conflicts over Muslim attempts to rent or buy land for the purpose of establishing cemeteries, in which case it should be obvious that even local Muslims bury their dead. However, this lack of corroboration does not seem to perturb ongoing embellishments of the ashy versions of the myth. (Fischer 2005: 19)

Of course, Muslims reject cremation and they do not cremate the bodies of their fellow brothers and sisters! But racist stereotypes do not need to be ‘real’, they should be just ‘believable’ for the target audience; and what more than ‘magic’ can instigate fear in those who strongly, also as part of their own medical traditions, rely upon it?

Since the beginning of the revolt in March, demonstrations against China are held in all those countries through which the Olympic torch is passing. From the politicians, to the public, from Hollywood to Bollywood, from the scholars (with few exceptions) to the students, from the Trade Unions to the Industrial associations: all show indignation against the ‘oppression of the Chinese government’. Yet they ignore the dark side of this ‘revolt’ which is not so different from that in 2003.

The people who are paying the highest price are the Muslim Hui and the Tibetan Muslims, which again have been the innocent target of Buddhist Tibetan violence, expressed in particular by young unemployed Tibetans and fully supported by lamas. One of the reasons, unsaid, for which the Dalai Lama threatened to resign as the ‘head of government’ is that he personally rejects violence and campaigns for a ‘democratic’ Tibet. However, this is not exactly what the lamas in Tibet wish. The Dalai Lama today has lost the support of many of the leaders in Tibet because of the rich and ‘fancy’ life he is accused of enjoying in the West and India.

The mosque in Lhasa was burnt and destroyed, shops and the possessions of Muslim Tibetans smashed, a family burned alive in their own shop, terror and terrorism have affected this community because of a pernicious form of ethnic (Buddhist) nationalism which seems to be the photocopy of the infamous extremist Indian VHP. Of course, the Chinese authorities, as we can see in some of the videos, protect the Chinese shops and people, but are quite happy to leave the Hui Muslims to the fury and indiscriminate violence and organised banditism of young Buddhist Tibetans. Meanwhile monks and lamas are just stoking the fire in the hope of not just a free Tibet but also an ethnically clean one!

Whay is the interest of the monks and lamas? It is clear that monasteries in Tibet live off of the alms of the Buddhists and so the high rate of unemployment and the often unsuccessful business ventures of the Buddhist Tibetans have an impact on the revenues of the monastery, and consequently of the lamas. Furthermore, not all Tibetan political and religious leaders (and often the two roles entangled) agree with the position of the Dalai Lama, who officially envisages a democratic Tibet. Some hope to return to a feudal system in which the lamas would enjoy power and resources.

The Dalai Lama, who has tried from the beginning, probably underestimating the Tibetan reality, to capitalise on the revolt, has subsequently distanced himself from the acts of violence. Yet, as religious and political leader, he has totally failed to report the ethnic violence, and the assault against Muslims. Not one word of apology, despite his being a rather loquacious man, has left his lips to reach the Hui Muslim community or the victims of ethnic and religious Tibetan Buddhist hatred: a failure that can only have consequences, in terms of religious and ethnic harmony, in a future independent Tibet.

Witnessing this, so misunderstood, revolt characterised by an amalgam of legitimate political struggle, hideous attempts at ethnic cleansing, and globalised Islamophobia, we can only ask: will the future of the Muslim minority of Tibet be similarly dark to that experienced by the Muslims in Burma?

Gabriele

Yesterday, Germaine Tillion has died at the age of the age of one-hundred. Few students of anthropology probably can tell you who Germaine is despite the fact that she has been one of the anthropologists who have contributed not only to the understanding of the Mediterranean region, particularly North Africa, but also to the freedom of Europe from the nightmare of fascism and Nazism. She has been a ‘partigiani’ and also a prisoner at Ravensbrueck; a personal experience which would mark her life and her future commitment against torture and oppression.

Germanie Tillion’s fieldwork took place in the Aures region of Algeria from 1934 to 1940. The material she collected has been at the centre of her two most famous works The Republic of Cousins: Women’s Oppression in Mediterranean Society and Il etait une fois l’ethnographie.

After the end of the Second World War, Germaine Tillion, despite wishing to study the ideology and reasons behind the Nazi crimes and the use of the camps, accepted professor Louis Massignon’s pressing suggestions and decided to go back to Algeria in 1954. She observed, and was the first to do so among ethnographers, that one of the main issues which Algeria was facing, and that would have affected its future, was the migration from the countryside to the cities, which caused a severe impoverishment of the migrants.

Recently, starting from her experience in Algeria under the French occupation, she had condemned the use of torture in Iraq and the ‘CIA secret prisons’ as part of the Bush administration’s ‘war against terror’. Her resistance against injustice and inhuman treatment never ceased despite her age.

In 1999, she became one of only five French women to be awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. In 2002, Alison Rice interviewed Germaine Tillion. The interview has been published in Research in African Literatures, I shall offer some of the interesting insights from this, often controversial but surely intriguing, anthropologist, whose words on the current war on terror should be kept vivid in our minds. Some of her words:

Gender and veil

GT: The veil can be ambiguous. It cuts both ways. The veil can also be a religious vindication, and this religious vindication is also ambiguous. I see countries like Afghanistan, where we find people of different languages united. In a place like that, I wonder if women weren’t responsible for bringing the famous Talibans to power. For, in a country where men engage in battles street by street, where different languages are spoken in each block, women fell back on Islam as a unifying force. Since what resulted from this action was the emergence of what I consider a repulsive Islam, it is surprising to discover that women played a role in championing this version of their religion. I am convinced that in Algeria it is women who carry the Islamic movements. They do this because they are not as advanced as the men in their thinking-I say this even though you and I are feminists-because they travel less. There is nothing like travel (metaphorical as well as literal) to open up the mind, but women who must remain in place are crushed intellectually. Who is victimized by these circumstances? The entire society! And this is why Islamic countries are all below normal standards of living. Keeping women in a stagnant state, behind the times, results in a big victim: the State.

The Experience of Ravensbruck

GT: When I reached Ravensbruck, they confiscated a suitcase that contained my thesis. It was filled with genealogies that were impossible to reconstitute, genealogies of all the families in the Aures. I had carefully noted the historical structure of the families in this region of Algeria, including relationships and inheritance. I discovered details such as if a certain tribe disappeared, which branch of another tribe would inherit the land. There was a whole mechanism of inheritance and this mechanism was dependent on genealogical structures. This was an enormous historical work. I retained the general overview in my head, but what I lost were the concrete aspects on paper: which group was the cousin of which group, to what degree, etc. It was quite simply a general genealogy, but the global understanding came with it. The substratum underlying this genealogy was the knowledge of each level of this society: if you place your foot there, you’ll fall, but if you place your foot there, you’ll hold up.

Resistance: “Dire non, c’est une affirmation”

GT: For me, resistance consists of saying “no.” But to say no is already an affirmation. It is very positive, the movement of saying no to an assassination, to a crime. Nothing is more creative, more life-affirming than saying no to an assassination, to cruelty, to the death penalty. One cannot say no to something one knows nothing about. You must have put your hands in something you hate to be able to catch it and throw it in the air.

On the War on Terror

GT: We see the United States as deeply worried about terrorism. But effectively fighting against terrorism does not mean increasing the number of military operations; it means fighting against what causes terrorism. If you introduce kindness and gentleness at the place where terrorism begins, you will eradicate terrorism without pain. It is necessary to examine the most sensitive areas of the earth. You can do nothing to stop the seventeen-year-old kid who has decided to place a bomb somewhere. You can do strictly nothing, and any effort against him will just fly back in your face. Countering violence with violence is the most melfective response imaginable. Instead, we should target the pain, with the goal to alleviate it. I firmly desire a worldwide dialogue, and I would like to see the United States discharged from the monologue. The period of great wars is over. Science has put in the hands of children extraordinary means of death. The greatest error the United States is currently making is to think that international military operations can stop a seventeen-year-old child from acting. The focus should be placed instead on alleviating the pain in the most sensitive regions of the world, beginning with Jerusalem.

About Life

GT: Learning to die, that’s what life is. For everyone. We know from the beginning, indeed we are born learning that we are mortal.

Adieu, Germaine!

Gabriele

Certainly he has not the fascinating look of a bin-Laden and does not live in the mysterious caves of the Hindu Kush, surely he has not the media appeal and the anchorman vocation which the ‘Master of Terror’ has shown to have in the last seven years; yet Roberto Sandalo (alias Robby the Mad or Commandant Franco) has more terrorist credentials than ‘Sheik Osama’. Roberto Sandalo, allegedly the leader of a Christian anti-Islamic terrorist movement called Fronte Combattente Cristiano or ‘Fighting Christian Front’.The mysterious group has been responsible, in the last year, for bomb attacks against Islamic centres and mosques as well as death threats to Muslims.

The Italian police arrested Mr Sandalo on 10^th April 2008; he has subsequently confessed to the attacks, the foundation of the Christian terrorist organization as well as new plots. Mr Sandalo, who was a member of the Lega Nord and subsequently expelled for providing a false name, has been an infamous, bloody killer and terrorist for Prima Linea (Front Line), a Communist terrorist organization similar to the Red Brigades. Mr Sandalo has justified his actions, and future plans to continue a terrorist campaign against Muslims, such as Dr Gonzaga, director of Islamic Relief Italy, as a fight in the name of Jesus against ‘Islamofascism’. The Italian authorities are still investigating the international links of the organization and the official number of members; another four people have been arrested today, among them Maurizio Peruzzi, an expert in chemistry and explosives. I am sure that this will not be the first or last of these anti-Muslim terrorist groups, yet I am not surprised that the first one started in Italy. As I have highlighted in another post, Muslims in Italy suffer, particularly from the extreme right, forms of discrimination as well as violence, and the Lega North is certainly one of the most anti-Muslims parties of Europe.

To tell the truth, I thought that news about the first Christian anti-Muslim terrorist group would have attracted international attention and fostered new debates. Think, indeed, if the terrorist’s name instead of Roberto was something like Muhammad; imagine the titles, the talks, the politicians’ words and the special legislations proposed. Well, we do not have very much to imagine, we need only to open a British newspaper.

But the news about a self-defined Christian terrorist and a Christian (mainly Catholic) terrorist organization has attracted virtually no attention. Nothing can be found, (at the moment in which I am writing) on the BBC (even BBC Europe) or the main British newspapers or the US. Furthermore, even those Italian newspapers which have dealt with the story, have not called the attacks, before often dismissed as the work of immigrants’ rackets and mafia, Christian terrorism, or referred to Mr Sandalo as a Christian terrorist (despite his own claim!). ‘How is it possible to kill in the name of Jesus?’ Many have asked. Well, history surely has the answer. It is not the first time; it will not be the last. I had the impression that many Italians (and by extension Europeans and Americans) would perceive as less dramatic the killing of people in a mosque than in a Church.

I have the impression that after so many wars against Muslim countries, audiences are becoming used to seeing Muslims dead, and, in some cases, some people maybe start to prefer them as such. None of the Italian or European politicians have condemned the actions, and plans, of the Fighting Christian Front. None of the clergy or the Pope has condemned or commented upon the actions committed in the name of Jesus. The message is clear: a mad Marxist - now fanatic Catholic - is perceived for what he is, a violent fool; while a mad Muslim who dreams of violent jihad is perceived as the correct expression of his religion.

I wish also to point out Mr Sandalo’s reference to ‘Islamofascim’. Check today (13^th of April) Jihad Watch’s page, Mr Spencer reports different events, some surely explosive, but not one word, not one comment about the Fighting Christian Front. Of course, Mr Spencer only watches jihad, but the fact that Mr Sandalo refers to the concept of Islamofascism perhaps would be enough to report, and condemn, Sandalo’s actions. Indeed, I have the impression, but we need more investigation, that Sandalo and his group may have been inspired by a certain language, ideology and viewpoints expressed often in a post-Marxist way. I find intriguing how many post-Marxists, among which we can mention David Horowitz, have turned their attention and criticism to Islam, but I leave this reflection to a future post.

Control over rhetoric can sometimes be difficult. Within the movements which supported the so called IslamoFascism Awareness Week and which claim Islam to be nothing else than a form of Nazism and Fascism (see for instance Geert Wilders, the author of the recent controversial film Fitna) starts to form a grey area of violent, racist and often really fascist supporters. I suppose that neither Mr Spencer nor Mr Horowitz would support Mr Sandalo’s group and views. I even think that Geert Wilders would feel disgusted by such violent terrorist intents. Indeed, in Geert Wilders’s own words, he ‘does not hate Muslims, but Islam’. The only issue, as I have argued in my recent book, is that Islam does not exist without Muslims; hence, hating Islam ends in encouraging actions against Muslims, as hating Judaism is nothing else than hating Jews.

Although, after the Holocaust, the majority of people seem to have finally grasped that hating Judaism as a religion can only end in hating Jews as people, and possibly looking for ‘final solutions’; in the case of Islam we have a clear situation in which this simple observation is not accepted. There is, also among politicians, such as Calderoli and other exponents of the Lega Nord, the idea that ‘holocausting’ Islam does not imply persecuting and killing Muslims. Mr Sandalo, with Marxist real politick, has better grasped the point. Certain recent, post 9/11 rhetoric is inspiring more and more Mr Sandalos; yet politicians, journalists and the general public seem to ignore the danger as much as many did in the 1930s, when the target of Mr Sandalo would have been Rabbis and Synagogues.

There are lessons which the increasing supporters of ‘anti-Islamofasicsm’ may learn from the history of communist terrorism in Italy, of which Mr Sandalo is one of the products. The Italian Communist Party, and the trade unions, of which many members shared with the Red Brigades and other subversive organisations much of the ideological rhetoric and slogans, quickly understood the importance of condemning and isolating the violent, terrorist components. Had they not done so, they would have ended absorbed and monopolized by the terrorist organization. Would the new anti-Islamic movements, which however reject violence, have the same courage or rather stupidly hope to manipulate such terrorist violence for their own ideological aims for a supremacist Christian (for some, often white) western anachronistic dream?

There is a saying, often attributed to Pope Bonifacious VIII which states ‘Qui tacet consentiret’ (i.e. Silence gives consent). In the case of the Fighting Christian Front, it is clear that the consentientibus among the self-labelled Christians are too many. Jesus can only cry.

Gabriele

Finally my second book, The Anthropology of Islam, will be available at the end of this month. I wish to share with you a short excerpt from the beginning of the Introduction. This is an Elenchos (from the ancient Greek ’έλεγχος) which refers to question–answer dialogue that aims to clarify a topic through deconstructing other arguments; in this case, how‘Islam’ may be understood within the field of anthropology:

ELENCHOS

STUDENT: What is Islam?

ANTHROPOLOGIST: Lots of things, of course.

STU: Yeah, but I mean, is Islam its holy books or what Muslims do?

ANT: Neither, I suppose.

STU: Well, it should be one or the other for sure!

ANT: Why should it be so?

STU: I think that the Qur’an and hadiths, and the other texts, tell Muslims how to be Muslims and this guides their actions.

ANT: OK, we can try an experiment. Get that copy of the Qur’an on my desk. So, tell me what this is.

STU: A book; a holy book, at least for Muslims.

ANT: What makes it holy?

STU: The fact that Muslims consider it so.

ANT: OK, but if you were a Muslim why would you have insisted that this particular book is the holiest?

STU: That’s simple Doc! Because, I would believe the book to be God’s words.

ANT: You see, Islam is not just what is written in its books.

STU: Why not? I don’t follow you.

ANT: Well, it’s very simple. You just said that this book, the Qur’an, is holy because at least one Muslim believes that God revealed it. Now you can agree with me that Muslims, each of them, have to perform cognitive operations to form a cognitive map of what for them is Islam. There is no Islam without mind.

STU: Certainly, you need Muslims to have Islam. Yet I still think that what is written in the sources of Islam shapes how Muslims are. Though there are some cultural differences, I am not sure about your point. I think that something called Islam actually exists.

ANT: OK, we will proceed point by point. Not only do we have different cultures among Muslims but also different interpretations. Which is the most basic element that you need to form interpretations?

STU: First, you need to know at least the language in which the text has been transmitted or trust a translation; but there are also other elements, like personal views and social conditions that surely influence one’s interpretation.

ANT: You are discussing a second order of elements. I asked about the basic element without which we cannot have interpretations, or any other mental process, since interpretations are complex mental processes.

STU: Well… the most basic is that you should be able to think. To have mental processes, like thoughts, we need a mind.

ANT: Yes, because for the ‘thing’ we call Islam to exist, we need a mind that can conceive of it, making it part of a mental process.

STU: Why refer to Islam as ‘the thing’ now?

ANT: You have just agreed that Islam exists because of the mental processes allowing some people to make sense of certain texts and practices. Are mental processes ‘real’ things?

STU: Well, I would say that they are exactly that, processes. We make sense of what is around us through mental processes.

ANT: Exactly, we, as human beings, through mental processes form what we can call maps.

STU: I can see that. So you are saying that Islam is just a map.

ANT: Well, more than one, for sure. It’s like one of those maps formed by many other different small maps, which, when put together, represent a vast territory.

STU: And, as you have reminded us many times, the map is not the territory.

ANT: But in this case, we can only know the map, since the territory consists of an endless ensemble of mental processes.

STU: At this point, I do not see the difference between a Muslim and non-Muslim forming mental processes about Islam. What makes them different?

ANT: Nothing, indeed, if we speak of the cognitive processes involved. You know, I have the impression that the most important thing that has been forgotten while studying Muslims is the otherwise obvious fact that they are human beings like me and you.

STU: But, I mean, doesn’t the fact that they believe in Islam make their mind different? Sometimes, in some articles, I come across the expression ‘Muslim mind’.

ANT: Some scholars, and unfortunately some anthropologists among them, have even suggested that a Muslim mind can exist. But how can a mind, which means cognitive processes allowed through neurological activities, be Muslim? Think if we extend this reasoning to other adjectives: Christian minds, Conservative minds, Jewish minds, Scientology minds, Jedi minds and Flying Spaghetti Monster minds.2

STU: So, what makes a person a Muslim? I thought that the fact that a person believes in the Qur’an and the sunna and in the shahāda, the profession of faith, makes a person a Muslim.

ANT: You are suggesting that it is the person’s act of believing that makes him a Muslim. Let me see ….do you believe that Juan Carlos I is the king of Spain?

STU: Yes, Doc.

ANT: Are you Spanish?

STU: Of course not. You know I’m Scottish!

ANT: Why are you Scottish and not Spanish, though you believe that Juan Carlos I is the king of Spain?

STU: First, I was not born in Spain, I do not have Spanish parents and, by the way, I do not feel Spanish at all. I am not emotionally attached to the idea of being Spanish. Like during the World Cup, if Scotland is not playing, I can support another team, but when Scotland is playing, I am excited and feel something . . . a particular attachment that tells me that I’m Scottish.

ANT: Indeed, what matters here is that you feel to be Scottish.

STU: Are you suggesting that Muslims are Muslims because they consider themselves Muslim?

ANT: Does it sound so strange?

STU: Well, if you are right it means that the most important aspect is neither what the Islamic texts read, nor what Muslims believe, nor how they act, but rather whether or not they believe themselves to be Muslims, and here emotions play a very important role, as in my case of feeling to be Scottish.

ANT: Yes, this is correct. We need to restart our research, as anthropologists, from that ‘feeling to be’, in this case, Muslim.

Gabriele

In the last few days on our newspapers we have read a series of news which seems to have attracted not so much attention within academia, but which are an important social political indicator. Although I am not going to discuss them in detail, I am referring to the cases of Irfan Raja, Awaab Iqbal, Aitzaz Zafar, Usman Malik and Akbar, whose conviction of Internet terrorist activity has been quashed by the Court of Appeal on Wednesday, 13 February 2008; the government apologies over the rendition flights on 21 February 2008; the full apologies of the US government for lying to the British one over the rendition flights; the quashed control order against the convert to Islam Cerie Bullivant because of a total lack of the secret evidence provided by MI5 (merely that the accused knew some people involved or engaging in ‘terrorist activities’); and the increasingly substantiate allegation that British troops executed and tortured Iraqi prisoners.

Each of these cases would deserve a comment in a single post. Yet here I am not interested in discussing the cases, but what they tell us about the unhealthy condition of our democratic values and the ‘circle of panic’ that this is dangerously creating.

The so-called War on Terror, launched since 9/11 has two main concocted tragedies. On the one hand a high cost of human lives, on the other hand, a high cost for our democratic values and understanding of social and political lives. They are connected issues, because the erosion of the latter is the inherent cause of the former. If the War on Terror has been successful in something, it has been in creating what I call ‘Western dystopia’. To have a dystopia you need firstly to posses a utopia. After the World War II and the defeat of Nazism, the Cold War provided a fertile ground for geopolitical essentialism. West and East became conceptual projections of civilization and values, in a frenetic competition characterised by the constant demonization of the opposite other.

Of course, this process has had an impact on the self-representation and understanding of the idea of the West. Part of this idea was a utopia which described, and still describes, the ‘West’ as a powerful civilizational force engaged in spreading its superior values, such as democracy, to the rest of the world. Economically, politically, and culturally ‘the West’, during the Cold War and the defeat of the USSR ‘evil empire’ fascinated the Muslim world, some part of which had received support from the US to fight their communist oppressors, such as in Afghanistan. As we know, the post Cold War honeymoon between this monolithically perceived, and represented, entity and Muslims was very short.

The reactions to the 9/11 events and its aftermath which led to the draconian anti-terrorist laws as well as unjustified and unjustifiable preventative wars conducted more on the wave of populist emotions than calibrated political judgement, have facilitated among the great majority of Muslims, and a considerable number of non-Muslims a deepening, pernicious, form of dystopia.

Our governments and politicians have been very slow to understand that the utopia was turning into dystopia. On the contrary, they presented themselves as a kind of Swiss Guards of western universal values, the only civilised ones. Somebody else, living in caves around the Hindu Kush, appeared to have developed better analytical skills able to penetrate the secret folders of those dystopic symptoms which were actually affecting the very same European and American political class. He wrote,

This Western civilization, which is backed by America, has lost its values and appeal. The immense materialistic towers, which preach Freedom, Human rights, and Equality, were destroyed. These values were revealed as a total mockery…[western politicians] declared what they declared and they order what they ordered, and they forgot everything they mentioned about free speech, and unbiased opinion and all those matters. So I say that freedom and human rights in America have been sent to the guillotine with no prospect of return, unless these values are quickly reinstated. The government will take the American people and the West in general into choking life, into an unsupportable hell…’

If you have not recognised the author of these words, you can just click here.

The pessimistic analysis, provided after 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror, seems to describe very well the panic and consequent dismantling of important parts of our democratic values which our western governments have engaged in since 9/11. In the attempt to guarantee a utopic security to ‘the civilised good people’ these politicians have actually derived their anti-terrorist laws from their own dystopic beliefs that the real fatal vulnus of our civilised way of life are ‘freedom’, ‘human rights’ and our juridical tradition. Our western governments justify these anti-liberal measures as necessary for our protection. In reality, since Islamic terrorism has not the power to destabilise or overturn our democracies, the continuous and unprecedented attack against liberal civil-liberties can be explained with a ‘fatigue’ of our democratic systems as well as the exploitation of the ‘circle of panic’ to compensate for the loss of the powerful twentieth-century ideologies. Politics without ideology can be less conflictual, but also proportionally less engaging and more difficult to manage.

Politicians need votes to eat; voters without ideology care less about parties and politicians. Politicians and government have lost the power to offer the dream of ideology, and so now they turn to offer the nightmare of hell instead.

If for the dream of ideology western politicians could confidently trust political rhetoric (i.e. propaganda), for the nightmare of Hell, they can only trust fabrication and hyperbole (i.e. lies). Yet this produces what I call stochastic dystopia, in which different parts of a society develop different, often contradictory, forms of dystopias. Furthermore, though a form of polarizations, the different parts of society would end in accusing each other for what they perceived, under each dystopia, as the catastrophic, hellish reality of their communities. These processes end in what Bryan Turner has defined as the ‘enclave society’.

To provide an ethnographic example of consequences of stochastic dystopia let me used Bishop Dr Nazir-Ali’s comments on ‘Islamic areas’ and my respondent Rajal. Dr Nazir-Ali has argued that Islamic extremism has turned some communities into no-go areas for people of a different faith or race, and has also added that the Islamic presence is a threat to the ‘Christian values’ and identity of Britain.

On the other hand, my respondent Rajal, born and raised in the UK and with what he defined a ‘strong Scottish identity enhanced by Islamic moral values, which according to him are very compatible with conservative English Victorian values, has highlighted how the British society is fully corrupt by a a-moral life style which is in total contradiction with the great historical and moral tradition of England and Scotland and creates no-go areas for law abiding citizens.

To have any idea of what Rajal is complaining about you can just watch this video about an ordinary Saturday evening in Aberdeen, the city in which both Rajal and I live. It is clear that as my Muslim respondent, Rajal, as Dr Nazir-Ali, are fully dystopic in their view of contemporary UK. Politicians are called to act on both the pessimistic views, if they wish to be elected and voted in power, so that the result is an increase in stochastic dystopia because of the introduction of further anti-liberal legislation. Yet this legislation often ends in having opposite effects.

Our democracies still have a powerful system to maintain, as part of the democratic framework, the division of powers between the political and juridical sphere. The draconian and anti-liberal legislation and decisions are increasingly challenged, when in other cases completely overturned and squashed, by courts. I have provided some examples of this tension between the political and juridical power at the beginning of this post.

The reason for the discrepancy between political power and the juridical one derives from the fact that while the political power has lost the power of dreaming of ideology, and turned toward the power of nightmares, hence moving from utopia to dystopia. The juridical system within a democratic liberal country by nature cannot be affected by neither utopia nor dystopia without negating its own function.

Nonetheless, we may wonder, if the effects of stochastic dystopia do not regress within the ‘western’ countries, whether the Hindu Kush based political analyst needs only, as the old oriental saying reminds us, to wait by the river long enough to see the body of his enemy floating past.

Gabriele Marranci

Why did our European and US governments invade Afghanistan? How many of us can recall the general rhetoric of a Just War fought in the name of an ‘Enduring Freedom’ to liberate Afghan women from their burqa and Afghan men from their long beards, as well as bringing to justice bin-Laden? The Afghan campaign has been a half military success, with US and Nato generals blaming each other for the other half failure, while bin-Laden, if not dead by natural cause, can celebrate Bush’s most evident flop. The Afghan war, while facilitating a new form of old corruption in the cities and capital, has increased the suffering of the rural population, often caught in battles of which they are only the victims. Yet some say that Afghanistan is now a better place since it is on the route toward democracy, though a fictional and corrupted one.

In the country the reality is quite dramatic, with an increased number of Afghan families relying on the cultivation of Opium, which Nato forces tolerate to avoid reinforcing the Taliban insurgence with new alienated and angered, desperate people. Indeed the Taliban and their allies, as one respondent, who visited the country told me, pay their ‘seekers of paradise’, many of which are ready to fight for gaining their family bread, and in case of death, there is still paradise (in other words a ‘Pascal’s Wager’).

Therefore, Nato and the US have decided to adopt less drastic measures than the Taliban did, with the result that today Afghanistan has an unprecedented record in the production of Opium. This is not the only negative side effect that Afghans have faced since their liberation. Today the country has for the first time seen people dying of HIV as well as experienced what people there often define as ‘western diseases’, prostitution and alcohol.

Of course, when people have more freedom, things can go wrong. Nobody, other than a blind minority, could, or can, consider the Taliban regime, with their unorthodox, tribal, interpretation of Islam an acceptable solution to social and political illness. Liberal Democracy, albeit suffering today a considerable and dangerous populist drift, remains the best system we currently have.

Afghanistan now is considered a democratic country, collaborating with the West for a secure future. The European Community is assisting the Afghan government in the process of building a tolerant democracy. Italy has accepted the challenge of helping the Afghan government to rebuilt its legal system.

Bombs, destruction, resistance, insurgency, counter insurgency, terrorism, corruption, sufferance are high prices that the ordinary Afghan people are paying for a better future and the ‘de-Talibanization’ of their country. However, we have now to ask how much support has the de-Talibanization. The reality is that the honeymoon with western democracy and values is ending every day more and more; the Taliban granted something that we cannot offer, other than betraying those same values we seem ready to spread even with bombs.

Sometimes, in fact, we forget that our liberties, freedom of speech, freedom of political action, freedom thought and freedom of creed comes, like a powerful medicine, with dramatic side effects; the worst of which is lack of security and social instability. The new ‘democracies’ are not the only ones to ponder advantages and disadvantages. Today old Europe seems ready to give up much of the liberal freedom that we have paid for with the blood of millions of Europeans.

However, Europe, or at least some of the European countries, such as the UK, took centuries to develop its own tailored form of liberal (sometimes monarchic) democracies. Since 2001 the US and Europe wished to provide Afghanistan with western tailored versions. The corrupted Afghan government, feigning innovation while maintaining Afghan warlord tradition, is losing even the last hopes of being seen as legitimate by its own people.

The truth is that without the sophisticated alchemy of warlords, opium traders, and Islamic charlatan-clerics, Afghanistan would witness an acclaimed return of the Taliban and Mullah Omar. The reason is simple: it is better to suffer under one single band of violent fanatics than hundreds of them. Furthermore, as an Afghan respondent told me ‘at least [under the Taliban] we may still be under the illusion that deprivations and hardship are for the benefit of Islam and our soul’.

Has the Afghan society changed since the Nato and US forces sent the Taliban back to the mountains from where their fight against the Russians started? If we leave aside the degrading effects of the War and the increasing differentiation between rich people in the cities and poor in the outskirts and villages, not very much has changed for the better for the ordinary afghan people.

Afghanistan, the Afghanistan which European and US politicians discuss, blaming only the insurgence and Taliban for the difficulties people suffer, is a masquerade. The demonstration? Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, an Afghan journalist sentenced to death for downloading material from the Internet relating to the role of women in Islamic societies. We do not know what he was looking for, but it was material linked to the condition of women in Islam. I am sure that as an Afghan who spent time under the misogynist Taliban regime, he must have had legitimate questions about it.

Karzai’s government lacks even the attempt to respect basic fundamental freedom of speech and the Afghan government’s clear fear to upset Talibanish Islamic judges shows the incredible masquerade that the US and Europe is ready to accept about Afghanistan. Yet today we can read that David Satterfield, America’s Co-ordinator for Iraq, sees Afghanistan as the real failure of the forced democratisation of a country, what he calls ‘the bad war’. Maybe we have just uplifted another masque, the one which covered the real interest behind the invasion of this tormented country.

It was a war of propaganda, a war which could have facilitated the acceptance of the real interest of Bush’s administration: Iraq and the redesigning of the Middle East. The hope of Afghan people and Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh’s rights (and possibly life) were never the real reason for the war.

I hope that many of you may consider to take part in Reporters sans frontières’ initiative to have the death sentence quashed, to have all the charges against him withdrawn and to have him released.

Gabriele

After World War I western nations have their own Unknown Soldier to commemorate those soldiers who lost their life serving their countries and whose identity was lost forever together with their lives. Some nations, like the UK, used their main churches to host the grave of the Unknown Soldier, others, like Italy, built monumental shrines. Yet the intention in any case is the same: to glorify self-sacrifice in the name of the nation. Although marked by an aura of religiosity, the monument is very much secular paraphernalia. Painted as a symbol of civil piety, the Unknown Soldier is a self-glorifying institution of Durkheimian mimesis.

Indeed, we assume that the Unknown Soldier is a hero who willingly sacrificed his life for the sake of the nation. Yet exactly because unknown, the real story of this soldier, reduced to dust by war and remade symbol by will of the state, may be different from the heroic outline the grandiose stones wish to narrate. Our unknown soldiers may have fought the state war because the state, otherwise, would have provided him with a very different grave, the lonely and shameful one of the executed platoon traitor.

Some of us visit the Unknown Soldier’s grave; we stop there and contemplate. We may think lots of things: from the less conceptual ‘who may be this unknown soldier; what is his story?’ to more philosophical ones, ‘why do we still kill each other?’, to more nationalistic ‘these are the people who saved my motherland’. Nonetheless, none of the visitors to the Unknown Soldier would expect to leave the place being cured from his physical, or mental, illness. The Unknown Soldier remains a symbol while his bones are reduced to dust. There are no expectations of him other than to be him, a faceless piece of destroyed humanity in the name of human war-games, of which the players, the politicians, rarely end in playing themselves.

Other cultures have very different approaches to their variant of ‘unknown soldiers’. Muslims are no exception, and many are the shrines of more or less famous šuhadā (martyrs) which people visit. The most famous of these shrines is linked to the Shi’a tradition and the most relevant Shi’a šahīd, Ḥusayn ibn ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib (i.e. Imam Ḥusayn). Yet, although less visible and less discussed, Sunni Muslims have their shaheeds’ shrine. Often rejected as folkloric Islam by the mainstream Islamic scholars and pernicious superstition by Sunni states, the pilgrimages to shaheeds’ graves or even graveyards remain an understudied reality. Some Sunni Muslims embark on such pilgrimages because of the widespread beliefs that praying on a martyr’s grave can grant miracles, particularly miraculous healings.

If one can decide to be a mujahid, s/he cannot decide to become a šahīd; one can only hope for it. šuhadā, not so different from our western tradition of the Unknown Soldier, are recognised as such by the consensus of the people. Indeed, despite the scholarly debates of how to identify a šahīd, ordinary people have the last word. You cannot stop people from claming others to be šuhadā, since popular beliefs are stronger than any theology. In some strict Islamic doctrines, such as Wahhabism, although šuhadā are respected and seen as examples, they are only people who have received the highest reward from Allah. Yet Islam is never homogeneous, and many Muslims believe that šuhadā have still something to offer more than their lives. Many Muslims, particularly in South Asia, strongly believe that šuhadā have baraka, a special divine property. In the case of šuhadā’s graves, the main belief is that they can cure illness.

During the 2001 war in Afghanistan, some ferocious battles between the US led forces and the Taliban supported by bin-Laden’s Arab militia took place in Khowst, Kandahar and Tora Bora and other small villages. The conflicts have left scattered on the ground the bodies of the mujahidin or parts of them. After the battles, the Afghan Villagers collected the corpses and buried them in improvised graveyards. Year after year following 2001, villagers started to report the miraculous healing of those whom had visited the graveyard. The mutilated, dismembered bodies of the mujahidin, now šuhadā, became the only hope for some poor people to survive diseases and illness.

Yet the interesting fact of this story is that those people who today pray on those graves were, in many cases, the people of yesterday who hated the arrogance and oppression of bin-Laden’s mujahidin and the Taliban. But there is a paradox within the paradox. The Taliban and bin-Laden’s Arab mujahidin, now transformed into healers by the US bombs and the local traditions, rejected the Afghan popular piety towards graves. They used to remove the banners and to punish the visitors. They, indeed, classified the rituals at the graves as idolatry and superstition.

Today the dead mujahidin cannot stop those same people they had once tormented, from using their ‘heroic’ death and šuhadā status for taking back, in the name of Islam, some of the hope bin-Laden’s mujahidin had shattered with their oppressive and violent view of Islam. Is this perhaps part of their torment of the grave?

Gabriele

Recently the Crown has claimed its first success in prosecuting, under Section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006, a wannabe ‘jihadi’, Mr Sohail Anjum Qureshi. Mr Sohail Qureshi, 29, pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to charges of preparing to commit terrorist activity and possessing items of use to terrorists, including a night vision scope and medical supplies To count this sentence as the first success of a quite unsuccessful piece of legislation is like to celebrate for a faux victory. I will explain the reasons below. Yet let me observe some aspects of the case. Here’s what the BBC has to say about it

Although I am not sure that, even living in Scotland, I would have trusted Mr Qureshi’s skills as a dentist, surely he was a much worse terrorist plotter. The plan was with an unclear target, the preparation boy-scoutish, and the risk he had taken unbelievable. In other words, Mr Bean could have not done better. I think that, though we have very few details available, Mr Qureshi, more than a serious terrorist, looks like a man with a clear inferiority complex (see the pictures here), boosting his masculinity by playing jihad. Did the game go too far, or actually did he hope to be caught? Of course, we cannot know, but we can safely assume that Mr Qureshi was possibly more attached to his own skin than his glorification of martyrdom, contrary to his self-representation in pictures and texts can show.

The investigation has demonstrated that Mr Qureshi not only did not plan a suicide operation, but his main aim was to reach Pakistan. Now, why did he need to bring with him to Heathrow the ridiculous equipment, in particular when he knew that there was no hope of passing unobserved or unchecked at the airport (leave aside in Pakistan!)? Moreover, it appears that Mr Qureshi had no real connection with either al-Qaida or any other Pakistani based extremist organizations. I have the impression that Mr Qureshi would have visited Pakistan, eaten lots of naans and lovely Pakistani curries, and enjoyed himself, only to then return to the UK and narrate heroic tales of his battles against the infidels and maybe be glorified in Ms Samina Malik’s poetry. It is not something so uncommon to fake jihadi expeditions to boast one’s own masculinity, as many can think.

Leaving aside the ridiculous circumstances that have forced the British Crown to use for the first time Section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006, I am more interested in exploring, starting from my four-year-research on Muslim prisoners, the reason for which he decided to plead guilty. Although I think that for terrorist related charges, there should not be an option to plead guilty, it is interesting to observe that the majority of those facing such charges, including those linked to cyber-terrorism, end up pleading guilty. Of course, he has received a shorter prison term. Nonetheless, even if the jury would have found him guilty (and there was a quite good possibility that they would have not due to the few and weak evidences) the sentence, as the judged has acknowledged, had to be a short one (i.e. less then 5 years). So, why was he ready to accept to be labelled a ‘terrorist’? Was Mr Qureshi, like some others I have met, actually happy to ‘do his own porridge’ in Her Majesty cells?

First of all, the word ‘Islamic terrorist’ for some individuals is now seen as a positive, rather than negative, label. In this sense, something very similar is happening with the term ‘Islamophobia’, where some people are proud of being Islamophobic. After the collapse of all ideologies and in times of extreme relativism, people, often with inferiority complexes, can reinforce their sense of Self through negative prototypes.

Secondly, when sent to prison Mr Qureshi may perceive himself as a ‘political prisoner’ or even be recognised as such by other Muslims, which would question the reasons behind his plea. Finally, prison, among certain extremists, is seen as a form of martyrdom. Following my last research, I am very concerned that Mr Qureshi could become more of a threat to us in prison and after prison than if he instead managed to reach Pakistan.

In prison Mr Qureshi can possibly achieve a higher profile than he may have ever had outside, and he can use the mass media attention he has received to boost the image of his charisma. Mr Qureshi can show that he is a recognised, licensed, card-carrying heroic terrorist, who is sacrificing his young life behind bars for the cause. Something of value within the complex world of extremism behind bars.

Indeed, look at this photo in which Mr Qureshi wishes to been seen as a pious ‘Taliban’. Can you notice that he has modified the turban and his own beard with a Sharpie-marker to touch up his ‘jihadi’ image? Is he a dangerous jihadi or actually a stupid fool, with a head full of Hollywood Rambo style films (which were quite popular in the 1990s among Pakistanis), Internet jihadi videos, and the worst JihadWatch stereotypes about what a mujahid might be?

Mr Qureshi has received a sentence which represents the level of his crimes according to the law: the lowest level possible under the current special terrorist legislation. This of course shows how unsuccessful, badly written and useless the legislation is to protect British citizens from the threat of real suicide-killers (see for instance 7/7). Yet the legislation is very useful to provide jihadi-mythomaniacs into state certified, and so ‘real’, Islamic terrorists - examples of virtuoso self-abnegation, available for glorification, and easy to imitate.

I have the impression that, if the government would recognise Mr Qureshi for whom he is (a person mentally disturbed) and used its power to commit him to one of our very efficient psychiatric units, and subjected his release only to psychological evaluation, less young male Muslims would end up trying to boost their sense of masculinity through religious delirium and delirious Rambo-dreams.

Gabriele

Finally Mr Spencer has answered my questions, of course in Spencer’s style, despite his traditional protestation and much crocodile tears, sees a great degree of victimization, demonization of the ‘enemy’, and manipulation of others’ viewpoints. Yet this post is not about Spencer’s answers, which in any case you can read and draw your own conclusions about. It is not about his lack of humour, and his self-centric business related, attitude. It is more about the kind of people who seem to orbit around him.

Indeed, due to such a reality, it becomes impossible to have any serious (or even humorous) discussion with him. You can read the slandering comments by his supporters posted on his post about me (with some comments lacking humour and sounding more like a jihadist-style rant), and the hundreds that I have received on my blog: some unpublished because of the vulgarity within them, and others which have even included, more or less serious death-threats.

I am an anthropologist, and as such I am fascinated by the situation. I may have discovered a new cult: Spencerdanism.

Go to the post in which Spencer has reacted to my discussion of Islamo-Fascism, read the supporters’ comments and Spencer’s answer to them. Analyse the comments through the available theories about cult formation and you can see that what Mr Spencer (consciously or unconsciously) has created is a new cult, of which he definitely is the much loved guru. And it is clear that, as any cult, you can accept it, you can reject it, but you cannot not discuss with it.

I leave aside psychological and psychoanalytical reasons for which Mr Spencer, (who I thought to be a commentator and a right-wing politician) has decided to move towards the formation of a sect, complete with a virtual (or at least so I hope) personal militia.

I can only observe that, while he has the time to reply to his worshipers, he leaves on his blog frantic, concerning, and often sinister comments about me and others (those of course he does not like). I am sure that Mr Spencer would never say the things that his adepts say about Muslims, Islam, and academics who disagree with him; but this is exactly what gurus do: let the others say and do what the guru cannot.

We have to admit that Mr Spencer, as well as his work, which I know and I have read, has changed a lot, as has JihadWatch. The new turn towards cult-movement can be understood if we think that Mr Spencer has to win his bread though popularity, politics and selective controversy. But a T-shirt - which he himself advertises on his own post, goes beyond any imagination. Is this serious, or a joke? Of course, I expect that he would say that he did not design the T-shirt, he only mentioned it (or at least I really hope so!)

Cults are serious things. Often gurus can lose control of them and the given cult can acquire a life of its own. Mr Spencer seems unaware of the danger related to his (wanted or unwanted) fanatic worshipers’ movement. I have written (seriously and humorously, since it is after all, only a blog) about BNP, fascist organizations, crazy Islamic movements, scholars, politicians, popes, religious leaders, critically and even sarcastically, but never have I witnessed such vitriolic and hateful reactions. All this only for expressing my own opinions and doubts about Mr Spencer’s views (and I am not the only one to see them as flawed!).
Yet I can understand that fanaticism, in particular when cults are involved, is very much the same: irrational emotion.

If a poor English teacher has recently experienced hatred and threats to her life from fanatics for innocently naming a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’, I can bear to be offended and death-threatened by Mr Spencer’s fanatic followers for daring to call him, with kind humour, a worshiped guru.

Happy New Year

Gabriele

UPDATE:  I thank Robert Spencer for sending me as a gift ‘his’ T-shirt pictured above. It is very nice.  If the US decides to lift the ban on our loved authentic haggis I will gift  him with  a real one. By the way, I have to notice that he has not autographed the T-shirt. So, I will keep it unused until the day we have an occasion to meet for a debate where I am sure he will be able to offer answers more sophisticated than “Some of ‘em. Not all of ‘em’” . I will not forget the pen.

Gabriele