The damage that Arab nationalism has inflicted on the Arab psyche is considerable, and

even though it is now a totally bankrupt and discredited ideology, propped up by a few
geriatric hacks in the service of dictators, it has left a residue of confusion and
misapprehensions in the mind of the average person. The intellectual dereliction in the
Arabic-speaking world is total. The return to Islam is accelerating at an enormous rate,
with
the powers-that-be terrified of being swamped by a force that is angry, inchoate and
bent on
retribution for decades of being lied to and fed with nonsense that distanced the
average
person from his commitment to the deen. Sensing this, the Christian Arabs are leaving
in
droves. Palestine is now nearly empty of its Christian population while in Lebanon the
Christian population has dwindled to half of its size twenty years ago. A similar story can
be
heard from Iraq and Syria. The fiction that Arabs are anything but overwhelmingly
Muslim
to their core is rapidly disintegrating, forcing a hasty attempt to define and control the
rise of
resurgent Islam in the heart of the Arab Muslim. This is coming in two ways. The first is
through an acceleration of the spread of immorality and license through the media, now
dominated by local satraps and allies of the global media industry. The second is
through the
encouragement of extreme forms of sectarianism and takfir through the intermediation
of the
world wahhabi movement, a trend which you correctly diagnosed.
The bedrock of Muslim social life is the sanctity of family and the regulation of sexual
relations through prescribed modes and forms that are licit. The global media
behemoths,
targeting the Arabic-speaking countries, are launching a number of stations that mimic
the
worst on offer in the western world. This is not the soporific and badly produced fare of
the
state-owned media, but targeted and extremely slick programs that are aimed directly at
young people, with the aim of separating them from their fitrah; and in the interests of
consumerism, sinking them in the hell of the global youth culture. What the ideology of
Arab nationalism could not do, the bets are now on the potent mix of sexual license,
drugs
and rock n’ roll, supposedly the mantra of contemporary youth. Hours upon hours of
deviant
programming, backed frequently by the wealth of an Arab prince or a billionaire Prime
Minister, is beamed without control or supervision on supposedly alienated youth
yearning
to breathe the heady scent of western freedoms. Even Arab nationalists were hesitant
when
they tried to enter the sanctum of the Arab’s private world. The modern media crusaders
have no such qualms.
This invasion of personal space by the forces of shaytan, in the name of cultural
freedom
and entertainment, goes hand in hand with another tragedy in the making; namely the
wholesale adoption, by the new variant of Arab “modernizers”, of the programme of the
socalled
Washington consensus. We have heard of this consensus before as being the mix of
policies and measures inflicted on the poor by the denizens of the World
Bank/IMF/WTO
and other related multilateral institutions in the service of finance capital. These policies
which usually end in the bankruptcy for the recipients of this sapient advise, combine, in
no
particular fashion, policies of removal of price controls, free movement of capital (but not
labour!), privatisation (or the transfer of state assets at give-away prices to the rulers in
partnership with local oligarchs and multinationals), establishment of financial markets,
a
free for all in the banking sector (accompanied by massive cases of fraud, theft and
bankruptcies), and exchange “liberalisation”
( which usually translates into collapsing currencies and hyperinflation).The
Arabicspeaking
countries have all received this wonderful advise and the consequences have been
the predictable ones of massive unemployment, destroyed economies and
pauperisation.
But burrowing under the surface is the flip side of the Washington consensus, which is
not
immediately recognisable. Unbeknown to most people is a nexus of institutions, some
specifically targeted at the Arabic-speaking countries, which are busily engaged in co-
opting
the new modernists under the programme label of “building a civil society”. Institutions
such as the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Studies, the National Endowment for
Democracy, the RAND Corporation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage
Foundation, the Institute of International Finance and a number of universities actively
control the agenda of the new Arab modernizers. These entities are linked directly to
western governments, multinationals and banks, and the Israel/Zionist lobby. Their
schema
is quite simple as it relates to the Arab and Muslim world. Replace the framework of
society
that is prescribed by the deen of Islam with notions of democracy, human rights,
women’s
rights, gender equality, rights of perverts, rights of minorities, rule of law in the sense of
the
corrupt adversarial system of pseudo-justice that pervades in the West. And on and on.
ABS
- Anything But the Sharia ! So if our dictators are to fall- and well they might- we will
replace them with an oriental version of Puerto Rico.
Allied with the campaign to devise the new Arab “modernizer”, is another one, aimed at
socalled
Islamic leaders, this time to produce a sanitised, “touchy-feely” version of Islam- a
non-threatening Islam eager to engage in the “dialogue of civilisations”; an Islam that is
really not at odds with the new tune of liberal democracy. Here we have our so-called
leaders- from both major sects- being trotted out to participate in silly conferences on
interfaith
dialogue, with these court Ulema and “Muslim thinkers” tripping over themselves to
produce unrecognisable versions of the deen to please or appease world kufr, as if this
means anything to them apart from bemusement at the abasement of the official
spokesmen
for Islam. Experts at holding these spiritual jamborees are the ex-Crown Prince of
Jordan
and ISISCO (The Organisation of Islamic Conference’s version of UNESCO). It is
remarkable how many outrages have been inflicted on the deen in the last two hundred
years
by faithless apologists, all subscribing to an unrecognisable Islam that one day has to
claim
an affinity with 19th century science and another with Marxian dialectics and on another
day
with post-modern feminists and liberal globalists. All so as to present Islam as “modern”
to
a West that doesn’t give a hoot about a toothless deen .It is only concerned with the
original,
because it is the voice of Haq; and shaytan knows that:
“atta al-Haq wa zahaqa al-Batil, inna al-Batilu kanna zahuqqa“
( Truth has manifested itself and has overwhelmed evil; it is evil that will always be
overwhelmed).
Another facet of this campaign is to present Islam through the ethereal gauze of a
benign,
spaced-out tassawuf, with Rumi translations occupying valuable shelf space in
bookshop
chains, stacked with other titles under the heading of “ New Age and Alternative
Spirituality”. You have to pore with a microscope to see any mention of the Sharia in this
hideous distortion of tassawuf, with only a faintly embarrassing acknowledgement of
Sufism’s relationship with Islam or with the person of the Blessed Prophet, Peace and
Blessings upon him. This is the path of haqiqa without Sharia, which is zandaqa, which
is
now being adopted wholesale by the more “spiritual” of the Arab modernizers. The poet
Adonis- an alias for the Nuseiri sectarian Ali Ahmad Said- wrote a whole treatise- under
supervision of the Jesuits, one might add- on this subject, and has been a model for a
whole
school of Arab literati who draw from the heritage of tassawuf to propagate zandaqa
and
faithlessness. Contemporary Arab literature, especially poetry, the uniquely appropriate
form of Arab adab, seeks its modernity from a deliberate stripping away of the bounds
of
the Sharia which necessarily contained the ecstatic utterances or shathats of the great
walis;
and draws its inspiration from a shameless distortion of this wonderful heritage. Ibn al-
Faridh is reinvented as an erotic poet; al-Hallaj is seen as an inspiration to libertines;
and the
Sheikh al-Akbar, Ibn ‘Arabi, is the justification for all varieties of pantheistic trivia that are
hauled out to justify the abandonment of a Sharia- centred deen. Drunkenness –as-
aprogram,
sexual license, slavish imitation of western intellectual and cultural fads, deliberate
and public flouting of courteous and modest conduct, is the hallmark of that pathetic
figure,
the progressive thinker in the Arab world these days. Variations of this shabby scene
can be
found now in all the Muslim World
In reality, Islam had been able to tolerate such behaviour simply because society as a
whole
was confirmed in its deen and had an inviolate, and scrupulously observed, set of ethics
and
principles of conduct. Sceptics such as Omar al-Khayyam; wine imbibers such as Abu
Nawas; love lyricists such as the Andalsuian Ibn Zaydun were all allowed a space to act
out
their eccentricities as long as they did not overstep the boundaries and turn their private
fantasies into a disruptive attack on the Umma. The situation these days is entirely
different.
Caution has been thrown to the wind and whatever sense of responsibility may have
existed
towards the Umma, is now replaced with the barks of “intellectual freedom” and
“personal
rights”. It is truly depressing to see the condition of the Arab intellectual- especially
those
who reached their maturity in the heyday of the secular nationalist/socialist tide.
Poseurs,
such as the apostate and pseudo-philosopher Sadiq el-Azm, who once infamously
called for
Islam to be placed in the museums, is now a dismal relic, reduced to writing tracts in
praise
of the “peace process” with Zionists. Marxist liberation politics’ twinning with Sufism and
the Mu’tazzila, as expounded in Hassan Mrou’s doomed project, got nowhere. The Arab
disciples of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, led by the effete Michel Aflaq,
completely subverted his thought and produced the gibberish that passes for the
“ideology”
of Baathism. Baathism, supposedly an engine for progressive change as seen by
political
scientists of the 1960’s and 1970’s, evolved effortlessly into a nearly perfected system
of
control and terror that easily meets the entry requirements for the world’s list of the most
brutal and bloody dictatorships. The impenetrable and possibly nonsensical writings of
Foucault’s deconstructionist followers in the Arab world, such as the Franco-Algerian,
Mohammed Arakoun, who can barely write in Arabic, is only a fig leaf for the
abandonment
of the Sharia. Hisham Sharabi’s assault on “patriarchy” is only a devise to undermine
Quranic-sanctioned relations between the sexes, a feeble attempt to curry favour with
the
feminist lobby, and is the last fling of an ageing Syrian nationalist who has seen his
dreams
turn to ashes.
The modernist’s attack on Islam has always been through the slogan
“ The Quran may be absolute; but the Sharia is relative”. In other words, place the
Noble
Quran on some shelf, alongside other books gathered under the heading “The Library of
Great Works of Mankind” and kick the Sharia out as some relic of a bygone age.
“ The Sharia must be reinterpreted in light of modern conditions!” cry the modernists,
and
this is the refrain heard from Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, through Ali Abd el-Raziq, right
down
to the current champions of abandoning the Sharia in the interest of some imaginary
world
of perpetual progress.
The disintegration of the anti-Islamic intelligentsia in the Arab World is now at an
advanced
stage. Nearly every pet literary, political and philosophical project of these mostly
untalented arbiters of the intellectual scene in the Arabic speaking countries is now in
ruins,
crashing against the harsh realities of Arab decay, mainly caused by the very
modernisms
that these wreckers have forced on Arab society, in alliance with the military and secret
police thugs who have seized power. The Umma in the Arabic-speaking world is simply
exhausted with political and social experimentation that only leads to further distancing
from the source of their life force, the deen and there is today a simple rejection of, and
resistance to, any further erosion of their Islam.