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| -Short Attention Span Theater- | |
| What happened to the MidEast's cosmopolitan intellectuals? | |
| 2010-07-25 | |
A common theme in public discourse, in both the region and the West, is that these patterns of conflict have deep historical roots in the 'mosaic society of the region, conflicts being only suppressed by imperial impositions, whether of the Ottomans or the British, and subsequently by violent dictatorships such as that of the Ba`th regimes. The current conflicts, then are explained in terms of imperialist manipulation, dictatorial rule and/or recent military interventions. The cultural and psychological turns of anti-colonial Third Worldism, pioneered by such cosmopolitan intellectuals as Franz Fanon, and supported by Sartre, and later Foucault, as well as a host of Western leftists, found an echo among many intellectuals in the region. Equally cosmopolitan intellectuals, such as Ali Shari`ati in Iran, developed this anti-capitalist, anti-Western search for authenticity, found in an invented liberationist Shi`ism of the martyrs. Many Arab and Turkish intellectuals developed similar trends of thought and culture. Those who followed them did not share their wider universalist visions and proceeded in more insular and fundamentalist directions. These trends, combined with the regimes that gained power through a series of military coups in the second half of the twentieth century such as those of the Iraqi and Syrian Ba`th, bringing to power regime cliques from poor rural backgrounds, who resented and subordinated the old notable elites that were part of the diverse Middle East. The totalitarian regimes and their popular constituencies sharpened religious and ethnic solidarities and tensions, contributing to the heightening of communal insularity, and, in extreme cases, such as Iraq, to ethnic cleansing. When your Middle Eastern friends now say to you, in sadness and wonder: Where has all this sectarianism and fanaticism come from? We never knew who was Sunni or Shi`i, did not care who was Copt or Muslim! - the chances are that they are part of the educated middle class, subordinated and impoverished by the totalitarian clan regimes and their cultural apparatus, the lucky ones migrating to the green pastures of the West, where the old Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism thrives in London and Paris. | |
| Posted by:Pappy |
| #8 I ran into a worldly Egyptian ex-pat selling women's designer clothes at one of our suburban mall Macy's, recently... It's like the French aristos who descended on England and the American colonies during the Revolution. Does anyone know what happened to their children? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2010-07-25 23:13 |
| #7 And are sending their kids to engineering and medical school, mostly to our benefit. |
| Posted by: lotp 2010-07-25 14:29 |
| #6 What happened to the MidEast's cosmopolitan intellectuals? They came over here and bought gas stations and convienience stores... |
| Posted by: tu3031 2010-07-25 14:16 |
| #5 Intellectuals that didn't flee are probably keeping their heads down and their mouths shut and I don't blame them. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2010-07-25 14:14 |
| #4 I blame Abraham and Hagar. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2010-07-25 12:06 |
| #3 Summary: There's a running narrative that's commonly used to explain the current conflict in the middle east. It goes something like this: There are deep, natural ethic and religious divides in the middle east. These were suppressed and/or caused to some degree by imperial rule: first the Ottomans and then the Brits/Euros. Western leftist intellectuals agitated for the dismantling of the colonial empires. Their ideology took hold among many intellectuals in the region, with the result that thuggish regimes like the Baathists (and Nassar and others before them) were enabled to take power. Those intellectuals at least in theory worked toward a wider unity among the Muslims. In practice, however, the result has been fragmentation which feeds more violence. Meanwhile, the intellectuals who didn't drink the Baathist/pan-Arab/etc. koolaid fled to the West, which is why there aren't any moderates in the middle east any more. It will be interesting to see whether the author agrees with that common narrative or pokes holes in it. Can't tell without publication of the book as a whole. |
| Posted by: lotp 2010-07-25 10:02 |
| #2 It's cultural. I tried to mentally summarize the excerpt into tightly-stated bullet-points using everyday language. Failed. |
| Posted by: Free Radical 2010-07-25 08:42 |
| #1 this fellow is writing a book and this post is from what will be an chapter IMO the writing is horrible. The premise in fuzzy. The logicall flow is non existent. Typically scholarly work. |
| Posted by: lord garth 2010-07-25 01:05 |