Conflicts Forum

By Mark Perry, Bitter Lemons, June 18, 2009

We in the “the West” have a special place in our traditions for anniversaries. We celebrate two important ones just now. It was twenty years ago that thousands of children arrived in China’s Tiananmen Square to petition their leaders for greater rights. They built a papier-mache statue of a white-clad lady that looked familiar to us. They carted her around for a time, as a kind of icon for their movement. Then one night they were murdered in their thousands, as the world looked on. The US ambassador there, James Lilley, told me, “it is a sad time for the Chinese people”.

It was a sad time for all of us.

The lady first appeared 180 years ago, in Liberty Leading the People, a painting by Eugène Delacroix commemorating the French July Revolution of 1830. Painters before him had focused on the Messiah. But Delacroix took him down from his cross, clothed him in white, made him a woman and placed a tricolor in his hand. Women who came to see the painting sank to their knees, as Mary once had before the empty tomb. The painting changed the world: on one side of this new symbol of modernity a boy surged into the future. All innocence, eyes ablaze, he understood the meaning of freedom. On the other, a wounded veteran and patriot marched, dedicated to the new catechism of freedom. Jesus no longer led the people; it was a simple woman. Liberty.

Zhou En-lai, the former premier and foreign minister of China got this right. Asked once in the 1950s to assess the impact of the French Revolution, he answered, “it’s too soon to tell.” She moves on, this woman, like a wave.

After Tienanmen the symbol was no longer western, but universal, as was democracy itself. Liberty led the people in South Africa and South America and in Eastern Europe. The impossible happened through no agency of our own: the Berlin Wall fell and the politburo washed away so suddenly it left us breathless. Ideas themselves did what no force could accomplish.

We anger history to ignore this, do violence to our ideals to reject it. They our not simply “our” ideals, they are everyone’s. Mother Courage bore witness to what happened to the revolutionaries of France; they transformed a society of nobles into a nation not of “peoples” but people. They bore witness to the children of Tiananmen who stood helpless in the face of those who, acting on behalf of “the workers” and “the party”, shed their blood. We, in the name of realism, stood silent.

What is it that Barack Obama doesn’t get about this?

The people in the streets of Iran are not protesting the outcome of a vote, but the foundation of a system. It does not matter who won. The issue is not votes, but the system. No recount will set it right. It is not a recount Iranians seek, but freedom. They do not fear their leaders; they fear a future without liberty. It does not matter to them whether we support them or not, and it will make no difference to their inevitable victory. But it will matter to us. Our silence will show complicity, especially from the current US president.

Barack Obama is showing great care, because after a season of meddlesome politics America must show that nations and people must act on their own. And he has said this. That’s all to the good. But that’s not enough. America did not elect Barack Obama simply because we hoped he would be a realistic president–though that is certainly what we wanted. We also elected him because he talked in ideals. We believe in those ideals. We understand them. We would like to live up to them, knowing we often do not. And so Barack Obama must say the obvious: we will not meddle, we will not interfere, and we will leave this to the Iranian people. But in each and every instance, when the people speak we are with them. We are for the people of Iran and we must hope they prevail.

Liberty is leading the people again, this time in Tehran. We must stand with them and with her.

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A Conflicts Forum Monograph, by Leo Kwarten*, June, 2009

Shiite citizens face considerable religious, political and social discrimination in Saudi society. In the 1970s and 1980s, this situation has instigated bloody street protests and Shia calls for an Islamic revolution. Although the Saudi Shiites have considerably moderated their position since, these incidents still feed speculations about the impact the political emancipation of the Shiites in Iraq and the rise of Shiite Iran as a regional power will have on the Saudi Shiites. Do they feel emboldened enough as to put pressure on their government by pushing through their political demands more forcefully to the point of striving for secession from the Saudi state? Leo Kwarten strongly disagrees with this line of reasoning. Making use of interviews with local Shiite leaders, he argues that the Saudi Shiites are strongly aware of their limited political options and strive to improve their position first and foremost through dialogue with the government. At the same time, they ally themselves with other neglected minorities and liberals in Saudi society hoping to change the absolutist foundations of the Saudi kingdom into a more pluralistic one.

Read the complete monograph [PDF]

*Leo Kwarten was trained as an Arabist and Anthropologist at the University of Leyden in the Netherlands. He is an established writer and political analyst on the Middle East, who is regularly interviewed by Dutch radio and television for his views on the Middle East, Arab culture and Islam. In 1997, he published a book about Syria. He is also a lecturer with the Clingendael Institute, a think-tank and diplomatic academy based in The Hague acting for the benefit of both government and general public. Additionally, he serves as a intercultural consultant for western companies operating in the Middle East. Some of his clients are Arab companies that want to gain further understanding of the western cultures they are dealing with commercially.

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By Alastair Crooke, New Perspectives Quarterly, June 2, 2009

Most Western analysts of political Islam make the same mistake. They instinctively assume that conflict with the West has mainly to do with specific foreign policies, particularly of the U.S. with respect to Israel, the Arab world and Iran, and, if those changed, all would be well.

In fact, my intensive contact over the years with Iranian clerics, Hezbollah and Hamas suggest that the conflict with the West is much deeper. It is rooted in radically different worldviews about human nature and the good society.

Failing to grasp this reality, the West continually misreads what is going on in the Muslim world. At root, the West is about individualistic, instrumental rationality and materialism; the Islamic resistance movements are about a communal and spiritual approach to life. Continue reading… »

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Volume One | Issue Two [PDF]
From the Margins to the Centre
From the Margins to the Centre: An Irish Republican Narrative of Resistance - Raymond McCartney
A Discourse of Demonisation - Seyed Mohammad Marandi
Introducing a New Political Discourse - Alastair Crooke
Moving Forward in South Africa - Ambassador Mohamed Dangor
Hearing the Call - Adli Jacobs
Anti-Apartheid Islam - Na’eem Jeenah
Mscnceptns of Islm - Sheikh Chafiq Jaredah
Resistance & Freedom - Raafat Murra

Cultures of Resistance Activism Forum is a project that aims to address the Western hostile use of language intended to restrict debate related to mainstream Islamist movements and currents. The project will explore more effective means to respond to hostile use of language - as well as explore how better to insist on extending public debate beyond its standard focus on ‘Islamist violence’ - by launching a ‘positive’ (non-defensive) discourse on Islamism. In partnership with a wide number of social activist and public campaign groups, we aim to advocate for a shift in language from the defensive to the positive; to learn how others, in different struggles, have achieved this transition; and by this means, and by gaining greater critical mass, to open space in which a discourse of rebuttal and ‘resistance’ can be developed through visual and other means to imposed narratives and stereotyping. The aim is the change the terms of debate and to move to a more directly challenging, but more widely accessible, advocacy of understanding of Islamist ideology.

Cultures of Resistance magazine is published twice a year by Conflicts Forum.

Volume One | Issue Two [PDF]

Volume One | Issue One [PDF]

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By Mark Perry, Bitter Lemons, April 30, 2009

The wry and oft-repeated saying among senior American military officers is always good for a laugh: “no matter what the question,” they claim, “the answer is always Clausewitz.” Unlike many war theoreticians, Prussian Major General Carl von Clausewitz actually served in the military–fighting Napoleon and spending time in a French prison. He was released in time to witness Wellington’s British squares crush Bonaparte’s Imperial Guard at Waterloo. His “On War” was published posthumously. For nearly two hundred years, Clausewitz’s work has retained its power. It was studied by Mao, was carried in the knapsacks of Vietnamese soldiers at Dien Bien Phu, was required reading among Saddam Hussein’s senior commanders.

We have Clausewitz to thank for German militarism: the Prussian army wasn’t really an army until he came along–its officer corps took pride in the length of their ponytails and scoffed at the notion that they should actually command troops. The Germans have since discarded Clausewitz’s most trenchant lessons: surveying the ruins of their cities in the wake of the last European war, they relegated “On War” to the dustbin of German history. Not so with America’s officers, for whom “On War” is viewed with the same awed faith that believing Christians reserve for the Nicene Creed. America’s commanders talk of war’s “fog”, its “friction” and the “strategic center of gravity”–all from the lexicon of the Clausewitz catechism. Continue reading… »

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By Rami G. Khouri, The Daily Star, April 22, 2009

Once in a while a wave of ideas sweeps across societies and countries, and when combined with political and social activism it changes global history for a time. We are living through such wave now in the global Islamist movement that has swept across much of the Arab world and Asia, as well as pockets of other societies since the late 1970s. Many different forms of Islamist movements have come and gone; some have endured for decades; most have embraced non-violent change that starts within the hearts of pious men and women; a few have veered off into violent confrontation or terrorism; and all have generated significant opposition, especially after the 9/11 attacks by Al-Qaeda against the United States.

Islamism broadly defined encompasses many dozens of different forms of nationalist, local, religious, charitable, social, economic, military resistance-based, and the occasional terror movements.

It is also controversial, misrepresented and misunderstood.

We are fortunate in this respect to have available a new book that provides, in my view, one of the most comprehensive, accurate and useful analyses of the core philosophy and motivating political principles of political Islamism that is available to English-speaking readers. The book is titled “Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution“, by Alastair Crooke. It cuts through much of the ideological venom, post-9/11 vengefulness, neo-Orientalist stereotyping, or mere nonsense that characterizes much of what is said and written about Islamist movements in much of the Western world and Islamic societies alike. Continue reading… »

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