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Wednesday, November 13, 2024


Islamic learning

Ghulam Shabbir 
November 8, 2024


MAN’S superiority over all creatures lies in his faculty of creative knowledge, which the heavens, despite their heights, the mountains, despite their firmness, and the earth, despite its vastness, refused to take on (Quran 33:72). This points to the faculty to discern the properties of things and give them ‘names’ (2:31). This is man’s inherent capability to unravel the mysteries of the universe and employ the same for his mastery over nature. Thus his mastery of the universe was a foregone conclusion. What matters most is to wield this mastery responsibly, for knowledge is a double-edged sword, prone to be used both for salutary and destructive ends.

Therefore, man’s real test lies in ‘mastering’ that mastery of the universe. So, ‘al-amana’ or the ‘trust’ which the universe trembled to bear, according to late Islamic scholar and thinker Fazlur Rahman, was to discover the laws of, and thus achieve mastery over, nature or in the Quranic terminology, to know the ‘names’ of all things and then use this mastery — under the human initiative — to create a positive world order.

To the Quran, all knowledge — intellectual, scientific or intuitive — comes from God. It sets high value on knowledge and excludes no category of learning whatsoever, with the overriding principle that this knowledge should be utilised through proper and constructive channels. Man’s essential task is to reconstruct a scientific picture of the objective reality and employ the same to create a healthy moral order. So, to engage in scientific pursuit without harnessing it for the creation of a just moral order — to know the ‘names’ without utilising them — would be, in the words of the Quran, ‘abath’ or a vain, dangerous, indeed Satanic pursuit.

Pristine Islam combined metaphysics and social reality — the Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) religious experience concerned both monotheism and socioeconomic justice. With an inherent symbiotic relationship, both monotheism and socioeconomic reforms assume fusion and flow like a seamless singular stream from the inner unity of the Quran and the immaculate conduct of the Prophet. Closer examination reveals that it was not monotheism but rather its entailing social reforms that invoked a vehement reaction from the Makkan oligarchy for they were least bothered by the monotheism of the Hanifs — certain Makkans who arrived at monotheism through self-deliberation — not linked with social reforms.


Islam combined metaphysics and social reality.

Islam, unlike the ancient world, combined metaphysics and social reality. Earlier, the streams of pure intellect and transcendentalism had flowed independently despite the coexistence of Jews and Greeks for a considerable period of time at Alexandria. To Christianity, excepting the gospels, everything was futile. Islam focused on the fusion of religious and positive knowledge; it made history a field of divine activity to objectify moral values. The Quran inspired Muslims to pursue all branches of knowledge irrespective of the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane and to utilise the same for the benefit of mankind.

Born out of a violent break with its past, the modern West will seek no negotiation with any spiritual system or moral ideology. In such a situation, what else but the Quran can steer the world out of its crisis? For Islam was the only genuine movement in history which ethically ‘oriented’ the raw materials of history rather than compromised with them under the convenient cover of secularism. Later, vested interests broke the fusion of metaphysics and social reality. Orthodoxy’s nexus with dictators led to the dichotomy of state and religion, while many Sufis’ neutr­ality to social phenomena triggered ‘personal-ism’ at the cost of collectivism. Ever since, orthodox religious knowledge is quarantined in the ma­­dressah, having no organic link with the positive knowledge of the external world.

The world of Islam in contradistinction to the ‘material’ West and the ‘spiritual’ East stands as a ‘gold median community’ (2:143) tasked with arbitrating their conflicts. On this premise, Iqbal has said: “Although we [Muslims] are coiled up in ourselves like a bud; should we perish, the whole garden [of the world] must perish.”

Dr Fazlur Rahman similarly challenged the West along the lines that you can ignore the law of gravity but Islam cannot be ignored. Muslims have become prisoners of the past and if they do not take the initiative to rediscover Islam, their future is bleak.

Muslims owe it to themselves and to the world at large to recover the fusion of moral values and social phenomena by the crystal-clear Weltanschauung of the Quran. This would be a potent step for them to assume the steering wheel of history. For how long must the Muslim faith remain in the grip of the past?

The writer is an academic.


Published in Dawn, November 8th, 2024

Sunday, October 06, 2024

 

Inconvenient Truths: The Shia Salah al-Din and 10/7


HE WAS A KURD

Salah El Din – Salah El Din El Ayoubi – Saladin and Richard the Lionheart

Jerusalem’s hard-fought liberation, now in process, is a recapitulation of the Christian Crusades of the 11th-13th centuries, this time, not by the knight on a white horse of legend, but through the long march of guerilla warfare by the much maligned Shia. This follows on the liberation of Iran from its Judeo-Christian yoke in 1979 and Iraq 25 years later, ironically by the US, forming the second Shia majority state. But it is the Shia minority of Lebanon that holds the keys to Jerusalem. Their 40% of the Lebanese population punches well above their weight in a fractious country split among Christians, and Sunni and Shia Muslims.

Hezbollah was forged in the heat of Israeli occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s. The then-rag-tag militia killed over 600 Israeli soldiers, forcing Israel to retreat in humiliation, its first such defeat ever, and by a nonstate actor, a very bad omen, which Israel’s almost daily murder of Palestinians every since cannot erase, and which culminated in 10/7, Israel’s own private 9/11, bringing us to Israel’s carpeting bombing of Lebanon.

It is the Shia of Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen we have to thank for preventing Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians from proceeding smoothly. Sunnis will have to wake up if they don’t want to be left behind by their Shia brothers, their self-satisfied Sunni hegemony cracked open, exposed as the ‘sick man’ of the Middle East, i.e., undermined by imperialism, the same compromised role that destroyed the Ottomans, created post-Ottoman puppet Sunni states, and planted in Palestine a cursed tree, the Quran’s poisonous zaqqum, rooted in the center of Hell, aka the Jewish state.

The Saudis long ago were compromised through a voluntary pact with first British then US imperialism but, until the rise of Muhammed Bin Salman (MBS), were at least keeping up the trappings of Islamic ritual, jealously guarding the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The quietist Saudis effectively blackmailed the Palestinians into accepting an interminable Israeli murderous occupation and creeping (now galloping) theft of their lands, financing Palestinian refugees, but with no promise of liberation, effectively working with not against the enemy.

Now MBS has let the westernizers loose in his kingdom, discarding the hijab, promoting concerts of trashy western rock music, buying British football teams (Newcastle United in 2021). Trump’s Abraham Accords were supposed to lead to a new Middle East with Israel and Saudi Arabia as the kingpins. With October 7 (10/7), the bottom fell out of MBS’s fantasy of a Saudi-Isreali hegemony over the Middle East, leaving the Palestinians in permanent limbo or exile. It didn’t seem to matter to the Saudis and Gulf sheikhs, who long ago lost interest in Palestine. In thie face of this complete betrayal of the Palestinians, of Islam itself, the Shia are the only Muslims to resist the sacrilege of permanent Jewish rule over Palestine and the destruction Islam’s holy sites to build a Third Temple.

Orthodox Sunni Muslims have always feared the moral purity which Shiism was founded on, in opposition to the more worldly, pragmatic Sunni majority. This very productive, though at times deadly, stand-off between the two strands of Islam began with Muhammad’s young cousin Ali being the first convert to Islam after the Prophet’s wife Hadija, Ali’s heroic military career defending the religion during the early, perilous battles immortalized in the Quran, through to the murder of him and his family by power-hungry rivals. The draw of idealism and justice has kept Shiism alive, and from what we see today, it is the saving grace of Islam, pushing back today against deadly secularism. Ultimately, the Sunni will have to admit that the Shia are not just an inconvenient footnote (like MBS et al would have liked to make of the Palestinians).

20th century ummah challenges

All Muslims will agree that the unity of the ummah is the first, most urgent, priority. The Shia, though outliers, strive for this even more, as they face hardline Sunnis who consider them apostates and would be happy to cut them loose or wipe them out. The official Sunni position has wavered over the centuries, but generally grudgingly accepts them. The imperialists of course were happy to use ‘divide and rule’, and they quickly turned a peaceful ummah into quarreling sectarians in India, Pakistan, Iraq, wherever they had the chance.1 This only really worked for post-Ottoman Iraq and Lebanon, both with large Shia communities mixed (peacefully) with Sunni. But the 20th century was one of increasing division, chaos, everywhere in the ummah. It is still on life support, held together now by the Shia thread, the ‘Shia crescent’, the only link the ummah has to Jerusalem and the Palestinians as they face annihilation, their Sunni brothers helpless or unwilling to save them.

The British official who fashioned the new Iraq in the 1920s, Gertrude Bell, had no time for Shia, who were the majority then as now, but Gertrude had no time for democracy for the dark-skinned. I don’t for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority; otherwise you will have a mujtahid-run, theocratic state, which is the very devil. She knew how the ulama in Iran had defeated the Shah on his westernizing mission, the famous tobacco fatwa of 1890 that forced the shah to cancel the British concession, and supported the constitution movement for democracy in 1905. The British had no interest in creating a radical Shia majority state and put in place a Sunni puppet king.

Iraq’s long and violent history since then finally undid Gertrude’s machiavellian scheming in 2003, bringing to an end a truly disgusting Sunni dictatorship, and the advent of the first Shia-majority state, the positive effects of which are still being discovered. We can thank the US imperialists (even a broken clock is right twice a day) for stumbling on a winning formula for Islam (and for themselves, for the world). By genuinely promoting electoral democracy (along with opening Iraq to foreign exploitation of Iraq’s oil), it started the ball rolling on Sunni-Shia relations everywhere, including US client number one, the Saudi dictator-king, with his truly downtrodden Shia, who sit on Saudi oil and get only repression, disenfranchisement and lots of beheadings as thanks.

The 20th century path that brought us to our present apocalyptic scenario was long and tragic. The Ottoman ‘sick man of Europe’ collapse at the end of WWI, invaded by the British and French (their Russian allies had already collapsed leaving more spoils for the victors). The end of the caliphate? For atheist Turkish dictator Mustafa Kemal that would have been fine. The Muslim ummah, both Sunni and Shia, anticipated this and had already rallied in its defense with the Khilafa Movement in 1919-1920, supported by other anti-imperialists, including Gandhi and India’s Hindus, who saw the British divide-and-rule as the poison that kept Indians subjugated.

Kemal got his way in 1924, accusing Indian Muslim leaders, who came all the way to Ankara to beg the Turkish strongman to maintain the caliphate, of foreign election interference. As if the caliphate was a Turkish plaything The shock wave reverberated around the world culminating in the World Islamic Congress in Jerusalem in 1931 at the behest of Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, bringing together Muslim leaders from around the world. A truly historic moment in the history of the ummah. But the caliphate was already a pipe dream, with growing Jewish immigration to British Palestine, the intent being to create a Jewish state, an imperial outpost to control the Middle East.

Everywhere, the Muslim world was occupied now by nominally Christian world empires, British, American, French, Dutch, the House of War (vs the ummah, the House of Peace), the the financial strings predominantly in Jewish hands, accounting for the plum Palestine being selected as a future Jewish state, purchased by the elite Jews who financed the British empire. Except for Shia Iran, which was never fully occupied and given an imperial make-over. But Iran also had its atheist modernizer, Reza Shah, who, having tricked the ulama into giving him their blessing initially, left them alone though marginalized. Though he weakened the religious establishment, outlawed the veil, and built industry and infrastructure, he was not so fanatically anti-Muslim He was anti-imperialist, and when WWII broke out, he was deposed by the British to prevent the shah from sending oil to the Germans. That occupation wrankled, and all the foreign devils, British, Russia, American were given the boot when the war ended.

It was the Shia ulama of Iran who were the only ulama to resist imperialism,2 supporting the first genuinely independent prime minister, Mossadeq, in 1951 in his effort to kick the British out and take control of the economy. The normally quietist, conservative religious elite had been radicalized despite themselves. When the US moved in to foment a coup in 1953, the invaders were able to get a few religious leaders to bless their scheming, but this blatant imperialist act galvanized all Iranians, and eventually led to the overthrow of the second and last Pahlavi shah in 1979. Newly religious Iran was joined by newly religious Turkey with the coming to power of Recep Erdogan in 2000, who refers to his followers as ‘grandchildren of the Ottomans’. Traditional Sunni-Shia rivals, Turkey and Iran are far from bosom buddies, but the current crisis of the ummah means that differences are put aside.

The second stumbling block for Muslims was the secular reaction to imperialism, Arab nationalism, now competing with Turkish and Persian nationalisms, fashioned as secular identities, undermining a united Islamic identity, central to the ummah. Egypt’s Nasser and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein are the two most notorious nationalist leaders, who led their countries in a death spiral of violent repression of Islam, corruption and failed military ventures.

Nationalism was foreign to Muslims, never the defining ideology, and these nationalist movements failed, with chauvinistic Sunni radicals morphing into violent pseudo-Islamic movements – al-Qaeda, ISIS and Islamic State–Khorasan Province.

With the current US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians, the ummah is coming together again, realizing this is the make-or-break moment for Islam, and that these nationalisms are evaporating in the heat of crisis. Even the perfidious MBS casually announced that there would be no Israeli-Saudi new order until the Palestinians have a real state. The ice is cracking, moving, as Palestine’s spring takes shape out of the Israelis’ ashes and rubble.

Turkey and Iran had secular capitalism imposed from the top to keep the imperialists at bay. Egypt had a brutal British occupation until the 1950s, creating the same secular capitalism as Turkey and Iran, but then came socialistic dictator Nasser in 1951, injecting a new political element. Sadly, he too refused to acknowledge Islam as the bedrock of society, a more genuinely socialistic way of life, his secular vision collapsing with Israeli invasion, leaving Egypt, the largest Middle East country, far weaker now than either of its two Middle East rivals. The Arab states have all remained puppets of imperialism and remain cool to, even resentful of the new Shia vitality and presence. But the Arab masses support the Shia defiance of US-Israel, despising their Quisling leaders.

Puppets and fledging actors

Iran’s revolution in 1979 was bad news for the Saudis, leading to even greater repression of its Shia. Saudi suspicions and fear of Shia have been a terrible ordeal for the 10% of Saudis who are Shia, and a powerful Shia state would naturally push for justice. So instead of making peace with their Shia (and thus, with the new Iran), in the 1980s, Saudi Arabia (and Kuwait) spent $25b (i.e., gave US weapons producers $25b) in support of the brutal, mad thug, Saddam Hussein in the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). When Saddam invaded Kuwait, cashing his US-Saudi IOU for sacrificing half million Iraqi Sunnis-Shia to kill a half million Shia Iranians, Saudi Arabia was unhappy. Not only had Saddam failed to crush Shia Iran, his defeat would mean an angry Shia state next door, which could easily invade and overthrow him.

So King Fahd invited the US forces into the kingdom to invade Iraq and keep the Saudi kingdom as head honcho of the Muslim world. I repeat: King Fahd allowed American and coalition troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabian forces were involved both in bombing raids on Iraq and in the land invasion that helped to ‘liberate’ Kuwait, the so-called Gulf War (1990-1991). The ummah, the House of Peace, invaded and occupied by the House of War. MBS’s current free and easy secularism makes sense after all, but not for the ummah.

Why would the US have gone to all the trouble to invade Iraq as part of ‘liberating’ Kuwait, and then leave the (truly odious) dictator Saddam in power? Ask weakling King Fahd, whose fear of a Shia-majority Iraq next door was even greater than his fear of a cowed, murderous Saddam. Pan-Arab nationalism – RIP.

This enduring Sunni-Shia stand-off is the imperialists’ trump card. All the Arab countries are in varying degrees still US puppets, and persecute their Shia because they, the so-called rulers, are weak and fear the implicit critique of their weakness that the morally uncompromised Shia represent. Nigeria, Bahrain, Indonesia, Malaysia have all driven wedges between Sunnis and Shias when it was politically useful. The Sunni masses, looking for a way out of the imperialist straitjacket but educated to despise Shia, looked not to solidarity with all Muslims to fight the looming imperial enemy, but inward to past Sunni experience, the early four Rightly Guided Caliphs, for their inspiration. They downplay the fact that the finally one was Ali, the inspiration of the Shia as sole legitimate caliph of the whole lot. In the 1980s-1990s, frustrated Sunnis coalesced around radical Saudi Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda, various ISIS caliphate dreamers in central Asia, the Caucasus, Africa, internationally, with an unIslamic jihad condoning mass civilian deaths as a key tactic.

This element continues to plague the Sunni world, the whole world. It has undermined the efforts to rebuild Iraq after the 2003 invasion. The Ba’thists were outlawed, leaving the minority Sunni with nothing, so they preferred chaos and road bombs, but Shia long-suffering patience grudgingly brought together ‘good’ Sunni and all the Shia to fight the latest (Sunni) terrorists, ISIS et al.

10/7 was an earthquake, not just for Israel but for Islam, the Sunni-Shia tremors finally syncing on that explosive day, pushing the Sunni establishment into Shia arms. All people of goodwill now rout for the Shia Hezbollah in their battle with Israel to protect the heart and soul of Islam. Paradoxically, this challenge was anticipated by the renewal of relations between the Saudis and Iran in March 2023, anticipating 10/7, an admission that Shia power could not be ignored in the new world order taking shape under China and Russia, quite apart from the central role Iran was now playing in protecting the Palestinians from total annihilation, with the Saudis watching with alarm from the sidelines as their position at the head of the Muslim world was being usurped by events on the ground, including from its own despised 10% Shia, now demanding the same rights as citizens that the Sunnis have.

Democracy really is the answer

It’s finally clear: Arab nationalism has been a flop, as has been Pakistan nationalism, where the 20% Shia must constantly fight Sunni chauvinists. Indian nationalism is worse, following the path of Israel, a racist Zionized Hindutva ideology that exclused all Muslims, Sunni or Shia. Sunni chauvinism under imperialism, taking refuge in nationalism, always undermines the ummah, unless the Shia are a sizable minority or majority, and the government is sufficiently representative. I.e., democratic.

In hindsight, I would argue the road to the liberation of Jerusalem began with Iran’s revoluton in 1979, which put Palestine liberation at the top of its international agenda. The war launched by Iraq was supposed to steamroll through a weakened Iran, as ordered by Saddam’s backers Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union, the US and Europe. (What a cynical, bizarre coalition!) Ayatollah Khomeini was brilliant and charismatic, but a poor politician, refusing to end the war when Saddam offered, hoping to liberate Iraq, leading to 100,000s more deaths and seriously weakening and tarnishing the revolution. His hubris was immortalized in telling anecdotes. My favorite: Pakistani dictator Zia had urged the shah in 1977 to crack down even harder on the rebels. When Zia met Khomeini as the shah’s successor a few years later, Khomeini merely asked politely for Zulfikar Bhutto’s life (Zia was Bhutto’s successor) to be spared. No dice. On the contrary, Zia advised Khomeini not to tangle with a superpower. Khomeini retorted he would never do such a thing and in fact always relied in the superpower. Ouch! That only made Zia persecute his Shia even more.

Arab secular states can’t unite when they are headed by dictators like Assad, Nasser, the Jordanian and Saudi king-dictators. Corrupt dictatorships don’t make good allies. The need for democracy is obvious. Iraq hopefully can be the model for Sunni and Shia learning to work together again under a robust electoral democracy. Sunni and Shia lived more or less till Saddam and sons really began their madness.3

The end of Saddam moved the Shia-Sunni ‘battle lines’ 200 miles west, now running through Baghdad, which was precisely what Gertrude Bell, Saddam and the imperialists had all tried to prevent. History takes its revenge. The chauvinistic Sunni hegemony of the Muslim world is finished. The Sunni hegemons tried to overthrow Khomeini and failed. The same battle took place 12 years later in Iraq and failed again due to Shia patience in the face of Sunni-inspired terror. Thousands of Saudi and Jordanian youth went to Iraq after 2003 to fight the occupation (and looming Shia hegemony) and die, just like they did in their misguided jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Their violent self-sacrifice only digging the Sunni world deeper into a state of humiliation. 85% of ISIS in Syria working alongside the US imperialists are Saudi. They are there solely to fight the ‘sons of al-Alqami’, referring to the Shia vizier when the Mongols razed Baghdad in 1258.

Now the Sunni are exposed as helpless in the face of Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, are actually helping ‘protect’ US-Israel from Iranian bombs intended for Israel. The Sunni world is humiliated, betraying Islam, kowtowing to not just the US but US-Israel. To defeat (Sunni-inspired) ISIS, the ‘good’ Iraqi Sunnis even had to welcome help from not just Iraq Shias (the army) but also Iran. It is high time to bury the hatchet of envy and suspicion, and join the Shia, if only because they hold the fate of the ummah in their hands.

The ‘bad’ Sunnis (regime elites) are still supporting the US-led war on terror. Their goal is still to wreck the new, Shia-led Iraqi state and keeping the lid on their own pressure-cookers, looking over their shoulders at the (failed) Arab Spring of 2011. The Sunni elites do US-Israel’s work for it. At the same time, they are angry with the US for complicity in Shia revival, undermining House of Saud, contributing to the decline in its religious legitimacy. MBS’s secular turn is more a parody of soft power, which only undermines (Sunni) Islam. The Saudi treatment of its own Shia mirrors Israeli treatment of Palestinians.4 Sadly, it is only because Palestinians have some shred of legal independence as part of the post-WWII internationally agreed policy of decolonization that this instance of apartheid is being fought openly. Anti-Muslim apartheid is actually alive and well but hidden behind national borders (China, Myanmar).

What remains of the insurgency in Iraq today is an alliance of Jordanians, Saudis and Iraqi Ba’thists. Syria and Saudi are both ripe for change, with Iraq and Iran as their models, but especially Iraq, with its more open, competitive elections and its large Shia population. The main legacy of the Iraq invasion was to make the Shia case, which means fighting Sunni extremism and terrorism, exposing the US Global War on Terror (GWOT) as a fraud (produced more (Sunni) terror), cementing Shiism as the adult in the room, holding the Islamic faith secure by a string, open to democracy.

21st century the Shia century?

This is already happening. Islamic Iran from the start allied with all anti-imperialist countries. Its revolution echoes the idealism of the Russia revolution of 1917, both of which were met by invasions by western powers and/or proxies, and both succeeding against all odds, based very much on ideological zeal for the good of mankind. Both also became authoritarian states, with elections but with limited choice. Iran’s elections are much more credible, and the election of reformers like Khatami and now Pezeshkian show there is room for real public debate. As with all countries victim to US ire, survival trumps all finer nuances, which are put on hold. Show me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are. Iran’s allies are the anti-imperialist good guys.

In contrast to the Arab states, with their muddled Islamo-nationalisms, which have failed to fashion a Sunni identity independent of imperialism, and which still exclude Shia. A shame that Shia find better allies on the secular left, with largely common political, economic and cultural goals, above all peace. Like the Jews at the heart of Bolshevism, Iraq’s Communist Party was full of Shia intellectuals (e.g., poet Muzaffar al-Nawwab). The Iraqi town Shatra in the Shia south was nicknamed Little Moscow. The Shia have a natural affinity for the secular left, supporting the underdog. The Iraqi Communist Party was reorganized after the Iraq war and its leader Hamid Majid Musa was part of the governing body the US set up. The communists wanted peace as do all communists, Islamic Iran and Iraq want peace (salam) more than anything. Neither the communists nor the ummah were/are aggressive, expansionist. Both offer(ed) a way of life that doesn’t have war built in as its engine. The communist alternative was social/state ownership and planning. The Islamic alternative is a mix of state direction/ownership and limited capitalism. There are no billionaires who aren’t emigres already. That kind of money lust is alien to a devout society or a communist one.

Iran and Hezbollah are suffering Israel’s truly Satanic war crimes alongside their Palestinian brothers. Meanwhile the Gulf and Saudi sheikh-dictators, the Egyptian no-pretense-dictator, the Jordanian British-installed-king sit on the sidelines cursing the Palestinians for disturbing their sleep. They actually come to Israel’s aid – Egypt and Jordan are official allies of Israel – when Iran tries to hurt poor little Israel, as they already did in April 2024. The US is well aware that the Jordanian and Egyptian masses are very unhappy, but it relies on its local puppet dictators to keep the lid on the pressure-cooker, and is very cautious about exporting one-man-one-vote after its painful and expensive experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, the former once again Taliban, the latter in league with Iran against the Great Satan, which just happens to include itself, US-Israel. So don’t hold your breath for US pressure to make its dictators relinquish power. 2011 was a close call, not to be repeated.

As for the Palestinians, they were completely left out of the negotiations about their future following the 1973 Egypt-Israel war. Sold out by (atheist, Sunni) Sadat with an empty promise. The past half century has been unremitting hell for the Palestinians, who were kicked out of Jordan in the 1970s, many ending up in southern Lebanon, living with the Shia there. This is the origins of Musa al-Sadr’s Amal and after his assassination, Hezbollah. This happened during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, forging of a new force to confront Israel, which was given a huge boost with the Islamic revolution in Iran. Suddenly there was a ‘Shia crescent’, a genuine quasi-state opposition to Israel that functioned outside the imperial constraints.

Musa al-Sadr represented the best of the Shia tradition, an activist cleric engaged in the life of his community, unafraid to speak truth to power. He earned a law degree from (shah-era) Tehran university. His Amal militia ran social services and acted as a political organization, a challenge to the fiction of pan-Arab unity and the unyielding reality of Sunni hegemony. Iran’s IRGC was organized by veterans of Amal training camps. Amal represented a political threat to the Arab and Palestinian establishment, and his assassination by Gaddafi was clearly a Sunni move to quash a Shia upstart.5 But he (and Israel’s brutal occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s) inspired the formation Hezbollah, which killed 654 Israeli soldiers in a few years and pushed a humiliated Israel out of Lebanon in 1985.

‘Good’ Sunnism is reviving but more in the emigre communities, largely in the US/Canada, Europe, Australia/ New Zealand, where there are now communities of mainstream Sunni and Shia as well as sects (Ismaili, Yazidi, Ahmadiya, Bahai’s). This young, well educated, assertive diaspora radically challenges the Sunnia world, as a new generation of Muslims takes electoral democracy for granted, and were able to gain equal rights as citizens in the ‘House of War’, which meant fight for Palestine against Israel. Effectively the need for young, educated workers to fuel its capitalist machine ended up importing the ‘enemy’ to the heart of imperialism. As these mostly Sunni Muslims spread their message of ‘goodwill to all men’, colonized, persecuted Palestine has gradually gained the edge over colonizer, persecutor Israel. They are joined by a growing community of converts, as people find out about Islam from friendly, law-abiding neighbors. Islam is the fastest growing religion everywhere.

The Shia are Islam’s ‘wandering Jews’ but without the usury, so they have a presence on all continents, mostly persecuted (or just ignored) by Sunni majorities (but not everywhere). The Sunni too are like the Jews with their world network, a persecuted minority (but not everywhere). In fact, Sunni emigres are free to criticize Israel and their own native Muslim-majority countries in the West, where, say, in Egypt or Pakistan that could land them in jail or worse. As with the Jews, the spread of both Sunni and Shia presence virtually everywhere creates a powerful network for mutual support, to ensure both Shia and Sunni, emigre and domestic, are vital parts of the ummah, all devoted to defending Palestine and liberating Jerusalem. A kind of benign Judaism.6 Democracy brings power to Shia majorities and give voice to minorities, resisting Sunni terrorists. The goal remains the liberation of Jerusalem, but the center of gravity has shifted from Saudi Arabia, Egypt to Iran and Iraq, now stretching from Lebanon and Syria along the Shia axis of resistance.

The US allies with the pragmatic Sunni dictators, hates, targets Shia, but they are the best defense against real terrorists (Saudi/ Jordanian ‘jihadists’, ISIS, US-Israel). Standing up to tyranny is never popular with tyrants. By overthrowing Saddam, the US unwittingly paved the way for the Shia revival. Ayatollah Sistani brilliantly used the opening to guarantee democratic Shia hegemony in Iraq as a model for a renewed Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, in short, the Muslim ummah. The Iraqi Shia proved that it is possible to work with the US and not compromise. Sistani refused to meet with US officials: Mr Bremer, you are American I am Iranian. Leave it up to the Iraqis to devise their constitution. He challenged US plans to hand power to Allawi, Chalabi. Insisted on one-person, one-vote. When the US refused, he called for large demos over five consecutive days until the US relented.7

Iraqi Shia abandoned the Iraqi nationalism of Saddam. The renewed nationalism is firmly nonsectarian, uniting the ummah. This is a powerful message to the other Arab states. It is fitting that Palestine has brought the Sunni to the Shia-led defense of Jerusalem. Israel can be defeated only by a united ummah which acts wisely, with restraint, indefatigable. It is also a message to Israel and the Palestinians about inventing a new nationalism based on peace and reconciliation.

ENDNOTES:

  • 1
    To give the US occupiers of Afghanistan 2001–2022, they made sure Afghan Shia, the Hazars, were given full rights in the new constitution, where the state was carefully dubbed Islamic, reflecting the new identity-politics imperialism.
  • 2
    Sunni Sufis resisted imperialism (Algeria, Caucasus) but never the Sunni establishment. Grand Mufti of Egypt Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) was a westernizing reformer. His legendary friend (Shia) Jamal al-Afghani was anti-imperialist but didn’t manage to do much.
  • 3
    Democracies are not immune from this as Biden’s pathetic defense of his son shows how family concerns can seriously undermine any legacy of good the leader accomplishes.
  • 4
    They have no public voice, all 300 Shia girls’ schools have Sunni headmistresses, they sit on the oil wealth and get only low paid jobs, scholars get their heads chopped off, etc.
  • 5
    Probably out of jealousy, as he saw himself as the savior of Palestine. See Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival, 2006, p 113.
  • 6
    This could be why Israel so detests Iran. Initially, Israel was admired by Iranian intellectuals. Jalāl Āl-e-Ahmad visited Israel in 1962 and recorded his experiences in The Israeli republic (1962). But when he observed the treatment of Palestinians, he soured and Iranians broadly criticized ‘westoxification’, anticipating the revolution’s clear anti-imperialism. Only Iran really ‘gets’ imperialism.
  • 7
    Vali Nasr, op.cit., p175.RedditEmail
Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to ImperialismRead other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.

Wednesday, August 07, 2024

 

Sacred Economics: Shylock as Anti-Christ

Money vs the gift
Sacred Economics 100
Deconstructing the Story of Self/ the World
Life without prisons

Marx’s ‘death knell’ of capitalism, revolution, was the first answer to capitalism’s ills, after which the state would wither away, and we would live in a utopian bliss. The 20th century put paid to that vision, as revolution, as most revolutions do, disappointed, mostly unravelled, and predatory capitalism took hold again. Are we stuck with a system that’s quickly leading us to the cliff edge with seemingly no turning back?

Happily, no, and happily no need for messy revolution, though there is already growing hardship from (and growing resistance to) our economic system’s gross injustices, insanities. The transition to a new economic logic is already underway, and we can all help nurse it into reality. In Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition (2021), Charles Eisenstein draws on anthropology and the prophetic writings of 20th century social critics to provide the way, hidden in plain sight. To return to the gift economy, to get rid of usury, debt money. For 90% of human history, that was how we lived, not in a mindset of artificial scarcity, where even the wealthiest pinch pennies, but one of abundance, where selfishness was despised, and ‘trade’ was a way of fostering peace, not ‘war by other means’.

Basically an ecological communism, where moneyS are based on real wealth and prices include all the environmental costs of your product. We have to make most of nature (land, water, air) a ‘commons’ again, as in feudal times when most land was commons, under the authority of lords but not an alienable commodity to be bought or sold.

Eisenstein picks up where Marx left off, or rather he takes out the rhetorical flourishes and puts the economy back into ecology, and in the process, establishes the underlying laws of the human-nature nexus. The Law of Return the most fundamental: Everything you consume is consumed somewhere else in nature. The uroboros. Pioneer species pave the way for keystone species, which provide microniches for other species and circle back to benefit pioneer species as they move into new territories. Actually a tautology but one that we’ve ignored until violating its logic has brought us to the brink of catastrophe.

Uroboros vs Sorcerer’s apprentice
Money vs the gift

First, chuck out your guns-and-butter Eco 101 text. We must look at not-so-innocent words like money, interest, profit, investment, goods&services, and put them to work for us and the world, not against us and the world.

The real human economy for at least 100,000 years was a gift economy, with daily life needs, division of labor, ensured through tradition rather than a punch-clock and cash. Money was originally used ceremonially, in a complex system of exchange to ensure trust between tribes, and as tribute. Social currencies were for consolidating relations (marriages, funerals, blood money, intertribal peace).

With the rise of agriculture, money transformed, secularized, as a form of credit (tallies of loans denominated in common unit of account, periodically settled by deliver of commodities). This conflation quickly led to debt peonage i.e., slavery, and the demotion of women. Behind every ledger is a man with a sword/gun. The world was no longer sacred, and man part of it, worshipping it. Our spiritual connection with nature was sundered, our spirit thin and now identified with gold-as-fetish, not with God. A king-god must be carried aloft, high above lowly earth. Man became divorced from nature, culminating in Descartes’ lonely ‘I’. We were already transforming nature 4,000 years ago, creating empires, replacing ‘sinless’ God with ‘sinless’ gold, a lethal case of misplaced concreteness.

This ushered in the Age of Separation – spirit-matter, mind-body, human-nature. This Story of Self/ World, the Ascent of Humanity,1 as Eisenstein called his earlier book dealing with this separation. It starts with the farming virtues of hard work, thrift, accumulation, but also the darker master-slave relation where slaves were often debtors who would never be able to pay. That isn’t in the Storybooks. Instead we have the story of isolated individuals rationally maximizing ‘utility’ (pleasure, which is still unmeasurable).

This Story as depicted in economics textbooks makes a bizarre kind of sense in a scientistic, timeless Newtonian world of atoms, but it has nothing to do with how we live our lives. What is it but a denial of spirituality, embodied mind, humanity itself? So the ‘ascent’ is a delusional one from the start, actually the opposite, as we see all around us today. If this is the crowning achievement of science, we would be healthier, happier in some (almost any) precapitalist society, absent money, certainly absent money as a hoarded store-of-value, and interest, a pointless and dangerous attempt to annihilate time-space. Of course, this is impossible. We live in space-time. You can’t go back in time, and the ‘space’ is already taken. We are long overdue for a Story that reflects us-in-the-world. Heidegger calls that dasein.

Reimagining our economy means first of all gaining control over our simple, elegant, now global money system which lets you do everything, everywhere, all at once. i.e., the antithesis of ceremonial money, which was attached to time, place, giver and receiver, as part of reinforcing that traditional way of life, with money as a sacred binding force. Now, instead of a simple, functional broom, we have the sorcerer’s apprentice. A hammer to kill a fly. Unnecessary power over everything, everywhere, all at once, which imprisons us in unreal fantasies and requires prisons for trigger-happy types.

Key reforms immediately suggest themselves:

  • Return us to localized, ritualized methods of exchange. Reinvent the fly swatter to deal with fly problems. That looks ridiculous to our individualistic mindset, captivated by the supercharged power of money, gold-as-god. Most precapitalist societies worshipped the sun as god, or all of nature. What we can call ‘the collective West’, formerly the imperialist power, latched on to gold as the ideal money by the 15th century, when Europeans travelled the Earth, invading and stealing wealth, especially gold, wherever it was found. That obsession marks the great divide in human history, total war of conquest of the planet, fittingly symbolized by gold. Inert, eternal, beautiful, heavy (i.e., important).
  • Following on the Law of Return, internalize all costs of whatever you produce/ consume. Right down to working conditions in the DVD factory in Bangladesh if that’s where your DVD player is made. Immediately it is clear that the majority of what we now produce and consume won’t make sense anymore. You will produce and consume more and more locally as the Age of Transition gets under way.

Eisenstein (and Keynes) argue that the short reign of gold as THE currency (1870–1932 and 1944–1971) was perhaps a necessary stage in our maturing as a species, but that it has outlived its purpose and, as we have witnessed over the past century, has already been replaced, though it is still a totem, a fetish that we secretly worship, many convinced that a return to the gold standard would solve all our problems. The fetishism is now secularized and represents the vast fortunes of Wall Street as if in a separate, disembodied realm. We need to take money off its pedestal, to invent new forms of money that will encourage good hoarding (of the commons) not the bad version (destruction of the commons).

The conquerors laughed at the cowrie shells that Polynesians carried thousands of miles by canoe to ‘trade’, seemingly senselessly, with other tribes. Or the wampum beads of Turtle Island natives. Even the most warlike tribes lived more or less peacefully, with their interactions centered on this ritual giving, before ‘we’ arrived with guns and declared total war of conquest on the world, inspired by gold.

It proved easy to unravel the complex, ritualistic societies outside Europe, once the Europeans launched their world war in search of gold for their very special and lethal money. ‘We’ ruined the complex web of world culture (just like we destroyed the anti-capitalist Soviet Union), and are quickly ruining what’s left of nature and now humanity itself, with total all-out war (not our low-grade ‘cold wars’) threatening like a Damocles sword over all our heads. And it is our very bloody form of money, or rather its pretend substitute, electronic money) that now governs a godless, global reality on the brink. Goethe’s (and Disney’s) sorcerer’s apprentice.

But our neurotic fetish is also responsible (everything is connected and money has been our hammer for everything) for the explosion of knowledge in the past five centuries. As we clear-cut the precious legacy of the our social evolution, the dazzling mini-civilizations everywhere on Earth, our scribes, anthropologists (or better, morticians) document(ed) the fast-dying remains of precapitalist civilizations, their (to us) bizarre customs, revealing discoveries about precapitalist societies every bit as marvelous as the potato, rubber trees and other gifts. ‘We’ quickly adopted the potatoes etc as they were profitable, ‘produced’ more gold, adapted to our industrial ‘civilization’, and wiped out the giver, the keeper of that miracle food.

As for the cultural wealth of those other civilizations, who cares? If they don’t make more gold, they are the enemy to be conquered or eliminated. Even the great thinkers of the 19th century, Hegel, Darwin, Marx assumed that these ‘primitive’ societies would be wiped out. But thanks to our morticians, we have salvaged some of what we realize now are precious gifts from the past. Most important of these human cultural artifacts is the gift culture, the social glue that let humanity prosper for millennia with destroying their world, Earth.

We must return to the gift, our traditional way of relating to nature and each other, but at a higher level. Thatcher’s TINA. There is no alternative. Just as tribes and nations have a cyclical rise and fall and, transformed, rise again as a new civilization, so does mankind’s trajectory from hunter-gatherer to agriculture to industry to information age, also have a grand overarching cycle, returning to the natural order after our spectacular but lethal bursts of creative innovation, which took us so far from the natural order.

Sacred Economics 100

LawEverything is sacred. In the first place, money. Money has magical qualities, the power to alter human behavior and coordinate human activity. The simplest way to inspire belief is to appeal to our instinct of self preservation, ‘me first’. So ‘greed’ is a kind of default attribute for money, a lowest-common-denominator money, supposedly appealing to our natural state. Like a person stuck at the level of a two-year-old, ‘ME!’ is then our belief system, which our money reflects, urging us to hoard, take by force.2 And what better than using an inert metal that never decays? So gold.

But this was much later. Hunter-gatherers actually grew up without gold, not stuck at the ‘terrible twos’, never ‘greedy’. Their money was constantly exchanged as part of their foreign relations. They couldn’t hoard anything and didn’t need to. Any accumulation was seasonal. They lived in abundance and shared everything, treated everything as a gift, promoting generosity and gratitude, not greed and war. So they had no need of this base money, our money.

We have learned that early humans did not see themselves as apart, above nature. They were part of a complex world of man-nature, matter-spirit, where everything is sacred. Everything. including our consciousness is a gift. For Muslims this is our God-given nature, fitra. We dismiss this worldview of the world as a huge gift as a charming metaphor, but the gifters were serious.

For atheists this is a problem. Who to thank? For me, my existence alone is enough proof of a higher order reality. If I’m right, then I should be thanking God every second of the day and night. Sufis strive for that mindset. For Muslims, praying 5 times a day is a religious duty. And the implication is you must treat every gift with respect. Use it and leave nature as rich and beautiful as it was before. So the Alberta tarsands, a huge toxic wound on the beautiful gift of the land and resources, is sacrilege. The guilty parties are traitors to our heritage and deserve the highest punishment. Instead, we laud them and give them billions of dollars to poison more of our gifts. ARGH.

Some things are more sacred than others (thunderstorms, waterfalls, rainbows, orchids), that were there to remind us of the sacredness of all things. With the rise of agriculture and greed money, we became progressively more divorced from nature, culminating in our modern economy, where gold is valued above all else, though, apart from sitting in vaults, hoarded for its magically quality, it is useful only as ornament. Ditto mankind as a kind of secular embodiment of gold, the supreme living creature as ‘golden boy’, is valued above all else to the point of destroying all else.

The rot really set in with Descartes’ disembodied soul, divorced from the body, observing but not participating in the world, which is run by a robotic Newtonian watchmaker god. As if Descartes was intuiting what the best Story of the Self was for our Story of the World, modern capitalism, governed by the abstract, now secular spirit, money. Your soul, mind is outside of science and not that interesting in a materialist, secular world anyway.

Shakespeare, writing at the birth of the new secular, capitalist order, made the usurer Shylock the archetype for the new man of finance: cruel, ruthless, paranoid, greedy. Shakespeare’s most compelling villain. The Merchant of Venice is the only play focusing on the economics of society, on an abstract idea, usury. Shylock loses everything including his daughter, who steals her inheritance and converts to Christianity. The play was problematic from the start, Jessica seen as a schemer betraying her father. Philosemitism runs deep in Britain, a product of the Protestant Reformation and the condoning of usury as good for business.

Shakespeare wanted us to detest the usurer, but already usury was an integral part of the now accelerating commercial and industrial revolutions. His audiences had usurers among them, and the immortal words of Shylock and Portia calling for tolerance and mercy have been emphasized, without Shakespeare’s anti-capitalist message. It took Marx and a century of anti-capitalist revolution for Jessica’s rejection of Shylock’s clear villainy to be appreciated for what it is, Shakespeare’s genius at penetrating to the heart of the new order and warning us. The answer is there in the rejection of usury, the demonetization of hoarded wealth, i.e., Jessica’s jewels revert to baubles, not capital, Christianity (still outlawing usury in the 17th century) the already ineffectual antidote to the usury of the Jew.

Paradox: Even as we realize the evil of usury/ interest, we outlaw criticism of Jewry for its adoption of usury as the basis of Jewish world power, such is the power of money. It force-feeds us illusions and forces us to spout lies to maintain the system. For all that, The Merchant of Venice is Shakespeare’s most popular play in Israel. (Only Jews in their Jewish state are free to be ‘anti-semitic’.)

Marx argued that money has become a world power, and, as the practical Jewish spirit, has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations, which became the spirit of the capitalist age. A Jew himself, he identified the Jewish practice of usury as the source of the evils of the day, and assumed Jews would disappear as a persecuted race once usury was abolished. He wrote before the secrets of past civilizations had been documented and jumped to ‘revolution’ and a very abstract communism as the one-size-fits-all answer. Another hammer to kill a fly.

We have built our lives as autonomous individuals worshipping this secular, material god, rather than the traditional spiritual god. We see the world crumbling before our eyes, we know the culprit, but, like a druggie, we just keep looking for our next fix, our disembodied soul no help at all.

So first, rewrite our economic textbooks, demystifying money. Money’s ‘natural’ purpose is to connect human gifts to human needs. Now money is based on artificial scarcity and rationality. Nothing about gifts, abundance. Our thinking too must change, though the change is just a reversion to our naturally/ socially evolved generosity and gratitude, adult emotions that we have suppressed as we live out our ‘terrible twos’, still dressed in diapers, unable to metabolize what we take from nature in a civilized way.

Deconstructing the Story of Self/ the World

Our Story of Self as autonomous individuals governed by instinct (mistakenly called greed) breaks down with observed reality. We are all found under the proverbial cabbage leaf. Our lives are given to us. A gift. Let that sink in. We are walking miracles! So our default is gratitude. Even in our Age of Separation, we still honor our parents for the gift of life, which we can never repay in money. That is the truth of our existence.

I still need to pause and reread that. We are so totally programmed to blot out that essential truth. Our new Story of the Self and consequently our Story of the World must start there. Life as a gift, ‘the gift of life’, gratitude to parents, responsibility to pass on the gift of life and the gifts of nature to the next generation (natives think in terms of seven generations). No wonder ancient religious thinkers said God made the world, and gave it to us to enjoy, i.e., gave us reflective consciousness. So the basic ‘units of account’ in economics should be humility and gratitude not selfishness and egotism.

The Big Bang is like God’s humongous gift – everything for nothing. As if the universe was created for us to see and reflect on (and be thankful for). Does any of this sound like today’s Eco 101? It starts with separate selves competing for scarce resources to maximize self-interest. Our bankers create money and divvy it out to profit-maximizers, so that we can maximize our utility in this world of efficiency.

This turns out to be as depressing and destructive as it sounds. It is a neurosis-inducing Story of the People, robotic, defying our natural emotions. Ditto with the Story of the World, on the surface rational and profitable, but with scarcity and fear lurking at the unconscious level. Barter and comparative advantage in a Hobbesian brutish and nasty world. New stories, please!

Rule of the gift: What comes to you is not kept for oneself unless one cannot do without it.

Rule of the gift: Everything is related, so economic relations are mutual, we always owe someone/ nature for our taking. Toaripi, Arabic, Chinese, German, Japanese have only one word for borrowing/ lending. The Arabic din means religion and debt. The Lord’s prayer used to be ‘forgive us our debts, as we forgive other’ until capitalism got a hold of it and changed that to ‘trespasses’.

Modern money transaction are closed, no obligation, at most a ‘money-back’ guarantee, but the buck stops there. The gift is open-ended, a relationship between participants. With a gift, you give some of yourself. Now you are just sell a ‘good’, which could be bad, and which has nothing to do with you.

Even today we go all soft in ceremonies of giving presents, without the hard edge of money involved. The gift still embodies something special that money kills – the sense of uniqueness and relatedness (the self expanding to whole community) that we all know we are, not the diminished robotic self that buys and sells as the ‘greatest good’.

Law: In the money economy, more for me is less for you. Zero-sum game. In the gift economy: more for me is also more you. Positive-sum game. I.e., those who have give to those who need. Gifts cement the mystical reality of participation in something greater than oneself. Axioms of rational self-interest do not apply, as the self has expanded to include some of the other.

There is no need to distinguish between work and play, business and personal relationships. Think hunter-gatherer: you do what you have to each day which takes a few hours, all the time social networking, telling Stories. Work and play are one. Economics was linked to cosmology, religion, psyche. You, John, need x from me. So you give me wampum, which means: ‘John met the needs of others in the past and earned gratitude.’ So I can give John’s wampum later when I am gifted by someone. The Story of the gift. Now, instead of giving me wampum, I get money, which no longer satisfies the need-gratitude problem, which has no story behind it. There’s no one to thank, not even God. Today, especially not God.

When the division of labor exceeds the tribal or village level, there is the need to extend the range of our gifts. Yes, trade, progress. Comparative advantage. Eco 101. By facilitating trade, we reward efficiency in production. Money facilitates trade and should enrich life.

So what happened that turned trade-as-nice-novelty into a weapon of mass destruction, destroying entire nations through boycotts, enriching others obscenely? Now money is the source of anxiety, hardship, polarization of wealth. The US boycotts, sanctions a third of the world for daring to disobey orders, killing as many as actual warfare and bombing.

Paradox. Dollar bills still show deified presidents, ‘out of many one’, ‘in God we trust’. Not. We need a true Story of wholeness and harmony, return to the hunter-gatherer, our most successfully evolved social organism, at a higher level.

Our ‘gifts’, given by God have some of Him in them. Prometheus’s fire, the Apollonian gift of music, agriculture, all ‘made in His image’. We have the desire to develop those gifts and give from them (from Him) to the world. Nothing beats the joy of giving.3 You are playing God in the best sense. Rational self-interest does not apply in our interactions with others. Just our innate generosity. You can’t live a fulfilled life without developing those gifts, sharing them with others. But our gifts are mortgaged to the demands of money, survival. We fret about the ‘cost of living’, we are ruled by the specter of scarcity.

Where did this ‘scarcity’ in a world of plenty come from? It invaded our epistemology of i/ biology with ‘selfish genes’, ii/ socio-biology with competing selves. It is more a projection of our own capitalist culture of artificial scarcity than an understanding of nature. Recent advances in biology shows that nature gives primacy to cooperation, symbiosis, merging of organisms into larger wholes, with competition playing a secondary role. And there is no stasis in nature. Everything is always in motion, evolving, living/ dying. The world is alive.

Nature is both complex and radically simple. Human nature is the same. In nature headlong growth is sign of immature ecosystems, followed by renewed interdependency, symbiosis, cooperation, always returning, recycling of resources. Ditto human societies. We have lived through a few centuries of wild, uncontrolled exploitation of nature and this is coming to an end even as I write. Money is already frayed and will continue to unravel as our lives take on more and more the properties of gift, as we return to our true nature, our fitra. The economy will shrink, our lives will grow. What a rousing, cliff-hanger Story of Transition this will make.

Law: In a dynamic system, there is no equilibrium but a state of controlled disequilibrium, infinitely complex.

Life without prisons

Our Stories’ economics axioms: scarcity + rational maximization of self-interest. ResultWealth makes you greedy. We need prisons to prevent greedy people from being too greedy.

Money’s basic function is to facilitate exchange, connect human gifts with needs, from each according to his ability to each according to her needs. That’s right. Communism. But also any religion worth its salt. And ‘we’ turned money into a corrosive agent of scarcity. Starvation a constant for much of the world, though there’s more than enough for everyone, and most people want to help, but can’t because there’s no money in it.

Indigenous Turtle Islanders from the start shook their heads at their dangerous visitors. They had no problem of greedy people (though the Europeans saw their disdain for things as sacrilegious), no need for prisons. None voluntarily joined the Europeans’ cruel, arbitrary society of violence and slavery. Many whites ‘went native’, enjoying the freedom and beauty of moneyless society and had to be dragged back or killed. No room for traitors.

Basically, capitalist society was/is a system of warfare, a zero-sum game where the natives lived life as a positive-sum game. Captured debtors and thieves like POWs, requiring prisons. Natives understood that if you have a good community, you don’t need prisons, or (today) a complicated maze of private daycare at $10,000+ a year (nice prisons to control your children).

Natives were so busy enjoying life, they don’t have time to get bored. No one got ‘bored’ before the word was invented in 1760 at the dawn of assembly lines, mass production urban ghettoes devoid of community, no contact at all with nature.

‘Bedouins can sit for hours in the desert, feeling the ripples of time, without being bored.’4 Boredom, the yearning for stimulation, distraction, for something (rather than a relation) to pass the time. Life is not about things, but relations. But we are isolated automatons in our Story of Self. We don’t need relations, but as a result we are stuck with things to soothe the existential pain of separation, lack of relations. Camus.

Now we get bored in an instant. We demand to be entertained. Reality is boring, alien. Media is more real.

As for economic growth, the mantra promising greater happiness, really just means the economy, the commons, life in general, is more and more monetized, colonized, producing lots of things to soothe us. But when everything is monetized, a scarcity of money makes everything scarce, even when drown in a sea of ‘goods’. Nothing has changed in the real world, but now you starve. Magic.

‘Evergreen’ container ship blocked Suez Canal for a week in 2021

From Perpetual sacrifice

by William Wordsworth

Men, maidens, youths,
mother and little children, boys and girls,
enter, and each the wonted task resumes
within this temple, where is offered up
to Gain, the master idol of the realm,
perpetual sacrifice.

Wow. Buddhism sees spiritual value in suffering, but that’s in pursuit of enlightenment. To commit someone to ‘perpetual sacrifice’, wage slavery, in the service of profit is about as low as you can go. We have reached the physical limits of our Stories, where abundance is cloaked in artificial scarcity, where the engine of growth is greed. How did our natural impulse of giving, generosity, turn into its opposite? Greed doesn’t make sense, even in the context of real scarcity. We naturally share especially in times of danger. We need scarcity to penetrate into our minds, emotions, so we will discard, repress our higher impulses, our social instincts, honed over millennia, in favor of the more primitive self-preservation instinct we are taught to call ‘greed’. Greed must be built into our Story of Self, and taught in schools and universities, so that there are no traitors to the cause.

Contrary to Eco 101 wishful thinking, there is no biological gene to maximize reproduction of a self-interested, economically rational actor. Greed is not written into our biology, but is a symptom of the perception of scarcity. In a psychology experiment a group of poor vs rich were given $1000 to share. Guess who is more generous? That’s right, the poor. You knew that ‘instinctively’, 2 times more generous! When you’re rich, anxiety is always there, scarcity just a step away. It’s not greed makes you wealthy, but wealth makes you greedy. I.e., they are so ‘invested’ in their wealth, they can’t let go. Pity poor Midas.

ENDNOTES:

  • 1
    Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self , p21, 2007.
  • 2
    But children quickly move beyond that, naturally sharing when they’ve had enough.
  • 3
    Readers joke I intentionally get lost on my biking adventures to feast on the selfless generosity of strangers.
  • 4
    Ziauddin Sardar, Cyberspace as the darker side of the West, 2000.Facebook
Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to ImperialismRead other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.

Friday, July 12, 2024

SUFIS

Kasnazani followers in Iraq commemorate founder's death anniversary

2024-07-04 

Shafaq News/ Followers of the Kasnazani Sufi order in Iraq commemorated the fourth anniversary of their founder Sheikh Mohammed al-Kasnazani's death on Thursday.

Disciples from across the country gathered in Sulaimaniyah, the order's headquarters, for remembrance ceremonies that included Quran recitation and tributes to the late Sheikh.

"The fourth anniversary of Sheikh Mohammed al-Kasnazani's passing saw a large turnout of followers from various regions of Iraq," said Khalifa Bahjat Hassan.

"A major religious ceremony was held, with Quran recitals and lectures delivered about Sheikh Mohammed al-Kasnazani's life and his role in promoting Islamic teachings," Hassan added.

Sheikh Mohammed al-Kasnazani, a prominent Iraqi Sufi figure, passed away in 2020 at the age of 82. He was known for his efforts to spread Islamic teachings and promote peace and love of Kasnazani Qadiri Order.

The Kasnazani Qadiri order is a Sufi order founded in Iraq in 1740. The order emphasizes traditional Islamic teachings and humanitarian values. Sheikh Mohammed al-Kasnazani served as the order's fourth guide.