{"id":12979,"date":"2015-03-02T09:35:28","date_gmt":"2015-03-02T13:35:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=12979"},"modified":"2015-03-02T09:35:28","modified_gmt":"2015-03-02T13:35:28","slug":"abdelwahab-meddeb-the-malady-of-islam-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/abdelwahab-meddeb-the-malady-of-islam-10\/","title":{"rendered":"Abdelwahab Meddeb: The Malady of Islam (10)"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1 class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b><a href=\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/maladie.jpeg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-12835 lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/maladie.jpeg\" alt=\"maladie\" width=\"228\" height=\"332\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/maladie.jpeg 237w, https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/maladie-205x300.jpeg 205w\" data-sizes=\"(max-width: 228px) 100vw, 228px\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 228px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 228\/332;\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/malady.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-12832 lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/malady.jpg\" alt=\"malady\" width=\"225\" height=\"336\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 225px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 225\/336;\" \/><\/a><\/b><\/span><\/h1>\n<h2 class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>The Malady of Islam<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n<h4 class=\"p4\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>by Abdelwahab Meddeb<br \/>\n<\/b><\/span><b><br \/>\ntranslated from the French by<br \/>\n<\/b><b>Pierre Joris and\u00a0Charlotte Mandell<\/b><\/h4>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em><strong>(10th installment)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>P A R T III<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Fundamentalism Against the West<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>21<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\">We\u2019ll begin with the first conjunction and its effects on Egypt.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>In the beginning of the 1970s, to fight against the Left, Sadat supported the return to legality of the fundamentalists whose political, if not physical, presence Nasser had abolished.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The legalization of fundamentalists, given their numbers, creates an explosive situation.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>At the same time, the democratization of learning corresponds to the soaring demography; the number of university diplomas increases at the cost of third-rate education.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The masses of the semi-literate inflate in their turn.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Poor wages force the pseudo-academics to emigrate to Arabia.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>In this political and social context, Egypt is subject to an active re-Islamization that accompanies the strategy of <\/span><em><span class=\"s2\">infitah<\/span><\/em><span class=\"s1\">, advocating opening up to the West \u2014\u00a0the best way of liquidating the state economy, inherited from Nasserism.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\"> Integration into the market economy is strengthened by an alliance with the United States.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>A regional coherence is established, with the convergence of Egyptian and Arabic perspectives.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>For Egypt will come close to the Wahhabite example, at the risk of deviating from its Western tradition, still evident in literary experience.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Literature will find itself relegated to the margins:<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>the reading public is reduced as the television audience widens.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>That is the effect of the Americanization of the world.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The triumph of the window of light, the new box of wonders, will bring cinematographic and literary creation, which was the vector of Europeanization, towards the periphery.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>One had to adapt or die.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Resistance, especially of a literary kind, could create the conditions of a survival at the margins, where there was no lack of experimentation.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>But the great majority remained riveted to televised images, as elsewhere in the world.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>In the lands of Islam, though, because of the contrast a heterogeneous way of life makes when compared with the kind that television shows, change seems more obvious; it can be seen on the surface of things.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>There is no need to dig deep or even to scrape the surface to unearth its evidence.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\"> I will not linger over the emergence and entry into society of the fundamentalist phenomenon; it is described in its time by Gilles Kepel.[1]<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>I will not recall the inflammatory sermons of hysterical imams, who exulted in adorning their verbal anti-Westernism with flowers of rhetoric that belong to the resources of the language they use.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Such an anti-Westernism resounds in the walls of the city with a thousand mosques at the very time when the politicians place their hopes in a Western alliance, which will make Egypt (especially its army) an example of this new form of protectorate of which America is fond.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The re-Islamization of society and the American alliance will go hand in hand and will constitute another paradox, which I will call the Egyptian paradox.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>As the society becomes Americanized (through incitement to material consumption and through the media), the quest for the specific gains in intensity.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\"> This phenomenon will have as its emblem the sequence animated by the deception of the Islamic banks, adapting financial investment to the divine law which forbids the earning of interest, which is considered usury.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>I will not insist on the bankruptcies that interrupted the activities of these banks; nor will I evoke the technical details that disguise bank interest as licit earnings.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The aim of such institutions was to answer to an ideological demand:<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>they were supposed to make the Islamic quality of participation in the market visible.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Such subterfuges prove illusory when any reasonable<b> <\/b>person knows that the immense Wahhabite fortunes flourished in the spheres of high finance and according to the rules of the Stock Exchange, which is not moved by any inclination to bend to the prescriptions of Islam.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The Islamic banks\u2019 vocation was to symbolize the articulation between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, between Nile fundamentalism (heritage of the movement born in the 1920s, as I recalled earlier) and Arabic Wahhabism.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>This was a way to give a color of Islam to the money earned by the Egyptian expatriates in Arabia.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\"> Should we connect the fundamentalist word with its deed, with the appearance of terrorism at the beginning of the 1980\u2019s, of which one spectacular victim was Anwar al-Sadat, who was at the origin of the return to this political radicalism in Cairo? Recall that behind this political assassination[2] stands the specter of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri, whom the reader will find later as the right hand man of Osama bin Laden during the second conjunction between fundamentalism and Wahhabism, the one that inducted the Afghan scene, as prelude to the attacks of September 11, 2001.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Should we also bring to mind the merciless war that the Egyptian government directed against fundamentalist terrorism, guilty of a long list of executed or excommunicated victims, featuring politicians and people belonging to the intellectual milieu or civil society, punished for having remained faithful to what\u2019s left of the values spread by Western modernity? In this war, Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, almost joined his predecessor in death during the assassination attempt made on him in Addis-Ababa in July 1995.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\"> But I would above all like to stress the consequences of such a political process devoted to violence.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0T<\/span>hrough its imprint, a society has changed its face.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Even if, politically, the fundamentalists have not won, their ideology has marked the whole of the social body.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Some of their precepts have been adopted by official Islam; in the war of words, the State thought it had to take away from the fundamentalists the argument denouncing the non-conformity of their society to Islamic norms.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>To defuse this criticism, the State decided to entrust to al-Azhar the governance of souls, provided it would minimize the reach of political Islam.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>After such a tacit agreement, society found itself metamorphosed.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The signs of European modernity were obliterated, while Islamic signs (adapted to an Americanized urban landscape) were restored.\u00a0The most obvious of these signs, and the most polemic, is the wearing of veils by women.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>With a few rare exceptions, even the most Westernized women conformed to this return to Islamic norm; the elegant ones created headgear to fit the circumstance, which fit tightly around their hair and kept\u00a0it hidden.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The memory of the feminist Hoda Sha\u2019r\u00e2wi is as effaced as the beautiful Neo-Mameluke house where she used to live.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0T<\/span>he house is destroyed; the land where it set now\u00a0serves as a garage for the tourist buses visiting the pharaonic museum.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\"> At best, we are witnessing the unfurling of a devout society, the realization on earth of a human ensemble obeying what the Savoyard St. Fran\u00e7ois de Sales had thought and imagined (in a different age!) when he recommended<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"p3\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\">accommodating the practice of devotion to the strength, business, and duties of each particular (\u2026).<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cThe bee,\u201d Aristotle said, \u201cdraws its honey from flowers without disturbing them,\u201d leaving them whole and fresh as it found them; but true devotion does even better, for, not only does it not spoil any kind of vocation or business, but on the contrary it adorns and embellishes them.[3]<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\"> In such a way, through your devotion, you can contribute to founding a society subject to Islamic virtue while still keeping your profession, your economic activities; nor does devout practice prevent you from satisfying the desire to consume, or to succeed in the affairs of business the market offers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\"> The reeducation of such a society occured through the intervention of televised sermons and instruction, which have had their stars, among whom Sheikh Sha\u2019r\u00e2wi stands out. The sheikh\u00a0had a large audience, and even an influence over the modern, enlightened minds that thought they were discovering the subtleties of traditional theology through the obscurantist theology this sheikh spreads, one more\u00a0avatar in whom the semi-literate, emboldened by\u00a0their very resentment, can feel\u00a0triumph.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\">Confusion is at its height, the loss of reference-points impairs judgment; and the public takes the theatrics as vitality. It responded to the literalist analogies the sheikh propagated. With drops of spit\u00a0accompanying his\u00a0emphatic gestures, this\u00a0pedagogue of the poor submitted his role to a well-received theatricality despite (or because of) his elementary expressiveness.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\">Using the new form of literalism he glorified,\u00a0he located Qur&#8217;anic references\u00a0to technological innovations, from electricity to the atom.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>It was\u00a0as if the masses of Islam could find an additional reason in this subterfuge to authenticate their book (which is supposed to enclose the very word of God), and credit it with an omniscience anticipating the inventions that changed the way humans live on the earth.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>As if from such a sense they distilled an appeasement that could console them for having excluded inventions produced by those evil, strange Westerners.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>As if such a divine premonition expressed in their language made them free of guilt, as if it placed their resentment in reserve to help them enjoy the material goods of post-industrial society while keeping the illusion of having been their heralds if not their actual inventors.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\">This is the kind of magic thread on which depends adherence to such a religion (whose rational dimension, which frees it from myth and legend to found it in history, its incense-bearing admirers praise).<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>This claim \u2014\u00a0shared, moreover, by the proud epigones of three monotheisms \u2014\u00a0is pushed to the height of its exuberance in fundamentalists like Sayyid Qutb.[4]<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>But none of them knows that with such ideas thrown together in haste, they themselves are fabricators of myths.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><span class=\"s1\">[1]<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Gilles Kepel, <i>Le Proph\u00e8te et Pharaon<\/i> [The prophet and pharaoh], Paris:<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>La D\u00e9couverte, 1986.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><span class=\"s1\">[2]<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Note that the fundamentalists, as children of Americanization, already cared about the televisual appearance of their horrendous crimes; they were already marked by the narcissism of the media, beyond the impact on the public that the image procures for them to propagate their ideology and intimidate the world through terror.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><span class=\"s1\">[3]<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Saint Fran\u00e7ois de Sales, <i>Introduction \u00e0 la vie d\u00e9vote<\/i> [Introduction to the devout life] Paris: Le Seuil, 1961,22-3.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><span class=\"s1\">[4]<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>In the same book we cited earlier, Sayyid Qutb shows how this passage from myth to a reality based on reason remained insufficient with the Jews as well as with the Christians, whose Scriptures are still full of legends (<i>as\u00e2t\u2019\u00eer<\/i>) and are scarcely free of the prevailing paganism (<i>wathaniyya<\/i>). Though he cites Biblical legends, he remains blind to the Koranic recollections of these same legends, as well as to those that are unique to the Book of the Muslims, or that this Book reaps from post-Biblical literatures.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p4\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><span class=\"s1\">22<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\">Among\u00a0the preachers, and even among\u00a0the \u201csecular\u201d editorialists, an extreme xenophobia illumines the disasters undergone by their community. Thus they invent an imaginary conspiracy attributed to the Other, in the role of the enemy.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The faults of the group and the deviances of individuals are attributable to the evildoing and malevolent foreigner.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Is there a better way of removing responsibility from the individual after having discharged him of guilt? The misfortune that plagues the Muslim has the West as its origin\u2026<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>and Israel, whose success is irritating:<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 T<\/span>he counterpoint is in fact his own failure, which he cannot acknowledge.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>That is how traditional anti-Semitism is changed into modern anti-Semitism.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>A world separates the two ways of expressing hostility against the Jews.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Traditional anti-Semitism involved the theological controversy in which the Jews themselves participated, as was the case of Yehuda Halevi, who, in Arabic, sang the praises of \u201cthe despised religion\u201d [translator&#8217;s note: Judaism] after having refuted the two rival monotheisms.[1]<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Such a feeling of hostility inscribed itself into a competition for legitimacy.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The goal was to establish the authenticity of one\u2019s own theological ground, all the more necessary since it had to distance itself from the potential influence the earlier exercises over the later, from the very moment you decide to found your own building on the site and with the materials of those who preceded you.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\"> Current anti-Semitism stems from unthinking Westernization; its engagement is fed by the use and adaptation of falsehoods made up by the anti-Semites of the West.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>This is the case of the translation and distribution of <\/span><em><span class=\"s2\">The Protocol of the Elders of Zion<\/span><\/em><span class=\"s1\">.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Or the use of the anti-Semitic document created in the 1920\u2019s by the American extreme right and attributed to Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), editor of the Constitution. The document that makes him express the suspicion the migration of the Jews should arouse, for if they were to multiply on American soil, they would usurp the State and manipulate it to make it defend their own cause.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>This text is considered a blessing by those who, in their anti-Zionist war, don\u2019t care about protecting themselves from the drift toward anti-Semitism. Relying without precaution on such falsehoods, they attribute the American alliance with Israel to Jewish infiltration of the most powerful State in the world.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>They fail\u00a0to see how basic the legitimacy of Israel is in the vision of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, marked by its Messianic reading of the Old Testament.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>They do not know that the Zionist idea emerged in the beginning of the nineteenth century in Puritan writings, from believers who found it unbearable that the Holy Land was not in the hands of its legitimate owners.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The idea of Zionism was born in a Protestant land before being formulated in a much more ample way as a Jewish aspiration.[2]<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Let us add to this historic truth the inscription of the Holocaust into the symbolism of the State and in the civic education of the United States, a holocaust of whose accelerating role in the process that led to the foundation of the Hebrew State everyone is well known.[3]<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\"> It is important to remember this reality in an effective approach to the Palestinian question.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 We must<\/span>\u00a0avoid the mistake of the great imam of al-Azhar, Sheikh Tant\u00e2wi, who imprudently used the falsehood attributed to Benjamin Franklin and made it the epigraph of the thesis he devoted to what should be a theological subject par excellence, <em>The Children of israel<\/em><\/span><em><span class=\"s2\">\u00a0in Koran and Sunna<\/span><\/em><span class=\"s1\">.[4]<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>This epigraph became the symptom that revealed that a traditional theological treatise had been transformed into an ideological tract, shot through with tendencies evoked by current events.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The Jews of Medina (contemporaries of the Prophet Mohammed) are judged in the same way as the Jews of Israel at war with the Palestinians and the Arabs.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Anti-Judaism is mixed with anti-Zionism and is changed into an anti-Semitism that is not even aware of being made from a Western import.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>In the generalized confusion, a theological controversy is assimilated with a political question that in its turn is mixed with a racist perversion.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The wound Israel inflicts on Arab consciences remains exposed to all purulence.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\">No one is spared, not even the least obtuse and least fanatical minds, such as Sheikh Tant\u00e2wi, one of the reasonable voices of authority of official Islam, representative of a semimagisterium to limit the damage that uncontrolled access to the word causes.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>He denounced the deception of Osama bin Laden and denied him any legitimacy in attributing to himself the position of imam; he reminded the Saudi millionaire that he had neither the moral authority nor the doctrinal competence to call for holy war, which had to obey particular conditions to be proclaimed canonically unimpeachable \u2014\u00a0at a time when that notion was valid.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>After saying all that, I am under the obligation to reveal that even the antidote to fundamentalist poison is not safe from the sickness of Islam, one of whose symptoms is xenophobia and anti-Semitism. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\"> Thus we propose to ourselves the theoretical and abstract foreigner as a scapegoat we overload with falsehoods.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Almost unanimously, Egyptian opinion was\u00a0that the Luxor attack (November 1997) was the result of a conspiracy hatched by the CIA and its Mossad hirelings.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>In vain I explained to my interlocutors that beyond the obvious fundamentalist implication, such a massacre of innocent tourists can be perceived as the implementation of the discourse spread in the name of official Islam by the organs controlled by the State.[5]<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>The problem stems from the Azharian brand of Islam that the State put in charge of souls.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>To defuse adherence to fundamentalism, this Islam felt it was in a favorable situation to take over the discourse of Islamists without shouldering its ultimate consequences, those that preach violence and insurrection.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\">Can one lead a society with such a discourse toward piety and devotion without inciting it to found the Islamic State that would accord with its moral condition and would assure it, if not permanence, at least endurance and coherence? Are we in a situation in which we are still living the separation between religion and politics? That is certainly the case today in Egypt, but the distance between the values emanating from the two modes of thought is such that it risks producing schizophrenic citizens, susceptible to mending their interior division by soldering it into that unity the fundamentalism of secrecy and violent action promises.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>This situation has engendered one of the leaders who directed the September 11 attacks, the one the press has talked about most of all:<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Mohammed \u2018Atta did not fall from the sky, he is the product of Egyptian reality, which produces many other similar figures.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\"> In the commentaries revived by the latest attacks on New York, we again find at work the same way of disengaging responsibility.\u00a0The attacks were attributed once again\u00a0to the Mossad, on the pretext that the instant the planes hit their target, four thousand Jews were not at their posts in the Twin Towers.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Supported by large segments of public opinion from the fringes of the intellectual milieu, the press for a long time gave the spotlight to Mohammed \u2018Atta\u2019s father, who did his utmost to explain that his son had been abducted by the Mossad so that his name would be sullied and used in an operation led by the Secret Services of Israel in order to harm Egypt and Islam.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s not hard for a father in distress to clear himself of having engendered a criminal and a monster! We should point out too that such attitudes are not unique to Egypt.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>While visiting Damascus during the last ten days of September 2001, I discovered that the attribution to the Mossad of the destruction of the Manhattan towers was circulated by the official Syrian press.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\"> Anti-Western xenophobia combined with anti-Semitism needs rumors to keep going strong.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>When I was at Abu Dhabi in May 2001, a number of my interlocutors, of various Arab nationalities (Lebanese, Syrian, Sudanese, etc.) confirmed the warning, spread by the local newspapers, to the public of the countries of the Near East not to buy the very inexpensive belts with the label <em>M<\/em><\/span><em><span class=\"s2\">ade in Thailand.<\/span><\/em><span class=\"s1\">\u00a0Thes ebelts, the people told me, were actually Israeli products in disguise, and carried a kind of flea that propagated an incurable disease:<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>one more Zionist trick to weaken Arab bodies, if not eliminate them.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>These interlocutors, otherwise reasonable and likeable, gave credit to information as fantastic as that.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Those are the fantasies in which the symptoms of the sickness of Islam can be seen, the receptive compost where the crime of September 11 could be welcomed joyfully.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Didn\u2019t the press report that, in a Cairo bus, when the radio revealed the first estimates of the number of victims pulverized in New York, the passengers had spontaneously applauded and congratulated each other as if they had just received the happiest news? If such a crime brought such joy to these people, how could it be attributed to the Mossad? It is true that opinions afflicted with blindness are not accountable for their contradictions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><span class=\"s1\">[1]<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Yehuda Halevi, <i>Le Kuzari, Apologie de la religion m\u00e9pris\u00e9e<\/i> [The Kuzari:<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>In defense of the despised faith], translated [into French] from the Arabic by Charles Touati, Louvain-Paris:<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Peeters, 1994.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><span class=\"s1\">[2]<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>See Henry Laurens, <i>La Question de Palestine<\/i>, Volume I, <i>L\u2019Invention de la Terre sainte<\/i> [The invention of the Holy Land], Paris: Fayard, 1999, 18.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>In his demonstration Laurens depends on Mayir Vret\u00e9\u2019s study, \u201cThe Restoration of the Jews in English Protestant Thought, 1790-1840,\u201d <i>Middle Eastern Studies<\/i>, vol. VIII, 1972, pp. 3-50.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>See also George Robinson, \u201cJ\u00e9rusalem, 21 ao\u00fbt 1830,\u201d pp. 196-200, in <i>D\u00e9dale\/Multiple J\u00e9rusalem<\/i>, 3 &amp; 4, Paris:<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Maisonneuve &amp; Larose, Spring 1996.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><span class=\"s1\">[3]<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>The State of Israel was founded three years after the revelation to the world of the disaster caused by the \u201cfinal solution.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><span class=\"s1\">[4] Sheikh Ahmad Tant\u00e2wi, <i>Beni Isr\u00e2\u2019\u00eel fi-l\u2019Qur\u2019\u00e2n wa\u2019s-Sunna,<\/i> Cairo, 1987, p.9.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><span class=\"s1\">[5]<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Abdelwahab Meddeb, \u201cComme un ange d\u00e9chu au Caire\u201d [Like an angel fallen in Cairo], pp. 402-426, in <i>D\u00e9dale\/La Venue de l\u2019\u00e9tranger<\/i>, Nos. 9 &amp; 10, Paris:<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Maisonneuve &amp; Larose, Fall 1999.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify; padding-left: 60px;\">[to be continued]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Malady of Islam by Abdelwahab Meddeb translated from the French by Pierre Joris and\u00a0Charlotte Mandell (10th installment) P A R T III Fundamentalism Against the West 21 We\u2019ll begin with the first conjunction&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12979"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12982,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12979\/revisions\/12982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}