The War on Ramadan? Posted by Shadi Hamid

Writing from Egypt, Zvika Krieger has an interesting piece in TNR about the commercialization of Ramadan (Islam’s holiest month), and the “Islamist” attempt to safeguard its “purity.” As long as you're not too conservative, Ramadan in Egypt is good fun: a lot of parties, eating/gorging, hanging out with friends and family, and, more generally, doing as little real work as possible (Egyptian bureaucrats have notoriously short working days that become even shorter during Ramadan. I remember reading an article which claimed that the typical Egyptian bureaucrat averages 7 minutes of actual productivity per day).

Anyway, this is a fun passage:

A 50-inch flat-screen television overhead plays music videos of the Killers and Nine Inch Nails, while waiters weave aimlessly around the booths. As the sun dips below the Nile, a Red Hot Chili Peppers video is unceremoniously interrupted--the guitar solo replaced by a solemn, baritone voice. "In the name of Allah, the most merciful," it begins in Arabic. Selected verses from the Koran are recited over stark images of pilgrims in Mecca. Within minutes, the Red Hot Chili Peppers return.

While it’s nice to think that the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Koran are, in fact, compatible (and I suspect they are), it's also evident that there's a bit of cultural schizophrenia going on here. Contradictions abound. The West is both hated and loved.

This past summer, when I was in Egypt, I went to the beach with my cousins and some of their friends. It was a posh, exclusive resort, reserved for Egypt’s secular elite, a way for them to escape the dirt, dust, and depression of Cairo. It was a parallel universe designed to feel like, well, a parallel universe. My accented Arabic, while steady, belied the fact that I was the lone American in the group. One day, a couple of them were letting off some steam about the Israel-Hezbollah war and praising Nasrallah as some kind of Arab Christ figure. After I cast doubt on the purported wisdom of Nasrallah and his self-serving provocations along the Israeli border, the conversation soon shifted, inevitably, toward a discussion of America, "the Jews,” 9/11, and a variety of nutty conspiracy theories. Few things amaze me, because I’ve heard most of it before, but I always get angry when thoroughly Westernized Egyptians whose whole way of life is shaped by their love of American culture, start saying that they’re happy that 9/11 happened or that “we deserved it.” Then there was one interesting character who cited Syriana and Lord of War as evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, with a straight face no less.

There is a moral/cultural sickness which has engulfed the region. I’ve discussed the roots of it here, here, and here. Much of it revolves around questions of “dignity,” and the humiliation that nearly all Arabs feel, regardless of whether they’re liberal or Islamist, religious or barely practicing. "Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations," Tom Friedman once noted. Without acknowledging this, it would be nearly impossible to make sense of things which seem to make little sense at all.

In closed societies, politics, culture, and religion become distorted. Impulses, anger, and frustration are denied legitimate outlets. The frustration builds and builds and manifests itself in a variety of disturbing ways, some violent, some not, but all troubling. The war over Ramadan is just one more symptom of a more serious, endemic problem in Arab society, an affliction that must be addressed before the pot boils over. It may be too late, but one hopes - for our sake and theirs -that it isn’t.

Comments

[Cal]

There is a moral/cultural sickness which has engulfed the region.

Our gov't just voted overwhelmingly against habeus corpus and the Geneva conventions. More than 1 in 3 Americans believe the federal gov't was involved in 9/11. We spend as much on weaponry as the rest of the world combined.

I know this is heresy for the exemplarists, but the sickness is in us as well, and its spreading. We need to remove the mote in our own eye first, before lecturing other nations.

To Shadi this view probably smacks of "isolationism" and anti-Americanism, but I consider it genuinely patriotic and practical. We can't help the Middle East until we overcome our own authoritarian tendencies.

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