Oct 27, 2024
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My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
by Doniphan Blair
Mediaeval Jewish money lenders, not as severely caricatured as some images. illo: unknown, circa 16th century Continued from My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 1
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WHILE THIS HUMAN TENDENCY TO
transfer blame was exploited by greedy, tyrannical or psychopathic individuals, it was also exacerbated by design flaws in Christian and Muslim civilization. The most notable of these is the prohibition of lending at interest, which Christians and Muslims “borrowed” from “The Old Testament”, where it is forbidden 18 times. The Jews could prohibit interest because they operated as a tribe, with members repaying the favor of an interest-free loan through labor, marriage or other gifts, but in a multitribal society or enormous civilization that would be severely limiting. Who would lend a non-tribal member a hundred head of sheep, say, only to be reimbursed five years later with the same herd? Indeed, lending is the central fiduciary instrument for building civilization, after money itself, and it dates back to Sumer. Lending at interest encourages people to help those outside their tribe; it redistributes accumulated resources through fair recompense, rather than disruptive or violent seizure; it accelerates economic recovery after environmental or social disaster; and it finances startups and inventions. The common complaint against it, that excessive or “usurious” interest rates are punishing or even enslaving, which is true in many cases, is solved by free markets and competition between lenders, not increasing control.
To replace the essential growth mechanism of financing, Muslims turned loans into investments, with recompense dependent on outcome, while the Christians invented a “tax loophole with God.” After the turn of the first millennium, Christians leaders began to worry that Christ had cancelled his “second coming” because the Church was serving as the bank, which condemned them to eternal damnation. Since the Jews were going to hell anyway, they reasoned, the Jews could serve as the retail money lenders for the Christians, while the princes and bishops would be the wholesale bankers, lending to and collecting their cut from the Jews (see my article on about it ).
During the Middle Ages, Muslims, Christians and Jews debated lending publicly as well as privately. Due to their hypocrisy about moneylending, religious compulsion and heavenly reward but similar views on other subjects, many Christians and Muslims were challenged by their encounter with Judaism, which their faiths had supposedly surpassed. This generated a conscious or subconscious death wish, much like unhappy sons hoping their fathers would get out of the way or simply die already. Despite worshiping the same single Lord and believing in monotheism’s universal justice, Christian and Muslim authorities decided to relieve their inferiority complexes and need to scapegoat by punishing the Jews. They instituted restrictions and humiliations, identifying insignias, hats or clothing, exclusion from professions, activities or the community outright, and, ultimately, mass murder. You don’t need to be a religious scholar to realize that murdering Jews solely for their religion abrogates the ethics of Christ and Muhammad, which, in turn, increased Christian and Muslim guilt and anger with their fathers.
The Muslims enacted only a few massacres of Jews, or “farhuds” as their pogroms are called, before the 20th century, while Christians executed over 99% of the killing. They started in 1096 with the First Crusade, which commenced its effort to “bring the light of Christ to the world” by slaughtering the large Jewish communities thriving along the Rhine River. It culminated three years later, with the capture of Jerusalem and the Crusaders’ slaughter of its Jewish and Muslim inhabitants—until its streets ran ankle deep with blood. In point of fact, the previous Dark Ages were actually a time of light for Jews living across southern and middle Europe, doing the same work as their Christian neighbors, members in good standing of multi-faith communities. The central square of 4th century Cologne, Germany, for example, had polytheist temples for Roman and Gothic deities as well as a church and a synagogue. Their millennium of horror started around the Renaissance, ironically, as the Church’s spiritual monopoly and wealth allowed them to force Jews into moneylending, ghettos, wearing insignias and endless abuse.
The cover of Reverend James Parkes's 'The Jew in the Medieval Community' showing Christians and Jews arguing, books in hand. photo: courtesy J. ParkesThe mass psychosis of mob-driven antisemitism first appeared as the “blood libel,” which started in 1144 AD, in Norwich England, when a 12-year-old boy was found dead. Although there was nothing linking his death to Jews, the monk, Thomas of Monmouth, who investigated it four years later, claimed there was and similar accusations spread across Europe. Supposedly, evil rabbis liked to use gentile children’s blood to make their Passover matzo, the unleavened bread honoring their liberation from slavery, despite the patently obvious fact that blood is red and flour white. Nine centuries later, after immense English achievements, from Shakespeare to defeating the Nazis or maintaining the earth’s oldest continual democracy, a malevolent strain of antisemitism continues in England, supported by hard leftists, new agers and conspiracy theorists as well as Muslim immigrants.
European antisemitism expanded during Black Plague (1346-53), which was blamed on the Jews, because their witchcraft supposedly kept death rates low, not their Kosher cleanliness or medical practices. Then came the Inquisition, which started in 12th century Italy and France but reached its height in 16th century Spain. In the 17th century, the Khmelnytsky Uprising in Ukraine killed tens of thousands of Jews, although that was more of a political attack against Polish aristocrats, with whom the mercantile Jews were allied. In the 19th century, religious slaughter started small in Russia (where the word “pogrom” comes from) but reached horrific levels in 1920, when 100,000 Jews were killed and 1,000 communities disappeared. However, that was during the Russian Civil War which caused nine million casualties in a chaotic clash between the Red, White, Black and Green Armies (communist, tsarist, anarchist and peasant, respectively) and immediately followed the unprecedented death trip of World War One, when about 20 million died, half soldier, half civilian.
As if that were not enough to slake European blood lust, after only 21 years, the Nazis tried to redeem Germany’s losses in a second even larger war, condemning some 65 million souls to the grave. The crowning achievement of that sepulchral orgy was the Holocaust, from “holokaustos,” Greek for “burnt offering,” the killing of almost six million Jews on an industrial scale, which the Nazis and their collaborators thought would allow their societies to finally start functioning. Even though the Jews served as proud German partners for 1600 years, from developing the Jewish language of Yiddish from German to Otto von Bismarck, the father of modern Germany, recommending Jews as wives, diplomats and economic associates, the Nazis were obsessed with eliminating Jews, just as Freud predicted. It was largely because they served as the perfect scapegoats around which to orchestrate conspiracy theories, like “The Stab in the Back” (where Jews secretly orchestrated Germany’s WWI surrender) and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (a Russian forgery claiming Jews controlled the banks). But there was an even more important reason: the Jews represented freedom of religion, elevated ethics and liberal democracy—the same reasoning as Rome’s war to the death with the Jews, in other words—which the Nazis rightly assumed would restrict their survival of the fittest behavior.
Moreover, this blood lust tainted European states which were Nazi vassals or collaborators or denied Jews refuge, which almost all societies throughout history provided during wars. Since only the city-state of Shanghai accepted visa-less Jews fleeing the Nazis (about 20,000 made the long and expensive journey), all the nations of the earth joined the Nazis to form the last ring of guard towers and barbed-wire in their vast archipelago of concentration camps, death camps and killing fields.
As if increasing mass murder into the millions was not enough sin for European Christian civilization, in the course of the half millennium from the 13th century to the Enlightenment, Jews were often confined to ghettos, which were closed to varying degrees, from locked after curfew to 24/7 imprisonment, sometimes for centuries. Although Jews could convert to Christianity, which made mediaeval Christianity seem enlightened compared to the Nazis, forcing them into ghettos generated generations of Jews who had never seen a tree, save the ones painted on their synagogues walls. In fact, often only two types of people were allowed to leave the ghetto, rag collectors and moneylenders, and the latter were essentially fiduciary serfs. Indeed, they could be loaned, rented, sold or “harvested” (for hidden gold), while the “Right of First Night” entitled dukes and princes to rape their wives on their marriage night.
The German Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833) hosted the first of the many popular European literary salons that were beloved by gentile intellectuals. illo: unknownJews finally rejoined monotheist civilization in the West around 1800, and in the Middle East, starting about a half a century later, after the Enlightenment was brought at the point of a sword, in the Muslim manner, to much of Europe. Emancipation started with the French Revolution’s “Rights of Man”, which included the Jews, but was instituted by Napoleon through his conquests (1798-1814), although those laws were often rescinded. Indeed, traditional religious antisemitism transformed almost immediately into the political version, where Jews were accused of being communists or capitalists, ill-mannered or overeducated, foreign immigrants or too assimilated. France itself dissolved into paroxysms of antisemitic psychosis 80 years later, with mobs chanting “Death to the Jews” in the streets of Paris during the Dreyfus Affair, when a Jewish army officer by that name was accused of spying for Germany (he was eventually acquitted).
The standard antisemitic trope was that the Jews were crafty, controlling or outright evil, even though many Europeans loved them, seeing them as suitable spouses, writers, musicians, chemists, political theorists and entrepreneurs. Indeed, the respect of many gentiles, as with the ancient polytheists who pilgrimaged to pray in Jerusalem, helped Jews join society with surprising speed. Their talent and vigor, however, was largely due to their millennia of monotheism, which fostered literacy, education and even scientific investigation (mostly medical, until the 19th century) as well as optimism, love (familial, romantic and humanist) and dedication to justice. Derived directly from Moses bringing down the law from Mount Sinai, many Jews became lawyers. While some were shysters, many fought for rule of law and human rights. Indeed, their ancient project of relief from bondage, poverty and suffering continued with many Jews becoming involved in progressive politics, from liberal democrat to communist, and philanthropies, especially building hospitals, where Jewish often exceeded gentiles, despite their tiny percent of society. Others devoted themselves to writing, music, other arts and their promotion through publishing, museums and theatres.
The Jews were released from European ghettos just in time for the 19th century’s explosion of democracy, capitalism and science. They had the energy, intelligence and desperation for freedom but also cash, due to the moneylending, which nurtured a few rich families, notably the Rothschilds. While their forbears served as grubby smalltime lenders or “tax farmers” (who paid a region’s tax bill up front and were provided soldiers to collect it, an veritable antisemitism manufacturing machine), five centuries is a longtime to study a profession and market. Naturally, they became adept bankers, international merchants and industrial magnates but also war materiel suppliers, required by Europeans for their endless wars. It was only through complex lending, international connections and detailed planning, they could get the weapons, ammunition, horses and food needed for aristocracies as well as democracies, including England.
Most Jews, however, were impoverished, like my grandfather, Mendel Rotkopf, who worked as weaver in Lodz, Poland, and lived paycheck to paycheck in one room with his family of five. Indeed, Jews had to study, work and hustle very hard to reenter the civilization they helped invent.
Nevertheless, within a century, they developed dozens of new enterprises and fields, from lumber yards and department stores to medical professions and film making, which enriched a few but benefited millions, both in Europe and the Americas but also the Middle East and Islam. Indeed, their invention and achievement was historically unprecedented, notably in political, psychological and scientific fields: the communism of Marx (who was of Jewish descent but became antisemitic), Freud’s psychoanalysis and social theories (he was an atheist but still tribal Jew) and the physics of Einstein (a mystical modernist of Jewish descent).
Indeed, the Jews were instrumental in the establishment of the modern, liberal and democratic era, despite representing as little as ten percent of a nation’s population, as in Poland, or less than one percent, as in Germany. In point of fact, Germany was saved during World War One by two Jews. Fritz Haber invented nitrogen fabrication and, after the war, the Allies were going to try him as war criminal, because nitrogen was the main ingredient in explosives but gave him the 1918 Nobel Prize instead, because it’s needed for fertilizers (which helped feed billions, to this day). Walter Rathenau was so revered for reengineering Germany’s wartime military supply chain, he was elected prime minister but served only five months in 1922, until his assassination (his assassins fled, although one later apologized to his mother).
All civilizations are like monotheisms, insomuch they’re rules-based, share the social moral construct of increased ethics and cooperation, and are universalist. Despite their stupendous suffering and occasional cynicism, often expressed in humor, most Jews assumed the other monotheists would eventually recognize that obvious fact. They were mistaken. Indeed, many Muslims, Christians and rational atheists, socialists and communists, rejected monotheism’s inherent equality, tolerance and spiritual generosity, even after it helped inspire the American Constitution and the elimination of slavery, during the Civil War (Abraham Lincoln referred to it often). Sadly, monotheism has long been gamed by charlatans, cult leaders and false messiahs as well as authoritarians, who roleplay Islamic, Christian or Jewish values but lust for the idolatry of personal or tribal benefits, despite the fact that “[a] civilization that builds on the basis of blood is a tribe, a tribe that builds on the basis of ideas is a civilization,” as I noted in “The Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto”.
Salafists Try to Make Islam Great Again
The Wahhabis were resisted from their very beginning, in the mid-18th century, by liberal Muslims, first by preachers in Wahhab’s own family and then in Mecca. Islam’s most sacred city was famous pre-Islam for tolerance and creativity, a tradition which continued during the Hajj. Making the pilgrimage is one of the “Five Pillars of Islam” (but only if a devotee can afford it) and Muslims from all over the world come to pray, talk, trade and sometimes marry, since women often attended unveiled. After the Sufi Renaissance, they were also entertained and enlightened by Sufi storytellers and theologians. During the Hajj of Wahhab and his devotees, however, “the qadi [head judge] of Mecca pronounced them to be unbelievers, in view of the well-known principle, based on Hadith, that whoever without good reason denounces a fellow Muslim as an unbeliever himself enters that category,” (Hamid Algars, “Wahhabism”, 2002).
The Wahhabis were so unpopular, in fact, they were driven from Mecca in 1811, only eight years after conquering it, by Egypt’s new ruler, Muhammad Ali Pasha, a military genius backed by his hardened Albanian troops. Ali Pasha was also a liberal Muslim, probably a Bektashi Sufi (a tariqa which allows alcohol), who opened Egypt to the West, by reviving the multicultural and intellectual center and port of Alexandria.
The Ottomans followed suit in 1839 with top-down reforms, called “Tanzimat,” which introduced elections and eventually full citizenship for Greeks, Armenians and even Jews, including the right to serve in the military (important to men to prove dedication and status, unfortunately, just in time for WWI). Meanwhile, “The Nahda,” meaning Arab Enlightenment, bubbled up from Arab street, driven by writers, intellectuals and diplomats, ranging from progressive modernists to conservatives or clandestine Wahhabis. Many Middle Easterners adopted western ideas, tools and goods, which radically altered their lives and life spans, but their democracy was in its infancy, their institutions were archaic, and their leaders were often corrupt. Hence, the poor and disenfranchised were perpetually pushed toward Salafism, as Wahhabism came to be known, after incorporating Islamist ideas from India and elsewhere.
Unlike the Protestants, who evolved in three centuries from Wahhabi-like Puritans to mostly tolerant democrats, the Salafists believed that modernity could be resisted by increasing fidelity to Shari’ah Law, even as they reinterpreted “The Quran” and even added sections. The Muslim Brotherhood, started by an Egyptian schoolteacher in 1928, adopted a few ideas from Abduh, Egypt’s famously liberal Grand Mufti (religious head), who allowed figurative art (after visiting European museums), often quoted “No compulsion” scripture, increased women’s rights, and helped inspired Egypt’s 1919 Revolution. But it mostly borrowed from the Fascists and Nazis, the latter already in control of Italy, with its use of brown uniforms, mass rallies, claims for resurrecting the thousand-year caliphate, extreme antisemitism and more. It became Salafism’s preeminent sect, with Hamas an offshoot, Qatar a Brotherhood state, and Erdogan’s Turkey Brotherhood-inspired, while its Egyptian wing tried to capitalize on the 2012 Arab Spring but then destroyed it. While the Brotherhood was getting going, the Wahhab-Sauds finished their conquest of most of the Arabian peninsula, established Saudi Arabia (1932), and began building immense wealth in partnership with infidels, the Americans who discovered oil there in 1938, which is forbidden by Shari’ah Law.
The Salafists also condemned the traditional Middle Eastern culture of belly dancing, music, wine and hash, which flourished in their world-class cafés. For millennia, Arabs made wine and “al-kuḥl” (another Arabic word), which many Muslims continue to enjoy privately, when Islamic prohibitions are enforced, and young men use as a rite of passage or even a psychedelic by getting blotto drunk. Coffee was discovered in nearby Ethiopia and popularized and commercialized in Yemen by Sufis and Arab traders around the 10th century. The international hash trade began a few centuries later, mostly imported from Afghanistan, before Morocco and Lebanon became hash superpowers, again with Sufis involved. Baba Ku was a hash-smoking folk hero from Balkh but the real pioneer was another Afghan, Qutb ad-Dīn Haydar, the dour leader of a small Malamati (self-blaming) tariqa in the 13th century. He preached abstinence and fakirism (pushing iron rods through scabbed-up holes in their arms) until, one day, “Walking in the country side in the midday heat, he discovered the divine properties of a plant that… almighty God has bestowed… which will dispatch the shadows that cloud your soul and will brighten your spirit,” (Gabriel Georges Nahas, Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, 1982).
After tobacco arrived from the New World in the 16th century, and the sultans convinced the mullahs to allow it, globalization gifted the Middle East three very pleasant, only modestly toxic, and still popular drugs, which were not available in Europe until the 19th century. Indeed, many Middle Eastern men enjoyed coffee, tobacco and hash in the male space of their cafes until the arrival of the Salafists.
From Morocco to India, Salafists began challenging the corruption of regular folk as well as authorities and started funding charities, schools and hospitals, which was welcomed. Not as popular, however, was their advocacy of covering women and punishing liberals, artists, gays and minorities, although they did inspire some Sufi and Shi’a theologians to adopt aspects of their doctrine and enthusiasm. This two-century struggle was considered an internal Islamic reform movement and largely unknown in the West until Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979.
Notorious for holding 53 Americans hostage for 15 months, the Shi’a Ayatollahs of Iran proved to be more brutal than the Shah, who was culturally liberal. After installing harsh regular and religious police and hanging judges, the Ayatollahs jailed and executed many opponents but also nominal allies. Some Western leftists, like French philosopher Michel Foucault (who visited Iran twice in 1978), supported Iran’s revolution and reversal of the CIA-assisted coup of 1953, even though it proved disastrous for Iranian women, artists, Sufis and minorities as well as socialists. A vibrant intelligentsia endures, especially among their filmmakers, but the authoritarianism generally increases, which sparks months-long protests every few years and are repressed with mass incarceration and murder. There were protests in 2019 and even larger and longer ones starting in September 2022, after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, was killed for not covering her hair properly. In the summer of 2024, mainstream media reported that agents from the Iran Revolutionary Guard were assassinating dissidents in Turkey.
The Ayatollahs also adopted extreme antisemitism, despite the ancient Persian friendship with the Jews, which started in antiquity with a mythical Persian Jewess, who became queen and saved her people (recounted in “The Bible”’s “Book of Ester”), and the factual Cyrus the Great. A brilliant general and lawgiver as well as liberal, Cyrus freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity, helped rebuild their temple, became the only gentile ever called a “messiah,” and invited Jews to Persia. They lived there comparatively well for 2,500 years, sometimes serving as advisors and doctors, and reaching a population of 100,000 in 1948, after which Iran was one of only a few Muslim countries to not expel their Jews.
Despite their long fraternity, mutual benefit and occasional intermarriage, however, the Ayatollahs kicked out the Jews (a few remain, but they are vehemently anti-Zionist). Moreover, they decided supporting the Palestinians and the abused Shi’a of Lebanon and attacking Israel would unify a chaotic Islam and attract Muslims of any sect who felt humiliated by the battlefield and economic achievements of the once-impoverished, third-class Jews living across Islam. Even though Israel was a tiny and a long way from Iran, if the Ayatollahs could destroy it, that would prove the superiority of Shi’a theology and ethics, help them defeat the nine-times larger Sunnis and make them God’s chosen people—absurd as that may sound to an Iranian liberal, artist or Sufi as well as any rational observer.
The Palestinian spiritual leader as well as war lord, Amin al-Husseini, lived in Germany the last few years of WWII, during he met with Hitler and tried to bring the death camps to Palestine. photo: unknown The Muslim Brotherhood as not the only people to import fascist and Nazi ideologies and tactics to the Middle East. Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1938, ministered to the spiritual needs of Islam’s third sacred city, but was also a brutal warlord. Indeed, he ordered the murder of dozens of liberal Muslims as well as hundreds of Jews, in massacres, which started in Hebron in 1929, with killing about 68 Jews (after the Jewish community fled, the Hebron merchants wrote them an open letter asking them to return), and then revolts and wars. Indeed, he took over the Arab Revolt in 1936 and, six years later, moved to Berlin, where he spent the remainer of World War Two encouraging Bosnian Muslims to fight for Germany and lobbying the Nazis to bring the Holocaust to the Holy Land.
Anti-colonial British sentiment in Iraq inspired the “Golden Square” coup of 1941, which was supported by Italian Fascists as well as the Nazis. The rebelling officers controlled the country only briefly, but it was enough time to slaughter some 250 Jews in Baghdad, which was half Jewish for over two millennia, replete with pillaging, raping and defilement, a foreshadowing of the 1948 attacks, which forced Iraq’s 90,000 Jews to flee to Israel, as well as Hamas’s October 7th invasion. Although the Ba’ath Party founded after the war was technically socialist, it produced the fascism of Sunni Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (1979-2003), and that of the Shi’a Assad family in Syria (1970-present). Full-blown Islamo-fascism, albeit not so much nationalist but Islam-wide, came in 1979 with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Within three years, Egypt’s liberal president, Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Egyptian soldiers affiliated with Islamic Jihad (another Muslim Brotherhood offshoot). His crime: making peace with Israel. Then came Hezbollah, “The Party of God,” an aggressive mosque-state combo of sect, political party and armed forces (now bigger than the Lebanese Army), as well as essentially an Iranian colonial foothold in the Middle East, like the ten Hashasheens castles Persia installed in Syria, eight centuries earlier. The Iranians capitalized on the Shi’a underclass status and oppression in Lebanon and Israel’s perhaps imprudent involvement in the country’s civil war, 1975 to 1990 (some 150,000 killed). Hezbollah earned radical Islamist and socialist street cred with two massive suicide truck bombings: one of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983, the other of a Jewish community center in Argentina, in 1994, murdering 241 and 85, respectively.
Seven years later, those numbers were eclipsed ten-fold by al-Qaeda’s killing of 3,000 on 9/11, Hashasheen-style, which raced Salafism to the top of the news, foreign policy and negative public opinion world-wide as well as in the U.S. While some Muslims celebrated, others took to the streets of Tehran, Cairo and elsewhere to show solidarity with the U.S. and opposition to radical Islamism, which largely went quiet for a decade. Indeed, in 2011, pro-democracy protestors rose up across the Arab world after a Tunisian fruit vendor, Tarek Bouazizi, set himself afire to draw attention to the endemic and punishing corruption. The Arab Spring quickly toppled Egypt’s corrupt dictator, Hosni Mubarak (he died in prison), Libya’s colorful and capricious one, Muammar Gaddafi (after three and four decades of abuse, respectively), and the leaders of Tunisia and Yemen. Alas, the Arab Spring failed to secure overwhelming support, was outflanked by the seasoned political operatives among the Salafists, and triggered civil wars in Libya and Yemen as well as Syria. Civil wars favor fundamentalists, as per the one-sentence revelation from 14th century Arabia, “Better a century of tyranny than one day of chaos.”
The Arab Spring did produce Egypt's first-ever free election in 2012, although voters elected president a Muslim Brotherhood member, Muhammad Morsi, whom the army had to oust in less than a year for abrogating democracy (he died in prison). Syria, meanwhile, sank into the standard Sunni-Shi’a slaughter, with over 600,000 casualties thus far (supported by Russia as well as Iran), as did Yemen, with almost a half a million dead, its Houthi rebels supported by Iran.
Sunni fundamentalists, for their part, flocked from across the West as well as Islam to Salafism’s newest iteration, the Islamic State. Amid the chaotic fighting of 2014 in Syria, IS (also called ISIS, an affront to that great goddess, and DAESH, their initials in Arabic) conquered a third of the country and a similar slice of Iraq. In bursts of orgiastic attacks, armed men raced across the desert, a la Wahhab cavalry, but in pickup trucks, and proclaimed a caliphate, the first since the Ottoman Caliphate collapsed nine decades earlier. In keeping with Salafism’s double-down strategy, IS adopted every possible western weapon, communication system and luxury good but an even more repressive Islam than Wahhabism. They mandated gloves, eye mesh and anklets, to more completely cover women, and forbode images or music for entertainment, educational or enlightenment purposes, but not propaganda. Their slick marketing and social media used extensive beheading, torture and snuff film imagery.
We need not find al-Ghazali’s modern counterpart to divine that IS’s claim to abide the letter of Shari’ah Law contradicts the spirit of the peaceful and mystical Muhammad as well as the Sufis. IS’s fiendish fundamentalism frightened so many Muslims, in fact, many Middle Eastern countries—including Iran—helped the American and Iraqi armies defeat them, which culminated in the Battle of Mosul (2016-’17), killing about 10,000 IS fighters and 8,000 civilians. Other than the Taliban’s second seizure of Kabul in 2021 (the first was in 1996), that was Salafism’s last major battle before October 7th, 2023.
Authoritarians Invariably Attack Liberals
On October 7th, I was in Lviv, Ukraine, a lovely university and café town, hanging out with its many educated, artistic and internationally-aware teens and 20-somethings—hippies, in other words…
This concludes the first half of “My Half Century With a Loving Islam, Its Four Secrets and the Monotheist Wars”. The second half will include the rest of this chapter, covering Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution of 2013-4, the situation there after the Russian invasion in 2022, and on my second visit in 2023. It will also have about eight more chapters:
My Dark Night of the Soul: Realizing a Second Holocaust Is Possible
Why Israel Does Have the Right to Exist
The Fourth Middle East Secret: Many Arabs Welcomed the Zionists
Today’s Arab Liberals: Arab Springers, Islamist Opponents and Honest Monotheists
Can Sufis Save Islam a Fifth Time?
The War of Symbols in The Middle East and Across the World
The Meaning of 10/7: The Beginning of Just and Equitable Multiculturalism
Other of my articles I will be linking to:
Why Arab Liberals Support Israel
Did Arabs and Jews Like Each Other in 1948?
Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed
Darwin and Love: What I Learned Making a Holocaust Movie
Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs
Posted on Oct 26, 2024 - 04:30 PM
by Doniphan Blair
Mediaeval Jewish money lenders, not as severely caricatured as some images. illo: unknown, circa 16th century Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 1
PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.
WHILE THIS HUMAN TENDENCY TO
transfer blame was exploited by greedy, tyrannical or psychopathic individuals, it was also exacerbated by design flaws in Christian and Muslim civilization. The most notable of these is the prohibition of lending at interest, which Christians and Muslims “borrowed” from “The Old Testament”, where it is forbidden 18 times. The Jews could prohibit interest because they operated as a tribe, with members repaying the favor of an interest-free loan through labor, marriage or other gifts, but in a multitribal society or enormous civilization that would be severely limiting. Who would lend a non-tribal member a hundred head of sheep, say, only to be reimbursed five years later with the same herd? Indeed, lending is the central fiduciary instrument for building civilization, after money itself, and it dates back to Sumer. Lending at interest encourages people to help those outside their tribe; it redistributes accumulated resources through fair recompense, rather than disruptive or violent seizure; it accelerates economic recovery after environmental or social disaster; and it finances startups and inventions. The common complaint against it, that excessive or “usurious” interest rates are punishing or even enslaving, which is true in many cases, is solved by free markets and competition between lenders, not increasing control.
To replace the essential growth mechanism of financing, Muslims turned loans into investments, with recompense dependent on outcome, while the Christians invented a “tax loophole with God.” After the turn of the first millennium, Christians leaders began to worry that Christ had cancelled his “second coming” because the Church was serving as the bank, which condemned them to eternal damnation. Since the Jews were going to hell anyway, they reasoned, the Jews could serve as the retail money lenders for the Christians, while the princes and bishops would be the wholesale bankers, lending to and collecting their cut from the Jews (see my article on about it ).
During the Middle Ages, Muslims, Christians and Jews debated lending publicly as well as privately. Due to their hypocrisy about moneylending, religious compulsion and heavenly reward but similar views on other subjects, many Christians and Muslims were challenged by their encounter with Judaism, which their faiths had supposedly surpassed. This generated a conscious or subconscious death wish, much like unhappy sons hoping their fathers would get out of the way or simply die already. Despite worshiping the same single Lord and believing in monotheism’s universal justice, Christian and Muslim authorities decided to relieve their inferiority complexes and need to scapegoat by punishing the Jews. They instituted restrictions and humiliations, identifying insignias, hats or clothing, exclusion from professions, activities or the community outright, and, ultimately, mass murder. You don’t need to be a religious scholar to realize that murdering Jews solely for their religion abrogates the ethics of Christ and Muhammad, which, in turn, increased Christian and Muslim guilt and anger with their fathers.
The Muslims enacted only a few massacres of Jews, or “farhuds” as their pogroms are called, before the 20th century, while Christians executed over 99% of the killing. They started in 1096 with the First Crusade, which commenced its effort to “bring the light of Christ to the world” by slaughtering the large Jewish communities thriving along the Rhine River. It culminated three years later, with the capture of Jerusalem and the Crusaders’ slaughter of its Jewish and Muslim inhabitants—until its streets ran ankle deep with blood. In point of fact, the previous Dark Ages were actually a time of light for Jews living across southern and middle Europe, doing the same work as their Christian neighbors, members in good standing of multi-faith communities. The central square of 4th century Cologne, Germany, for example, had polytheist temples for Roman and Gothic deities as well as a church and a synagogue. Their millennium of horror started around the Renaissance, ironically, as the Church’s spiritual monopoly and wealth allowed them to force Jews into moneylending, ghettos, wearing insignias and endless abuse.
The cover of Reverend James Parkes's 'The Jew in the Medieval Community' showing Christians and Jews arguing, books in hand. photo: courtesy J. ParkesEuropean antisemitism expanded during Black Plague (1346-53), which was blamed on the Jews, because their witchcraft supposedly kept death rates low, not their Kosher cleanliness or medical practices. Then came the Inquisition, which started in 12th century Italy and France but reached its height in 16th century Spain. In the 17th century, the Khmelnytsky Uprising in Ukraine killed tens of thousands of Jews, although that was more of a political attack against Polish aristocrats, with whom the mercantile Jews were allied. In the 19th century, religious slaughter started small in Russia (where the word “pogrom” comes from) but reached horrific levels in 1920, when 100,000 Jews were killed and 1,000 communities disappeared. However, that was during the Russian Civil War which caused nine million casualties in a chaotic clash between the Red, White, Black and Green Armies (communist, tsarist, anarchist and peasant, respectively) and immediately followed the unprecedented death trip of World War One, when about 20 million died, half soldier, half civilian.
As if that were not enough to slake European blood lust, after only 21 years, the Nazis tried to redeem Germany’s losses in a second even larger war, condemning some 65 million souls to the grave. The crowning achievement of that sepulchral orgy was the Holocaust, from “holokaustos,” Greek for “burnt offering,” the killing of almost six million Jews on an industrial scale, which the Nazis and their collaborators thought would allow their societies to finally start functioning. Even though the Jews served as proud German partners for 1600 years, from developing the Jewish language of Yiddish from German to Otto von Bismarck, the father of modern Germany, recommending Jews as wives, diplomats and economic associates, the Nazis were obsessed with eliminating Jews, just as Freud predicted. It was largely because they served as the perfect scapegoats around which to orchestrate conspiracy theories, like “The Stab in the Back” (where Jews secretly orchestrated Germany’s WWI surrender) and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (a Russian forgery claiming Jews controlled the banks). But there was an even more important reason: the Jews represented freedom of religion, elevated ethics and liberal democracy—the same reasoning as Rome’s war to the death with the Jews, in other words—which the Nazis rightly assumed would restrict their survival of the fittest behavior.
Moreover, this blood lust tainted European states which were Nazi vassals or collaborators or denied Jews refuge, which almost all societies throughout history provided during wars. Since only the city-state of Shanghai accepted visa-less Jews fleeing the Nazis (about 20,000 made the long and expensive journey), all the nations of the earth joined the Nazis to form the last ring of guard towers and barbed-wire in their vast archipelago of concentration camps, death camps and killing fields.
As if increasing mass murder into the millions was not enough sin for European Christian civilization, in the course of the half millennium from the 13th century to the Enlightenment, Jews were often confined to ghettos, which were closed to varying degrees, from locked after curfew to 24/7 imprisonment, sometimes for centuries. Although Jews could convert to Christianity, which made mediaeval Christianity seem enlightened compared to the Nazis, forcing them into ghettos generated generations of Jews who had never seen a tree, save the ones painted on their synagogues walls. In fact, often only two types of people were allowed to leave the ghetto, rag collectors and moneylenders, and the latter were essentially fiduciary serfs. Indeed, they could be loaned, rented, sold or “harvested” (for hidden gold), while the “Right of First Night” entitled dukes and princes to rape their wives on their marriage night.
The German Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833) hosted the first of the many popular European literary salons that were beloved by gentile intellectuals. illo: unknownThe standard antisemitic trope was that the Jews were crafty, controlling or outright evil, even though many Europeans loved them, seeing them as suitable spouses, writers, musicians, chemists, political theorists and entrepreneurs. Indeed, the respect of many gentiles, as with the ancient polytheists who pilgrimaged to pray in Jerusalem, helped Jews join society with surprising speed. Their talent and vigor, however, was largely due to their millennia of monotheism, which fostered literacy, education and even scientific investigation (mostly medical, until the 19th century) as well as optimism, love (familial, romantic and humanist) and dedication to justice. Derived directly from Moses bringing down the law from Mount Sinai, many Jews became lawyers. While some were shysters, many fought for rule of law and human rights. Indeed, their ancient project of relief from bondage, poverty and suffering continued with many Jews becoming involved in progressive politics, from liberal democrat to communist, and philanthropies, especially building hospitals, where Jewish often exceeded gentiles, despite their tiny percent of society. Others devoted themselves to writing, music, other arts and their promotion through publishing, museums and theatres.
The Jews were released from European ghettos just in time for the 19th century’s explosion of democracy, capitalism and science. They had the energy, intelligence and desperation for freedom but also cash, due to the moneylending, which nurtured a few rich families, notably the Rothschilds. While their forbears served as grubby smalltime lenders or “tax farmers” (who paid a region’s tax bill up front and were provided soldiers to collect it, an veritable antisemitism manufacturing machine), five centuries is a longtime to study a profession and market. Naturally, they became adept bankers, international merchants and industrial magnates but also war materiel suppliers, required by Europeans for their endless wars. It was only through complex lending, international connections and detailed planning, they could get the weapons, ammunition, horses and food needed for aristocracies as well as democracies, including England.
Most Jews, however, were impoverished, like my grandfather, Mendel Rotkopf, who worked as weaver in Lodz, Poland, and lived paycheck to paycheck in one room with his family of five. Indeed, Jews had to study, work and hustle very hard to reenter the civilization they helped invent.
Nevertheless, within a century, they developed dozens of new enterprises and fields, from lumber yards and department stores to medical professions and film making, which enriched a few but benefited millions, both in Europe and the Americas but also the Middle East and Islam. Indeed, their invention and achievement was historically unprecedented, notably in political, psychological and scientific fields: the communism of Marx (who was of Jewish descent but became antisemitic), Freud’s psychoanalysis and social theories (he was an atheist but still tribal Jew) and the physics of Einstein (a mystical modernist of Jewish descent).
Indeed, the Jews were instrumental in the establishment of the modern, liberal and democratic era, despite representing as little as ten percent of a nation’s population, as in Poland, or less than one percent, as in Germany. In point of fact, Germany was saved during World War One by two Jews. Fritz Haber invented nitrogen fabrication and, after the war, the Allies were going to try him as war criminal, because nitrogen was the main ingredient in explosives but gave him the 1918 Nobel Prize instead, because it’s needed for fertilizers (which helped feed billions, to this day). Walter Rathenau was so revered for reengineering Germany’s wartime military supply chain, he was elected prime minister but served only five months in 1922, until his assassination (his assassins fled, although one later apologized to his mother).
All civilizations are like monotheisms, insomuch they’re rules-based, share the social moral construct of increased ethics and cooperation, and are universalist. Despite their stupendous suffering and occasional cynicism, often expressed in humor, most Jews assumed the other monotheists would eventually recognize that obvious fact. They were mistaken. Indeed, many Muslims, Christians and rational atheists, socialists and communists, rejected monotheism’s inherent equality, tolerance and spiritual generosity, even after it helped inspire the American Constitution and the elimination of slavery, during the Civil War (Abraham Lincoln referred to it often). Sadly, monotheism has long been gamed by charlatans, cult leaders and false messiahs as well as authoritarians, who roleplay Islamic, Christian or Jewish values but lust for the idolatry of personal or tribal benefits, despite the fact that “[a] civilization that builds on the basis of blood is a tribe, a tribe that builds on the basis of ideas is a civilization,” as I noted in “The Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto”.
Salafists Try to Make Islam Great Again
The Wahhabis were resisted from their very beginning, in the mid-18th century, by liberal Muslims, first by preachers in Wahhab’s own family and then in Mecca. Islam’s most sacred city was famous pre-Islam for tolerance and creativity, a tradition which continued during the Hajj. Making the pilgrimage is one of the “Five Pillars of Islam” (but only if a devotee can afford it) and Muslims from all over the world come to pray, talk, trade and sometimes marry, since women often attended unveiled. After the Sufi Renaissance, they were also entertained and enlightened by Sufi storytellers and theologians. During the Hajj of Wahhab and his devotees, however, “the qadi [head judge] of Mecca pronounced them to be unbelievers, in view of the well-known principle, based on Hadith, that whoever without good reason denounces a fellow Muslim as an unbeliever himself enters that category,” (Hamid Algars, “Wahhabism”, 2002).
The Wahhabis were so unpopular, in fact, they were driven from Mecca in 1811, only eight years after conquering it, by Egypt’s new ruler, Muhammad Ali Pasha, a military genius backed by his hardened Albanian troops. Ali Pasha was also a liberal Muslim, probably a Bektashi Sufi (a tariqa which allows alcohol), who opened Egypt to the West, by reviving the multicultural and intellectual center and port of Alexandria.
The Ottomans followed suit in 1839 with top-down reforms, called “Tanzimat,” which introduced elections and eventually full citizenship for Greeks, Armenians and even Jews, including the right to serve in the military (important to men to prove dedication and status, unfortunately, just in time for WWI). Meanwhile, “The Nahda,” meaning Arab Enlightenment, bubbled up from Arab street, driven by writers, intellectuals and diplomats, ranging from progressive modernists to conservatives or clandestine Wahhabis. Many Middle Easterners adopted western ideas, tools and goods, which radically altered their lives and life spans, but their democracy was in its infancy, their institutions were archaic, and their leaders were often corrupt. Hence, the poor and disenfranchised were perpetually pushed toward Salafism, as Wahhabism came to be known, after incorporating Islamist ideas from India and elsewhere.
Unlike the Protestants, who evolved in three centuries from Wahhabi-like Puritans to mostly tolerant democrats, the Salafists believed that modernity could be resisted by increasing fidelity to Shari’ah Law, even as they reinterpreted “The Quran” and even added sections. The Muslim Brotherhood, started by an Egyptian schoolteacher in 1928, adopted a few ideas from Abduh, Egypt’s famously liberal Grand Mufti (religious head), who allowed figurative art (after visiting European museums), often quoted “No compulsion” scripture, increased women’s rights, and helped inspired Egypt’s 1919 Revolution. But it mostly borrowed from the Fascists and Nazis, the latter already in control of Italy, with its use of brown uniforms, mass rallies, claims for resurrecting the thousand-year caliphate, extreme antisemitism and more. It became Salafism’s preeminent sect, with Hamas an offshoot, Qatar a Brotherhood state, and Erdogan’s Turkey Brotherhood-inspired, while its Egyptian wing tried to capitalize on the 2012 Arab Spring but then destroyed it. While the Brotherhood was getting going, the Wahhab-Sauds finished their conquest of most of the Arabian peninsula, established Saudi Arabia (1932), and began building immense wealth in partnership with infidels, the Americans who discovered oil there in 1938, which is forbidden by Shari’ah Law.
The Salafists also condemned the traditional Middle Eastern culture of belly dancing, music, wine and hash, which flourished in their world-class cafés. For millennia, Arabs made wine and “al-kuḥl” (another Arabic word), which many Muslims continue to enjoy privately, when Islamic prohibitions are enforced, and young men use as a rite of passage or even a psychedelic by getting blotto drunk. Coffee was discovered in nearby Ethiopia and popularized and commercialized in Yemen by Sufis and Arab traders around the 10th century. The international hash trade began a few centuries later, mostly imported from Afghanistan, before Morocco and Lebanon became hash superpowers, again with Sufis involved. Baba Ku was a hash-smoking folk hero from Balkh but the real pioneer was another Afghan, Qutb ad-Dīn Haydar, the dour leader of a small Malamati (self-blaming) tariqa in the 13th century. He preached abstinence and fakirism (pushing iron rods through scabbed-up holes in their arms) until, one day, “Walking in the country side in the midday heat, he discovered the divine properties of a plant that… almighty God has bestowed… which will dispatch the shadows that cloud your soul and will brighten your spirit,” (Gabriel Georges Nahas, Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, 1982).
After tobacco arrived from the New World in the 16th century, and the sultans convinced the mullahs to allow it, globalization gifted the Middle East three very pleasant, only modestly toxic, and still popular drugs, which were not available in Europe until the 19th century. Indeed, many Middle Eastern men enjoyed coffee, tobacco and hash in the male space of their cafes until the arrival of the Salafists.
From Morocco to India, Salafists began challenging the corruption of regular folk as well as authorities and started funding charities, schools and hospitals, which was welcomed. Not as popular, however, was their advocacy of covering women and punishing liberals, artists, gays and minorities, although they did inspire some Sufi and Shi’a theologians to adopt aspects of their doctrine and enthusiasm. This two-century struggle was considered an internal Islamic reform movement and largely unknown in the West until Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979.
Notorious for holding 53 Americans hostage for 15 months, the Shi’a Ayatollahs of Iran proved to be more brutal than the Shah, who was culturally liberal. After installing harsh regular and religious police and hanging judges, the Ayatollahs jailed and executed many opponents but also nominal allies. Some Western leftists, like French philosopher Michel Foucault (who visited Iran twice in 1978), supported Iran’s revolution and reversal of the CIA-assisted coup of 1953, even though it proved disastrous for Iranian women, artists, Sufis and minorities as well as socialists. A vibrant intelligentsia endures, especially among their filmmakers, but the authoritarianism generally increases, which sparks months-long protests every few years and are repressed with mass incarceration and murder. There were protests in 2019 and even larger and longer ones starting in September 2022, after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, was killed for not covering her hair properly. In the summer of 2024, mainstream media reported that agents from the Iran Revolutionary Guard were assassinating dissidents in Turkey.
The Ayatollahs also adopted extreme antisemitism, despite the ancient Persian friendship with the Jews, which started in antiquity with a mythical Persian Jewess, who became queen and saved her people (recounted in “The Bible”’s “Book of Ester”), and the factual Cyrus the Great. A brilliant general and lawgiver as well as liberal, Cyrus freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity, helped rebuild their temple, became the only gentile ever called a “messiah,” and invited Jews to Persia. They lived there comparatively well for 2,500 years, sometimes serving as advisors and doctors, and reaching a population of 100,000 in 1948, after which Iran was one of only a few Muslim countries to not expel their Jews.
Despite their long fraternity, mutual benefit and occasional intermarriage, however, the Ayatollahs kicked out the Jews (a few remain, but they are vehemently anti-Zionist). Moreover, they decided supporting the Palestinians and the abused Shi’a of Lebanon and attacking Israel would unify a chaotic Islam and attract Muslims of any sect who felt humiliated by the battlefield and economic achievements of the once-impoverished, third-class Jews living across Islam. Even though Israel was a tiny and a long way from Iran, if the Ayatollahs could destroy it, that would prove the superiority of Shi’a theology and ethics, help them defeat the nine-times larger Sunnis and make them God’s chosen people—absurd as that may sound to an Iranian liberal, artist or Sufi as well as any rational observer.
The Palestinian spiritual leader as well as war lord, Amin al-Husseini, lived in Germany the last few years of WWII, during he met with Hitler and tried to bring the death camps to Palestine. photo: unknown Anti-colonial British sentiment in Iraq inspired the “Golden Square” coup of 1941, which was supported by Italian Fascists as well as the Nazis. The rebelling officers controlled the country only briefly, but it was enough time to slaughter some 250 Jews in Baghdad, which was half Jewish for over two millennia, replete with pillaging, raping and defilement, a foreshadowing of the 1948 attacks, which forced Iraq’s 90,000 Jews to flee to Israel, as well as Hamas’s October 7th invasion. Although the Ba’ath Party founded after the war was technically socialist, it produced the fascism of Sunni Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (1979-2003), and that of the Shi’a Assad family in Syria (1970-present). Full-blown Islamo-fascism, albeit not so much nationalist but Islam-wide, came in 1979 with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Within three years, Egypt’s liberal president, Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Egyptian soldiers affiliated with Islamic Jihad (another Muslim Brotherhood offshoot). His crime: making peace with Israel. Then came Hezbollah, “The Party of God,” an aggressive mosque-state combo of sect, political party and armed forces (now bigger than the Lebanese Army), as well as essentially an Iranian colonial foothold in the Middle East, like the ten Hashasheens castles Persia installed in Syria, eight centuries earlier. The Iranians capitalized on the Shi’a underclass status and oppression in Lebanon and Israel’s perhaps imprudent involvement in the country’s civil war, 1975 to 1990 (some 150,000 killed). Hezbollah earned radical Islamist and socialist street cred with two massive suicide truck bombings: one of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983, the other of a Jewish community center in Argentina, in 1994, murdering 241 and 85, respectively.
Seven years later, those numbers were eclipsed ten-fold by al-Qaeda’s killing of 3,000 on 9/11, Hashasheen-style, which raced Salafism to the top of the news, foreign policy and negative public opinion world-wide as well as in the U.S. While some Muslims celebrated, others took to the streets of Tehran, Cairo and elsewhere to show solidarity with the U.S. and opposition to radical Islamism, which largely went quiet for a decade. Indeed, in 2011, pro-democracy protestors rose up across the Arab world after a Tunisian fruit vendor, Tarek Bouazizi, set himself afire to draw attention to the endemic and punishing corruption. The Arab Spring quickly toppled Egypt’s corrupt dictator, Hosni Mubarak (he died in prison), Libya’s colorful and capricious one, Muammar Gaddafi (after three and four decades of abuse, respectively), and the leaders of Tunisia and Yemen. Alas, the Arab Spring failed to secure overwhelming support, was outflanked by the seasoned political operatives among the Salafists, and triggered civil wars in Libya and Yemen as well as Syria. Civil wars favor fundamentalists, as per the one-sentence revelation from 14th century Arabia, “Better a century of tyranny than one day of chaos.”
The Arab Spring did produce Egypt's first-ever free election in 2012, although voters elected president a Muslim Brotherhood member, Muhammad Morsi, whom the army had to oust in less than a year for abrogating democracy (he died in prison). Syria, meanwhile, sank into the standard Sunni-Shi’a slaughter, with over 600,000 casualties thus far (supported by Russia as well as Iran), as did Yemen, with almost a half a million dead, its Houthi rebels supported by Iran.
Sunni fundamentalists, for their part, flocked from across the West as well as Islam to Salafism’s newest iteration, the Islamic State. Amid the chaotic fighting of 2014 in Syria, IS (also called ISIS, an affront to that great goddess, and DAESH, their initials in Arabic) conquered a third of the country and a similar slice of Iraq. In bursts of orgiastic attacks, armed men raced across the desert, a la Wahhab cavalry, but in pickup trucks, and proclaimed a caliphate, the first since the Ottoman Caliphate collapsed nine decades earlier. In keeping with Salafism’s double-down strategy, IS adopted every possible western weapon, communication system and luxury good but an even more repressive Islam than Wahhabism. They mandated gloves, eye mesh and anklets, to more completely cover women, and forbode images or music for entertainment, educational or enlightenment purposes, but not propaganda. Their slick marketing and social media used extensive beheading, torture and snuff film imagery.
We need not find al-Ghazali’s modern counterpart to divine that IS’s claim to abide the letter of Shari’ah Law contradicts the spirit of the peaceful and mystical Muhammad as well as the Sufis. IS’s fiendish fundamentalism frightened so many Muslims, in fact, many Middle Eastern countries—including Iran—helped the American and Iraqi armies defeat them, which culminated in the Battle of Mosul (2016-’17), killing about 10,000 IS fighters and 8,000 civilians. Other than the Taliban’s second seizure of Kabul in 2021 (the first was in 1996), that was Salafism’s last major battle before October 7th, 2023.
Authoritarians Invariably Attack Liberals
On October 7th, I was in Lviv, Ukraine, a lovely university and café town, hanging out with its many educated, artistic and internationally-aware teens and 20-somethings—hippies, in other words…
This concludes the first half of “My Half Century With a Loving Islam, Its Four Secrets and the Monotheist Wars”. The second half will include the rest of this chapter, covering Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution of 2013-4, the situation there after the Russian invasion in 2022, and on my second visit in 2023. It will also have about eight more chapters:
My Dark Night of the Soul: Realizing a Second Holocaust Is Possible
Why Israel Does Have the Right to Exist
The Fourth Middle East Secret: Many Arabs Welcomed the Zionists
Today’s Arab Liberals: Arab Springers, Islamist Opponents and Honest Monotheists
Can Sufis Save Islam a Fifth Time?
The War of Symbols in The Middle East and Across the World
The Meaning of 10/7: The Beginning of Just and Equitable Multiculturalism
Other of my articles I will be linking to:
Why Arab Liberals Support Israel
Did Arabs and Jews Like Each Other in 1948?
Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed
Darwin and Love: What I Learned Making a Holocaust Movie
Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs
Posted on Oct 26, 2024 - 04:30 PM
