Kamel Daoud is always worth reading. There are a LOT of people in the Maghreb and ME who have long and harrowing experience of being very personally threatened by Islamists, it is depressing we so seldom pay any attention to them.
1.1 is interesting. I honestly don't have the background to assess a lot of foreign-policy op-eds, and I find myself just defaulting to a skepticism that whoever wrote it may be a modern-day equivalent of Chalabi.
I did find it very weird that he's suggesting women are a "weak link" in society. Hopefully that was just a translation error. If not, I reaalllllly hope he didn't meant to imply that uneducated women are home watching TV and getting brainwashed.
Dramas of Nationhood ...Lila Abu-Lughod, about Egyptian TV, mostly poor women watching serial melodramas, roughly 1970-2000;and the rise of Islamism in that period, in large part directed by poor women, who were the driving force that made actresses start wearing veils.
This kind of rhetoric of Muslim equality, even though produced in the context of a hierarchy with religious authorities and men at the top and sometimes pushed in authoritarian ways, offers something beyond the rhetoric of development and the increasingly absent helping hand in national projects of uplift. As Saba Mahmood argues, the goals of the piety movement are to encourage people to cultivate virtuous selves, and beyond that to create a virtuous Islamic society.Those who teach use the language of sisterhood and brotherhood, not paternalism and maternalism.Given the structures of power, the continuing control of families over the lives and reputations of women, and the very real social and economic inequalities in Egypt, their messages may resonate with many more women than feminist developmentalism, with its calls to empowerment through (a selfish) individual advancement and (an unattainable or disappointing) education and its maternalistic reinforcement of the authority of the educated middle class. Moreover, the language of piety may seem more familiar than the secular language of rights and choice used by feminist developmentalists including the writers and directors of television productions like Nuna al-sha'nuna or by the family planning enterprise represented by And the Nile Flows On, which, Kamran Ali has argued, through a language of choice and health of the individual, asks women "to abandon familial and domestic concerns, and to enter as individuals the realm of the universal and the civil, the domain of impending citizenship."
uneducated women are home watching TV and getting brainwashed.
What I don't know about the societies of the Islamic world would fill many volumes, but I might believe that women in many of them are subject to restrictions in education, movement, association, and media.
So, apparently Andrea Mitchell's husband:
a) has a new memoir out
and
b) says though it is "politically inconvenient" to say so, the Iraq war was largely about oil
Can someone who is feeling less rage-y than me interpret this? Is he just trying to sell books?
Should have invaded Pennsylvania. Fracking seems to have worked to lower gas prices.
Daoud has and does work as a journalist/commentator but is also a novelist, in Algeria. He is pretty far from your typical op ed bloviator, he's doing something quite different.
Here's a profile in the NYT Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/magazine/stranger-still.html?_r=0
A piece in the New Yorker focused on his novel Mersault: Contre-Enquete (sorry, I don't know how to make diacritical marks on this keyboard): http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/an-algerian-in-paris-kamel-daoud
A piece in the LRB: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n23/jeremy-harding/the-castaway
But as mentioned in a couple of these pieces, his views are hardly exceptional in the Maghreb, for example Mouna Hachim in Morocco and Amel Saher in Algeria also write intelligently and frequently about the omnipresent threat of islamists in their lives.
Daoud has and does work as a journalist/commentator but is also a novelist, in Algeria. He is pretty far from your typical op ed bloviator, he's doing something quite different.
Here's a profile in the NYT Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/magazine/stranger-still.html?_r=0
A piece in the New Yorker focused on his novel Mersault: Contre-Enquete (sorry, I don't know how to make diacritical marks on this keyboard): http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/an-algerian-in-paris-kamel-daoud
A piece in the LRB: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n23/jeremy-harding/the-castaway
But as mentioned in a couple of these pieces, his views are hardly exceptional in the Maghreb, for example Mouna Hachim in Morocco and Amel Saher in Algeria also write intelligently and frequently about the omnipresent threat of islamists in their lives.
apologies for double post, have no idea how that happened!
bonne soiree a tout le monde!
Ah, my mistake. I thought it was a second memoir and missed the dateline on the Guardian link. Mea culpa.
And thanks, dq!
In my own personal mind, the explanation for the Iraq war is becoming less about oil and more about the individual chubbies Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld got when they thought about invading Iraq.
I'm not sure if there is any reason for this changing impression or if anyone else shares it.
Oh that novel is supposed to be really good!
All novels are supposed to be really good to at least somebody.
Can't seem to get it through interlibrary loan but a copy is winging its way to me very soon, very much looking forward to reading it!
Makes me wish my French were better.
This comment is a mess, but.
In the OP's linked article, I take it "Daesh" is being used to refer to any Islamist state/organization, whether it's terroristic or not.
Something is bothering me about this, and I'm not sure what it is, so I'll grope for it. First: do we know how much terroristic activity Saudi Arabia is fostering or supporting? I confess I'm just ignorant here: or rather, NO, I'M NOT. Many of the 9/11 perpetrators were Saudis.
Blargh, I just don't know what to make of our continued blind eye toward Saudi Arabia.* On the other hand: substitute "Christianist" for any number of statements made about Islamist societies -- the theocratic propaganda and governmental overreach, the preying on weaker (economically, chiefly) members of society -- and you're looking at the U.S. It's an easy sub:
There are thousands ofIslamistChristianist newspapers and clergies that impose a unitary vision of the world, tradition and clothing on the public space, on the wording of the government's laws
Perhaps it is just not as bad in, say, the U.S. as it is in Islamist societies. We certainly tell ourselves that. I'd need an outsider's perspective, I think, to tell me.
*Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton called out Saudi Arabia in her recent foreign policy speech; while it was rather weak sauce, it was something.
Here's a question: while I've read a few things about the origin of the term "Daesh", I wonder why "Islamists" doesn't do. How would it sound if, e.g. Francois Hollande started saying "We will fight Islamists"? It would sound weird, I imagine, because he doesn't want to fight Islamists. He wants to fight ISIL or ISIS. I think I'm just trying to get a grip on use of the term "Daesh" and why it makes sense for the OP's linked article to term Saudi Arabia a white Daesh, a trampler underfoot, but in a benign way.
I'm really not sure why I'm fussing about this - probably nothing, a case of overthinking.
"Daesh" is the Arabic acronym equivalent to "ISIS" or "ISIL" in English and refers to the same entity.
One terrifying aspect of the last week for me has been the absence of any intelligent reporting on IS in the British press. No analysis, no attempt to set out foreign policy options, nothing except 'could this issue finish off Jeremy Corbyn?' and a load of live-blogging of police statements from Paris / Brussels. Possible exceptions are the LRB. And maybe the FT, but I don't subscribe. Yet. And am now very thankful for the NYT.
Of course, it might be something to do with the fact that all UK newspapers are about to go extinct.
And we also had this piece by Rafael Behr which I think a better editor would have refused to let through.
20 -- I know you know this, but Islamist is a general descriptive term, while IS is a specific entity, with a command structure etc. For the last 14 years, we haven't been having a war on "terror" or on "terrorists" but rather on the groups/individuals who executed the 9/11 attacks and those who harbor them.
25: Right. Which is why I was resisting terming Wahhabist Saudi Arabia "white Daesh". Nonetheless I take the point made in that article, and it's an important one.
20: the Saudi government are definitely Islamists, in that they believe in a form of government in which the power of the state is used to enforce Islamic ideology, including enforcing sharia as the basis for the legal code, and exclude non-Muslims (or the wrong sort of Muslim) from positions of power, or even from the entire country as far as possible.
And the Saudis are ideologically closer to Isis than a lot of Islamist groups are (such as, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood) because they are extremist, following the minority Salafi form of Islam.