Monday 12 September 2011

Asad... No, Not that Asad

I've just been reading this fantastic interview with Talal Asad, who certainly thinks more clearly about Egypt and politics than I do.  And also more clearly about a great many other things, such as formations of the religious and the secular/political (see previous posts one and two).


Anyhow, there are some really great sections:


On revolutions:
Maybe one needs to think of the uprising as more than a technique for getting rid of a despotic regime, but as a mode of existence, almost. The novelist Alaa Al Aswani said in an interview with The Independent that being part of this revolution is “like being in love.” I don’t think it’s quite like that. You might say, actually, that it’s more like a religious experience.


On religious parties:
 I can understand why many people would equate the religious right here and the religious movements there. But I don’t think that they’re directly comparable. There is a difference, and I think part of it comes from the savage repression in Egypt of the Muslim Brothers, which the religious right in the U.S. has not had to undergo. This doesn’t justify anything in particular, but it’s something that one has to think about. And, connected with that, there’s the fact that the Brotherhood is a movement that has been resisting what I would call Western imperialism, whereas that isn’t true of the religious right in the U.S., which, on the contrary, very often supports it. Now, I don’t want to be understood to be saying that simply because the Muslim Brothers oppose imperialism they’re beyond reproach. What I’m saying is that it’s more complicated. During the Brotherhood’s rise in the 1930s, it was strongly anti-British. And the United States has been constantly intervening in Egypt after the British left—even supporting Mubarak right until the very end—and that’s not going to be lost on the Muslim Brothers, although it’s still an open question as to whether they and the U.S. government will now regard each other as implacable enemies.
I have tried to tell people to think of the Muslim Brotherhood as the religious right, but of course, they're different.  My point in doing so is that people have a very weak ability to turn problems around in their head.  They remember 9/11 and think "we were justified in our war against so-and-so" without thinking what people must feel like in countries we've invaded.  There were weeks upon weeks of 9/11's that, for lack of superior firepower, didn't spark an invasion of our homeland.  It always strikes me that the people who shout the loudest about how 9/11 justifies us would be the first to join the terrorist resistance to a foreign occupation of North Dakota.


On Colonialism:
I’m also sometimes irritated by people who would like to explain everything in terms of colonialism. That is just so crude. I also find myself resisting people who say that colonialism has nothing to do with the present situation because colonialism is dead and gone. My own feeling is that what people assert or deny is due to colonialism should be constantly interrogated. In our world, external intervention by strong powers, superpowers, or the superpower, is a fact of life. The United States has been intervening in the Middle East for a long time—it would be surprising if it didn’t!


On being in the midst of revolution:

NS: What was it like to be there in the midst of a revolution?TA: Even before my wife and I went, people kept saying to us, “Are you sure it’s safe?” Our Air France plane was actually cancelled. We were due to go on the 29th of January. We eventually left on the 12th of February, via Paris. We weren’t even able to go directly to Cairo, either. We had to go through Beirut. Then, all sorts of people starting ringing, again asking, “Is it safe? Are you sure you’ll be safe? We’ve heard all sorts of frightening things.” Remember the stories circulating early in the uprising about the prisons that had been opened and the police being withdrawn from the streets? That was what the fear was about. People wouldn’t believe me, but I was there for four months, almost, and I went all over town and never encountered any violence. I didn’t have any friends who could attribute violence to the uprisings—which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. Cairo contains eighteen million people, so it has always had its fair share of criminality. But ordinary life, actually, continued. Cafes were open, and shops, restaurants, and so on. You’d often hear that foreigners were in danger, or that ordinary life was impossible, but that is really not true.
I noted last week that being "in the midst of the revolution" can really be a lot like being in the midst of every-day life.  I was up in the Delta during the storming of the Israeli Embassy this past weekend, and people in town simply didn't know about it.  One tried to tell me that the pictures on TV were from the earlier protests because, well, we hadn't heard that things were on fire right now.

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