This is a very rough draft.
Go backto journal 27.
the expansion of the world
capitalist market into the Ottoman and Qajar empires from the mid-18th and
early 19th centuries, the classical "age of empire" from the 1870s to World
War I, and the latest phase of corporate-led globalization from the 1970s
to the present. These three periods are characterized by an accelerated
circulation of ideas, commodities, capital, and people -- phenomena now
commonly called globalization. Multifaceted movements of Islamic revival
and reform across a broad geographic range arose during all these
periods. We wish to explore what, if any, are the intersections between
these two sets of processes.
Is there anything comparable about the manner in which the movements of Islamic revival and reform of each period intersect with the economic and social processes of the two periods? Are the movements of Islamic revival and reform part of the processes of globalization? Are they a form of resistance to it? Or are they, in fact, expressions of local identities and traditions?
Those interested in participating are invited to submit abstracts of no more than 500 words by October 1, 2002.
OUTLINE
Casbah, gates of quarters
Reading the news (salfiyya in indictment)
Freidman �they must be offered modernization� Cromer
Upshot of the Israeli incursion�more people know it�s Palestinian land.
Bulldozing
Bernard Lewis Ottoman specialist
Multifaceted movements of Islamic revival
Text of Ben Laden
Jabarti watched the French, Boulaq printed Maqrizi
Important texts:
Description of Herat before it was dynamited (capitalist markets time)
Napoleon�s love of Volney (from Edward Said, �Orientalism�
Jibran at WWW1�the procession vs Ben Laden
To see the Dawn
FBI texts Arab Literature
DRAFT: One of the favorite sources of �proof� that the Arabs are inherently backward is the study of the Ottoman period, the period of the Civil War in the US. Bernard Lewis recent book, What went wrong, is the prime example of this. In this paper, I would like to provide some empirical evidence that the idea of the ghetto was introduced from the West into the East, and walled segregation did not exist there until well into the Ottoman empire.
Bernard Lewis, now retired, was the Editor of the Encyclopedia of Islam, a collection of articles by scholars who could only be published if they followed the rules of Orientalism. There is almost nothing in the Encyclopedia of Islam about the Salafiyya, for example, which forms the centerpiece of the argument put forward by the Justice Department for emprisoning four co-workers of mine, whom I never knew, in the airline servicing business.
Let us take the text of this endictment as typical of what might be called the new orientalism, or the new Bonapartist/Napoleonic view of the Islamic Revival movements. It has nothing to do with the Islamic reformist movement that one can read about in Esposito, or that used to be part of the curriculum of the Arabic Studies departments at US universities in the era of Philip Hitti and Nicola Ziadeh. In fact at Princeton, there was a course in the catalogue circa 1980 specifically calling into question the George Antonious inspired scholarship on the Arab world which said there was �an Arab awakening.�
Great things were happening in the Arab world, such as Nequib Mahfouz winning the Nobel Prize, the restoration of the Dome of the Rock, the re-acquisition by Syria of stolen pieces of bronze age stele, but western universities were paving the way for people like Thomas Freidman to be able to say, as I heard him say to Terry Gross on National Public Radio �I�d LOVE to see democratic election where one of the islamicists would be elected and they�d have to take responsibility for forbidding people to go to Disney world, or Beirut. Then they would see the reality.� He�s churned up the �they are so envious of us� to such a pitch that he�s forgotten that Cairo, like Tunis and Rabat churn out writers and movies with a much wider audience than anyone in Israel, and that in Damascus, for example, you can still have a non-Coka Cola product on the in a shady restaurant on the banks of the Barada in a city that is so beautiful that the Prophet, Muhammad, figured he shouldn�t go there because it might tempt him away from paradise. Even if you compare the Arab intellectual world with Israel, there is not one Israeli, or even American, woman with the intellectual, moral, and even celebrity stature here comparable to Hannan Ashrawi, Edward Said�s student.
Before George Antonious was thrown out of college curriculums�presumably because he was the only book in academia that talked about the influence in the Middle East of the Bolshevic revolutionaries publishing the secret diplomatic treaties of the Tzar with the British and French�scholars would urge their students to read about Muhammad Abdo, and the other modern Islamic reform nationalists. Now, except for Esposito, what is actually happening in Arabic discussion, in newspapers and such is ignored and a version of Islam in English developed by the political arm of the US government is what is entering discourse.
Like the Arabic word Jihad, the word Casbah began to be introduced into English discourse, with it�s own special meaning. It would be a challenge to any undergraduate to do a good textual analysis of the Indictment against Koubriti. Where are the footnotes for the description of salafiyya? My only guess is that whoever put this together must have been a student of Islam within the Israeli university system, which proposed Hamas originally as an antidote to the PLO, and continues to study and empathize with movemnents for a one-religion state, since of course Israel is such a state itself. There is also remnants of the pre-Bernard Lewis state of Arabic studies in the US, which used to be fascinated with the end of the caliphate. To the west, the caliphate is very threatening.
Links to other sites on the Web
Next page of journal with an Edward Said quote on the New York Times