Hugh Fitzgerald takes issue with Rayan El-Amine's view of American foreign policy:
"American foreign policy that has waged wars directly or indirectly on the Arab and Muslim world for decades for geopolitical reasons without any regard for its inhabitants."In 1956 Eisenhower and Dulles forced Britain and France to end the Suez Campaign, thus saving Nasser from defeat and humiliation. The United States government not only did nothing to shore up the French in Algeria, but supported, under Kennedy, Algerian independence. For the past 60 years, the American government has allowed itself to believe that Saudi Arabia is a "staunch ally" and has consistently relied on a chimera -- the idea that the Saudis somehow will "do us favors" -- as a substitute for a relentless policy of raising, through self-taxing, the price of oil so as to diminish revenues to malevolent Muslim states.
In recent decades the American government has consistently pressured Israel to give up territory it had every legal, historic, and moral right to retain, beginning with the Sinai. The Sinai was for Israel legitimate spoils of war: see the boundaries that are customarily withdrawn after every war; see, especially, what happened all over Europe after World War I, and after World War II. Yet Carter and Brzezinski insisted Begin yield it for a handful of promises about Egypt ending hostile activities and propaganda. Not one of those promises was kept by Egypt.
The assorted plans, the Oslo Accords, and now the American encouragement -- assisted suicide --of the vacuous and dangerous destruction, by the Israeli state, of Jewish villages that bestride the chief invasion route, and in some cases were founded before the state of Israel was declared, is mad policy. A real ally would have understood the geopolitical significance of allowing a "Palestinian" and hence an Islamic triumph. A real ally would have known that such a triumph boded ill -- and not only for Israel, but for other Infidel peoples and polities, not least in Europe (where the connection between allowing Muslim control of the Holy Land through whittling away at an all too-compliant Israel, and the moral collapse of the Western world, is not understood).The American government for decades was the main diplomatic and military support for Turkey, a country which in the last few years has begun to show (and then to try to hide) the Islamist colors that were, during those same decades, hidden by Kemalist camouflage. Those colors are now running.
The American government rescued Muslims, not all of them entirely guiltless or quite as wonderful (nor the Serbs quite so horrid, and their fears, given five hundred years of history, quite so implausible), in Bosnia, and in Kosovo.
The American government has supplied one of the most anti-American countries in the world, and a promoter and exporter of anti-Americanism, Egypt, with $2 billion a year. It started as a way to bribe Egypt into behaving itself (though Egypt never felt it had to obey the Camp David Accords, once it had safely pocketed the entire Sinai, in three tranches). The American government is the main source of aid to Jordan. The American government has sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the "Palestinian" Authority.
The American government has now spent $300 billion to do two things: to remove a monstrous regime that had ruled Iraq for 35 years, and was prepared to rule for another 35 years, and to "reconstruct" Iraq, which has already resulted in 4.5 million Iraqis now having potable water, thousands of schoolrooms built, a hundred hospitals rebuilt and completely re-equipped, and power plants rebuilt and enlarged.
And none of this, nor the lives of soldiers disrupted, or marred, or ended, will earn any lasting gratitude from more than an infinitesimal number of Iraqis. As for the "war for oil" -- there is not, and never was, such a war. The price of Iraqi oil will remain the market price, and no special favors will be done the Americans by the Iraqis, as none have been done for Western countries by any Arab or Muslim state, anywhere, at any time.
There is much to deplore in American foreign policy toward Muslim states. That policy has been grounded on a misunderstanding of Islam, on a failure to recognize the central nature of Jihad (to be promoted, through a variety of instruments, whenever possible), to recognize how Muslim doctrine (derived from the immutable canonical texts -- not only the Qur'an, but Hadith and Sira as well) divides the world uncompromisingly between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, between Believer and Infidel. The failure of American foreign policy has led to the pursuit of a will-o'-the-wisp: Arab or Muslim goodwill.
It has led to much else. Had Islam not been seen only as a "bulwark against Communism" (which led to all sorts of follies, including a misreading of Turkey, and a dreamy belief that tens of thousands of Stinger missiles should be distributed to Afghani mujahedin), the Americans might have understood that they must work not to arm but to disarm Muslim countries, or to sell them only the equivalent of jeeps, rifles, and zumbookars. The United States realized after World War II that its wartime ally, the Soviet Union, was -- and had always been -- its enemy, because of its ideology. After the Cold War ended, however, it has still not been sufficiently realized that those stout "anti-Communists" -- because Muslim -- states, such as Saudi Arabia, whose interests so misleadingly seemed to coincide with ours in Afghanistan, are -- and always have been -- our enemies, and in a more profound way than Communism (which is still a product of the West, and unlike Islam, cannot hide or explain away its own failures in the very area -- economic performance -- where it promises paradise).
The political, economic, social, and intellectual failures of Muslim states and peoples are a result of Islam itself. But they cannot see it, and many Muslim states cushion or hide their failures through the fantastic accident of OPEC oil revenues. Others (Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, the "Palestinians") do what they can to extract foreign aid from Infidels (never fellow Muslims, who are loyal to the umma, and will pay for weapons and prize-money to the families of suicide bombers, but not anything else).
The Arab and Muslim states will continue, absurdly, to berate and blame the West, and America, for the faults of their own societies that are really the result of Islam. All such blame should never be accepted; it only encourages the patient in his delusions. Everything should be done to force that patient to begin to recognize the sources of his disorder, the sources of misrule, and the sources of poverty and failure, despite trillions in undeserved OPEC revenues, to create modern economies. Everything should be done to force the patient to face the failure to have left much by way of worth for at least a thousand years, when compared, say, to the West, or China, or even societies that once seemed less impressive than Islam, but now seem more -- such as those of Meso-America.
Saudi Arabia, the richest and, with Iran, the most malevolent of Muslim states (because Iran and Saudi Arabia are the states where the sharia is in force, where Islam remains undiluted by local ways or cultural softenings and distractions), did not suddenly begin to offer up hatred for infidels in its textbooks and sermons in the last few years. It has been doing it all along, but only in the last few years has anyone in the West begun to notice, or occasionally to write about it. Saudi Arabia has now been recognized as a state likely to use some of its undeserved oil revenues to promote Islam (and that is the most natural thing for the Saudis to do -- the obvious, unstoppable thing) by paying for madrasas and mosques all over, and by distributing ill-disguised bribes to former government officials, diplomats, intelligence agents, journalists, and academics all over the Western world, in order to keep the Saudi claque clapping every time someone from the Al-Saud family steps out on stage. But this has only been recognized by a few.
There is much to find fault with in American foreign policy vis-a-vis Muslims and Arabs. But it is not the kind of fault that the Muslims themselves charge -- that we have demonized them, and are “racists" and "Islamophobes." Quite the reverse. The real faults have only been realized in the past few years, and despite the best efforts of Western governments (how many times do we have to endure being assured by our rulers that Islam is a "religion" of "tolerance" and "peace" -- all three words are highly misleading). How many stories of Muslim persecution of non-Muslims have been buried, or never covered? How many statements made in khutbas (sermons) can be found on the Internet, but never reported in the Western press? How many historical studies, by the dozens of great Orientalists whose names now scarcely register (Joseph Schacht, say, or C. Snouck Hurgronje, or Edmond Fagnan, who studied Jihad, or those important works pioneering scholar of dhimmitude, Bat Ye'or) have simply been ignored? It is if these scholars, and their works, had never existed. Instead, we are directed again and again to vaporings and apologetics by people who are either working out their own psychic disarray (Karen Armstrong), or repaying those who, directly or indirectly, support them (John Esposito), or who are simply the snappy-phrasing Irwin Coreys ("Dr. Irwin Corey, world's greatest authority" was a comic act of the 1950s), such as Davos-attending mountebanks like Tom Friedman. All these, with their well-reimbursed lectures and books, produce guides to nothing and to nowhere.
With American foreign policy pursuing such strategies, based as they are on Armstrong/Esposito dogma, Rayan El-Amine should see it as Islam’s good friend.
Great essay. The dispective of most people who can look at these same facts and come up with a totally different picture never ceases to amaze me.
I just finished watching a 3 part series titled: "Two Thousand Years of Christianity." For the most part, the series was insightful and informative, but among the narrators were the some of the usual suspects: William Dalrymple (who said that the Muslim conquerors of the Holy Land were treated as "liberators"), Diana Eck (of the "Pluralism Project" at Harvard), and of course, Karen Armstrong. The following are K. Armstrong's comments on WW I:
"I think that the first World War can be seen almost as the collective suicide of Europe...I think it also reflects a terrible death wish that has been part of the modern experience."
Get real Ms. Armstrong. Snap out of your Hegelian stupor for just one minute. The allies of WW I were not committing "collective suicide." They loved life. Most of all, they loved freedom, and wanted to make sure that their lives and the lives of their children were worth living.
The only Westerners I know who seem to have a death wish are self-hating are morally impoverished, freelance monotheistic (but closet pantheist), postmodernist, New Age freaks like YOU.
God willing. The Hell for people like you consists of people with twisted necks, forever condemned to stare at their own navels.
Hugh, I want to thank you for your time and knowlegde that you continue to share.
I wish we as a nation would declare war on our enemy instead of their actions.
As Abraham Lincoln said "you cannot win a war, if you cannot declare a enemy".
We are guilty of humanism by saying actions are wrong but denying the root cause.
Being PC is going to destroy the West.
We are lucky that American weapons are made with "Swiss engineering," i.e., all high tech precision. This is why the Stingers you mentioned have not been used against us because once taken "out of the box," the electronic parts corrode quickly, and the corrosion affects all the parts that have close tolerances. It is the sturdy Russian weapons that remain dangerous decade after decade. That is why the Mideast is awash in workable AK-47's from the Afghan and Vietnam war eras!
[[William Dalrymple (who said that the Muslim conquerors of the Holy Land were treated as "liberators")]]
William Dalrymple is the biggest Dhimmi on Earth. Some of the things he has written are almost comical in their dripping-wet-gibbering upper-class-Englishman-in-awe-of-the-Islamic Orient crassness.
His bootlicking wetness is astonishing in its sophistry and hypocrisy. I suspect he has deep sympathies for the Islamists and a romantic thrill shoots through at the mention of the word 'Jihad'.
Pathetic is not the word to describe him.
Hugh, thank you.
Great essay, screamingly true.
How ironic, to so misread reality as to pursue a policy of supporting the main threat to our culture, our nations, and our future, as America has done with arabs/moslems, and be reviled for it by those same enemies, and bribed, bullied, threatened and propagandized to do more for them.
Looking at Europe's performance since suez, and of course Russia's, i see all three power blocks seeking to gain favour with the arabs and their moslem empire, because of the oil, because of the numbers and scale of the empire.
William Dalrymple, mentioned above, is an absurd figure, though not too absurd to be invited, along with Francis Robinson, to be a regular reviewer of res Mughalica (Mughal stuff) at the Times Literary Supplement, no doubt invited to do so by Robert Irwin. Was it not William Dalrymple whom Irwin (or someone with Irwin's approval) invited to review Irwin's own book on the Alhambra? Irwin is a kind of aesthetic apologist who exaggerates the achievements of Islam and minimizes its awfulness, but he is hardly the worst of those who, having spent a few decades learning Arabic and falling in love with something or other -- a view or a verse espied on Mutanabbi Street -- can see the silliness of a Said, but cannot quite dismiss so much else that needs to be dismissed, and certainly cannot bring themselves to fully confront the horrors of Jihad-conquest and subjugation of all those non-Muslim peoples who more or less disappeared from view.
A North American "aesthetic" appreciator of high Islamic civilization (whether singing crows or al-Ghazali), who reminds one of Irwin only in this, is Eric Ormsby. His book of poetry (which mentions Mutannabi, namesake of the eponymous street in Baghdad, and author of the lines of verse that Irwin took as the title of his own translation of poems from classical Arabic -- a book reviewed by Ormsby in terms far more glowing than those carefully studied, almost noncommittal words of possible but faint praise from John Updike and Mary Jo Salter on Ormsby's book of verse.
As for Dalrymple, he is essentially a more sophisticated, less absurdly absurd Barbara Cartland in drag, bedazzled by the Wonder That Was Mughal India, disinclined to look too closely at the fate of Hindus in that Mughal India. But then many liked Scarlett and Rhett in Gone With the Wind, and never you mind about slavery, Marse Tom. Dalrymple likes the court intrigue, the fabulous wealth expressed in glittering jewels, the tales of heaving passion -- and if those Star-of-India-crossed lovers must defy racial or religious barriers, well all the better, sahib.
If Dalrymple ever gets tired of that Mughal India stuff, he can use the same backdrop to write Harlequin Romances for the passionately unfulfilled,and at the end, instead of the English Lord or the Arab Sheikh taking the girl up in his arms, he can have a Mughal prince, and the girl can be the beautiful fiance of a British lieutenant who had been suddenly called back to Blighty, while she, in a spirit of adventure, leaves the hill town where he had parked her and makes her way to the Court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, where the Hadrami guards flash their scimitars, and the Nizam's oldest son flashes his eyes at Lady Arabella (oh, yes, she just has to be a Lady), and we can fill in the rest later with a little help of Hollywood, or Bollywood, or even Cinecitta, for the cool hill town, with its English Reading and Tea Rooms, and that court, with its jewels bedecking the Nizam, and the daggers everywhere, and those flashing, flashing eyes.
Neither Sir William Jones nor, for that matter such non-Muslim students of India as the historian K. S. Lal or writer V. S. Naipaul, would have much patience with William Dalrymple. In the age of mass literacy, others apparently do.
Markjames,
So we're safer...because we make very crappy weapons...
Allllrightie...
Yay...?
Geoff
Hugh,
Every time I read your essays I learn something new, either directly or after I look up something I didn't quite understand. I would like to thank you for the free education, which is proving far more valuable than the very expensive one I got a long time ago!
If you were running the show in Washington, I sure would feel better about the future of this country. At least the enemy would have a name. How will we ever defeat an anonymous enemy? It makes me sick to realize that our pusillanimous, politically correct politicians are either too ignorant or too gutless to acknowledge what every American has a right to know.
The frustration and feelings of hopelessness and helplessness are sometimes overwhelming, but I guess we're all in this together. I only hope we all get out of it together.
Hugh, good insights as usual, especially since I'm no great fan of the House of Sa'ud myself. But there are a number of things that need to be considered.
The Islamic world is a large, highly diverse portion of the globe stretching from the lands of the Niger in Africa to Ningxia in China, on the bend of the Yellow River; from Mauretania to Mindanao, and from the Kama in Russia to the Comorros between Madagascar and Mozambique. Is it in the American interest to have that enormous swath of territory and its peoples at enmity--when such enmity might be the ONLY thing that could truly unite it? After all, the Darfur-Janjawid conflict is Muslim-on-Muslim, albeit interethnic, violence.
If we declare war on the entire Muslim world, it means striking at those Pakistani Muslims who have just arrested al-Qaeda's number 3, as well as at OBL (if he is still alive). It means striking at not only al-Muhajiroun, but also those Muslim immigrants who are quietly exploring other religious options (who are more than many on either side of this debate care to admit).
If we really wanted to, with conscription and enuogh of the world P.O'd at Islamic militancy bearing the "taught in and financed by Sa'udi Arabia" label, we could probably have the US Army picnicking on ham sandwiches and beer before the Ka'aba in a matter of weeks--to say nothing of occupying the oil fields. Yet, is this truly necessary when there is any possibility of diplomatic arm-twisting or cashing in political chips of our own? These are a lot cheaper than blood.
American foreign policy since World War II has tended to be guided most by the Wilsonian notion of self-determination coupled with an eye on how a democratic ward's electoral polls might look. Hence, the great-grandfather of modern American foreign policy could be shocked when someone pointed out that the Czechoslovakia he had advocated, due partly to the exile politics of ex-Austro-Hungarian pan-Slavists included three million ethnic Germans (more, at the time, than the Slovaks numbered). When the USA looked at the Suez crisis in 1956, it saw not Islam vs. the West, but a struggling post-colonial nation being bullied by erstwhile colonialists; Soviet fishing in troubled waters (something the unlamented USSR did very well), and the sympathy of the whole Bandung generation from Zhou Enlai to Jawaharlal Nehru to Leopold Senghor to Kwame Nkrumah (remember those names?) rooting for Nasser. Siding with the genuinely defrauded British and French (who were still owed money for digging and maintaining the ditch, after all) and truly threatened Israelis would have united the entire Afro-Asian world with the Soviet Bloc against us.
Similarly, the French position in ALgeria was foredoomed long before Kennedy set the USA up for any of forty dozen international mousetraps. France was already starting to show signs of demographic decay (which meant no pool of possible European colonists which had made a French Algeria seem feasible in the first place); while the Muslim world's ongoing baby boom had taken off since the introduction of modern medicine.
The USA believed then that it could court the non-Western world with aid and respect; and there are a few instances where it reaped a bit of political capital (not many, I admit).
It is of course true that ultimately, we did have most of the Islamic, Asian, African, and Soviet blocs aligned against us in the UN. What it should have taught us is that the crowd roots for the strong horse, as one northern Afghan said as the choppers started landing. Yet, isn't it odd, that this UN super-bloc peaked as it became clear that the USA was abandoning Southeast Asia? After all, was any strongly anti-Communist Far Eastern state truly tenable when a Communized China was the 800-pound gorilla in the neighborhood, and the Soviet Union, for all its mistrust of Beijing, was still in de facto alliance with it against the USA?
Which raises another point. I wouldn't be surprised one whit if some of the human intelligence we now have on Qaeda and other Islamofascist terrorists might not be stamped "Khourtesy of Khartoum". We won't know for sure until fifty years after all of us are dead; but this, coupled with the ceasefire in Southern Sudan suggests to me that the government of Sudan has been sweating bullets since it saw that 9/11 only brought down some buildings--and then brought down the wrath of the USA. And all intelligence work involves dealing with people who are unsavory. After all, we learn what we learn from those willing to sell their own countries. That's why unsavory countries tend to have really good intelligence resources.
Lastly, both the Biblical and Kantian traditions admit that "we" can wrong "them"; that moral law is something higher than its custodians. It's built into even the most scary anti-Canaanite passages of the books of Moses and the most horrifying visions of the Apocalypse.
I hold no candle for Islam; and I'm no great admirer of Wilson and Kennedy. There's much I like about India and Israel as well. Yet as things stand, we have to deal with the Islamic world whether we like it or not, and that means being as nice and respectful as possible to those parts of it willing to deal with us by doplomacy and trade rather than by war.
Hugh
A great, and extremely funny, post about Dalrymple there. His absurdities multiply every day. They include a relentless focus on Hindutva, disregarding the fact that whatever the excesses of the Hindu right, India is and will always be a country in which religious minorities flourish and can practice their faiths. He never seems to have a bad thing to say about the absence of Sikhs and Hindus from Pakistan though, and the Islamic worlds slow and steady asphyxiation of its non Muslim populace. Such deviancy and lack of comment amounts to support for the Islamic process, as far as I am concerned.
The man is so in thrall to Islamica that he has no credibility, I remember an article he wrote in the Guardian once about the declining number of Christians in the Middle East that started off with a hate screed against Israel and some Israeli soldiers in Bethlehem being the cause of Christian decline there. I have to say, this kind of thing makes him a true idiot, unable to see what is standing before his eyes. If he sees it but refuses to say it there is only one explanation: he agress with the civilising mission of Islam. No doubt, the Coptic persecution is related to Israel too. But I doubt he sees the persecution of the Copts, he doesnt mention the persecution of Christians in Pakistan.
In which case, what the hell is he doing in India, amongst Hindus? He should settle in the Islamic paradises of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. What makes him stay in plural, multi-faith, Hindu dominated India? He is basically a defender of and makes excuses for Islamic Jihadic crusades.
I really believe that he is the kind of imbecile and sap who fantasises about being over run by Islamic hordes who come to civilise infidels, and living as a catemite in a Mughal harem being stroked amongst silks and brocade whilst listening to Urdu poetry and listening teary eyed and wistfully as the call to prayer is heard in the distance.
That he is lapped up by leftists in our media shows how stupid and gullible people have become.
Zico--
I didn't know about Dalrymple's philo-Islamic dreaminess being expressed, as well, as the usual anti-Israel nonsense. But it makes sense; all those susceptible, through islamisant sympathies, to antisemitism have, in the Western world, become definite security risks.
And the rest of your charge against Dalrymple sounds right, except possibly for the catamite part. I know nothing of his desires, but think he referred to a wife. The thought occurs that he lives in India because his wife may be an Indian Muslim. Could that be?
One gets used, in the cases of such extaordinary sympathies by Westerners, to look first for the money (all those ex-diplomats and intelligence agents), then at the twisted thoughts, and finally look at the wife, or other aspects of the love-life.
Once bank accounts have been checked for Arab funds, or mysterious houses in Eaton Square accounted for, once bookshelves have been scanned for "A Guide to Islam for New Muslims" or Edward Said, or even "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (and in some extreme cases, such as that of Roger Garaudy, one is likely to find all three), and comes up short, one checks out the love-interest. Cherchez la -- explanatory -- femme. Just look at Grover Norquist -- now there's a tale that may involve more than one of the elements listed above.
For some reason I feel like playing some zydeco music. I wonder why.
Hugh
He lives in New Delhi and is married to an English woman. I agree with you about following the dhiram, but there are genuine cases of wet and ridiculous men whose attachment to Islamica and the muezzins call comes from a deep felt, freakish fetishism and attachment. These are men from a certain class and family background in England, old boys in thrall to the scent of the casbah and the chowk.
Prepare yourself, because what I am about to reveal to you is going to simultaneously amuse, amaze and appal you. I think I am on the right track when I ascribe sexualised motives and harem fantasies to this man as a primary source of his dhimmitude and blindness. The details certainly concur with your hilarious and brilliant pastiche of his writing earlier. A few years ago he had an affair with a British based Indian Muslim journalist. From The Times:
[[IT IS one thing for a writer to bare his soul, quite another for someone else to do it for him. This is the uncomfortable position in which the celebrated author William Dalrymple finds himself after a steamy affair has turned, in the age of e-mail, into a blizzard of vitriol....
It begins with Damji’s claim that Dalrymple seduced her on a pile of scatter cushions under a towering plum tree in the walled garden of his home in Chiswick, west London, one sweltering night this summer while his wife was away.
Later, when the relationship ended, she wrote an account on the internet of their affair in which she describes how she circled his flame like “a jehadi moth, intoxicated by the white-hot power of his words”.
The ease and immediacy of e-mails encourage an intimacy and style that might make a writer, on reflection, cringe. Some of the e-mails revealed by Damji show that her nickname for him was “Sweet Baronet”, a reference to his father, Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, the former Lord Lieutenant of East Lothian. In turn, Dalrymple called her “Farah-ji” and begged her not to dedicate a book she was writing to the plum tree.]]
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-931996_1,00.html
I still find it hilarious, this Little Lord Fauntleroy playing sexual games, getting turned on by the Jehadi metaphor, talking as though he lives inside an Urdu poem, being made such a fool of. But then it became a curious entry into his world. Well, I suppose there are dhimmis of every type out there, including strange foolish men with an erotic fascination for the whole thing.
regards
Makes my day.
But there is one disturbing detail. Not the jihadi moth intoxicated by the white-hot flame of his words." Not the "hot sticky betrayals" ---- as Dennis Potter would put it. Not the cushions. Nor the poor plum-tree, that no doubt has seen sights it wishes it had never seen in that hortus pretty conclusus.
No, what disturbs is that this all took place in Chiswick! The 3rd Earl of Burlington's Palladian villa and gardens, first laid out by William Kent and then restored (I visited them on bus tour organized by the National Trust or perhaps it was some other group-- possibly the Daughters of Albion), with no goose-stepping guards as in other countries, but one goosefoot (patte d'oie) after another, and temples, and statues in grottoes, and a little river, and inside the beautiful villa, an octagonal room, and furniture of the period, and pictures, and old prints, and leather-bound books (at least one with plans by Palladio), and old china, and even, possibly, an orrery.
You can learn more, discover more of human and artistic and historical interest, at the Earl of Burlington's Chiswick villa and gardens than you possibly could at any grimly geometric but essentially lifeless Islamic site, or group of sites, anywhere. Even the calligraphy can't hold a candle to the Chinese version.
But what would William Dalrymple, or all those dalrymples who fail to appreciate their own country and fall, clearly, for exotica -- and that of the most obvious and shallow kind -- know about that? And if William Dalrymple were to take time from his ebats and dard-pomping under the plum-tree, and actually took the time to investigate Chiswick, with his kind of moral and historical myopia he would not be able to detect the ghosts Pope and Swift, walking together at the end of the garden.
No. He would not.
By the way, I'm going out right now to buy a dictionary of Hobson-Jobson. Obviously I'm going to need it.
Nor the poor plum-tree, that no doubt has seen sights it wishes it had never seen in that hortus pretty conclusus
Thank you, for making me fall off my chair with laughter :)
You know that Dalrymple lives a gilded life. Why should he worry of these things? When the burr of the wings of the Jihadi moth flicks around his ear like the call to prayer how could this wet and idiotic dhimmi resist?
It certainly puts a psychological profile on all those tales of Raj intruige with 'syed' Princesses amongst the havelis of Hyderabad and Delhi which he fashions in the Barbra Cartland style.
Lord Haw Haw in a Jinnah Jacket.
By the way, I'm going out right now to buy a dictionary of Hobson-Jobson. Obviously I'm going to need it
Hours of fun ahead of you, a genuinely enlightening book. You will be constantly surprised and delighted by how much of the English language today derives from India. Our true Hindu heritage.
You mentioned Eric Ormsby earlier. Came across this article today, his thoughts on Sanskrit literature. After reading this it makes me wonder why he ended up in the Islamic department. Still, interesting read, in a way.
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/may05/ormsby.htm
I like Eric Ormsby's essays in The New Criterion, especially on Victor Hugo, or anything having nothing to do with Islam. His memoir of Goitein had very nice touches, including the Pninian echo of "none other than Professor S. D. Goitein." But he failed to tell the full truth about Goitein's change of heart about Islam, which came from a number of things, including his study of the papers in the Cairo Geniza which revealed to him just how onerous the payment of the jizya had been for Jews (see his "A Mediterranean Society"). And he apparently did not know that Goitein had been in touch with Bat Ye'or, and admirered her first book on the dhimmi ("The Dhimmi").
I raised his name because I was discussing Robert Irwin, who has literary longings (a novel, which I own but have not read) of his own, who spent many years studying Arabic, and has translated classical Arabic poems. When one invests a large amount of time and effort in the study of some language, and the liteature in that language,, and in the course of that study has friendly, even warm, relations with native speakers who, if you are not a declared political enemy, but somewhat sympathetic, are likely to be quite warm and winning in turn, it is a hard man who will continue to remain resolutely unaffected. And how many of us, putting in five or ten years studying Arabic, would conclude in the admit, would admit to himself while shaving, and addressing the mirror "you know, I made a mistake. It really hasn't been worth it. The literature is so limited. The thought is so limited. Why did I trade in years when I might have read French, or Russian, or Italian, when I might even have read and re-read Shakespeare, just for the thin gruel of the goddam singing crows and Mutanabbi and "The Leisure of a Mesopotamian Judge"? Am I not a Western man, the inheritor of -- let's face it -- the best that has been thought and said. Well, too late now." Well, I don't expect that, but there are all sorts of ways to go native. Plenty of people have studied and translated Tiutchev and not descanted upon the wonders of Soviet Russia -- or even of Russia. Arthur Waley, last I looked, translated The Dream of the Red Chamber but never had a good word to say about Chinese despotism, still less Chinese communism. Ivan Morris translated Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji, but he never felt compelled to defend Admiral Yamomoto, or Japanese Nippon-first racism. When it comes to Arabic, however, there must be something in the grammar-books, or some kind of supposed charm that soft-spoken ways, the kind that British officials no doubt found so much more appealing than the supposedly crude and rude manners of all those (here comes the cliche) those Russian and Eastern European shtetl Jews (never mind that Zhabotinsky was a brilliant translator and boulevardier and writer, admired by James Joyce who gave Zhabotinsky's "Samson the Nazarite" to the singerJohn MacCormack, a man whom Nabokov -- ne tot Nabokov, but his uncle, the Russian ambassador to Great Britain during World War I, declared to be the "greatest orator in Russian" he, Nabokov, had ever heard.
The charm of Edward Said, who seemed hideous in every respect, and of others like him, whose stock-in-trade is mendacity -- escapes me. Hamid Dabashi liked him. And Bernard Lewis didn't like him, but finds Prince Hassan and others in Amman to be friendly and charming hosts. My taste in charm runs to something a good deal less oily, and less connected to the receipt of favors or generous hospitality. Taciturn Vermonters. Ruddy Yorkshiremen. Well-educated Russians of modest means, left high and dry by the new, undoubtedly improved, but unfortunately radix-malorum Rus.
The oleaginous Edward Said is being progressively dismantled. It might take time, but Ibn Warraq's expose will take its toll, others too. The final conclusive evidence, for me, is the series of articles he wrote in the last few years before 9/11 when he talked about how Islamic terrorist was a chimera manufactured by wicked AmeriKKKa. His grumpy reponse in The Observer in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, egg, yoke, albumen and egg shell dripping off his face, made clear to me the utter moral turpitude of this man. It also made me wonder how a Christian Arab could be such a pathetic lickspittle for Islam, and then I realised something: he is the text book example of 1500 years of Arab Christian dhimmitude, the grovelling prostrate slave reflex to the Islamic masters for survival. A more wretched sight I cannot imagine. He is the personification of that terror, the terror of Islam over the Christian, the descendant of the first people to feel the horror of the Islamic dagger.
Loved reading the rest of your post. Cussed Yorkshiremen are indeed to be treasured.
Zico and Hugh: A lot of present day Islamophilia reincarnates the romantic Leftism which has turned Che Guevara into a T-shirt icon. That was a large part of Edward Said's appeal.
In America, a large part of the problem was that the generation that came of age in the 1960's was the last one to be educated in the public schools that America was some special, unique shining nation--and then found themselves in a counbtry conflicted over its heritage of racism and a war in Viet Nam that was going badly. They thus did a 180, and decided that theirs was an especially evil nation, and have been wearing the hair shirt ever since. They were the audience for whom Said wrote.
As for Dalrymple, he bears he same name as James Dalrymple, First Viscount Stair, who was one of the men of the Glorious Revolution. The First Viscount Stair was also one of the men who saw to it that Scotland would keep a Presbyterian stablishment and was the father of modern Scots Law (which is actually a Roman rather than Common Law system).