#1. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour is an Egyptian-born ex-Muslim now living in the United States. He likes Israel. He does not like Arab terrorists. He has just written a few paragraphs mimicking and mocking anti-Israel academics who provide their solemn analyses, and justifications, of Hamas’ war against the Jews. His piece first appeared at elderofziyon.com here.
“Whoever has a rifle, either go shoot a Jew or give it to Hamas.” -A chant in a demonstration in Ramallah from earlier today.
A Western social science professor will record these as indigenous protest folk songs that attempt to re-humanize the colonized through the lyrical act of murdering the colonizer. This imaginative murder then dissolves the colonized and dehumanized essence of the subaltern and restores to it a state of equality with the dead colonizer. Thus, the rifle stops being an instrument of war and becomes a bridge to liberation, the symbol of the lost humanity that needs to be restored.
Here, the decolonial subjectivity is pursuing its humanity of the antiracist emancipatory praxis through the act of murder, which is made to challenge, to interrogate, to haunt, and to deconstruct Western knowledge which is deeply penetrated by the all-encompassing colonial subjectivity. This compromised and deeply colonized Western knowledge imposes the arbitrary and oppressive dichotomy of the peaceful and the violent, both imperialist social constructs, as part of its arsenal of weapons of discursive coercion meant to disarm the colonized and prevent them from resistance.
The rifle then doesn’t just murder the colonizer, but also the Western coloniality of representation which attempts to monopolize and homogenize the decolonial struggles, acting as a castrating agent for capitalist modernity. This discursive act of resistance is a harbinger of the humanism that was hijacked and distorted by Western coloniality, an ideology of psychotics who live in an entirely subjective temporality of oppression and dehumanization.
#2. MESA Nostra Contest
Nearly 20 years ago, I posted at Jihad Watch a contest, in which applicants were invited to guess who had written a few paragraphs of fashionable gibberish about Middle Eastern matters. No one came up with the right answer then, , having been prompted by the humorful Hossein Aboubakr Mansour above, I’ve decided to re-post that contest right here. Only one thing has changed: the winner will not be receiving a beautifully calligraphed and framed copy of Hamid Dabashi’s “Ode to Edward Said.” For some reason, Hamid Dabashi has chosen to take his poetic tribute down from its place online. Instead the winner, should there be one, will have the quiet satisfaction of knowing he has done what no one else could do. That should be reward enough.
Bon Appetit!
Readers of JihadWatch are aware that MESA Nostra is the professional organization in which, in order to become a uomo d’onore, or a donna d’onore for that matter, no kneecaps need be broken, no nightclubs broken up, no trucks hijacked, no girls put on the streets, no cocaine contraband prescribed by “los medicos” of Medellin need be distributed. No, there are only two requirements to become a Made Man in MESA Nostra. The first is easy: you must view the entire Middle East through ideological blinkers, in which Islam scarcely matters, and in which, whatever happens, Jihad-conquest and dhimmitude will be ignored, so that contemporary expressions of millennium-old doctrines, attitudes, impulses will be interpreted without the slightest reference to those doctrines, attitudes, impulses.
That is content.
There is also form.
What would Shakespeare have been like had he not forced himself to squeeze his dramatic verse into the Elizabethan doublet of iambic pentameter? Or Spenser, without the Spenserian stanza? It is not only writers in Elizabethan England who found such constraints productive. How impressive was that 20th century French writer, Georges Perec, who managed to produce a novel without using the letter “e,” or that other one, Raymond Roussel, who composed a series of works based on a single device: the beginning and the final sentences of whatever he wrote were phonetically identical, though semantically wildly different, and he assigned himself the writerly task of beating a plausible path through the overgrown jungle of language, a path that led ineluctably from that first sentence to the same-sounding, but different-meaning, last sentence.
Many of those in MESA Nostra may not realize it, but they are akin to Shakespeare and Spenser, Georges Perec and Raymond Roussel. For them it is not a question of verse-forms, or lipograms, or homophonic puns. Their self-imposed constraint consists in limiting their scholarly lexicon to fewer than fifty nouns, and two-dozen verbs. They harness these exhausted nouns, these over-worked verbs, and put them to work, no matter the subject. No matter the subject.
Thus the prose produced by one member of MESA Nostra will sound remarkably like that of another. Here we mean the enthusiastic, full-throated members of MESA Nostra, those whose interests do not stray very far from “Palestine” and “colonialism” and “genocide” and “empire,” and the obvious ring-changing variants: “occupied Palestine,” “settler-colonial,” “apartheid state,” “Palestinian people,” “Israeli colonialism,” “American hegemony,” “Israeli genocide.” Many members of MESA Nostra membership have a deep and abiding personal and professional interest in these matters, as they do in little else. They can do no other.
But a few members of MESA Nostra are members-in-name-only, who remain different in mental makeup, and distant from the bureaucratic intrigues, the political tendentiousness, the anti-American,anti-Israel, anti-Western themes and variations. These “non-member” members do not write about the “construction of Palestinian identity” nor the “(de)construction of Israeli identity.” Rather, they write about “The Methods of the Muhaddithin,” or “Ephraim of Edessa,” or “Xavier de Planhol and Agricultural Desolation in the Berber Heartland,” or “Yemeni Jews as Chattel Slaves” or “The Destruction of the Coptic Churches of Upper Egypt,” or “Schacht, Jeffery, Gottheil: Three Masters of Morningside Heights” or “Arabic but not Quran’ic: The Evidence of Numismatics” or “Twelver-Shi’ism in Mevlevistan” or “Ibn Battuta, the Rihla, and the Destruction of Hindustan” or “Why There Was No Arab Copernicus or Vesalius: An Inquiry” or “Aisha and Marriage in the Islamic Republic of Iran” or “Quran’ic Memorization and Comparative I.Q. Levels in Post-Independence India” or “Sir William Jones and the Re-Discovery of India” or “The Role of Hadrami Traders in the Muslim Conquest of the East Indies” or “The Story of Thomas Pellow” or “Indo-Persian Miniatures of Jihad-Conquest in the British Museum Collections: A Catalogue Raisonée” or “Table-Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge: A Critical Edition” or “Book-Binding at the Abbasid Court” or “The Paganini Qur’an” or “The Role of Hungarian Converts in Ottoman History” or “The War Within Islam: Universalist Claims, Arab Supremacist Doctrine” or “The Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya and Pacta Sunt Servanda: Muhammad and Grotius on the Law of War and Peace” or …well, you get the idea. But these are not the people whom we have in mind when we discuss MESA Nostra at JihadWatch. We are talking about the other kind.
And it was with that other kind in mind – the card-carrying careerists, the blurb-and-reference swappers, the runners-for-office, the risers-high, the much-interviewed, the solemn dispensers of wisdom to the unwary, the True Believers – that we created the MESA Nostra Contest.
The contest is simple. Below is a single paragraph, itself consisting of a single sentence, transparently written in Mesanostran. Contestants are asked to identify the author.
“In conclusion, I feel that this work of analysis, by focusing on the implications of the phallic hegemony of Wehrmacht-helmeted Israeli troops and their supporters throughout the American empire, both equally unappeasable in their demonstrable need for “the Other,” does what in a quasi-heuristic sense it was intended to do, as it manages to break away from all Eurocentric approaches to discourses of postcolonial subalternity, or even of meta-alterity, and comes so subversively close in its disjunctive interrogation of the counter- or, more exactly, anti-mimesis which is inherently essential to Mesopotamian or indeed to Cairene, Abbasid, Jordanian or Palestinian thought for, as a native of (Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Islamabad, Ramallah, Teheran, etc. – choose one) and hence a non-European, I am of necessity self-assigned to that category of people best placed to perform such a mission of interrogating all postcolonialist as well as narrativised specificity, but of equal necessity, not as one obviously intent on de-undermining or rather meta-determining the poststructuralist or post-postmodern universalism, with its customary relativised discourse analysis which seldom lends itself to anticipatory prolepsis, but on the other hand my critique is quite meta-consciously deeply para-rooted within, as well as up-rooted out of, and obviously from, Western thought with its inalienably alien constructions of meta-identity and hypersexuality, which necessarily give rise to post-essentialism which, in a larger sense, serves merely to violate all the strategic critiques of hegemonic historiographical constructions of essences, whether of the Orient or of scholars who deny the self-referentiality of all postcolonialist essentializing.”
Send your entry, please, to director@jihadwatch.org.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Ah, Hugh, those were the happy days you used to write 100-word sentences, 1000 word paragraphs and words that wouldn’t fit on a Scrabble board 😈
Lyone Fein says
This sentence cum paragraph is just beautiful. I have tears in my eyes.
deze MN bee says
ChatGP3.
deze MN bee says
ChatGp4?