[lbo-talk] Ghazals of Ghalib (Re: The Last Mughal)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 4/24/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 24, 2007, at 11:04 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > Today is a good day to remember that secular nationalism is worse for
> > minorities than Islam:
> >
> > <http://herodote.net/dossiers/evenement.php5?jour=19150424>
> > 24 avril 1915
> > Le génocide arménien
> >
> > Le samedi 24 avril 1915, à Istamboul, capitale de l'empire ottoman,
> > 600 notables arméniens sont assassinés sur ordre du gouvernement.
> > C'est le début d'un génocide (*), le premier du XXe siècle. Il va
> > faire environ 1,2 million de victimes dans la population arménienne de
> > l'empire turc.
>
> I'm so glad you presented that little item in the original French;
> its loveliness is as untranslatable as a Valery poem!
>
> Your introductory comment is pretty nonsensical. Islam is a religion,
> and can be good, bad, or neither. One can make a long list of things
> that are "worse than Islam" - e.g., Naziism, phosgene, brain tumors,
> English food. Islamism, and Islamic theocracy, is another ball of wax
> entirely. Your Islamist pals in Tehran have persecuted, often
> viciously, a host of religious and national minotiries in Iran -
> among them fellow Moslems who made the mistake of adhering to the
> Sunni rather than the Shia brand.

As capitalism developed in the West so did racism and nationalism, and
both began to shape the rest of the world -- the change in British
imperialism after the end of the 18th century that William Dalrymple
among others has emphasized is part of the same secular change as what
happened in the process of the death of the Ottoman Empire and the
birth of the nation state of Turkey.  The Ottoman Empire had social
spaces for peoples of various religions, ethnicities, and so forth*,
but the rise of nationalism on all sides began to close down the old
spaces, hierarchically defined as they were, that protected
minorities.  Secular ultra-nationalists of Turkey, being anti-Ottoman,
therefore had and continue to have the hardest time coming to terms
with this historical fact.

To overcome the problem of nationalism that made each group more
vulnerable to imperialism, activists and intellectuals in the Middle
East invented, for instance, pan-Arabism, but that obviously tends to
exclude the Kurds, the Turks, the Persians, and so on.  Islam is
probably a better building block for a regional identity, provided
that Muslims can overcome jihadists and their sponsors in the Gulf
states.

*  Voltaire was no fan of Islam, but he recognized the Ottoman
Empire's practice  was more tolerant than Christian countries:

<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/goytisolo240107.html>
Voltaire and Islam
by Juan Goytisolo

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Voltaire launches an eloquent defense of the Turk: "The Great Lord
peacefully governs twenty peoples of different religions; two hundred
thousand Greeks live peacefully in Constantinople; the Mufti in person
names the Greek patriarch and presents him to the emperor " (sic), and
the empire, he adds, "is full of Jacobites, Nestorians, and
monotheists."  Internal wars among Christians -- like those that are
tearing up the Islamic world today -- rouses his indignation against
fanaticism, responsible, he says, for all evils of the world.  Years
later, in "The Profession of Deists," he will condemn that, while
Christians on the shores of the Bosporus parade their God freely in
the streets, in Europe "any Calvinist preacher is condemned to the
gallows or the wheel, and anyone who listens to him, to the galleys."
To that, Voltaire adds: "Oh nations, compare and judge."

-- 
Yoshie