One thousand years later, little has changed in the dynamic between the Rum and the Muslims. Now however, the western consensus is that it is the Islam at the heart of the Muslim world that is antithetical to “progress”, that Muslims must therefore be separated from a coherent understanding of Islam, and that the only person who can achieve this is someone from within the faith. A theological Saracen version of the Prester John fable.

Over the last 30 years several “Muslims” have been auditioned for the part. The first was the Bengali author Taslima Nasreen, who was immediately attractive because of her gender, her somewhat confused but resolutely secular views and the riots against her in her homeland. Unfortunately for her neo-liberal boosters, Nasreen was a dunce, her poetry was so bad that she sank like a stone helped along by her repellent personal qualities.

My life, like a sandbar,
has been taken over by a monster of a man
who wants my body under his control
so that, if he wishes,
he can spit in my face,
slap me on the cheek,
pinch my rear;
so that, if he wishes,
he can rob me of the clothes,
take my naked beauty in his grip;
so that, if he wishes.
he can chain my feet,
with no qualms whatsoever whip me,
chop off my hands, my fingers,
sprinkle salt in the open wound,
throw ground-up black pepper in my eyes,
with a dagger can slash my thigh,
can string me up and hang me.

More recently she has tried to re-enter the public debate about Islam with an autobiography in four parts (one would ask why such an august personage should limit their biography to only four parts?). Surely the public has a right to a more detailed description of every dump she took.

She was rapidly overtaken by a more serious academic figure who used the nom de plume Ibn Warraq. He is an Urdu speaking Muhajir from India to Pakistan who was schooled in the UK at the University of Edinburgh. Ibn Warraq is initially plausible as an academic, although the more one reads him, the more his works degenerate into a polemic, unforgivable for a supposed work of scholarship. His work also suffers from his poor grasp of classical Arabic (Fusha) causing him to make frequent errors. In the references he includes works without any scholarly value but rather solely because of “their hostility to Islam“.

More serious still is the compiler’s heavy-handed favoritism for certain revisionist theories (particularly those of John Wansbrough), resulting in a thoroughly one-sided selection of articles and translations that constitute the bulk of the volume. These include works, mostly well-known, by Ernest Renan, Henri Lammens (including a complete translation of his monograph “Fatima and the Daughters of Muhammad”), C. H. Becker, Arthur Jeffery, Joseph Schacht, Lawrence I. Conrad, Andrew Rippin, J. Koren and Y. D. Nevo, F. E. Peters, Herbert Berg, and G. R. Hawting. Most of these were landmark contributions to the lengthy debate on the origins of Islam, by scholars who had (have) strong opinions about it and were possessed of full mastery of the primary languages (especially Arabic) and sources. “Ibn Warraq’s” bias, however, causes him to omit fine contributions that pose challenges for some revisionist ideas—by H. Motzki, U. Rubin, and many others. This lopsided character makes The Quest for the Historical Muhammad a book that is likely to mislead many an unwary general reader.

Titling his book Why I am not a Muslim served only to highlight that the author was not of the caliber of Bertrand Russell.

But it was not his sloppy scholarship that was his undoing as secularism’s brown knight, rather his gender and his anonymity; it’s hard to be on the lecture/book tour circuit without a face. A more attractive candidate is Ayan Hirsi Ali, the fraudulent Somali asylum seeker turned anti-immigrant MP. Recently her “infidel” tour came down under. Ali’s thesis, if it can described as such, is that she had her genitals mutilated, that she grew up in Somalia and that she was a woman in an illiterate tribal society at war with itself, and that this was entirely and solely because she and her society were Muslim. When she arrived in Holland, she was perplexed by its perfection which sent her on an intellectual journey to secularism.

As a thesis it’s pretty lame, but it’s popular. One can reasonably ask, why her appalling life story is not caused, for example, by being a black African, rather than being a Muslim? The reason is, of course, beyond the white-pride community, there is not an audience for such a view. Similarly, one may ask that when Islam was at its zenith, the Muslim world was the most prosperous and innovative part of the classical world, why her argument cannot be deployed in favor of Islam, rather than against it.

The Ali thesis is preposterous, but like Prester John’s epistle, it fits neatly into the West’s imagination of the other. The world however, is now much more skeptical and multi-polar, and tripe like this does not stay unexamined for long (as Irshad Manji discovered) and more recently reviewers have asked some obvious questions of it.

In a similar vein, another “Muslim” who experienced a secular epiphany coincident with visa and financial problems, is Wafa Sultan. Fortunately her secularism has afforded her a more attractive and rewarding career path.

More recently and more importantly Eddie Husain’s personal narrative of his time as one of Lenin’s vanguard October revolutionaries in The Islamist has become the new work from a Muslim with which to club 1.3 billion Muslims. Given my previously expressed views on the modern religious innovation of Islamism, one would expect us to be sympathetic to Husain, but you would be mistaken. Husain’s narrative is a deeply flawed account of his life from a man who is unable to accept that the core of his problem is himself, and the poor choices that he has made. He now presents himself as another of Islam’s self-styled liberal reformers. Although the product has changed, Husain’s earnestness and enthusiasm for his newfound ideology (much like that of the nighttime TV shopping channel spruiker) has not.

Reading his words one is struck by how little Islam Eddie actually understands. Husain’s failure as a Muslim remains the most damming (but unintended) reflection on the group who “trained” him. For us within the Muslim community, it is unsurprising that an Eddie Husain figure would arise from the ranks of HT. I don’t wish to recount the flaws in this work, which have been well documented here, here, here, here and here. But essentially it is that Eddie has mistaken his experience with HT for an experience with Islam.

In the wake of the recent Glasgow self-immolation/bombing more ex-HT wallas have come out of the woodwork to denounce Islam, when really they should be denouncing themselves. Whilst they seem to offer the truth of the ex disciple turned whistle-blower, I have not seen or read anything that encourages me to believe that their personal megalomania and narcissism has in any way diminished.

Whilst all of these authors may offer some insights, with varying degrees of faithfulness, the uselessness of this genre in literature is equivalent to the ‘I was ravished by an Arab, ravish me again” school of writing. They offer the easy conformation of our pre-existing beliefs, but as an instrument to navigating the wider encounter with the Muslim world, they are as irrelevant.

On both sides of the isle, much more nuanced scholarship is now long overdue.

In the last three days, I’ve counted three young men and two women — non-Arabs and presumably non-Muslim — wearing Yasser Arafat-style scarves wrapped around their necks. That might not be uncommon if one was talking about a university campus but this was just walking around the CBD, riding public transport and entering offices. Unlike the socialist types one sees around university wearing those things as a sort of political statement, these people seemed to be wearing them more as a fashion statement. Maybe you’ve noticed the same thing too.

So what does it all mean? Well, I don’t know but according to this article in Heeb Magazine, Arabs are now cool and the emergence of the keffiyeh as a hot fashion accessory is proof of that.

With keffiyehs wrapped around the necks of hipsters coast to coast, one of the hottest bands of the moment going by the name Beirut, and Comedy Central snapping up shows like the “Axis of Evil Comedy Tour” and The Watch List, it seems like America’s pop-cultural tastebuds are primed for Middle Eastern flavors—for better or worse, it’s becoming cool to be Arab-American.

Apparently, these visible and well-known aspects of Arab culture have become symbols of rebellion or resistance in the West; becoming chic and fashionable in the same way as similar aspects of African-American culture have become fashionable with many other races and ethnic groups.

To be sure, most kids who sport the patterned scarf are more likely concerned with whether it goes with their oversized sunglasses and skin-tight leggings than with any political implications it may carry. Nevertheless, their attraction to the keffiyeh is actually spawned by the garment’s “whiff of danger,” according to Ted Swedenburg, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas. “The keffiyah is seen as a global symbol of resistance because of its association with the Palestinians. It’s not mainstream, which appeals to hipsters.”

Hipsters indeed.

I was reminded of the battle of Salamis, Alexander’s assault on Aoronos. How can anyone stand against such courage?

Aragorn: Hold your ground, hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of woes and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you *stand, Men of the West!*

Thank God for blacks and Hispanics huh?

OVER the past two hundred years the influence of intellectuals has grown steadily. Indeed, the rise of the secular intellectual has been a key factor in shaping the modern world. Seen against the long perspective of history it is in many ways a new phenomenon. It is true that in their earlier incarnations as priests, scribes and soothsayers, intellectuals have laid claim to guide society from the very beginning. But as guardians of hieratic cultures, whether primitive or sophisticated, their moral and ideological innovations were limited by the canons of external authority and by the inheritance of tradition. They were not, and could not be, free spirits, adventurers of the mind.

With the decline of clerical power in the eighteenth century, a new kind of mentor emerged to fill the vacuum and capture the ear of society. The secular intellectual might be deist, sceptic or atheist. But he was just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs. He proclaimed, from the start, a special devotion to the interests of humanity and an evangelical duty to advance them by his teaching. He brought to this self-appointed task a far more radical approach than his clerical predecessors. He felt himself bound by no corpus of revealed religion. The collective wisdom of the past, the legacy of tradition, the prescriptive codes of ancestral experience existed to be selectively followed or wholly rejected entirely as his own good sense might decide. For the first time in human history, and with growing confidence and audacity, men arose to assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and cure them with their own unaided intellects: more, that they could devise formulae whereby not merely the structure of society but the fundamental habits of human beings could be transformed for the better. Unlike their sacerdotal predecessors, they were not servants and interpreters of the gods but substitutes. Their hero was Prometheus, who stole the celestial fire and brought it to earth.

But to refresh, I noted early on in the piece that nowadays, the Middle East is pop culture-saturated:

I could tell that in some ways, peculiarly enough, there were people in other parts of the world who took their situation more seriously than themselves.

My feelings were confirmed when the next day I sat in front of the TV, flicking channels and finally settling on one of the many music stations taking the Arab world by storm. This one was called “Superstar”, not to be confused with the pan-Arab Idol show of the same name, and it ran music videos and concert clips 24/7, SMS messages of love and flirtation scrolling constantly across the bottom of the screen in gaudy technicolour. A family friend later confirmed that they were watching Mazzika, another of these music channels, more than Al-Jazeera. It all seemed very bizarre to me, but I concluded that in such times of trouble, no matter how misguided it seemed, music videos, with their cheeky storylines and buffed, good-looking and impossibly happy actors, obviously served as an antidote. Forget occupation and war — Nancy Ajram had a new album out.

And so it is that Iraq, a country in absolute chaos, drowning in bloodshed, kidnappings, and war, is momentarily united because of an Idol-esque show called Star Academy.

Shatha Hassoun, a 25-year-old woman of Iraqi origin, has managed to provoke an outbreak of gunfire; but, for at least one night, the popping sounds of weaponry mark a time of celebration.

In some ways it seems strange how deeply Iraqis have taken her in, spending money and time voting for her when they can barely scrape by, and especially given that she’s not, nor has she ever been, a resident.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported:

Hassoun is an unlikely ambassador for Iraq, as she has never been there. Born in Casablanca, Morocco, she claims Iraqi nationality through her father, a native-born member of the Shimary tribe of southern Iraq. Some say the distance may also have help her rise as a unity candidate: no one knows for sure whether she is Sunni or Shiite, so both sides have claimed her.

Although I am warmed by the fact that Iraqis are able to find joy in their devastation, I do find it sad that it takes Star Academy to get there. Then again, I suppose Hassoun is a sign of hope for those without any. They see her as a beautiful, accomplished woman who, very importantly, is Iraqi and cares for her country.

On the other hand, George Bush et al need not hang up their cowboy hats. I can’t imagine that those responsible for local atrocities are avid watchers of Star Academy.