Posted on Sunday, July 23, 2006 - 3:00 pm:

In Sanayeh Garden, Beirut's only public park, the fragile democracy Bush had nervously praised was nowhere to be found. Instead, there was a handful of students, a couple of flak-jacketed TV cameramen, and several hundred Shia who had fled the bombing in southern Lebanon. By July 18, at least 500,000 Lebanese had been displaced. One family had camped out under a tree, hanging a birdcage with a canary from its branches and setting up a small gas stove. A young man with greasy, shoulder-length curls walked up to me and asked, in French, if I was a journalist.

"Yes, I am," I told him. "Are you?"

"No," he replied. "I am king here."

The king led me to a tired young student wearing the insignia of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a small, pro-Syrian nationalist group. Wissam Abou Sleiman, a 24-year-old college grad, was in charge of the relief operations for the entire park. There was nobody, not a single official, from the Lebanese government. None of Lebanon's powerful political parties had showed up; some had donated money, but no manpower. "Future helped a bit, but we want more from them," said Sleiman, his face tight with frustration.

The Future Movement is the Saudi-backed party of Saad Hariri, leading light of Beirut's Sunni establishment and son of billionaire former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The elder Hariri, who was assassinated by a car bomb last year, helped rebuild the city's downtown into an international tourist magnet. When Hezbollah launched its war against Israel, the collateral damage included Lebanon's thriving tourist economy, which was poised to have a banner year this summer. Sunnis, to whom the rebuilt Lebanon was a source of endless pride, are extremely angry. Now, to make matters worse, hordes of Shia are flooding middle-class Sunni neighborhoods in Beirut, some of which are still trying to get rid of Shia squatters from Lebanon's last war.

There's also the sectarian subtext of the current war, in which an Iranian-backed militia essentially assumed the prerogative of the state. Two days after Hezbollah kidnapped the soldiers, the Saudi Press Agency issued a statement declaring the war a "miscalculated adventure" carried out by "elements inside the state and those behind them"--a clear reference to Iran. Over the past year, Sunni support for "the resistance" has dropped considerably, thanks to Shia support for Syria. Tensions between Sunnis and Shia, already simmering, are now explosive.

For all these reasons, the Sunnis, along with the rest of Lebanon's sectarian leaders, are not inclined to help the almost exclusively Shia refugees. "Deep down inside, in the psyche of Sunni politicians, and certainly the Christians, they think: 'They started this, let them fix it. They caused this mass exodus. Why should we clean their s hit?'" says Charles Adwan, the former director of the Lebanese Transparency Association. "Those people are Shia, and they are there because of Shia actions. Let the Shia help them."

Posted on Sunday, July 23, 2006 - 3:25 pm:

The Achilles heel of [Said's best known work] Orientalism, and much of the "critical scholarship," was its very narrow conception of the forces of change in the Middle East. <i>Orientalism<i/> made no mention of modern Iran at all, or indeed of any movement framing its agenda in the language of Islam. To Said's mind, it was an orientalist trope to invoke "the return of Islam."2 "History, politics, and economics do not matter" to the orientalists, wrote Said mockingly. "Islam is Islam, the Orient is the Orient, and please take all your ideas about a left and a right wing, revolutions, and change back to Disneyland."3 In many contexts, Said insisted upon writing "Islam" with quotation marks, as though it were a category created solely by and for orientalists. That "Islam" might actually serve to mobilize movements more readily than ideologies of left and right seemed not to occur to Said at all. Malcolm Kerr, in his review of Orientalism, was struck by the omission: "Does Said realize how insistently Islamic doctrine in its many variants has traditionally proclaimed the applicability of religious standards to all aspects of human life, and the inseparability of man's secularand spiritual destinies? What does he suppose the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Muslim Brotherhood are all about?"4

It was a valid question, and one that Said consistently dodged. His Covering Islam, published in 1981, represented a scramble to cover the gaping hole in Orientalism. Said's indictment of the media and "experts" for their failure to anticipate or explain the revolution in Iran was very much a diversionary tactic, given Said's own failure to do the same in a book published only two years earlier. Nor did he risk offering an interpretation of his own. The closest Said came to an account of Islamism was to blame the orientalists: according to Said, Muslim Orientals, subjected to orientalist demonization, had entered a reactive mode, "acting the part decreed for them" by the experts.5 By this logic, Said could trace every Islamist excess to Western prejudice, and eventually he did. In 1989, Khomeini issued a fatwa (edict) condemning the British-Indian author Salman Rushdie to death for his novel The Satanic Verses. "Why is that ignorance there," asked Said, "if not for the disregard, indifference and fear with which things Islamic are considered here? . . . Islam is reduced to terrorism and fundamentalism and now, alas, is seen to be acting accordingly, in the ghastly violence prescribed by Ayatollah Khomeini."6 This mode of argumentation conveniently absolved Said and followers of the difficult job of accounting for Islamist deeds. Instead, each Islamist action became another opportunity for the repetitive and ritual denunciation of Western prejudice against Islam. [My emphasis. Note that the same dynamic applies in the ritual denunciations of imperialist 'provocation' or 'humiliation' of Arabs and/or Muslims which crop up with every suicide attack, train bombing, kidnapping, decapitation, rocket launch, etc. against western civilians. -JC]

Still, the "return of Islam" was an unwelcome surprise to Said and Saidians. Even more surprising (and, for Said, unpleasant) was the way many Islamist "returnees" read Said's texts. Almost invariably, they understood them as anti-Western, pro-Islamic polemical tracts and deployed them as intellectual ammunition against Islam's "enemies," including secularists in their own societies. By choice or by ignorance, Said had disregarded the prior existence of an elaborate discourse of anti-orientalism within the Muslim world. When these Muslim readers opened Orientalism and Covering Islam, they perceived nothing new, and read them merely as "insider" confirmation of long-standing suspicions that Western scholars were agents of their governments, that Western scholarship was part of a conspiracy to defame Islam.