Arab world is in the throes of a fascist conflagration, borne of Islamist extremism
Fascist moment
The Arab world is in the throes of a fascist conflagration, borne of Islamist extremism, writes Abdel-Moneim Said
The “fascist moment”, like the “perfect storm”, expresses the nature of a period of time that sweeps into the histories of peoples and nations in a flash. It is a period of upheaval, quakes, hurricanes; a period in which events range out of control and in which the system, human or material, only regains equilibrium after great violence and destruction.
Historically, the fascist moment arrived in the wake of major changes brought, for example, by the French Revolution and its repercussions, from the Napoleonic wars to the rise of labour and socialist movements. These triggered conservative backlashes that eventually turned racist against minorities in European countries and against “non-white” countries elsewhere.
Eventually, World War I erupted, perhaps to restore the world to some sanity. But the fascist moment arrived again in the 1930s, when the “sanity” of the League of Nations went bankrupt, the US recoiled behind its oceanic borders and the pains of the war and the rancour from settlement arrangements began to seethe.
In the course of this fermentation, the major racist notions that were born in the 19th century reached their peak in Italy, Japan and then Nazi Germany.
The fascist moment has finally reached the Middle East. It arrived after decades of turmoil, failure, wars that stemmed from World War II, battles for independence, military coups and revolutions of various stripes, while the world was progressing technologically and militarily at a faster pace than ever since the dawn of history.
The Middle East erupted following an era known as the Arab Spring. This eruption ushered in the fascist moment that is epitomised in the terrorist bombings and attacks that occurred in the interval between when I wrote last week’s column and when I wrote this.
In Tunisia there was the attack against the beachside holiday resort in Sousse, where tourists of all nationalities and their Tunisian hosts were gunned down in cold blood. Tunisia had not been spared by the fact that its “Spring” was moderate, that it eventually settled on a democratic system, that “secularism” there has a larger following than other Arab countries, and that it is one of the relatively “safe” Arab countries.
Suddenly Tunisians awoke to the destruction of their country’s most important source of revenue, and in the aftermath there resounded cries for extraordinary legal and security measures to deter attackers. Tunisia President Beji Essbesi declared a state of emergency on Saturday.
As though this were not enough for a single day, a suicide bomber entered a Shia mosque in wealthy Kuwait. The purpose was obvious, as it was with the massacres that were perpetrated against two other Shia mosques in Saudi Arabia: to foment sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shia.
Notice that the Kuwait attack occurred in Ramadan. Nor were exceptions made for Friday prayers, or for the presence of women or children. All this culminated in the fierce attacks against diverse targets in Egypt, the most reverberating being that which occurred in Sinai.
In all three countries, the government stood firm and moments of national unity were felt. But the fascist moment is not about a single event or striking a single target. Rather, it comes in the form of tumultuous waves that strike and strike again until the shore crumbles and the port is destroyed.
The examples are clear in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya where, in varying degrees, expressions such as “failed state” or “no state at all” have become fully-fledged realities.
These waves bring four types of challenges. The first is the challenge of death against life. The norm in human existence is to live until God decrees one’s death. When this fate becomes contingent on the will of another human being who believes that he can impose it on others we have the very essence of violent fanaticism.
It is fanaticism that has no sense of the sanctity of life, even if it observes religious rites such as fasting and prayer. Notice, now that all such things have become visible and on display, the pure bliss and rapture that fills the faces of Islamic State or Al-Qaeda killers as they commit their slaughters.
Those people do not sense that they are compelled or constrained to fight. They are in it for the love of the kill and thirst to increase their ecstasy by killing more. All the evidence from Nazi concentration camps testifies to that state of “nirvana” that the murderers felt at the moment they killed their victims and afterwards. In our case, the murderer has no hesitation to play football with the head of the victim he has just slaughtered.
The second is the challenge posed by destruction to the struggle for development. If the purpose of human life is to develop and fructify the earth, the fascist moment brings the very antithesis of this calling.
Whether we speak of electricity cables in Egypt, or antiquity sites such as Karnak in Luxor or Palmyra in Syria, civilisation is the target, both modern and ancient. Amazingly, the fascist groups are endowed with a large dose of a curious kind of arrogance.
They claim to be rescuing society from its sins and from injustice and their means towards this end is to kill the people they are supposed to save, to destroy their means of livelihood and to force them into various forms of degradation.
Third, there is the challenge of instinct against the intellect. One of the hallmarks of the fascist moment is the prevalence it gives to the baser instincts, and specifically hatred, spite, envy and a tremendous amount of contempt for everything that is different or diverse.
The fascists, themselves, actively embody the “animalism”, virtually like those mutants in films that become savage werewolves or bloodthirsty vampires.
In our case, as they give full rein to their instincts, they force women into concubinage, force Christians and others into bondage and slavery, and spread the most virulent forms of every kind of hatred and malice ever known in history.
The fourth challenge is that posed to Islam itself by the Kharijites, the contemporary version of which began when the “Muslim” Brothers, who “are neither brothers or Muslims”, sought to reconstruct Islam in a manner that would enable a secret group (like the Kharijites in the early Islamic era of the Great Fitna or Strife) to feel mentally and racially superior to all others.
From that womb, over the next six decades, emerged the new Islamo-fascisms, from Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya to the hordes of “jihadist” groups that are not only fighting Arab and Islamic states and societies but also, thanks to their very narrow outlooks and perhaps out of some unwitting mercy for the Muslim people, waging war against each other.
What we must bear in mind is that “fascism” is always defeated in the end, but at an enormous cost.
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