Hussein’s husband had previously boasted to the media that the local police had fully supported him. And while Basra law enforcement officials have told the press that Leila Hussein’s defiance had nothing to do with her murder, that this was a routine spat of sectarian violence targeting the women activists, their own role in this story makes their statements suspect.

It wouldn’t be surprising if Leila Hussein was being made an example of. This wouldn’t be the first time, nor the last time, in today’s brutalized Iraq. The activists who were trying to help Hussein escape are receiving threats as well. Any woman who does not submit to her role as a passive piece of human garbage is a potential target in a patriarchal society scarred by years of violence.

Please note that the authors of Jezebel can help you donate money to the Basra activists, if you contact them. We hope to have more on this story. Until then, may God rest the souls of the innocent. There is nothing more that I can personally can say in the face of such tragedy.

Nick Broomfield’s “The Battle for Haditha” has not yet gotten enough press. In some ways, this is understandable. Despite the explosive subject matter, this is a low-key film. There are no big-name actors, no enormous budget, and, most importantly, the picture’s stylistic elements tend toward a stark, bare-boned simplicity. Nevertheless, this is a film to see.

Broomfield cast many amateurs for key roles, among them some ex-Marines and Iraqi refugees, and this is both good and bad. There is a definite air of authenticity surrounding the film, yet the acting occasionally appears forced. Some of the dialogue struck me as contrived- although this may have something to do with the subtitles. I do not speak Arabic, but having been accompanied by an Arabic speaker at the screening, I discovered that the subtitles are not as good as they could have been.

This movie is earnest, but, in some scenes, it also comes across as didactic. Do we really need to see the chief insurgent character, a disgruntled former member of the Iraqi army, spelling out the message with lines such as: “The Americans created the insurgency by dis-banding the army”? Does the chief insurgent furthermore have to opine stiffly on the future of Iraq, noting (in a manner that suggests that he is channeling Fukuyama) the bleak possibility of the country inheriting a new leader, someone who will be a helluva lot worse than Saddam?

Yet in spite of a few missteps, this is a haunting picture. I can’t get it out of my head, and I probably won’t for a long time. Broomfield captures the comings and goings of the residents of Haditha, people whose lives are about to be shattered, with intimacy and grace. I was floored by the character of Rashied (Duraid A. Ghaieb), a young man besotted with his pregnant wife (Yasmine Hanani – who attended the screening alongside the director, and ex-Marine actors Elliot Ruiz and Eric Mehalacopoulos), keenly aware of the growing danger of staying with his family in Haditha, and yet unable to do much about it.

Alongside U.S. Marines and Iraqi civilians, Broomfield dares to portray the members of the Iraqi insurgency as human beings. These people are not just fundamentalist foreigners, they are also ordinary locals who are infuriated with what has happened to their country. This simple truth is about as inconvenient as anything Al Gore can come up with, and is bound to make American audiences squirm in their seats.

At the Q & A afterwards, Broomfield pointed out that the massacre at Haditha has been extensively researched, and the script was an attempt to stick as faithfully as one could to real-life events. The movie was shot on location in Jordan, and grim anecdotes were related: apparently, one of the Iraqi families featured in the film wanted to pack up and leave in the middle of the shoot, highlighting the adversity of refugee life for the crew and the rest of the cast.

The audience, meanwhile, was happily irreverent. People expressed their anger with the U.S. occupation of Iraq with ease, blunt questions were asked, awkward pauses were observed, and the entire occasion had a fresh, unscripted feel one so rarely gets in similar settings in the States. Kudos to the festival organizers for this, honestly.

One woman asked if “The Battle for Haditha” would get past “censorship” in the States, a question which reminded me of misconceptions people hold about the U.S. film industry. In the U.S., the real censorship lies in trying to find a distributor for a potentially controversial film. The MPAA can cripple a movie’s chance at being distributed by issuing an NC-17 rating, but such ratings are usually tied to graphic representations of sex. “Battle for Haditha” has secured a U.S. distributor and will, hopefully, be seen by at least a fraction of the people who need to see it most: those among us who continue to defend the ongoing, blood-spattered mess that has been made of Iraq.

The best moments of the film have to do with the peculiar duality of wartime violence: how it is both personal and mediated, vicious and strangely, grotesquely casual. It is the antithesis to all life, and yet it can make its perpetrators feel alive. No amount of theorizing can ultimately reveal its true nature, and Broomfield understands this. Sometimes, all you need to do is watch.

Before I reveal to you my ambitious proposition to end human strife and achieve world peace, allow me first to share with you an unusual personal condition from which I’ve been silently, yet painfully, suffering for at least two years now. Today, I believe the time has come to speak out and seek counsel, and perhaps even find a cure. Although I know this is not a help-line for my ailments nor is it the right venue for such private complaints, I still feel the need to blurt it out in public. Maybe, just maybe, I would feel a little better somehow by talking about it. So please excuse my selfishness if you can, but here it is, my mysterious disorder: I cannot read, hear or watch the news anymore.

There it goes, off my beleaguered chest (I already feel some relief, by the way). As ridiculous as it sounds, I am confessing that I lost the ability to concentrate during what should be an important part of my daily life, namely those moments I used to dedicate to finding out from various media outlets what’s going on around the world. They say that a problem diagnosed is a problem half-solved, and I think I know exactly why this is happening to me. Although I’ve never been one with a soft heart, it seems that the sheer magnitude of violent deaths and human suffering in every story, in every broadcast and in every line of news, has finally overwhelmed me. I have finally succumbed to the ugliness of this world by unconsciously shutting down my receptors. As an involuntary reaction, my mind started to switch off completely in the face of unspeakable calamities. A defense mechanism, I would guess, is being triggered inside my brain to block out the mayhem. No matter how hard I try, each time I tune in to the news or browse newspapers on the internet, I crumble under the weight of an insurmountable depression that envelops me.

How many of you suffer from the same syndrome, I wonder? In one day in Iraq, for example, while digesting the report of the daily maniac blowing up the daily crowded market killing the daily dozens, we learn of American soldiers gang-raping a fifteen year old girl in her house and then killing and burning her with her entire family. Because I refuse to believe that our species can be so barbaric, for a fleeting fraction of a second I get the feeling that I would wake up from a terrifying nightmare – only to discover that these are true stories and that the images are real. Yet, in a streak of masochistic conduct, I persist in seeking that which eats away at the core of my soul. Out of indefatigable habit, I suppose, I keep following the bloody news and keep suffering the consequences, just like a moth drawn to the fatal light that will eventually consume it.

Although I stopped getting the paper editions long ago (mainly because their ink messes your hands), one glittering Saturday morning in Geneva, I decided to buy a few newspapers to re-experience holding them up and flipping through them while waiting to have my haircut. I see people doing it all the time, and it looks so normal, so human, so unnoticeably routine. However, by the time my turn had come and I was seated in the barber’s chair, I couldn’t for the life of me remember how I walked across that room, nor could I recollect where it was that I dropped the newspapers along the way. Wrapped in that cloth that you wear inversely like a straitjacket (yes, they have those in Geneva, too), I saw a different gloomy face in the mirror, one I could hardly recognize. I realized that I had lost focus somewhere between reading of the latest mass grave in Iraq, the latest family wiped out in Gaza, and the latest meaningless slaughter in some remote part of the world which I cannot recall right now. Even the small side stories were as ghastly as the major ones. There was no respite in the graphicness of death, and no time even to reach the sports pages either.

I found myself suddenly stranded in a surreal state of utter disbelief, staring at the scissors swinging over my head and imagining what it would really be like if its blades had been used to decapitate me. The skies outside were no longer as blue and uplifting as I had left them. Neither was my spirit as elevated as when I first hopped out of bed that sunny morning. Looking at the same mirror, I thought to myself, surely, the oblivious clients around me waiting for their trim could not have been reading the same news and casually pretending they were from a different planet? Unless, of course, they were, and I was stuck inside an endless horror movie, packed with weird alien characters. “Would you like to wash your hair?”, the voice came as I was about to stand up and leave. “No, thanks”, I mumbled, with my incredulity peaking as I glanced at the avalanche of morbid tales still plastered on the front pages of the papers I had just left behind. “Your papers, sir”, the lady said with a smile. I feigned a smile back, asking her to add them to the stack of Paris Match and Hola magazines scattered on the coffee table. I don’t need them anymore, I said to myself, nor do I need her straitjacket. What I needed most was my sanity. Escape, if I have to, and I was going to do just that. We all need to and we all do every once in a while. In my case, I just couldn’t take the news anymore, and I deliberately decided to get as far away from it as I could. I turned on my noisy engine outside, and off I ran like a coward, looking for a new ride and a new secluded mountain to hide.

Thinking of the Jordanian MPs who had walked all over our dead bodies by desecrating the memory of our fallen martyrs, I remembered a line from the movie that made Mustapha Akkad, the genius director murdered in the same attacks, so popular in the Arab world. At the beginning of this household epic, as prophet Muhammad’s uncle, Abu Talib, worried for his nephew – who had spent the last three days meditating inside the cave of Hira’ – the old man gazed at the hilltop, and with deep resignation in his voice, he expressed his trepidation: “I don’t know what it means… men see the world too well from a mountain”. I don’t know what it means either, and I don’t pretend to descend from these long rides drenched in revelation or singing words of wisdom. However, it dawned on me during one of these escapades that the true meaning of citizenship in any society can only be understood through appreciating the complexity of the two-way reciprocal stream of taxation and representation. European citizens love their countries and passionately cherish them because they know that they elect politicians and civil servants whose paramount obligation is to provide them with a decent level of public services, wherever these citizens may be located. In other words, they expect and do get something in return from their participation in public life.

So, as I was cruising the French Saleve mountain towering over Geneva, but climbing its other side which overlooks the beautiful city and lake of Annecy, I crossed through a tiny village that was quite literally in the middle of nowhere. Yet – and it was the first time that I paid attention to this particular observation – it struck me that the infrastructural development of the roads, the services, the landscaping and every other little detail in every little corner of this seemingly obscure spot on the map was simply astounding. Admiring the beauty of the perfection, I noticed a phenomenon that we so badly lack in the Arab world and which Europeans take for granted: that every remotely isolated square inch of rural Western Europe is as developed and nurtured by the state and its local authorities as the heart of any of its bustling capital cities. That’s why, I believe, you always detect this natural desire by the inhabitants to care for the land and for its surroundings, far beyond the boundaries of their private properties. This communal protective instinct is the healthiest trait any government can aspire to instill in its citizens, motivating them to assume that noble task of being the voluntary guardians of the realm. And such behavior flourishes in Europe not because Europeans are superior beings, but because they have realized that good citizenship is a mutually beneficial state of affairs, for them and their governments.

For example, these lonely villagers go through the trouble of adorning their balconies with such a breathtaking array of geranium flowers because they do feel that their village belongs to them and that their tax money visibly bounces back from a government system that caters for the well being of their community. That’s why they want their towns to look so pretty and do their best to keep them that way. That’s also why they will avoid littering their streets in as much as they will refrain from doing so inside their actual homes, because both physical domains are afforded the same affection and viewed with the same sense of ownership by their residents. Both spaces inspire the same attachment to a dwelling, a personal habitat, one that belongs to you as much as you belong to it, whether you actually own it or not. This domino effect of mutual concern between citizen and state, when it is multiplied throughout the land, symbolizes the real meaning of a homeland inside of which you feel significant as an equal tax-paying citizen, no matter what your last name is and who your relatives and friends are. This balanced equation is in my opinion the ultimate concept of a nation that you would want to safeguard, one that you would give your life to protect. That is also why this fact should be remembered by all those good men and women in Jordan’s recently sprawling committees, the ones seeking to inject into our people a sense of patriotic belonging by using various creative slogans. For such efforts to succeed, it is indispensable for us to bear in mind that the rights and duties associated with citizenship have to flow both ways. There is just no other way for this river to take shape.

Down to sea level, slowly but surely, reality sinks back in. News of our region is as unavoidable as I had left it when I took off, and it breaks my heart yet again. How many times can I bear this cycle in the space of 24 hours, I wonder? There is just so much injustice in our part of the world, so much misery and suffering, all perpetuated by overzealous fanatics from all faiths in the name of worshipping the same creator. If religion is indeed the opium of the masses, as Karl Marx famously opined, then the Middle East must be experiencing the dizzying nausea of a lethal overdose. From Jewish supremacist politicians who regard non-Jews as vermin, backed by evangelical Christians who can’t wait for the end of the world, to Islamic fundamentalists who think all Jews are descendants of pigs and monkeys, I can think of only one way to end this ancient squabble once and for all. I do believe that there are enough people like me on all divides who do not want to occupy other people’s land or drive them from their homes, and want to live in peace with peoples of all faiths and denominations, whether they worship the same God or worship nothing at all.

We have to stand up and be counted, because we are not the problem. The problem lies in the fanatics and extremists on both sides who are bent on exterminating each other. Therefore, I say in all earnestness, let them fight it out. Why not? Let those who believe in killing and death go to a neutral and far away desert and put themselves out of their misery. We just need to convince them that they need to conduct their battles elsewhere, not in the middle of our towns and cities, and we should provide incentives for them to do so.

For example, if there are indeed people living amongst us in Jordan who believe Zarqawi was a hero, I think our government should not persecute them at all, but should instead provide the transportation by airlifting them to a place where they can join their fellow madmen. In other words, we should shorten their quest for paradise as much as possible and do all of us a favor. I used to laugh with an Algerian friend of mine back in the early nineties when he used to advocate a drastic solution to the murderous upheaval in his country by criminals disguised in the robe of Islam. He used to say that Algeria has enough vast deserts to allow these sword-wielding butchers to set up an independent state of their own where they can have all the camels and tents they need to live in the stone age, if that is what they really aspire for.

Today, I don’t laugh anymore. We do need to take polls and we do need to ask people what they truly want and where they stand. If we can ultimately separate the advocates of a just peace and co-existence from the advocates of death and destruction on both sides, then as I said before, we have a problem half-solved. Thereafter, let those in favor of resolving human disputes through violence battle it out away from us. At our paid expense, if need be, they should be transported to a suitable battlefield. I will even pray for all of them to go to heaven, as long as they keep enough distance to let the rest of us live in peace. A crazy and idiotic solution, you’re thinking? Perhaps. But when in Rome – and if all Romans have lost their heads – then you have the absolute right to do as they do and start speaking their twisted, insane language. When the only currency in circulation are rusty copper coins of madness, who can blame a humble writer exchanging absolute folly for the semblance of wisdom? Yes, I say, let them fight it out.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

I’ve had it with the deceptions of the media. Perhaps my face doesn’t show it, but I am pissed-off angry. And here, for once, I’m not talking about the political side of things. I’m not talking about how docile news organizations in the West capitulated to their governments and, without a shred of resistance or an atom of intellectual integrity, accepted the barrage of blatant lies that linked Iraq to WMD’s and to Al-Qaida, thus facilitating the most unprovoked and unforgivable invasion in modern history. I’m not discussing how these misinformation organizations let their political leaders literally get away with murder of hundreds of thousands of people so that a few multinational corporations can add billions upon their trillions of ill-gotten wealth.

Let’s leave all that aside for now – along with the uncontainable mayhem coming out of the Pandora’s box that was irresponsibly opened in Iraq. In this episode of my road chronicles, I’m referring to other more mundane, yet equally irritating, aspects of the daily bombardment of lies and half-truths that I am subjected to every single day by an advertising industry gone berserk. Whether it’s when I’m out soaking up one billboard after the other, or sitting peacefully at home reading a magazine or watching TV, I am fed up with being taken for a ride.

Don’t get me wrong, I think advertising is a sacred right of every business. But what was supposed to have been a marketing vehicle to convey the qualities of products and services to otherwise not so well-informed consumers has mutated beyond recognition. Ever since Saatchi & Saatchi first handed Margaret Thatcher her 1979 landslide victory, the genie had been unleashed out of the bottle. Spin-doctoring was born, baptized by the high priests of logos and rationalized by the revered gurus of brands. The art of creating a parallel reality where truth is a marginal detail that has to be either ignored or avoided at all costs became one of the most lucrative supporting industries in the capitalist economy. This new world of make-believe and multi-purpose propaganda will soon rent out the space underneath our eyelids in order to keep us on message. George Orwell is already turning in his grave.

Gradually but consistently, the business of unashamed manipulation and distortion of facts has elevated itself to an absurd dimension that knows no bounds when it comes to misrepresentation of the truth. And the purpose is not always to actually sell; that takes place anyway thanks to the global cartels suffocating the market. The aim is now to make us see a compassionate face where none exists. When image has become paramount, the spin-doctors have turned into virtual plastic surgeons. Take the oil industry as an example. The richest polluters in the universe and the greediest usurpers of other nations’ natural resources have been granted the invaluable opportunity to portray themselves as the Mother Theresa of all money-making enterprises. A soft voice that would otherwise whisper a Christmas parable to your kids would now come out on CNN telling you that grabbing every last drop of oil from this earth is not as important to these companies as protecting that last cute Panda in the forests of China or saving that lonely whale off the coast of Japan. Sometimes you don’t even realize what is being advertised at first and imagine the ad to be for a charity helping lepers in Calcutta until you read the name of the giant war-mongering, tax-evading conglomerate at the end. Just keep repeating it and people would believe it, goes the motto. Just get Morgan Freeman to say it, and it will magically sound so humane and selfless. These obscenely profiteering empires are not actually trying to sell you, me or our governments anything in particular. They just want us to believe that the welfare of your little cat is what drives them, motivates their research and keeps them up burning the midnight candles. Now what kind of four legged morons do they take us for?

I have a different bone to pick with the advertising methods of the automobile industry. Actually, it is not the advertisers I have a problem with – the ads are usually very amusing works of art – but it is the hypocritical governments that allow them to run who drive me crazy. Most of these car ads should be against the law because they do not point out to the consumer that not only will driving the car in the same way they do in the ad will end the driver up in jail in every world jurisdiction (save for a few autobahns in Germany), but it will almost certainly result in a very violent and painful death for all the passengers – especially if you do actually race down that curvy, snowy mountain, blasting your car stereo with that stupid grin on your face. Hell, why do governments even allow cars to be manufactured with speedometers ranging from 200 to 400 km/hour if the highest speed limit in most countries does not exceed a lousy 120 km/hour? Isn’t this like allowing Airbus and Boeing to manufacture airplanes and then pass a law that prohibits all forms of aviation above two thousand feet? Think about it. Is this some sort of a trap to get our driver licenses revoked and generate more income for the government coffers in fines and penalties? Is there a secret understanding between car manufacturers and governments to continue making cars that break the speed limit once you switch to second gear so that a police patrol can wait for you around the corner to drag your ass in court?

And that’s not all. The dichotomy between the boundaries imposed by the law of the land and the exemptions allowed for ‘Big Business’ has definitely crossed the line of sanity in the fashion industry – with the not so fashionable insinuation that hard drugs can positively contribute to the way you look. Each time I hear the expression “heroin chic” I ask myself how on earth did a grossly unhealthy and skinny look for women that was evidently the result of needle abuse come to be so glamorous – and legal to promote? Can the words “heroin” and “chic” actually be used in the same sentence by the trendsetters and providers of garments to our spouses and daughters? Silly me, I always believed the intravenous taking of the serum derived from the opium poppy had health consequences beyond its dietary benefits. Perhaps lawmakers in the vice and drugs corridors of western governments could finally make up their minds about whether these substances are good to abuse or not? Is it going to be a “just say no” or “just do it” policy, can the sloganeers please explain?

These confusing contradictions between permissible reality and unattainable fantasy may have actually started in Hollywood, the guilty culprit we all love to hate. The movie industry, for example, has been the unchallenged pioneer in promoting the triviality of gun violence – despite the late emergence of a small trend within the industry calling for gun control and repenting by making movies in that vein. But it was not until Steven Spielberg spoiled the fun in Saving Private Ryan that we truly visualized what it means to be shot in the leg, arm or groin, screeching in fear as you watch your limbs depart your body. Until then, we all grew up watching digestible scenes of bullet wounds that were always dry, neat and perfectly sanitized, the recipients of which simply fold on the ground painlessly, silently, and spotlessly – if they were the bad guys, of course. As for the good guys, generations of kids were made to believe that dodging a salvo of close range bullets from an Uzi submachine gun was doable as long as you were moving, ducking, or screaming “let’s go”. Not only that, but if you happened to receive multiple gunshot wounds anywhere except between your eyes, then instead of bleeding profusely to death as you normally would, you could still continue to run, leap from rooftop to another, fall from the fourth floor on a hard surface, land on your back as you cushion the fall by the garbage container positioned by chance to receive you, get up again, fist-fight and overpower six other armed guys who shoot at everything but you, jump from a speeding car only to grab the rails of an airborne helicopter with one hand, bring it down, and then passionately kiss your lover while a small band-aid will take care of your wounds. OK, I agree, there’s nothing wrong with some harmless fairytale action; we all enjoy an adrenaline rush every once in a while, and we don’t always try to do the same at home. But to those well-meaning anti-gun Hollywood icons I say this: you should not take your grievances against companies like Colt or Smith & Wesson. These entities merely manufacture the guns, while it is the same Hollywood studios that are making you rich who have actually been doing all the free marketing for assault rifles and pistols throughout the years until these weapons have become household items today. Let’s see you boycotting these studios if you are serious, because they are the ones fuelling the demand for these deadly products ever since Dirty Harry glamorized the .44 Magnum with his classic one-liners back in 1971.

Apart from the frivolous use of guns in the movies, what really makes me laugh is the message against authority we have been indoctrinated to believe counts as the next best thing to actually being Robin Hood himself. Isn’t it a farce that in all these movies the good policeman is always the one who has absolutely no regard whatsoever for due process? You know what I’m talking about. The likeable hero is always that good Samaritan cop who is held back by the tedious restraints of that bureaucratic waste of time they call chain of command and protocol, the one who needs to hand over his weapon to his boss and lose his badge in order to do the right thing – before he is finally vindicated and decorated by his department after he operates outside the rules. Yes, you’re getting the picture. It’s that detective who has a stubborn allergy against arrest or search warrants who is the role model to follow because he believes the police code invariably works in favor of the bad guys. Ironically, in the gospel according to Hollywood, it is this protagonist that angers all his superiors up to the President himself who eventually ends up saving the world because breaking the rules is the only path to justice. So, here we are, saturated from an early age with all these quasi-educational narratives – the ones inspiring us to defend the underdog by resenting useless procedure, rolling up our sleeves and being the vigilantes and the whistle blowers of our respective environments – only to find out that it is not always he who rebels against authority who rides into the sunset with the pretty girl. On the contrary, we go out to the real world, and what do we discover? Just try smoking in a non-smoking area in New York. Worse even, try skidding your car in a London street or overtaking the cable car in Geneva – even if you were trying to save a life. Then try to explain to the judge that you saw the same thing happen in a car ad on TV or in a Mel Gibson movie. And by the way, if they do lock you up, the last thing you want to tell your cell mate is: “Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”, unless you do have that same .44 Magnum Clint Eastwood was flashing stashed under your prison trousers. Otherwise, keep those trousers up and the belt tightly fastened. Trust me, there will be no Shoshank Redemption for your sorry ass if you don’t.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

A picture of it is displayed in the British Museum, that Aladdin’s cave of looted treasures from Britain’s former colonies, near the Stela of Nabonidus. Made of basalt, 58 cm high by 46 cm wide, and dating from the 6th century BC, this has carved upon it in bas-relief is a figure wearing the traditional dress of a Babylonian king, who is thought to be Nabonidus, the last ruler of Babylon before it was conquered by Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 BC.

Crudely speaking, these two artefacts bookend the period of (uneven) Babylonian supremacy in Mesopotamia. We may put this another way by saying that this is the point at which we reach the most persistent of Babylon’s real life and real history. In the 6th century BC, the Babylonian New Year would be marked by an extravagant pageant along the Processional Way and through the Ishtar Gate, an 11-day ceremony which, it was hoped, would guarantee for another year the favor of the gods, grateful for all the attention lavished on them.1

Nabonidus was away from Babylon for most of his reign, leaving the city in the hands of his son Belshazzar, he of the feast and the writing on the wall (in a modern materialization of the myth, an American soldier has carved the word TEXAS into one of the bricks in a Babylonian wall hubristically rebuilt by Saddam Hussein, an exemplar of sorts of archaeological best practice). In Nabonidus’s absence, the New Year was not celebrated.2 Shortly after, the Tower of Babel collapsed.

The fall of the Tower is perhaps the central urban myth; it is certainly the most disquieting. In Babylon, the great city that fascinated and horrified the Biblical writers, people of different races and languages, drawn together in pursuit of wealth, tried for the first time to live together–and failed miserably. The result was bleak incomprehension. Ambitious technology striving to defy the natural order of things was punished as the tower that was meant to reach the skies crumbled. Irreligion and promiscuity inevitably conjured the apocalypse. And unlike Egypt, which in popular imagining continued serene through the centuries, Babylon is seen to have flourished and fallen again and again, the reading of each episode informed and deformed by those that went before.

Mythical or historical, they go on and on: The Tower of Babel; the conquests of Nebuchednezzar and the invasion of Babylon by Alexander; the glorious court of Haroun-Al-Rashid; the devastation of Baghdad by the Moguls in 1258, where the Tigris ran black with the ink of the manuscripts from the ransacked libraries and the Euphrates ran red with the blood of the slaughtered. Still, is there any other culture from which the distant past, real or imagined, still wields power?

Let’s first take on the antiquities of Mesopotamia, which reveal the constants of Middle Eastern politics. Endlessly fluctuating frontiers and proliferating religions mean endless wars. Here, in the sculptured reliefs, are the cities bombarded, the women and children abused and killed, the aggressive signs of military power displayed, the brutality of militaristic regimes paraded, the puppet rulers installed, deposed, and at times hanged. Baghdad fell in 2003, but Babylon falls everyday in the National Gallery. In Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast, painted in Amsterdam in the 1630s, a corrupt and doomed ruler is about to be deposed by foreign armies, all supposedly in the name of a God he had disparaged. The writing on the wall announces that Belshazzar has been found wanting and that his kingdom will be divided among foreign occupiers. In a few hours divine retribution will strike.

It is the biblical story as depicted by the 17th century Dutch painter. And if the National Gallery shows the night before the debacle, the morning after the invasion is exhibited at the British Museum. In 539 BC, Cyrus, the King of the Persians, entered Babylon and overthrew the tyrannical regime. The event is well known from Hebrew scriptures. But the British Museum also has evidence from another perspective–a cylinder of baked clay about 30 cm long, known as the Cyrus cylinder. It is an extraordinary document, in which Cyrus, using the script and language of his new kingdom, decrees that the cults of the different gods are to be restored and honored, and that the deported populations are to be allowed to return home. Unlike the Hebrew scriptures or Rembrandt’s painting, this is the story as it seemed in Mesopotamia itself.3

The looting of the Baghdad Museum after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003 made headlines around the world. Images of priceless objects from the very roots of our civilization being carted away in the chaos that followed the collapse of the regime caused unprecedented outrage in the West and the Rest. But what is not known is that the treasures of Iraq have been plundered over many years, and on a massive, organized scale. Archaeologists, historians, and UN officials are appalled but seemingly helpless to stop the flow of artifacts out of Iraq and into the hands of museums and collectors in the antiquity-hungry West. Was the emptying of the Baghdad Museum simply random looting in the confusion following the war? Probably not.

There is now strong evidence that some of it was a pre-planned professional operation aimed at feeding the huge Western appetite for Iraq’s incredible heritage. What costs less than a dollar to dig up in the deserts of Iraq can sell for $400,000 at one of the prestigious auction houses of New York, Paris, or London. We can now only dimly imagine how sand bags, used to protect the green zone, are filled with deposits containing shards, bones of memory. Gravel is brought from elsewhere to make car parks and helicopter landing pads, contaminating the archaeological record. Fuel has leaked into the ground. Nine of the molded dragons on the foundations of the Ishtar Gate have been damaged. The brick pavement of the Processional Way has been broken by the wheels of heavy equipment, and further damage to objects still under the ground is likely to accrue. “The movement of heavy vehicles on the surface is,” John Curtis, “generally regarded as very bad practice on an archaeological site.”4

Maybe it takes an expert to know this kind of thing: it is fairly easy for someone (me, for example) with no idea of what to look for to visit a site of archaeological significance and fail to notice that there is anything special about it. The people trampling over Babylon, ignorantly stamping out the fragile remains of a centuries-old civilization, are soldiers, not archaeologists. But that being the case, why are they there at all? The only possible justification for their presence is to protect the sites from looting and other damage in the chaos following the invasion, but as in almost every other aspect of this woefully misconceived adventure, the coalition has ended up doing far more harm than good. The mise à sac of Baghdad is symptomatic of the thoughtlessness–and the disregard for history and indeed collective memory, ancient and modern–that has characterized this war since its first devising.

As the horror and shame of the present time continue, what can we do to denounce an illegal war and a cultural genocide of the worst kind that still go on in Iraq as I write? Very little, except to cry out loud that whoever fights a monster, as Nietzsche once put it, should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself. “When you look long into the abyss,” he wrote, “the abyss also looks at you.” Even so, one can only wince at the manner in which ignorant armies clash by night and go on the rampage of an ancient land and culture while the rest of the Arab world continues to stand by idly quarreling over fallen bread crumbs around the kitchen table, or masturbating in the bedroom where the Real Thing happens as Lacan would have it.

In the meantime, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine are burning. Otherwise, how can we describe the double invagination of 8,000 years of history? One answer comes to mind: the deliberate destruction of Iraq’s heritage is meant to tell the rest of the Arab world that henceforth Iraqis and the rest of us are without collective narrative, history, past, memory. This is the brink of life, or life at the brink.

In the meantime, the suffering of a people should not be used as a pretext to justify the mediocre, cliched, and threadbare, in any form of artistic expression. It is not acceptable that because we are on the tragic edge of history the painting should be reduced to a poster, the lyric to a military anthem, the play to a sermon, the novel to straight ideology, or the poem to a slogan. Unfortunately, Bush Murder Inc. has done just that.

The stench of the operation now hangs in the air over Nineveh and Khorsabad, two Assyrian capitals; Mosul, an important museum containing Assyrian and Islamic artifacts; Ommayad Mosque, Mujahid Mosque, mosque to the prophet Jonas, mosque to Prophet Jerjis, Palace of Qara Sarai; Ashur, Assyrian capital near Makhmur; Arbil, ancient Roman town of Arbela, continuously inhabited for 5000 years; Kirkuk, supposedly site of the fiery furnace in the Book of Daniel; Samarra, Northern capital of al-Khalifa al-Almutasim, built in 836, Great Mosque, Ma’shouq Palace, Abu Duluf Mosque, Askari Tomb; Haditha, near Anah with Babylonian inscriptions and Assyrian minarets; al-Ramadi, ancient town of Heet on the Euphrates; Fallujah, ancient site with cuneiform tablets drawn by Pellugto, ruins of pre-Islamic Anbar, most important city in Iraq after Ctesiphon in 363; Baghdad, capital of Abbassid dynasty, world famous National Museums of Antiquities, Abbassid Palace, Mustansiryah College (possibly the oldest university in the world), Martyr’s Mosque, Archaeological sites of Jemdat Nasr and Abu Salabikh; Kerbala, Shi’a shrine to Imam Hussein, most renowned to Iraq’s Islamic sacred attractions; Babylon; Borsippa Ruined City; Kish Biblical Site, capital of King Sargon, founder of first Mesopotamian Empire; Najav, most important Shi’a shrine to Imam Ali and one of Islamic world’s principal centers of instructions; Uruk, Sumerian city, 4000 BC; Ur, Iraq’s most famous site, perhaps earliest city in the world; Basra al-Qurna, said to be the site of the Garden of Eden with Adam’s tree and its shrine dating back to early days of Islam. This is the reality on the ground today.5

Whether the assault on Iraq is a crusade ordered by God or an unusually aggressive corporate takeover by a consortium of Texas oil companies, we are not sure. What is, however, certain is that the “showdown is all about imperial arrogance unschooled in worldliness, unfettered either by competence or experience, undeterred by history or human complexity, unrepentant in its violence and the cruelty of its technology.”6

In such a case, it is impossible to forgive let alone forget the shame inflicted on a culture that goes back forever, back to the very beginning of time; in its blood and bone and brain it carries the memories and traces of all humanity. For Babylon is also the birthplace of civilization, Abraham, Hammurabi, Nabuchodonosor, Salahueddine, Harun al-Rashid, Scheherazade, Aladin and his magic lamp, Abu Al-‘Ala’ Al-Ma’arri, Al-Mutanabbi. Baghdad is also the city of Mustansirya University, built 25 years before the Sorbonne, the tale of Gilgamesh, The Arabian Nights, Babel with its majestic tower and majestic gardens. Maybe Baghdad, once called Madinat a-Salam (City of Peace), is forever doomed to destruction as Psalm 137 tells us: “O Daughter of Babylon . . . / Happy the man who shall seize / And smash / Your little ones against the rock!” The devil is in the verse.

Notes

1. This is most memorably discussed by Thomas Jones in his “Short Cuts,” LRB 3 February 2005: 22. I am grateful to Jones for the formulation of the idea I develop here.

2. One would not catch George Bush making that kind of mistake. Babylon may have been destroyed, but the traditions of its kings live on: Witness the multimillion-dollar maximum-security inauguration extravaganza in Washington on 20 January–or, for that matter, the annual state opening of Parliament in England. For more on the subject, see Peter Turnley, “Four More Years: Republicans in Black and White,” Harper’s Magazine (November 2004): 47-57.
3. “Robbing the Cradle of Civilization,” CBC Documentary, Wednesday, October 29, 8 p.m.
4. Quoted in Jennifer Allen, “The Worst Devastation Since the Mongols,” Artforum (April 2003): 12.

5. Gregory Elich, “Spoils of War: The Antiquities Trade and the Looting of Iraq,” www.globalresearch.ca 3 January 2004.

6. Edward Said, “Diary,” LRB 12 April 2003: 28.

These summer attacks, particularly those in London , have generated an unprecedented level of debate. If compared to 9/11, it is quite extraordinary how mature the reaction of the British Government and people has been. It is true that the scale of 9/11 cannot be compared to that of 7/7, but it is still amazing to consider the speed with which the majority of British journalists and commentators moved on to consider the underlying causes behind the carnage in London . Post 9/11, any attempt to review the causes was deemed almost sacrilegious. I still clearly remember the hysteria with which erstwhile considerate writers, such as Christopher Hitchens, attacked Noam Chomsky for daring to analyze what lay behind the crimes of Mohammad Atta and his band of mass murderers.

While I respect and salute the maturity of debate around these events, it is important not to overdo it. The simple truth that we must face is this: There can be no political rationale behind the insanity of the attacks of 7/7, Sharm El-Sheikh, Baghdad or anywhere else. These are not a reaction to the invasion of Iraq .

How can these attacks be linked in any way to Iraq when the so-called insurgency in the heart of that country is more focused on killing Iraqis than any other nationality? This is not a perfunctory point that we passively reflect on before moving on to consider the bigger picture. Let us just stop there. What kind of a ridiculous insurgency or revolution focuses on the killing of its own people? What kind of a movement is this that thinks it is worthwhile to kill scores of Iraqi children in order to kill one American soldier who was handing them sweets (as happened in Baghdad on July 13 th , 2005, when a suicide bomber intentionally rammed his vehicle into a large crowd of children, killing 27 people)? This is not a simple detail. Let us look at it again and again. This is the creed of Zarqawi, Bin Laden and others of their ilk. And don’t tell me that, for them, this is collateral damage! The suicide bomber headed straight into the children. These Arab and Muslim children were as much a target for Zarqawi as the US soldiers. All those who want to believe otherwise are deceiving themselves.

Similar obvious questions can be asked of the other acts of madness we have witnessed lately. One of the suicide bombers in Sharm Al-Sheikh intentionally and knowingly drove his car of death straight into a café serving hard working Egyptians, killing 17. That’s because of Iraq ? Or could it be Palestine ? What on earth could have driven the mad bomber to do this? Did he really think he would put pressure on Husni Mubarak by killing his fellow citizens?

The same applies to London . Londoners and other Britons staged the world’s greatest anti-war rally in the run-up to the Iraqi invasion. Anti-war opinion floods the daily newspapers and magazines. Why on earth, in such a country, did British suicide bombers decide to kill their fellow citizens on buses and trains? The naïve say that this is a strategy to influence the British people, so that they put pressure on their government to withdraw from Iraq . But let’s think about it. Imagine this British-born bomber on the tube, as he looks around and sees the fellow passengers he is about to kill or maim. Is he really thinking of justice for Iraqis at that particular moment? As he sees a mom or teenager going about her or his business, is he ecstatic with joy at the thought of bringing justice to Iraq by killing these commuters? Absolute nonsense.

Surely, if the bomber had one tiny brain cell, he would have realized that most of the people he was about to kill were vehemently opposed to the war on Iraq . If he had two brain cells, he would have asked the inevitable question: Who is actually dying in Iraq nowadays and why? Most of the civilian deaths caused in Iraq are the result of acts committed by the brothers in arms of the London bombers. Did these suicide bombers really think that such a bomb would change anything in Iraq ? If they were so passionate about stopping the war in Iraq , why didn’t they consider joining the Liberal Democrats? Did they not realize that there were also Muslims who would be killed? At which point did they lose their humanity?

Once again, let us pause there in order to understand. Before we get to the big picture, let us imagine these killers as they go about their grisly business. Let us analyze that moment to death. When we do pause and think, we realise that the big picture is actually as pathetic and outrageous as we all feared: It is beyond doubt that these killers were brainwashed by the Ben Ladens and Zarqawis of this world into believing a number of outright lies about Islam to be true. This ignominious list of Ladenesque lies that is sweeping the minds of non-thinking Muslims worldwide includes:

• Islam allows the killing of non-Muslims (if anyone disputes that this is what they are being told, please check one of the latest statements by Zarqawi in which he misquotes the Holy Koran and claims that non-Muslims should be killed wherever they can be found);

• The definition of non-Muslims includes the vast majority of Muslims who are not followers of the Zarqawi/Ben Laden brand of Islam. This explains why they don’t give a damn about killing Muslims. In fact, I am sure that for these bombers killing modern Muslims like myself and Shahara Islam (a victim of 7/7) is even more valuable than killing US or British soldiers;

• The Koran fully supports all these actions. One way or another, the brainwashers of the bombers must have constructed an interpretation of Islam that not only condones their actions, but absolutely supports them;
• The life of the Prophet Mohammed contains stories and incidents that support these types of actions. Al-Jazeera broadcast an interview a while back with one of the masterminds of 9/11, and he was saying that the Prophet had allowed the killing of civilians in a couple of incidents during his lifetime.

• The ultimate and greatest goal is to establish an Islamic Caliphate. We don’t need to look far in history to understand what type of Islamic super state they are looking to build. They want a replica of the Taliban’s Afghanistan . That living hell is, apparently, their idea of heaven on earth.

Only this could explain how these young men and women are brainwashed into wasting their and others’ lives. It is a massive misconstruction exercise, centred on the definition of Islam.

The ensuing conclusion is obvious: We Muslims are facing a battle for the soul of Islam. And the choice that faces us all is this: either we give way to the Islamic definitions used by Ben Laden and co, and the undying culture of misinterpretation of Islam, or we fight back to reclaim Islam. There needs to be a revolution of thought that would bring back our religion to its beautiful core.

It is not enough to go around repeating parrot-like that Islam is a religion of peace and these acts have nothing to do with it. We, the modern and true Muslims (if we are going to win this existential battle, we have to start getting a bit more self-confident!), need to re-conquer our religion and clutch it out of the choking grip of backwardness which had befallen it over the last few centuries. It is not just the wild misinterpretations of the terrorist masterminds. Even the mainstream application and interpretation of Islam, in the mosques and schools of the Arab and Muslim world, has gone off-track in various ways over the last few centuries. I am amazed at the smallness and pettiness of several of the Friday prayer sermons that I attend. The Islamic religion has been turned by the average preachers into a religion of fear, petty rituals, self-glorification, and outright xenophobia at times. The clerics focus almost all of their fiery rhetoric on hair-raising depictions of hell for alcohol drinkers and adulterers, wild theories on how the Muslims are victims of conspiracies by almost everyone else on earth, belittlement of Christianity and Judaism (not to mention Buddhism), and much worse. Even in the arts, to which the Islamic civilization contributed so much, the fundamentalists want to put the icing on the cake by decreeing that Islam prohibits all beautiful and spiritual disciplines such as music, film, painting …. Etc.

I remember attending a Friday prayer a year ago, in which the preacher decided to devote his entire speech to the issue of whether or not Muslim men are allowed to have sexual relations with their wives during the month of Ramadan. Is this subject worthy of an entire Friday sermon?

On another occasion, I attended the funeral service of the mother of a friend in Amman . The mosque was filled with the dignified sadness and piety of the relatives and friends of the deceased woman. Some of her friends and relatives, including some hapless Muslims who thought they were exercising their right to freedom of worship, decided not to enter the mosque for the funeral prayer. Suddenly, the preacher bust into an impromptu tirade against the “so-called Muslims” who did not attend his service. He started cursing them and praying to God that they rot in hell! He mocked the non-attendees for standing outside with the non-believers, i.e. Christians! I presume the preacher failed to see the irony of the current misinterpretation of Islam, whereby these Christians could not enter the mosque even if they wanted to.

Is such vengefulness part of the Islam that spread from a small town in the desert of Arabia to the four corners of the world? Is this the Islam of the Prophet Mohammad and his “sahhabah” (companions)? Is this the Islam of Omar Bin Khattab, the second ruler of Muslims after the Prophet and a man who would qualify for the title of history’s fairest and most just ruler? Bin Khattab, a friend of the prophet’s from the outset of the revelations, had an almost superhuman obsession with Justice. Every decision, every action was considered, reconsidered over and over again in the interest of Justice. He would roam the streets at night incognito to see whether the people were well-fed. He would castigate his lieutenants and province governors for the slightest mis-treatment of the people. He treated people of other faiths with extreme respect, famously refusing to pray in the main Church of Jerusalem upon the peaceful conquest of the City; he was worried that, if he prayed in the Church, Muslims would afterwards use that gesture as an excuse to turn it into a mosque. He also signed a treaty in which he assured all the inhabitants of Jerusalem that none of their churches or any other places of worship would be touched under Muslim rule, and providing a written guarantee of freedom of worship to all inhabitants of the city.

This is Islam. This is the Islam that truly conquered the hearts and minds of the world. If there are shameful episodes in our history, and each civilisation has its share of shame, then it is the deeds of Muslims and not the teachings of Islam. If our religion was as static and unforgiving as the current interpreters would have us believe, how could it have reached the hearts of millions and so quickly. It was Islam’s obsession with justice, fairness and equal rights that endeared it to the world in the Seventh century. And it is those same principles that we must use to save Islam today.

Compare the life of Mohammad and his companions with the Taliban, with their despicable destruction of Buddhist temples (compare that with Bin Khattab’s treatment of Christian monuments in Jerusalem, or even the Pyramids in Cairo; why didn’t the early Muslims lay the Pyramids to waste?), not to mention their systematic demolition of all facets of dignified life for those who had to endure their rule in Afghanistan for a few abhorrent years; compare it with Zarqawi’s stream of bombings targeting Shia mosques and institutions.

The lists are endless on both sides. On the one hand, the stories of the life of Mohammad and his companions are flooded with compassion and the pursuit of justice and equality. On the other hand, the stories of the systematic and wilful misconstruction of Islam by today’s terrorists and certain so-called “ulama” are as numerous as they are shameful.

It is surely time for us to reclaim our religion. It is time to re-connect Islam with its history. It is time to read Islam in context. The context is the life of the Prophet and those who were there at the outset of the Islamic revelation. The context is their actions in the time in which they lived. Omar Bin Abdul Azeez, another Muslim Caliph in the golden age of Islam, strove for the greatest standards of justice and equality a thousand years before the European enlightenment. It is the fact that he strove for such excellence in such an unlikely time and improbable setting that should give us, as Muslims today, room for sober reflection. It is the fact that the Prophet gave absolute equality in opportunities and dignity of life to both men and women during his time that should shame current preachers who would confine women to their homes and a life of servitude. It is the fact that the Prophet gave women rights of inheritance one thousand years before many European countries that we must dwell upon. This is how advanced and avant-garde Islam was. If Islam made the Prophet and his contemporaries aim so high then, how can we allow it to go so low today.

It is not about confining the text to its most rigid and mindless interpretation. It is how those texts were applied, and the spirit of that application, by those who understood them best, i.e. the Prophet, his companions and the early bearers of the message.

It is our historic responsibility to save Islam. Never before has our religion been under such a concerted attack. And the attackers are neither Bush nor Blair. The real blasphemy is spreading insidiously from within. With the forces of misinterpretation as powerful as they are, it is no easy task to devise a specific plan to reclaim our religion. But surely the first step is to speak out without fear. And today I wanted to join the increasing ranks of Muslims who have chosen to raise their voice in defence of a religion that is longing to reclaim its place as a beacon for graceful spirituality, justice, tolerance and equality.

It funny, for all the current saber-rattling going on about Iran at the moment, Bush seems completely ignorant of the fact that he himself has just helped create a new Iran: a battered, bitter post-Saddam Iraq at the risk of succumbing to fascism in the guise of moral authority. Oh sweet irony.

What’s wrong with having a religiously conservative Iraq? Well, nothing really, as long as women aren’t being stoned to death for making personal decisions regarding their sexuality, as long as representatives of other religions don’t get prosecuted, as long as dissenting bloggers aren’t being thrown in jail, and controversial writers aren’t being threatened with fatwas. The scary thing for all of us living in America is the notion that if all those things really do start taking place in Iraq, the American government will ignore them stoically, attempting to save face. Nobody is going to want to admit that atrocities are happening, if only to avoid shouldering the responsibility since, hey, we did invade them first. Oops.

If Iraq is going to be the new Iran I will hang my head in despair, not out of some presumed Western superiority complex with regards to Islam, but because the government of Iran has little to do with Islam, and a lot to do with modern day fascism. Expressions of faith and spirituality do not have to go hand-in-hand with oppression and bigotry, but tell that to the Ayatollah, who recently chose to continue persecuting Salman Rushdie. Is this the future of the new Iraq?

When I see pictures of the wives of new Iraqi politicians, tiptoeing behind their husbands with their faces primly covered, I have to admit that I could care less what these women are wearing. But I do care about the fact that there are plenty of women in Iraq who aren’t interested in the burkha, or marriage to powerful men. Are they going to be allowed to make their own choices? Or does President Bush’s beloved “freedom” apply only to those members of Iraqi society in possession of male gonads and fundamentalist beliefs?

Here’s hoping I’ll be proven wrong.

P.S. River at Baghdad Burning confirmed my worst fears. Let’s hope that in the future, she won’t.

I will always remember my conversation with a friend on the day it transpired that Baghdad was about to break all records in the speed of city surrender in conflict (so much for Stalingrad!). He said in despair: “Call me back in a few minutes. I think I’m going to kill myself.”! This friend is a modern Arab. His education and work life had been almost entirely in Europe and the pragmatism of that continent marks his character. And he has always believed in the sanctity of democracy. He was far ahead of Bush and Rumsfeld in the anti-Saddam stakes. He hated Saddam so much he would have recurring nightmares in which he sees a scarily grumpy Saddam threatening to kill him. Yet he was hoping, like that overwhelming majority of Arabs, for a victory for the Iraqi people.

Other enlightened Arabs were hoping against hope for a miracle: the Iraqi people, in a moment of inspiration at once rivaling the American War of Independence and the Czech Velvet revolution, would put up a stoic resistance to the Anglo American invasion while simultaneously getting rid of Saddam. People power like never seen before in the Arab world.

But that was too much to ask of a people who have lived for at least six hundred years under dictatorial or colonial rule. That is too much to ask of other Arab people who have also lived for at least six hundred years deprived of freedom. There can be no turning point in Arab fortunes without a structured and pragmatic agenda. An agenda that would be wholeheartedly adopted by big sections of that proverbial Arab street. Another friend of mine (an Arab too) has so long despaired of the Arab street, he frequently taunts me by saying the street is entirely populated by lackadaisical Shawirma sellers. But it’s our own laziness in thinking up a solid vision for the future that leads us to this interminable cycle of self-mockery, desperation and empty dreams of easy salvation.

There is no salvation from an Anglo American invasion of Iraq. Not even if Bush and Blair were angelic reincarnations of Mother Teresa and Thomas Jefferson. Not even if it’s proven that we were all too skeptical of the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and, contrary to all reasonable analysis and the facts, they were actually selfless warriors who dream of nothing more than assisting the Iraqis and other Arabs in establishing democracies. The fact of the matter is that the US, like every superpower since the beginning of time, is working to further its own self-interest. And as the historical record shows, the US has almost always worked against true democratic movements in the Middle East. But US intentions are ultimately irrelevant in this debate. Nothing good will ever come to the Arab world unless Arabs start willing it for themselves.

Most Arabs are presently caught between a rock and a hard place. The governing regimes are, for the most part, the antitheses of democracy and the rule of law. Yet, if elections were held tomorrow, it’s acknowledged that the winners would be extremist religious parties that fundamentally reject the notion of democracy. So where do we go from here? Do we simply accept the status quo, as so many do, on the ground that the relative tolerance of the regimes in power is infinitely better than the unpalatable alternative that awaits us in the ballot box? Do we simply accept the religious parties’ almost absolute dominance of the hearts and minds of the majority? Do we simply resign to our seemingly eternal role as spectators? Just hang around and hope Bush doesn’t bomb Syria next? Just watch television and cry tears of shame and hilarity as Arab governments yet again demonstrate unparalleled impotence towards every important issue of the day?

Surely, there is a way out. A way that is not confrontational, reactionary or revolutionary. We definitely don’t need any more so-called revolutionary movements in the Arab world. God knows we’ve had enough of those and they have almost succeeded in destroying what the colonial powers and dynastical systems couldn’t get to.

What is needed is a new movement that seeks to unite the “we” I took the liberty of using so far. I am talking of Arabs who are tired of an Arabia that is light years behind realizing its true potential. Arabs who firmly believe that Islam is the greatest and most positive force in the history of the region, yet understand that the notion of mixing politics and religion is at best an act of self-serving deception. Arabs who are wise enough to realize that talk of democracy being incompatible with Arab culture is nothing more than racist claptrap propagated by apologists for the pervading dictatorial rule. Arabs who are open to the culture of the world and believe that there is a lot of good to be learnt from the economic and political success stories of Europe, Asia, and, yes, the United States. Arabs who believe in our potential to play a key role in a vibrant free market economy. Arabs who will settle for nothing less than real and lasting justice for their long suffering compatriots in Palestine. And last but not least, Arabs who believe, whether by conviction or necessity, that Arab unity is the only real bedrock for sustainable development in the region.

This movement need not focus on political change. It should direct its efforts at real cultural, social and economic change in the Arab world. On the economic level, while it is still lamentable that inter-Arab trade represents only around 9% of Arab countries’ trade, there are signs that regional business is on the rise. This is particularly the case in the Information Technology and other copyright-based industries. A new breed of young Arab businessmen is coming to the fore. Businessmen who tailor their economic models on the region, racing to set up branches in Amman, Cairo, Riyadh and other Arab cities. While such regional expansion is of course not novel, the passion with which these new age traders seek Arab synergies is.

A concerted effort must be made to raise the level of cultural awareness in the region. A starting point should be book-reading. We must do everything possible to make reading books cool in Arabia again! The Arab book publishing business, let alone the business of reading, is in terrible disarray. I am always amazed when I travel in the region; plane passengers almost never carry a book on them. Whilst any flight in Europe is a mobile air library. We are in desperate need for public awareness initiatives to increase book reading. This is an important step in fostering the culture of democracy in the Arab mind.

This movement would give voice and structure to the impressive outburst of expression spreading across the internet. Every day, I am bombarded with articles and thoughts on Iraq, Palestine and the world from friends, friends of friends, distant acquaintances… The internet is providing the forum that empires and armies tried to deny us for centuries. It is finding its way to every office and home. It’s the voice of new Arabia.

I do not purport to write a program for this movement in this short article. I simply wanted to express the obvious need for it. In the Arab world, we will not have the strands of political thinking that pervade in Europe and the US. There will not be an Arab equivalent of the Tories and Labour. No Arab Gores and Bushes fighting it out in a bye-election in Karbala! The slow and hard road to democracy in Arabia will be traveled by three schools of thought, the same schools that will compete in any eventual democracy that we hope to achieve in the region: the “status quo” movement (arguing that what we have now is better than any alternative), the political Islam movement, and the modern freedom-aspiring pan-Arab movement. It is this last movement that needs to spring into action immediately, bringing the disparate personalities and groups that believe in its tenets together. It’s a historic opportunity that we cannot miss.