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We've Been Here Before
This is just another tip of the iceberg! and "I Am" not going away.
Maybe those that are sitting on the fence in, their "little dream worlds" should take a long hard look in the mirror!!! lol
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As the campaign to bring democracy to Egypt goes on through the night in that huge country and the people die in the street, over their need for some freedom from oppression after all these years and the movement amongst Arab youth grows by the week across the Middle East - have a read of this very important piece by Palden Jenkins (in the UK) who has spent years in the middle east and working with groups, especially in Palestine, to help bring change in the way people approach reform from the ground, up .... I suggest that if you want, send out to your friends lists so as to spread a better understanding , of what's going down in the M.East.
About Middle Eastern movements
Palden Jenkins
I first published a rather prescient article about Muslim extremism amongst the young in January 2007. The street movements of early 2011, four years later, though not specifically Muslim in ethos, prompted me to re-publish it, with a few small adaptations. The title comes from a line in My Generation’ by The Who.
There's something many people don't understand about what's happening in the Middle East. It concerns generation gaps and the way that history changes: old people die off and young people grow up. We hear a lot about Middle East extremism’ but this is the language of paunchy authoritarians indicating that Muslim popular movements do not agree with their values and profit margins. Meanwhile, there's more.
As an aged hippy extremist’ who went through a spiritual and political awakening with my peers in the 1960s, I see parallels between the cultural movement of which I was a part and the younger-generation Muslim-world street movements of today. They're not just Muslim, they're social movements, and they could equally be socialist, nationalist, rights-based or just cool’.
They are populated to a great extent by young people, with not a few women. Even middle-aged parties such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are being outflanked by these largely spontaneously-arising movements. Across the Middle East, a majority of the population is younger than 25. This matters because today's youths are tomorrow's policymakers, the street’ is a crucible of new ideas and, democracy or not, majorities matter.
In the West we see the world in terms of an ageing 20th century picture, with the developed world’ positioned as the fount of wealth, ideas, initiative and power. But we're in a new century, and many seem oblivious to the full implications of this. Since 2000 the geopolitical agenda has been dominated by an attempt to stamp American hegemony on the future, specifically on hapless Afghanistan and Iraq – it hasn't worked, and many people now know this. But they have little idea of what comes next.
In the 1960s-70s my generation envisioned a new age, a new civilisation. Raucous and colourful it all was, yet it was also the seed-point for many issues that nowadays dominate the public agenda: bio-sustainability, gender, minority and race issues, global networking and culture, holistic or ‘joined up’ thinking and more. Another key element, spirituality (in distinction to religion) is little-mentioned nowadays as a major social issue, but it lurks beneath the surface, perhaps waiting until people's waistlines shrink and their insecurities escalate. The world is faced with mammoth issues and a need for quantum solutions. The Middle East is one of the nexus-points for this.
Love is still all we Need
To Westerners preoccupied with terrorism and insurgency – that is, assaults on our sense of order and control – what is not seen is the revival of love, humanism and spirituality lying behind Middle Eastern movements. Westerners see violence, mayhem and insurgency, not the potential dawning of a new paradigm of human behaviour – and they’re both right and wrong.
Central to emergent street-level thinking in the Middle East is the notion of the umma, the ‘community of believers’. Taken a level deeper, the umma is what French Enlightenment philosophers called the social contract’ – an implicit consensus of good behaviour, respect, integrity and mutuality between people and with social institutions.
In the Sixties, a key element of the new paradigm’ was community – a sense of a need to transform personal, social and global relations. Those who like to denigrate the alternative movement’ of that time quote failed communities as examples of its flawed, lofty idealism. But the times they are a-changing, and what once was an ideal, difficult to get working, is now looking suspiciously like the basis for a pragmatic global solution.
Faced as we are with drastic climatic, ecological, resource, development and conflict issues worldwide, we’re heading for terrible downfall or enormous breakthrough, or some of both. A massive collective choice is involved. Visionary and pragmatic solutions surreptitiously converge when they’re faced with a vacuum of fundamental answers such as we see today. Love is not only what we need: in future decades it might constitute a macro-economic and geopolitical survival agenda.
As a young hippy, I saw no purpose in war, competition, ego, materialism and exploitation. I set about building alternatives with a minority of kindred spirits - inspired or misguided, depending on your viewpoint. We didn't initially set out to oppose the system’ – we set out to bring new light, love and solutions into society. We ate macrobiotic food, toked chillums, sat cross-legged and thought geodesic thoughts. It became clear this was not welcome, and the heavy hand of repression came down – for our own good, of course. Our fathers had fought for freedom, and we should be grateful, yet we saw that the free world’ we lived in was totalitarian. It still is. All that changed from Stalin's and Hitler's time was the increased use of carrots instead of sticks.
Had the West openly investigated the possibilities revealed in the Sixties, starting a programme of incremental change over the decades that followed, we might now have no war on terror, no clash of civilisations, neither the same degree of social degeneration, hyper-government, devastation, nuclear proliferation, climate change or even drug addiction.
Things could have gone in a different direction. We had this option. Heaven wouldn't have dawned on Earth, but we would have made significant progress tackling issues that were visible 30-40 years ago and now constitute a mounting crisis. This was foreseen.
Today, we’re seeing a comparable movement in the Middle East. Young people are struggling for new answers – partly thrashing around, partly inspired and innovative. Teenagers have a sharpness of vision that their jaded, experienced elders don’t. The paradoxes they face are enormous, yet they see possibilities where older generations see none or have given up. As for us in the Sixties, the picture we formed then was still formative, not yet clear, a mishmash of ideas and beliefs within which a new centre of gravity was forming. It was generated from deep feelings of pain felt about social conditions, the state of the world, and a struggle for a new identity, and a future to hope for. It’s similar today.
The key movers in the Middle East today are those who have grown up straddled between Western and Muslim values, whose position and identity are most unclear. To the surprise of staid Westerners, many terrorists’ and suicide bombers of recent decades have been educated people with prospects, not deranged losers with an axe to grind. Terrorism is no longer cool with younger people today, but the young people on the streets are nevertheless the bright ones, tech-savvy, globalised.
Similarly, in the West, the visions and principles of the Sixties grew up amongst young, educated, middle class youngsters, not amongst the workers and the downtrodden. The revolution’ didn’t reach the workers, who by then were the old guard. Similarly, what goes on in the text messages of young folks in Basra, Isfahan, Beirut, Tunis and Ramallah is hardly comprehended by the oldsters who look on from across the street. They just don't know.
The manic mujahedin
It started with fundamentalism’ in the 1970s to the 1990s, an ethic wrung out of a growing sense of aversion to what the Middle East had become. It was a reaction to the influence of amoral Western modernity. Fundamentalists thought that, by cleaving to a categorical, conservative rendering of orthodox Muslim values, society could be weeded of its degenerative ills. Foreign powers didn’t like this, so we saw a succession of wars for control, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the American invasion of Iraq.
Fundamentalism became tied to gunfire, with mujahedin as its foot-soldiers. Westerners failed to recognise that, though confused and militant, this movement’s roots lay in a sincere quest for new human relations. It referenced back to a lost golden age, a caliphate, from the time before the foreign infidel Crusaders came along 900 years ago – a romantic perception, yes, but with some basis to it.
This was just a start, and things have moved on. As the ayatollahs of Iran have proven, old men with religious authority aren't the fount of all wisdom, and they certainly don’t share the perceptions of the upcoming young. Many of the young began to feel the weight of the old guard by the 1990s. But the same is also the case for many of the young disaffected in the West who, given a choice between a tab of ecstasy or the right to vote, might well choose the ecstasy.
Though anti-Western feeling pervaded fundamentalism, Western technology played a crucial role in moving things beyond fundamentalism. The Iranian revolution in the late 1970s was facilitated by the smuggling and circulation of cassette tapes and, by the 1990s, networking moved on to mobile phones and Internet. These have helped create a new, buzzy fermentation, a new reality for young people. These gizmos are no longer Western. This new fermentation has grave doubts about the misbehaving West. Longer-term, it will outpace the West.
Behind this networking phenomenon lies a moral questing, a soul-searching before Allah in the face of social disintegration, violence and oppression. For folks like me four decades ago, such questing was fulfilled through LSD and lifestyle transformation. For many younger Muslims, a new understanding of Allah, of social goals and community standards is emerging from between a rock and a hard place. Gaza, Beirut and Baghdad are the nexus of their concerns.
For young Arabs or Iranians the Q’uran provides many useful spiritual and behavioural answers, but a renewed, self-defined interpretation is emerging. There’s an anxious sense of 'What did we do wrong to incur all the suffering we get?'. Allah, help me become whole again. What went wrong in the 20th century was two main things: a homegrown loss of progressive impetus in Muslim society, and its insidious corruption by Western ways. The key element here was the breakdown of the social contract and the rise of individualism, which gave some the freedom to explore life as they felt best, yet it isolated people, killing off families, communities and inter-generational connections. It killed the umma, that consensus of mutually-supportive values, understanding and cooperation that should, by rights, be common in the world.
The Umma
Western intervention in the Middle East has had two counterproductive effects: it corrupted and obstructed natural, self-generated renewal in the Islamic world, and it alienated many Muslims or drove them further into Islam, seeking indigenous answers. The more it imposed its values, economics and military might, the more the West drove younger Muslims against it, and against its placemen heading most Middle Eastern regimes.
The struggle to revive the umma is not just an anti-Western jihad. It is a struggle against what is ‘not right’ in Islamic society and culture – though definitions vary as to what this means. It’s a movement for solidarity, peace, social welfare and community, seeking a new future – a new paradigm. To young people, many of the older generation have come to constitute the problem, having fallen into a compromised, corrupt or tainted condition. This is a different perspective from that of fundamentalism – it’s heterodox and psychological rather than orthodox and ideological.
At root it is peaceable. But too many of the young have watched family being killed or jailed, or witnessed American or Israeli missiles slamming into neighbours’ houses. The older generation tried negotiation, and they got nothing: current generations want no more of this charade. Hence, in Palestine, the gentlemanly Abu Mazen and the Fatah establishment, who made deals with the Israelis, only to watch them bulldoze and enclose even more Palestinian land, have lost support. Hamas, who refuse to deal with the Israelis until they behave themselves, have retained some support, though they risk backing themselves into a corner and becoming outdated too. Their asset is that they have a philosophy based on the umma, and they are noticeably lacking in corruption. Their philosophy is more in step with the way things are going, though some may disagree with the way they're doing it.
So resistance’ is a moot term today: does it mean fighting back, throwing off’, or does it mean preserving one’s culture quietly while the tanks roll by outside? In the end it means neither: movements like Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon recognise that a society becomes strong when it has justice, welfare and relative equity – a reconstituted umma. To foreign visitors to Palestine, this is already somewhat visible today: despite 60 years of pressure and hardship, the surprising strength of Palestinian society and its tangible human and community values are impressive. A Palestinian street is safer to walk down than a Western street on Friday night. You don't hear about this in the media.
But Western governments and media have decided the Muslim world is fundamentally violent and chaotic, harbouring terrorists and resisting ‘progress’. The Western approach to dealing with that, demonstrated by USA in Iraq and Israel in Lebanon, nowadays defeats its purpose: by bombing hell out of ordinary people, the lesson many Muslims learn is that resistance is even more necessary. Hezbollah staved off the Israelis in 2006 not through military superiority but because of resolve, passion and sheer effectiveness – their hearts were in it.
But the Middle East is caught in a loop of violence. To quote Hussein Issa, the late founder of Hope Flowers, a peace and democracy school in Bethlehem, Palestine, “Every act of violence is the result of an unhealed wound'. This school teaches kids how to handle difficult situations, speak their truth and work together with others. It uses counselling, therapy and creativity to help kids and their parents heal their pain and slip out of the loop of vengeance and violence. This is the language of feelings, vulnerability, faith and reconciliation in the new umma – though Hussein was not a Muslim activist or extremist, and he wouldn't use the term umma’.
The urge for umma, for social intimacy, trust and community, is not unique to Muslims – it's inherently human. But Muslims are nowadays placing this issue centre-stage in today’s world. Western socialist reformers of a century ago failed to create an umma, a socialist or communist society, because they lost their hearts in the rubble of politics. Power became more important than people.
The West's failure to recognise the validity of Muslim social movements puts the West itself in danger – mainly from itself. There are many parallels between these and the Western workers’ movements of the early 20th Century – a massing of people at the bottom of the pile, generating new ideas and morphing toward a new order. Social reformers of a century ago were troublemakers and extremists too, but now they are historic figures. If the West and its proxy power-holders in the Middle East were wise, it would listen to the modern Muslim movements, for they play a key part in the future.
Quantum shifts
There is more to this. The movements of the Sixties – not just flower power, people power, black power, feminism and eco-warriors, but also those bringing new ideas in science, technology, media and social thinking – were not simply a logical extension of what went on before. A significant leap was made: looking back from today, it was the gateway to a digitised, globalised age. The full, historic story is yet to be fulfilled, and the ideals and visions sketched out then are under test now. That decade represented a quantum shift, the prequel to a new time.
Arnold Toynbee, the Oxford historian, observed that, when a civilisation reaches its zenith, as Western civilisation arguably did in the late 20th Century, it needs a new guiding vision to give it a future. Otherwise it lapses, becoming formulaic, losing creative initiative, eventually becoming irrelevant and superseded. In the 1960s, such a zenith-vision emerged in places like San Francisco and Liverpool, crazy as it seemed. It wasn't coherent, but its core ideas were important. The price the West now pays for shoving it to the side is that it has now lost the plot. It's busy talking mainly to itself and it is miscalculating badly.
Not that the rest of the world has all the answers, but something else is starting to happen. The future lies in the hands of those who once were the victims, clients and subjects of the West and the Soviet bloc – the former third world, now the majority world. The West is being overtaken. This is their century – like the last few centuries were ours.
Young Middle Eastern movements of today suggest a quantum shift that resembles that of the Sixties. They represent a new computation of the issues and solutions, starting from a new starting-point and seeking a new horizon. The Street has a new perception, facilitated by the community of the cellphone, e-mail, YouTube, satellite TV and the airplane. It’s driven from below, it's youthful and driven by half of the population. It's an organic network, not an organisation. It has language and laws, shared sentiments and perspectives. This is a form of texted, emailed hyper-democracy. Like us pot-smokers of old, they have found ways of bypassing the authorities, and they get away with many things the rest of society doesn't know about. Like the ecstasy-driven dance generation of the 1990s, their community and feeling of togetherness, their umma, is the key.
The world transformation ethic of the Sixties was contained and suppressed in the 1970s, diverted into glitzy gizmo-fascination and money-making in the 1980s, becoming a waste, proliferation and waistline problem in the 1990s. Arguably these displacement strategies are derailing in the early 2000s. The new movements of the Middle East might or might not themselves be successfully suppressed or diverted, and they might or might not get things right – this will emerge in the coming years. But something historic is still happening long-term.
One lesson of our day is that chickens come home to roost, and governments and security forces cannot stop the tide of history – they can only complicate it. Today we have a global crisis, predicted 40 years ago and then studiously ignored: it makes the clash of civilisations and the war on terror look small. Globally, we are faced with a challenge to get our priorities right and act on them. It's a survival issue.
A major key is the umma, the community of souls – not just of Muslims, but everyone. The message of the 21st Century is simple: together we stand, divided we fall. What Westerners don't see is that ‘Muslim extremists’, in a strange and convoluted way, point the way to a lot of answers, toward a new umma.
The difficult bit for Westerners is that, having been top dogs, we have to rejoin the human race on equitable terms before we can get our fingers back on the pulse. Our buzzwords – peace, freedom, democracy and human rights – sound good, but our actions smell badly. We continue to want to maintain our comfortable lifestyles and export our double standards, whatever the cost to others. So the world is bypassing us. This is why we need to recognise that what’s brewing in the Middle East is worth watching. Don't be deceived – it's not just bombs and rioting. There's much more.
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© Copyright Palden Jenkins 2007 (Updated 2011). This article may be reproduced for personal and networking use if unaltered, whole and properly attributed. Reproduction in quantity or pay-for media requires permission. www.palden.co.uk palden.jenkins@btopenworld.com
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Feb. 1, 2011