Al-Dayah begins by quoting an unnamed Hamas leader who condemned critics of the organization’s attack on Israel.

The politician castigated as “fools” those who argued that it would have been safer to avoid armed conflict rather than losing tens of thousands of lives. The politician denounced such persons as a fifth column for Israel, aiming to weaken “this nation and its determination.” The Hamas leader alleged that Israel killed 500 Palestinians at West Bank checkpoints in 2022, even though the Palestinians were not engaged in violent struggle that year. He implied that Israel would kill Palestinians even if they were passive. The price for being occupied was being paid then, but, he said, “you have to choose whether to pay it freely as a fighter and a victor, God willing, or to pay it in humiliation, disappointment, and loss.”

Al-Dayah refutes this militant, reminding him that struggling in the way of God is not a straightforward, simplistic duty, but is predicated on conditions, purposes and principles. It is necessary to consider matters such as the character of one’s leaders and soldiers, the terrain, the weaponry available, and the character of the opponent (whom he calls “the aggressor,” suggesting he believes this warfare is defensive).

[The issue of “terrain” is an important one. I quote Mao Zedong in my new book, Gaza Yet Stands, to the effect that having rugged terrain that affords hiding places is essential to a guerrilla movement. Otherwise, Mao said, the insurgents are just roving peasant rebels, doomed to fail. Gaza is not a promising place from which to fight a guerrilla struggle.]

Al-Dayah repeats that “aggression against religion” is one of the grounds for launching such a military struggle, as are “life, honor, family, land or property.”

Since it is a religious struggle, it has to be predicated on faith and sincerity, the righteousness of the individuals involved, and their cohesiveness and preparation, as well as logistical matters.

But there are, al-Dayah says, also counter-indications that might weigh against launching such a struggle. If the prerequisites listed above are lacking or defective, it cannot be undertaken.

Most important, you can’t launch a struggle for the faith if it seems likely that it will fail: “it is essential to avoid it if it is likely to bring harm to religion, life, honor, family, or property.”

He points out that the Qur’an, the Muslim scripture, promises that pious Muslims can prevail when the odds are 1 to 2 (Q. 8:66). The conclusion we may draw from the verse is that the believers cannot win against just any odds. If they are overwhelmed 3 to 1, they should avoid entering the fray. He quotes the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin, Ibn Abbas, as having said: “If a man retreats from two, he has fled, but if he retreats from three, he has not fled.”

His implication is that the Israeli armed forces are far superior in numbers, training, and equipment to the 30,000 members of the al-Qassam Brigades, the paramilitary of Hamas. Given this reality, it is “permissible to refrain from initiating combat.”

He also repudiated the Hamas leader for his harsh accusations against suffering Palestinians mourning the gravity of the disaster that has befallen them. They don’t, he insisted, deserve to be called agents or cowards for wishing it could have been avoided.

He points out, “These are the sentiments of the majority of people, whose homes are gone, their loved ones have perished, and they endure all forms of suffering.”

He concludes, “I ask God Almighty to return us to the right path and hasten relief. Amen.”

Prof. Dr. Salman bin Nasr Al-Dayah

The legal opinion has six sections, with this having been the first. In subsequent broadsides, he went on to elaborate his arguments. For instance, he quotes a saying of the Prophet that “it is not for the believer to humiliate himself” by undertaking a campaign clearly doomed to failure. I think, however, we get the point.

Al-Dayah rejects secular states and even the fundamentalist governance of Hamas, arguing for a restored Muslim caliphate or theocracy. However, he belongs to the quietist branch of Salafism or revivalism, since he generally rejects violence as a path to his aspirations, especially if the violence is stupid. Al-Dayah has refused to leave North Gaza, even though the Israeli authorities are attempting to ethnically cleanse it.

Similar debates were conducted between quietist Salafis in Jordan and the proponents of ISIL (ISIS, Daesh), the so-called “Islamic state” group.

Before the 2006 election, nearly half of the voters in Gaza supported the secular, nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization, and it is not clear that 18 years of Hamas rule will have altered this proportion. Indeed, the evidence from countries that have a state religion is that it tends to drive people away from religion or make them apathetic toward it. Al-Dayah as a quietist Salafi may not represent a very large proportion of Palestinians in Gaza. His discontents with Hamas, however, are likely widely shared.

The Arabic text of the fatwa was posted to Facebook.

The verse “Shema Yisrael” is a testimony to God’s oneness. The same idea is central to Islam. A linguistic connection shows Judaism and Islam share much in common.

( The Times of Israel) – This Shabbat we read the second paragraph of the Shema, and last week we read the first paragraph which opens with a call — arguably the most famous prayer in our liturgy:

Listen, Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4).

“The first paragraph of the Shema as written in a Mezuzah or Tefillin), July 2009, Picture taken from a Mezuzah or Tefillin.” Public domain. Wikimedia Commons.

The Masoretes determined that when written in the Torah scroll – 2 letters should have special formatting: The final letter of the first word שמע, ayin, and the final letter of the last word אחד, dalet, are enlarged (see pic). These two enlarged Hebrew letters spell the word עד, or “witness.” By saying the Shema, we are acting as a “witness” testifying to the existence and oneness of the Divine.

This concept of bearing witness to God’s oneness is central to Islam too, and is referred to as the ‘testimony‘ or Shahada (الشَّهَادَةُ).

It is part of the adhān, the call to prayer, and is considered one of the Five Pillars of Islam.

The word ‘Shahada’ derives from the same root of a Biblical monument to peace. When Jacob and Laban–who both felt wronged by the other–decided to let bygones be bygones, they erected a mound of stones as a witness their peace treaty. Laban called it in Aramaic יְגַר שָׂהֲדוּתָא, Yegar Sahaduta (like Shahada), while Jacob called it גַּלְעֵד Gal-ed – both meaning “Mound Witness” (Genesis 31:47).

We see how roots and concepts are shared between Judaism and Islam.

Reprinted from The Times of Israel with the author’s permission.

Eyewitnesses said that not all the dead were elderly, that young persons died, as well.

Pilgrims carry out a series of rituals during the pilgrimage, beginning with preparing themselves and establishing their pious intention. Many of the steps involve being outside and being active. They dress in white robes. They circumambulate the cube-shaped Kaaba shrine. They run between the nearby hillocks of Safa and Marwa seven times, in commemoration of the search of Abraham’s wife Hajar for water for her son with the patriarch, Ishmael. They walk or are taken in buses to Mina and spend some nights of the pilgrimage there. There, they throw stones at satan.

H/t Saudi Ministry of Hajj

AFP explains that some pilgrims try to avoid paying the hefty visa fees by just showing up unregistered. They however, then lack access to air conditioned facilities and are at special risk of heat stroke.

The number of heat stroke deaths seems to have doubled since last year. Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s major oil producers, and burning petroleum to power vehicles puts the deadly heat-trapping gas, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere, heating up the planet.

The G20 Climate Risk Atlas writes, “The science shows that Saudi Arabia will experience devastating climate impacts if it follows a high-emissions pathway. Without urgent action, Saudi Arabia will see an 88% increase in the frequency of agricultural drought by 2050. Heatwaves will last more than 4,242% longer and the combination of sea level rise, coastal erosion and fiercer weather will cause chaos for Saudi Arabia’s economy, which stands to lose around 12.2% of GDP by 2050.”

A 12.2% loss of gross domestic product for Saudi Arabia today would amount to a loss of $135 billion annually. That loss alone is more than the entire yearly GDP of Kenya or Ecuador.

Flooding on the kingdom’s coasts as the sea level rises threatens 210,000 of the 22 million citizens. Long droughts endanger fisheries, forests and agriculture, which make up 2.6% of the country’s gross domestic product. Longer heat waves will reduce the quality of life and menace livelihoods and health.

I have to tell you, I have lived in the Arabian Peninsula. I remember one June evening my wife and I were ready to take a short walk over to a restaurant when it was 114° F., and we went out and were met with a blast furnace. We went back in and ordered an air conditioned car for the two-minute drive. We just couldn’t bear to walk five minutes in it.

The Saudi government sees hosting the annual Hajj or pilgrimage as a form of soft power that adds to its legitimacy throughout the Muslim world, comprising some 2 billion persons. If its oil-intensive policies increasingly contribute to disabilities for pilgrims on Hajj, in turn, that development can only harm the monarchy’s reputation, since it styled itself “Servant of the two holy shrines.”

AFP Video: “Hajj pilgrimage ends amid deadly Saudi heat spike | AFP

(The Conversation) – Algorithms have become integral to our lives. From social media apps to Netflix, algorithms learn your preferences and prioritise the content you are shown. Google Maps and artificial intelligence are nothing without algorithms.

So, we’ve all heard of them, but where does the word “algorithm” even come from?

Over 1,000 years before the internet and smartphone apps, Persian scientist and polymath Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī invented the concept of algorithms.

In fact, the word itself comes from the Latinised version of his name, “algorithmi”. And, as you might suspect, it’s also related to algebra.

Largely lost to time

Al-Khwārizmī lived from 780 to 850 CE, during the Islamic Golden Age. He is considered the “father of algebra”, and for some, the “grandfather of computer science”.

Yet, few details are known about his life. Many of his original works in Arabic have been lost to time.

It is believed al-Khwārizmī was born in the Khwarazm region south of the Aral Sea in present-day Uzbekistan. He lived during the Abbasid Caliphate, which was a time of remarkable scientific progress in the Islamic Empire.

Al-Khwārizmī made important contributions to mathematics, geography, astronomy and trigonometry. To help provide a more accurate world map, he corrected Alexandrian polymath Ptolemy’s classic cartography book, Geographia.

He produced calculations for tracking the movement of the Sun, Moon and planets. He also wrote about trigonometric functions and produced the first table of tangents.

Al-Khwārizmī was a scholar in the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikmah) in Baghdad. At this intellectual hub, scholars were translating knowledge from around the world into Arabic, synthesising it to make meaningful progress in a range of disciplines. This included mathematics, a field deeply connected to Islam.

The ‘father of algebra’

Al-Khwārizmī was a polymath and a religious man. His scientific writings started with dedications to Allah and the Prophet Muhammad. And one of the major projects Islamic mathematicians undertook at the House of Wisdom was to develop algebra.

Around 830 CE, Caliph al-Ma’mun encouraged al-Khwārizmī to write a treatise on algebra, Al-Jabr (or The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing). This became his most important work.

At this point, “algebra” had been around for hundreds of years, but al-Khwārizmī was the first to write a definitive book on it. His work was meant to be a practical teaching tool. Its Latin translation was the basis for algebra textbooks in European universities until the 16th century.

In the first part, he introduced the concepts and rules of algebra, and methods for calculating the volumes and areas of shapes. In the second part he provided real-life problems and worked out solutions, such as inheritance cases, the partition of land and calculations for trade.

Al-Khwārizmī didn’t use modern-day mathematical notation with numbers and symbols. Instead, he wrote in simple prose and employed geometric diagrams:

Four roots are equal to twenty, then one root is equal to five, and the square to be formed of it is twenty-five.

In modern-day notation we’d write that like so:

4x = 20, x = 5, x² = 25

Grandfather of computer science

Al-Khwārizmī’s mathematical writings introduced the Hindu-Arabic numerals to Western mathematicians. These are the ten symbols we all use today: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0.

The Hindu-Arabic numerals are important to the history of computing because they use the number zero and a base-ten decimal system. Importantly, this is the numeral system that underpins modern computing technology.

Al-Khwārizmī’s art of calculating mathematical problems laid the foundation for the concept of algorithms. He provided the first detailed explanations for using decimal notation to perform the four basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and computing fractions.

This was a more efficient computation method than using the abacus. To solve a mathematical equation, al-Khwārizmī systematically moved through a sequence of steps to find the answer. This is the underlying concept of an algorithm.

Algorism, a Medieval Latin term named after al-Khwārizmī, refers to the rules for performing arithmetic using the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. Translated to Latin, al-Khwārizmī’s book on Hindu numerals was titled Algorithmi de Numero Indorum.

In the early 20th century, the word algorithm came into its current definition and usage: “a procedure for solving a mathematical problem in a finite number of steps; a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem”.

Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī played a central role in the development of mathematics and computer science as we know them today.

The next time you use any digital technology – from your social media feed to your online bank account to your Spotify app – remember that none of it would be possible without the pioneering work of an ancient Persian polymath.

Correction: This article was amended to correct a quote from al-Khwārizmī’s work.

Debbie Passey, Digital Health Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

From childhood, we are told that patience is a virtue and that good things will come to those who wait. And, so, many of us work on cultivating patience.

This often starts by learning to wait for a turn with a coveted toy. As adults, it becomes trying to remain patient with long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles, misbehaving kids or the slow pace of political change. This hard work can have mental health benefits. It is even correlated with per capita income and productivity.

But it is also about trying to become a good person.

It’s clear to me, as a scholar of religious ethics, that patience is a term many of us use, but we all could benefit from understanding its meaning a little better.

In religious traditions, patience is more than waiting, or even more than enduring a hardship. But what is that “more,” and how does being patient make us better people?

The writings of medieval Islamic thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazali can give us insights or help us understand why we need to practice patience – and also when not to be patient.

Who was al-Ghazali?

Born in Iran in 1058, al-Ghazali was widely respected as a jurist, philosopher and theologian. He traveled to places as far as Baghdad and Jerusalem to defend Islam and argued there was no contradiction between reason and revelation. More specifically, he was well known for reconciling Aristotle’s philosophy, which he likely read in Arabic translation, with Islamic theology.

Al-Ghazali was a prolific writer, and one of his most important works – “Revival of the Religious Sciences,” or the “Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn” – provides a practical guide for living an ethical Muslim life.

This work is composed of 40 volumes in total, divided into four parts of 10 books each. Part 1 deals with Islamic rituals; Part 2, local customs; Part 3, vices to be avoided; and Part 4, virtues one should strive for. Al-Ghazali’s discussion of patience comes in Volume 32 of Part 4, “On Patience and Thankfulness,” or the “Kitāb al-sabr waʾl-shukr.”

He describes patience as a fundamental human characteristic that is crucial to achieving value-driven goals, and he provides a caveat for when impatience is called for.

1. What is patience?

Humans, according to al-Ghazali, have competing impulses: the impulse of religion, or “bāʿith al-dīn,” and the impulse of desire, or “bāʿith al-hawā.”

Life is a struggle between these two impulses, which he describes with the metaphor of a battle: “Support for the religious impulse comes from the angels reinforcing the troops of God, while support for the impulse of desire comes from the devils reinforcing the enemies of God.”

The amount of patience we have is what decides who wins the battle. As al-Ghazali puts it, “If a man remains steadfast until the religious impulse conquers … then the troops of God are victorious and he joins the troops of the patient. But if he slackens and weakens until appetite overcomes him … he joins the followers of the devils.” In other words, for al-Ghazali, patience is the deciding factor of whether we are living up to our full human potential to live ethically.

2. Patience, values and goals

Patience is also necessary for being a good Muslim, in al-Ghazali’s view. But his understanding of how patience works rests on a theory of ethics and can be applied outside of his explicitly Islamic worldview.

It all starts with commitments to core values. For a Muslim like al-Ghazali, those values are informed by the Islamic tradition and community, or “umma,” and include things like justice and mercy. These specific values might be universally applicable. Or you might also have another set of values that are important to you. Perhaps a commitment to social justice, or being a good friend, or not lying.

“Nizamiyyah University Nishapur,” Digital imagining, Dall-E, 2024.

Living in a way that is consistent with these core values is what the moral life is all about. And patience, according to al-Ghazali, is how we consistently make sure our actions serve this purpose.

That means patience is not just enduring the pain of a toddler’s temper tantrum. It is enduring that pain with a goal in mind. The successful application of patience is measured not by how much pain we endure but by our progress toward a specific goal, such as raising a healthy and happy child who can eventually regulate their emotions.

In al-Ghazali’s understanding of patience, we all need it in order to remain committed to our core principles and ideas when things aren’t going our way.

3. When impatience is called for

One critique of the idea of patience is that it can lead to inaction or be used to silence justified complaints. For instance, scholar of Africana studies Julius Fleming argues in his book “Black Patience” for the importance of a “radical refusal to wait” under conditions of systemic racism. Certainly, there are forms of injustice and suffering in the world that we should not calmly endure.

Despite his commitment to the importance of patience to a moral life, al-Ghazali makes room for impatience as well. He writes, “One is forbidden to be patient with harm (that is) forbidden; for example, to have one’s hand cut off or to witness the cutting off of the hand of a son and to remain silent.”

These are examples of harms to oneself or to loved ones. But could the necessity for impatience be extended to social harms, such as systemic racism or poverty? And as Quranic studies scholars Ahmad Ismail and Ahmad Solahuddin have argued, true patience sometimes necessitates action.

As al-Ghazali writes, “Just because patience is half of faith, do not imagine that it is all commendable; what is intended are specific kinds of patience.”

To sum up, not all patience is good; only patience that is in service of righteous goals is key to the ethical life. The question of which goals are righteous is one we must all answer for ourselves.

Liz Bucar, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Northeastern University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Another sometime Nigerien spokesperson, Insa Garba Saidou, put it in blunter terms: “The American bases and civilian personnel cannot stay on Nigerien soil any longer.”

The announcements came as terrorism in the West African Sahel has spiked and in the wake of a visit to Niger by a high-level American delegation, including Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee and General Michael Langley, chief of U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM. Niger’s repudiation of its ally is just the latest blow to Washington’s sputtering counterterrorism efforts in the region. In recent years, longstanding U.S. military partnerships with Burkina Faso and Mali have also been curtailed following coups by U.S.-trained officers. Niger was, in fact, the last major bastion of American military influence in the West African Sahel.

Such setbacks there are just the latest in a series of stalemates, fiascos, or outright defeats that have come to typify America’s Global War on Terror. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This maelstrom of U.S. defeat and retreat has left at least 4.5 million people dead, including an estimated 940,000 from direct violence, more than 432,000 of them civilians, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. As many as 60 million people have also been displaced due to the violence stoked by America’s “forever wars.”

President Biden has both claimed that he’s ended those wars and that the United States will continue to fight them for the foreseeable future — possibly forever — “to protect the people and interests of the United States.” The toll has been devastating, particularly in the Sahel, but Washington has largely ignored the costs borne by the people most affected by its failing counterterrorism efforts.   

“Reducing Terrorism” Leads to a 50,000% Increase in… Yes!… Terrorism

Roughly 1,000 U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors are deployed to Niger, most of them near the town of Agadez at Air Base 201 on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Known to locals as “Base Americaine,” that outpost has been the cornerstone of an archipelago of U.S. military bases in the region and is the key to America’s military power projection and surveillance efforts in North and West Africa. Since the 2010s, the U.S. has sunk roughly a quarter-billion dollars into that outpost alone.

Buy the Book

Washington has been focused on Niger and its neighbors since the opening days of the Global War on Terror, pouring military aid into the nations of West Africa through dozens of “security cooperation” efforts, among them the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, a program designed to “counter and prevent violent extremism” in the region. Training and assistance to local militaries offered through that partnership has alone cost America more than $1 billion.

Just prior to his recent visit to Niger, AFRICOM’s General Langley went before the Senate Armed Services Committee to rebuke America’s longtime West African partners. “During the past three years, national defense forces turned their guns against their own elected governments in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Niger,” he said. “These juntas avoid accountability to the peoples they claim to serve.”

Langley did not mention, however, that at least 15 officers who benefited from American security cooperation have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the Global War on Terror. They include the very nations he named: Burkina Faso (2014, 2015, and twice in 2022); Guinea (2021); Mali (2012, 2020, and 2021); and Niger (2023). In fact, at least five leaders of a July coup in Niger received U.S. assistance, according to an American official. When they overthrew that country’s democratically elected president, they, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as governors.

Langley went on to lament that, while coup leaders invariably promise to defeat terrorist threats, they fail to do so and then “turn to partners who lack restrictions in dealing with coup governments… particularly Russia.” But he also failed to lay out America’s direct responsibility for the security freefall in the Sahel, despite more than a decade of expensive efforts to remedy the situation.

“We came, we saw, he died,” then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked after a U.S.-led NATO air campaign helped overthrow Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, in 2011. President Barack Obama hailed the intervention as a success, even as Libya began to slip into near-failed-state status. Obama would later admit that “failing to plan for the day after” Qaddafi’s defeat was the “worst mistake” of his presidency.

As the Libyan leader fell, Tuareg fighters in his service looted his regime’s weapons caches, returned to their native Mali, and began to take over the northern part of that nation. Anger in Mali’s armed forces over the government’s ineffective response resulted in a 2012 military coup led by Amadou Sanogo, an officer who learned English in Texas, and underwent infantry-officer basic training in Georgia, military-intelligence instruction in Arizona, and mentorship by Marines in Virginia.

Having overthrown Mali’s democratic government, Sanogo proved hapless in battling local militants who had also benefitted from the arms flowing out of Libya. With Mali in chaos, those Tuareg fighters declared their own independent state, only to be pushed aside by heavily armed Islamist militants who instituted a harsh brand of Shariah law, causing a humanitarian crisis. A joint French, American, and African mission prevented Mali’s complete collapse but pushed the Islamists to the borders of both Burkina Faso and Niger, spreading terror and chaos to those countries.

Since then, the nations of the West African Sahel have been plagued by terrorist groups that have evolved, splintered, and reconstituted themselves. Under the black banners of jihadist militancy, men on motorcycles armed with Kalashnikov rifles regularly roar into villages to impose zakat (an Islamic tax) and terrorize and kill civilians. Relentless attacks by such armed groups have not only destabilized Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, prompting coups and political instability, but have spread south to countries along the Gulf of Guinea. Violence has, for example, spiked in Togo (633%) and Benin (718%), according to Pentagon statistics.

American officials have often turned a blind eye to the carnage. Asked about the devolving situation in Niger, for instance, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel recently insisted that security partnerships in West Africa “are mutually beneficial and are intended to achieve what we believe to be shared goals of detecting, deterring, and reducing terrorist violence.”  His pronouncement is either an outright lie or a total fantasy.

After 20 years, it’s clear that America’s Sahelian partnerships aren’t “reducing terrorist violence” at all. Even the Pentagon tacitly admits this. Despite U.S. troop strength in Niger growing by more than 900% in the last decade and American commandos training local counterparts, while fighting and even dying there; despite hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into Burkina Faso in the form of training as well as equipment like armored personnel carriers, body armor, communications gear, machine guns, night-vision equipment, and rifles; and despite U.S. security assistance pouring into Mali and its military officers receiving training from the United States, terrorist violence in the Sahel has in no way been reduced. In 2002 and 2003, according to State Department statistics, terrorists caused 23 casualties in all of Africa. Last year, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution, attacks by Islamist militants in the Sahel alone resulted in 11,643 deaths – an increase of more than 50,000%.

Pack Up Your War

In January 2021, President Biden entered the White House promising to end his country’s forever wars.  He quickly claimed to have kept his pledge. “I stand here today for the first time in 20 years with the United States not at war,” Biden announced months later. “We’ve turned the page.” 

Late last year, however, in one of his periodic “war powers” missives to Congress, detailing publicly acknowledged U.S. military operations around the world, Biden said just the opposite. In fact, he left open the possibility that America’s forever wars might, indeed, go on forever. “It is not possible,” he wrote, “to know at this time the precise scope or the duration of the deployments of United States Armed Forces that are or will be necessary to counter terrorist threats to the United States.”

Niger’s U.S.-trained junta has made it clear that it wants America’s forever war there to end. That would assumedly mean the closing of Air Base 201 and the withdrawal of about 1,000 American military personnel and contractors. So far, however, Washington shows no signs of acceding to their wishes. “We are aware of the March 16th statement… announcing an end to the status of forces agreement between Niger and the United States,” said Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh. “We are working through diplomatic channels to seek clarification… I don’t have a timeframe of any withdrawal of forces.”

“The U.S. military is in Niger at the request of the Government of Niger,” said AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan last year. Now that the junta has told AFRICOM to leave, the command has little to say. Email return receipts show that TomDispatch’s questions about developments in Niger sent to AFRICOM’s press office were read by a raft of personnel including Cahalan, Zack Frank, Joshua Frey, Yvonne Levardi, Rebekah Clark Mattes, Christopher Meade, Takisha Miller, Alvin Phillips, Robert Dixon, Lennea Montandon, and Courtney Dock, AFRICOM’s deputy director of public affairs, but none of them answered any of the questions posed. Cahalan instead referred TomDispatch to the State Department. The State Department, in turn, directed TomDispatch to the transcript of a press conference dealing primarily with U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Philippines.

“USAFRICOM needs to stay in West Africa… to limit the spread of terrorism across the region and beyond,” General Langley told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March.  But Niger’s junta insists that AFRICOM needs to go and U.S. failures to “limit the spread of terrorism” in Niger and beyond are a key reason why.  “This security cooperation did not live up to the expectations of Nigeriens — all the massacres committed by the jihadists were carried out while the Americans were here,” said a Nigerien security analyst who has worked with U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

America’s forever wars, including the battle for the Sahel, have ground on through the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden with failure the defining storyline and catastrophic results the norm. From the Islamic State routing the U.S.-trained Iraqi army in 2014 to the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan in 2021, from the forever stalemate in Somalia to the 2011 destabilization of Libya that plunged the Sahel into chaos and now threatens the littoral states along the Gulf of Guinea, the Global War on Terror has been responsible for the deaths, wounding, or displacement of tens of millions of people.

Carnage, stalemate, and failure seem to have had remarkably little effect on Washington’s desire to continue funding and fighting such wars, but facts on the ground like the Taliban’s triumph in Afghanistan have sometimes forced Washington’s hand. Niger’s junta is pursuing another such path, attempting to end an American forever war in one small corner of the world — doing what President Biden pledged but failed to do. Still, the question remains: Will the Biden administration reverse a course that the U.S. has been on since the early 2000s?  Will it agree to set a date for withdrawal? Will Washington finally pack up its disastrous war and go home?

Copyright 2024 Nick Turse

Tomdispatch.com

The minister’s report – and this anecdote – were well-received at the court. The Ottoman authorities were impressed by the openness and tolerance of the European universities they visited and as a result took steps to introduce educational reforms into their own educational system.  

The Hungarian Jewish scholar referred to in this anecdote was Ignaz Goldziher, the savant who pioneered the scientific study of Islamic languages and texts in the West. During his long career he produced books and articles that are studied by Islamicists to this day. His work had a profound effect on Western scholarship in the areas of comparative philology, religious studies, and the emerging disciplines of Semitic languages and comparative religion. His vast oeuvre includes over eight hundred scholarly articles. The titles of his major books, six of which are studies of various aspects of Islam, are familiar to all students of the Middle East. His earliest work, Mythos bei den Hebräern (1876), was influenced by Max Müller’s work on solar mythology and addresses the relationship between theories of myth and the narratives of the Hebrew Bible. From scholarship on the Bible Goldziher moved to the study of Islam. He translated Islamic classical texts into German and Hungarian and synthesized this material into surveys of Islamic religion and philosophy. He rose to prominence in his native Hungary and then throughout the West as the preeminent non-Muslim authority on Islam. Islamic scholars in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world recognized the importance of Goldziher’s accomplishments and considered him a valued colleague. Goldziher understood the political and social implications of his scholarly work. Throughout his life he strived to create an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding between Muslims, Jews, and Christians.  

Goldziher was not the only late nineteenth century Jewish scholar drawn to Islam. Many others were drawn to the study of what they deemed Judaism’s “sister religion.” As we shall see in the coming chapters, Islam held a strong appeal to European Jewish intellectuals in the nineteenth century, a period of intense ferment and change in Jewish life. This central European Jewish fascination with Islam was not limited to those engaged in the study of religion and philosophy. In the late nineteenth century, the anticipated full emancipation of the Jews was blocked by a resurgence of Christian anti-Semitism. Islam, as an abstraction, if not as a political reality, appealed to many Jews. The Golden Age of twelfth century Spain, the Convivencia in which the three monotheisms were imagined to have lived in mutual tolerance, was the model for a new era of religious tolerance and mutual respect. This aspiration was reflected in the Moorish architectural styles of German synagogues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.   

Among those fascinated by Islam were the early rabbis of Reform Judaism. First and foremost among them was Abraham Geiger. Geiger’s doctoral dissertation, presented at age twenty-four, asked the question “What had Muhammad taken from the Jews?” Geiger demonstrated that many stories narrated in the Qur’an had close parallels to narratives in the Bible and the Midrash, and he speculated that the Jewish narratives directly influenced the Qur’an. His later work focused on the development of Judaism, which he saw as an evolving faith, one that could be brought into line with modern European thought and practice. With this modernizing project in mind, Geiger shaped the emergence of Reform Judaism in the mid-nineteenth century.  

These German Rabbis and scholars viewed Islam as a ‘rational’ religion, a religion unencumbered by the magical and ‘superstitious’ aspects of Christianity, and of Orthodox Judaism. For reformers of Judaism, Islam offered a model of a ‘religion of reason.’ And in emulation of Jewish life in the Convivencia of Spain’s ‘Golden Age,’ a period idealized and romanticized by many scholars, European Jews would flourish. Goldziher was affiliated with the Neolog (Reform) movement. 

At the University of Budapest Goldziher studied Arabic and Persian with Arminius Vambery. Vambery’s birth name was Chaim Wamburger; and he had become both a Muslim and a Christian in pursuit of ‘Oriental Knowledge’ and a university lectureship. In his autobiography Vambery noted that his Orthodox Jewish education and its emphasis on the mastery of texts and languages prepared him for mastering Islamic texts and languages. In his six-year sojourn in Istanbul, Vambery mastered Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. For Muslims, as for Jews, Vambery noted, text study is a form of devotion.

H/t Memorial Website of Ignaz Goldziher

Like his teacher, Goldziher was educated in Orthodox Jewish schools and brought to the study of the Qur’an the same attention to detail that Rabbinic scholars brought to the Torah. Thus many, but not all, of the era’s Jewish scholars of Islam had a Jewish religious education rich in text study and analysis. With these tools in hand, they took on the study of Arabic and Islam.  

Thus, from the outset of the liberalization of European Judaism, the study of Islam, or more precisely, an idealized vision of Islam as ‘rational religion,’ played a significant role. That vision was based on the recognition that the two sister religions had similar, though not identical, approaches to the study of scripture, the development of law, and the practice of rituals. 

In the first half century of this modern Jewish engagement with Islam, (1870-1920), contact with actual Muslims was limited. Some of Goldziher’s teachers, colleagues, and students spent time in the Arab world and in the wider Muslim world. And they met with European Muslims, of which there were many in Germany. Goldziher himself studied at Cairo’s Al-Azhar, the great center of Muslim learning. But these contracts did not lead any of these Jewish scholars to convert to Islam.  

In the next stage of this Jewish – Muslim encounter, roughly from Goldziher’s death in 1920 to the outbreak of war in 1939, a number of European Jews became Muslims.  

From Budapest, Goldziher went to study in Germany, then the center of both Jewish studies and Islamic studies. At the University of Leipzig he was mentored by Heinrich Fleischer, the preeminent European Arabist of the day. Fleischer, who began his academic training in a Christian seminary, was unusual in that he accepted Jewish students into his doctoral program. Eventually some forty percent of his one hundred and thirty advisees were Jews. In his eulogy for Fleischer, Goldziher said “He was one of the few learned men of our time whose academic influence was inseparable from the moral beauty that adorns a man’s character.”ⁱⁱⁱ 

Excerpted from:

From Jews to Muslims: Twentieth-Century Converts to Islam by Shalom Goldman. Click here to order.

Much of Goldziher’s inspiration for this life long-commitment to scholarship derived from his 1873-74 journey to the Middle East. He was then twenty-four years old and at the end of a five-year period in which he had travelled throughout Europe and studied with the most eminent European Arabists of his day. When he arrived in Damascus in 1873 and then proceeded to Cairo, he was already fluent in Arabic, and this eased his entry into Muslim religious and educational institutions. The bulk of his time in the Mideast was spent in Cairo, where his language skills, intellectual acumen, and persistence gained him an introduction to the Shaykh Al-Azhar, the administrative and spiritual head of Al-Azhar, Islam’s oldest center of religious learning.  

Goldziher was the first European non-Muslim to attend lectures at this prestigious academy. He was allowed to do so only after the Shaykh gave him a rigorous examination. Of the four months that he spent at Al-Azhar Goldziher later wrote “Both the students and the teachers treated me as if I were one of them, although I never posed as a Muslim. These were four glorious months of spirited learning.” In his travel journal Goldziher wrote movingly of his period of study at Al-Azhar: “In those weeks, I truly entered into the spirit of Islam to such an extent that ultimately I became inwardly convinced that I myself was a Muslim, and judiciously discovered that this was the only religion which, even in its doctrinal and official formulation, can satisfy philosophic minds. My ideal was to elevate Judaism to a similar rational level. Islam, as my experience taught me, is the only religion, in which superstitious and heathen ingredient are not frowned upon by rationalism, but by orthodox doctrine.”^iv 

Note that though he was fascinated by Islam, and driven to master its texts and traditions, Goldziher did not feel drawn to convert to Islam. He remained within the Jewish fold. This was in marked contract to his teacher Chaim Wamburger – Arminius Vambery, who, in the course of his life converted first to Islam and later to Christianity.  

Goldziher, as events towards the end of his life would indicate, was deeply loyal, attached to the Hungarian language and people, and to its Jewish community – and this despite his constant complaints about his job in that community’s Neolog (Reform) Synagogue.  

Goldziher’s teachers at Al-Azhar gave him an Arabic title, Shaykh Zarawi. The Arabic document which the head of Al-Azhar wrote on Goldziher’s admission to the theological school reflects a more relaxed period in interfaith relations, in which a non-Muslim scholar, fluent in Arabic, could gain permission to study at an institution usually closed to outsiders. The document read: “There appeared before us the Hungarian talib Ignaz, a man of the ahl al-kitab (peoples of the book) with the presentation of his desire to delve into the sciences of Islam under the eyes of the wise and learned shaykhs of the mosque. . . .  He declares himself far removed from all pursuit of mockery . . . Thus it is the decision of God that this youth become a neighbor of our flowering mosque, and one must not obstruct the decision of God.”^v In later years, Goldziher’s pride in this affiliation remained. He signed his books with the title Ignaz Goldziher, the Magyar (Hungarian) Azhari, student at Al-Azhar.  

In Islam in its earliest form (c. 7^th century A.D.) Goldziher found a model for religious tolerance, a model that he felt could serve modern societies and religions well. In his Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, Goldziher wrote that “It is undeniable that, in this earliest phase of the development of Islamic Law, the spirit of tolerance permeated the instructions that Muslim conquerors were given for dealing with the subjugated adherents of other religions.” And speaking of the Islamic states of his own time, Goldziher noted that “What today resembles religious toleration in the constitutional practice of Islamic states goes back to the principle of the free practice of religion in the first half of the seventh century.”^vi 

But it was not only with the Egyptian religious establishment that Goldziher forged lasting ties during his sojourn in Egypt. He met with intellectuals, activists, and Sufis. Goldziher was also acutely aware of the political struggles then raging in Egypt and allied himself with progressive nationalist forces. He sympathized with the views of Egyptian nationalists opposed to both the Ottoman Turks and the European colonial powers. In Cairo Goldziher befriended the influential thinker Jamal ad-Din Al-Afghani, (1838-1897) who called for Egyptian independence from all foreign powers. Al-Afghani, who lived in Egypt from 1871 to 1879, had a profound effect on Egyptian politics in particular and on Arabic political thought in general. The mid 1870s, when Goldziher was in Cairo, were a formative period in Al-Afghani’s political development. His charisma and oratorical ability had attracted many followers. Visiting European intellectuals were eager to meet with al-Afghani, and he with them. Among the Europeans, it was Goldziher with whom he formed the closest association. The friendship with Al-Afghani and the other social and intellectuals ties that Goldziher formed during this 1873-74 visit had a profound effect on his understanding of Islam as it is lived. As Lawrence Conrad noted in an important series of articles on Goldziher, the full import of this trip must be understood in the context of the times. For Goldziher arrived in the Near East in the heady early days of the nahda, the great revival of Arab political and cultural awareness that influenced the intellectual and social life in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Middle East. 

Among the aspects of Islam that Goldziher investigated and explained to a Western audience was Sufism, the mystical tendency and tradition within Islam. In Egypt, Goldziher met with Sufis and observed their rituals. He wrote extensively about Ibn Arabi, the great thirteenth century scholar who interpreted the Qur’an in a mystical manner. In his Lectures on Islam Goldziher dedicated a full lecture to Ibn Arabi and the Sufis. His essays about Sufism helped popularize its teachings in the West – and those teachings were the background for the resurgence of Western interest in Sufism in the early twentieth century. In this book’s accounts of Jewish interest in, and conversion to, Islam, an attraction in Sufism is a major factor in some individual’s decision to convert.^viii This was particularly true in the United States and Western Europe, where mystical forms of ‘Eastern’ religions held great appeal to the young and unaffiliated. 

Though the necessity for religious tolerance was a theme that emerges from Goldziher’s oeuvre, he himself was the victim of intolerance throughout his life. The breadth and depth of his scholarship on Islam was recognized by experts throughout the world, yet despite his international stature as a scholar, the state-controlled University of Budapest would not grant him a regular university appointment. A Jew, even one educated within Hungary’s own university system, was not a suitable candidate for a professorship. In predominantly Catholic Budapest, Protestant candidates too were often rejected. A contemporary of Goldziher’s, the Jewish linguist Bernard Munkacsi, in writing of his own travails at the hands of the university’s administrators, described the fate of Jewish scholars who aspired to university professorships in late-nineteenth century Hungary: “The honors degree, Ph.D. and academic achievements were all in vain! Where teacher’s posts were given, certificates of baptism were required. Teachers-to-be of Jewish origin had to settle their ‘religious status’ before being employed by the state. Many of my attempts to acquire a secular job have failed.”^ix  

Goldziher, while bitter at rejection by the system that educated him, did not vent his spleen at the Hungarian authorities. Rather, he reserved his most caustic remarks for his Jewish co-religionists. When Goldziher, in his mid-twenties, realized that admission to the regular university faculty would be denied him, he accepted an administrative job with the Neolog (Reform) Budapest Jewish community. As secretary of the Israelite Congregation, the Reform Synagogue with the largest membership in Europe, Goldziher was responsible for the religious, educational, and social activities of the congregation. As Raphael Patai noted, “A man without Goldziher’s intense scholarly drive, and more important, with a thicker skin, could have found at least some measure of satisfaction in occupying this influential position.”^x But Goldzhiher, though he served in an influential position for thirty years, did not. 

Goldziher found no satisfaction from his work as a community official. In his diary, and in his letters to friends, he complained bitterly about his fate as a synagogue administrator. Early on in his period of service he wrote “It was decided that I become a slave. The Jews wanted to have pity on me. This is the misfortune of my life.” Even though he expresses his feelings strongly, it is remarkable that Goldziher did not succumb to these bitter feelings and sink into inactivity. On the contrary, he persisted in his studies of Islam and developed a work ethic that enabled him to produce scores of books and articles over the thirty years he served the congregation. During the working year Goldziher would read Arabic texts at night, translating and taking notes, and this after working eight hours in the congregation’s office in which he supervised a staff of ten employees. On his six-week summer vacation he would take these books and notes (and later, when he married, his wife and son) to the mountains and write a complete monograph in one sustained effort. Among the magisterial works written in this manner were: Islam: Studies in the Religion of Mohammad (1881), a long German-language monograph on the Zahiris (1884), and the authoritative Introduction to Islam (1910).  

While engaged in mastering a vast corpus of Islamic texts, Goldziher did not neglect the study of Judaism. In many of his essays he compares Jewish and Islamic beliefs and practices. As Alexander Scheiber noted, “The Bible and the Talmud were Goldziher’s favorite studies in his youth. He remained a good Hebrew stylist and retained his interest in Jewish learning until the end of his life.”

It was only in 1905 that Goldziher, then aged 55, received a regular university appointment in Budapest. During his thirty-year tenure at that city’s Reform Jewish congregation, he had turned down job offers from the most important European and Middle Eastern centers of the study of religion and culture. Among the offers: In 1893 the University of Heidelberg, at the urging of the great Semitist Nöldeke, offered him a professorship. A year later Cambridge University invited him to occupy the chair left empty at the death of William Robertson Smith, the eminent philologist and historian of religion. In the first decade of the twentieth century Goldziher received offers from the Khedive of Egypt to teach in Cairo – and from Zionist leader Max Nordau (who was Goldziher’s childhood friend) to teach at the newly envisioned Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Surely he was the only person who received job offers from both Muslim and Jewish institutions. 

Senior Zionist leaders, including Max Nordau and Nahum Sokolow, sought Goldziher’s involvement with the Zionist cause, and Sokolow hoped to “entrust Goldziher with the mission of improving relations between Arabs and Jews.”^x Though Goldziher wrote that “he wished that persecuted Jews would find a home in the Holy Land and live peaceably together with Christians and Muslims,” he was not an active political Zionist and declined the invitation to teach at the planned, but not yet established, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which opened its doors in 1925. 

Goldziher remained within the Jewish community, he never was a committed Zionist. We noted earlier that his teacher Armin Vambery – who professed the Protestant faith after his youthful conversion to Islam – actively supported “the Return to Zion.” A decade before Zionist leaders asked Goldziher to take on “the mission of improving relations between Arabs and Jews,” Vambery met with Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, and agreed to arrange a meeting between Herzl and the Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Hamid.

To all of these offers of university professorships at foreign institutions, tied to Budapest and his family, friends, and regular employment, Goldziher said no. His refusal to consider teaching positions outside of Hungary – coupled with his continuing bitterness and anger at the Jewish community for “enslaving” him in his administrative position – are congruent with the general psychological picture we get from reading his correspondence. Despite his accomplishments and worldwide acclaim, he felt trapped in a work situation in which his worth as a scholar was not recognized. And from that trap he could see no way to free himself. Too, his loyalty to Hungary and its community of scholars made him reluctant to leave his native land. This was the way that Raphael Patai, the anthropologist whose father was a student of Goldziher’s, viewed Goldziher’s psychological makeup. A more recent study and analysis by Lawrence Conrad, sees Patai’s reading of the diary as flawed. For along with Goldziher’s stridency and occasional emotional outbursts, there is much in his correspondence with colleagues that is positive and affirming. To use Goldziher’s emotional outbursts as the basis for an interpretation of his life and work seems to Conrad, and to me, an unreasonable assumption.

Robert Simon, Goldziher’s biographer, noted that “he transformed correspondence into a veritable cult.” The Hungarian Academy of Sciences has preserved a good deal of correspondence, and as one observer put it, “the mere quantity of these letters is astounding: 45 boxes containing 13,700 letters from 1,650 people.” Goldziher clearly followed his own advice about staying in touch with colleagues. A letter from a valued colleague or student was joyfully received. He told A.S. Yahuda that “if I receive a letter from Nöldeke or Snouck I feel as if I were given a precious gift. A happy and solemn mood descends upon me immediately.” And these were not mere missives of politeness. Scholars who have studied his correspondence noted that these letters, and Goldziher’s detailed replies, could pass for scientific papers, in that they convey more ideas and scientific value than many other scholarly articles of the time. Joseph de Somogyi, a student of Goldziher’s who emigrated to the U.S. and taught Arabic at Brandeis University, quoted his teacher as exhorting him “to do two things if you want to prosper in life: answer every letter or card you receive, even if your answer be negative; and give lectures at the Orientalists’ congresses. This is as important as literary work.”

The outbreak of World War in 1914 was a great blow to Goldziher’s spirit, and to his hopes for world peace. His ability to travel, and to receive visiting scholars in his home, was severely curtailed by the hostilities. Hungary, one of the belligerents, was severely destabilized by the war, in which it was on the losing side. At times, Goldziher’s personal concerns about the war emerge in his correspondence, though for the most part his letters are concerned with matters philological and textual. Some of these letters served as drafts for his academic papers. Goldziher also kept a diary and in it he allowed himself greater freedom of expression. Portions of these diaries were published in the 1970s. William Montgomery Watt, in an essay on the diaries, noted that they contained a startling revelation about Goldzhiher: “His apparently effortless mastery of his subject and the even tenor of his scholarly expositions suggest a placid existence in the groves of academia. The publication of the diary shows such a suggestion to be completely erroneous. All these works of serene and profound scholarship came from one who was engaged for over thirty years in an intense spiritual struggle against forces which made his daily life almost unbearable and threatened to destroy all his confidence in himself.”This ‘spiritual struggle’ referred to here was Goldziher’s experience of his synagogue job as oppressive and his scholarly work as liberating, life-affirming.  

Goldziher’s literary legacy of books, articles, letters was vast. His other great contribution to scholarship was mentoring of students. He taught and inspired a generation of Islamicists, Comparative Semitists, and students of religion. These students, in turn, founded scholarly lineages of their own. During World War Two, many of his Jewish students were murdered by the Nazis. Others fled Europe and survived. They taught, wrote, and inspired a new generation of scholars in New York, Boston, London, Moscow and Jerusalem. As Noam Stillman wrote in an essay on “The Mindset of Jewish Scholars of Islamic Studies”: “Goldziher’s holistic approach to Islam as religion and civilization, to Hadith, law, theology to practice – both orthodox and heterodox, high and popular, historical and actual – and to belles lettres, shaped succeeding generations of scholars, Jews and Gentiles alike.”

 German-trained Jewish scholars of Arabic and Islam explored many facets of the historical relationship between Islam and Judaism. One of them, Jacob Goldenthat, explored “the influence of Islamic culture on medieval works in Jewish philosophy and Hebrew Grammar.” Another German-trained Jewish scholar of Arabic and Islam, Joseph Horovitz (1874-1931), continued and expanded on the legacy of Goldziher. Horowitz sought to forge ties between Jewish and Arab scholars of Islam. In 1928, in his argument for establishing a School of Oriental Studies at the recently established Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Horovitz wrote that, “The idea was to create a school for the study of the East, its languages and literatures, its history and its civilizations especially the Arabic and the Islamic worlds, were to be considered. It was hoped that the work to be undertaken would be such as to be appreciated by the learned world in general and more especially by savants of the Arabic speaking countries; and that in its own way, i.e. by showing that there was a ground of intellectual interest common to Jewish and Arabic scholars, the institute might also help to promote the good feelings between these two communities.”^xix But for many reasons, this institute was never established. Arab opposition to Jewish settlement in Palestine, and to what the Arabs saw as British support for Zionism, broke out into violence in 1929 and to a full-scale rebellion in the Arab Revolt of 1936-9. Horovitz’s proposal that academic cooperation would lead to a lessening of tensions no longer seemed relevant to the faculty and directors of the Hebrew University. 

As some scholars have noted, Goldziher’s life and scholarship flatly contradicts the assertion of post-colonialist scholars that the study of Middle Eastern cultures is inextricably tied to imperial designs of power. For Goldziher’s work is itself a critique of Orientalism. It is an attempt to present Islam as it is understood and interpreted by its followers in its own textual tradition and not as it is presented by its antagonists. Goldziher sharply attacked Renan and other European scholars who denigrated Islam and repeatedly sought to disprove his negative view of Islam and Muslims. Goldziher’s Cairo friend al-Afghani also produced a trenchant critique of Renan’s Orientalist views. One might imagine the young Hungarian Jewish Orientalist and the older Muslim religious and political thinker critiquing Renan’s views as they walked through Cairo in the winter of 1874.^xx 

The reader will recall Goldzhiher’s youthful declaration, at age twenty-four, that “Islam was the only religion which can satisfy philosophic minds.” Goldziher and his colleagues saw early Islam as a ‘religion of reason’ and as a model of how Judaism might be integrated into European civilization, and in the decades after his death the appeal of contemporary Islam as an alternative to ‘Western’ faiths grew, especially among Jews. In the mid-1920s, a few years after Goldziher’s death, a small but significant number of German and Austrian Jews converted to Islam. Among them was Leopold Weiss of Berlin, who, as Muhammad Asad, (1900-1992), dedicated his life to presenting Islam as a religion of reason, and arguing against what he saw as extremist tendencies within the Islam of the late twentieth century. Similarly, twentieth century Western interest in Sufi teachings and rituals was informed by the scholarship of Goldziher and other late nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars of Islamic mysticism.   

Excerpted from with the author’s permission from: From Jews to Muslims: Twentieth-Century Converts to Islam.

The latest film adaptation of the Sixties novel helps us understand the contemporary Middle East and its ecology.

“Based on Herbert’s 1965 science fiction classic, “Dune” is a tale of a rising duke, intergalactic power struggles, a precious spice, and lethal spaceworms. The story, which deals with religion, politics, myth, destiny, heritage, environmental decay and colonialism resonates as much with audiences today as it did when the novel was first published.”

( TRT World ) – The latest Hollywood blockbuster “Dune” is a space opera based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name. While written in the Sixties, its current release is salient as the film reengages audiences with several core themes of the novel.

The novel is replete with Arabic and Islamic references, which raises the question of whether the novel is orientalist, in addition to the film, given the resurgence of cinematic orientalist tropes post-9/11.

Also, while the novel “Dune” won a slew of science fiction (sci-fi) awards, it could also be considered one of the first cli-fi novels, or climate fiction novels. Herbert’s work was prescient given its examination of the ecology of a desert planet that essentially stands in for the Middle East. 

Finally, the novel is relevant due to its trope of resistance and empire. “Dune” is essentially a political thought experiment, examining how charismatic leadership can lead to the defeat of stronger states and empires, salient to US foreign policy, whether it is the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh or the Afghan Taliban.

Techno-Orientalism

In a previous article for this publication, I used Edward Said to examine “Slavery, the “robot,” and Orientalism in science fiction.” I categorise Orientalism as a system of communication that essentialises the East with a series of ‘E’s. The West sees the ‘East’ as Exotic, Erotic, and the Enemy.

For example, in the “Star Wars” franchise, there are Middle East-inspired elements with the Sufi orders reflected in Obi Wan and the Jedi. Orientalist flourishes include the Enemy, the barbaric Sand People and the Erotic, the indolent Jabba the Hut, who smokes a nargile and maintains a harem, which includes princes Leia.

“Dune”, like “Star Wars”, is about a band of rebels who bring down an empire. The protagonists of Lucas’ space opera consist of a rebel alliance brought together from far ranging planets and galactic groups, like Admiral Ackbar, the squid-like commander from the Mon Calamari, to the Ewoks. In Herbert’s work, the rebels are the Fremen, who practice a futuristic form of Islam, seeking to free their desert planet Arrakis and bring down a down an intergalactic empire led by the Padishah Shaddam.

“Dune,” Digital, Dall-E 3, 2024.

The references to the Middle East are not flourishes to exoticise the narrative. The Arrakis depicted in the novel and latest film are not exotic, but enigmatic. There is little that is erotic in “Dune”. The Fremen are not the enemy; you root for them as the protagonists. 

The Fremen are led by a messianic figure, Paul Atreides, who engages in a “jihad” against the empire, but Herbert used this term in the sixties well before the notion become associated with terrorism post-9/11.

It is unusual to have the Muslims as good guys. The only other science fiction franchise that does the same is the “Pitch Black” franchise beginning in the mid-Nineties, also examining a futuristic, intergalactic Islam. The protagonist Riddick, played by Vin Diesel, seeks to save another character, simply referred to as “al-Imam” on his way to complete the hajj in New Mecca on the planet Tangiers-3.

I would argue that the prevalence of a futuristic Islam in both sci-fi stories makes neither orientalist. In both cases Islam is not exotic but banal, interwoven in interplanetary daily life.

Finally, all orientalist films essentialise the Middle East as a desert landscape replete with camels and minarets. The desert in “Dune” does not serve as a mere exotic background but makes an ecological argument. The dunes symbolise the vulnerability and precariousness of human life. The heat and sand, Mother Nature if you will, overwhelms this future civilisation and its technology. The theme of insecurity and the quest for water pervade the narrative. In the face of this powerlessness, the Fremen represent a fight for agency by learning to adapt to the desert, not exploit it. 

Science fiction and empire

The revolt in Arrakis seeks to bring down an intergalactic empire, led by the Padishah Shaddam. While Shaddam does sound like Saddam, the future Iraqi president was relatively obscure when Herbert wrote the novel. However, the title Padishah refers to the highest rank in the Ottoman or Persian empires.

Sci-fi has had a long history of dealing with empire and resistance. One of the first sci-fi pioneers, HG Wells published “War of the Worlds” in 1898 as a commentary on the British extermination of the local population of Tasmania, Australia.

Arrakis could very well be a reference to Iraq. The Spacing Guild in “Dune”, a cartel that controls the production of the Spice that is necessary for space travel is certainly influenced by petroleum and OPEC, which was founded in Baghdad in 1960 (albeit the brainchild of a Venezuelan oil minister). 

In this case “Dune” would fit other sci-fi and cli-fi narratives where Iraq emerges as an imaginative space challenging the 2003 invasion. The film “Avatar” critiqued the rise of mercenary companies, where the planet Pandora stands in for Iraq and Unobtainium, like the Spice, is a reference to oil.  

The 2004 reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” portrayed the villains, the robotic Cylons as Americans, and the humans resisting them as the insurgents, forcing TV audiences, particularly in the US, to see the conflict from an Iraqi perspective.

While sci-fi as a genre is escapist in nature, it simultaneously brings our current reality into greater focus. It reveals our current technophobias and anxieties over the convergence between scientific advance and what it means to be human. 

Close to 50 years separate the novel “Dune” and the film. The themes of ecological precariousness, rapacious resource extraction, and resistance to occupation are as relevant now as they were when the novel was first published. In this case “Dune”, a work of science fiction, is also a political fact.

Ramadan in the Gaza Strip this year will be anything but “normal.”

Malnutrition and disease are claiming dozens of lives. The Gaza Health Ministry said on March 6, 2024, that at least 20 people had died of malnutrition. Many others, it said, were “dying silently,” unable to reach medical facilities.

According to humanitarian organizations, the proportion of people in Gaza deprived of food exceeds any other place in the world.

What meaning can the holy month’s fast have for those who have nothing to eat?

Ramadan and the Quran

Fasting in Islam requires believers to abstain from certain acts that are necessary for sustaining life – mainly eating, drinking and sexual – from dawn to dusk. But it is not just about food. It also requires that people abstain from lying or criticizing others behind their backs.

Muslims access “the sacred” primarily through the Quran, which is recited collectively from cover to cover in communal night nighttime vigils during Ramadan.

As a scholar of Islam and as a practicing Muslim, I often think of how Islamic scripture describes the purpose of this sacred month. “Fasting is prescribed to you,” says the Quran, “that ye may learn self-restraint.”
The revelation of the Quran to Muhammad commenced in Ramadan, and Muslims take this time of the year to renew their connection to God’s words.

Fasting in Ramadan was prescribed in 624 C.E., the second year of Islam. This was shortly after the Prophet Muhammad’s emigration from Mecca to Medina in today’s Saudi Arabia to escape persecution. This episode, known as the Hijra, came to mark the first year of the Islamic calendar.

While Muslims may fast voluntarily throughout the year, it is mandatory in the month of Ramadan. Sick or pregnant people, as well as travelers, must make up missed days. The chronically ill or elderly must make amends by feeding others.

Fasting in Ramadan is believed to rejuvenate spiritual strength. The Prophet Muhammad said the mere ritual of fasting without inner transformation results in nothing but hunger.

“Goodness does not consist in your turning your face towards East or West,” the Quran cautions, in reference to the orientation that is required in ritual prayer. Rather, goodness consists in caring for the neighbor and stranger. These are principles that all religions have in common.

Ramadan and charity

In Muslim culture, Ramadan is experienced primarily as a month of prayer, ascetic practice, family life and generosity. A select few engage in a practice known as “i’tikaf,” a voluntary retreat in partial seclusion at the mosque, typically during the last few days and nights.

Ramadan begins amid warnings of mass starvation in Gaza | BBC News Video

A highlight of Ramadan is increased acts of charity and the feeding of others. Many mosques offer meals, which is believed to be an act of particular virtue at sunset to facilitate breaking of the fast, at this time of the year. Muslims often pay their annual mandatory alms known as zakat during Ramadan in order to reap the special rewards of this month.

Islamic educational and humanitarian organizations increase their appeals for donations every year in Ramadan, and the rhythm of life in Muslim communities transforms with pre-dawn family meals, lazy mornings, working afternoons and communal feasts.

Ramadan in Gaza

The meaning of Ramadan in a war zone is poignant for Muslims who are suffering directly. War is neither prescribed nor prohibited during Ramadan. Muhammad urged his troops to break the fast when entering into battle in order to preserve their strength. The Battle of Badr, the first of many military confrontations under Muhammad’s command, which became a turning point in early Islamic history, took place in Ramadan.

For those who witness that suffering on screens from the comfort of their homes, the question of moral responsibility still remains. Muslims who seek to fulfill God’s command are “to spend out of what God has provided for them” in worthy charitable causes in Ramadan. Many of them will ask what more could be done to feed the hungriest of hungry in the world, who are now in Gaza.

Religions help us come to terms with our mortality. They help us make sense of life beyond this life. In a time of war and famine, when death is near, Ramadan can remind us that God is nearer: “closer than the jugular vein.”

For countless innocent victims of all ages and every gender who are breathing their last – in the direst of circumstances and the deepest of anguish – this thought can be a source of solace, if not joy.

Mahan Mirza, Executive Director, Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, and Teaching Professor of Teaching Professor of Islam and Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame

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