…and divided.
Kamal Ghanaja, a Hamas official, was buried on Friday in Amman, Jordan. He was found dead in his home in Syria, his body showing signs of torture. (Muhammad Hamed/Reuters)
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Not the most brilliant thing I’ve read lately but one important, though really flawed, point:
“BY 1900, only two genuine multinational empires remained. One was the Ottoman, which was by then in the process of abandoning its traditional religious toleration for Turkish nationalism and even racism. [A completely, unfair, simplistic and un-historical assessment] The other was Austria-Hungary, home to 11 major national groups: a paradise in comparison with what it was to become. Its army had 11 official languages, and officers were obliged to address the men in up to four of them.
It wasn’t terribly efficient, but it secured an astonishing degree of loyalty. It also brought rapid economic and cultural progress to an area extending from the Swiss border to what is today western Ukraine. During World War I, Austria-Hungary fielded eight million soldiers commanded by, among others, some 25,000 Jewish reserve officers. Thirty years later, the nation-states that succeeded the empire sent most of the surviving Jewish officers to the gas chambers.”
Unfortunately, the poison of the ethnic-based nation-state ideal had gotten too far by then. Even the portrait of Austria-Hungary he gives us is completely idealized and existed in the form he describes for less than a century.
(Click above)
How sweet though, to have lived in a world that interesting instead of the stupefying monotony of the modern nation-state. But that idea is so powerful — no, not because it’s natural and inborn, but because the modern, bureaucratic state was the first with the technical apparatus to impose it on its population(s) — that it deletes all historical files dealing with plurality. Not a single European tourist who comes to New York fails to make the same comment: “Amazing…all these peoples living together…” and I want to explain that that’s how humanity lived for most of its civilized existence — or just pull my hair out — but I usually don’t bother.
But that reminds me: I do live in a world that “sweet” and “interesting:”
Mr. Deak (Hungarian?) is also wrong on an even more crucial point. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires were not the world’s last multi-ethnic states. There’s still China. Most of southeast Asia. And Russia. And most ex-Soviet republics. And certain Latin American countries. And almost all of Africa. And Syria and Lebanon and Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan and Pakistan and the world’s great wonder, India. Even Turkey. (And wherever ethnic nationalism is a problem in those countries it’s based on the Western intellectual model.) In fact, most of the world still lives in “plural” situations. Only Europe (and even in Europe there’s Spain and the U.K.), has an issue with this concept, but it seems to be fading even there. Its last bastion will probably be the growing number of viciously homogenized, ugly little states of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Which brings us back to Michael Ignatieff:
“The misery of the Balkans stems in part from a pathetic longing to be good Europeans — that is, to import the West’s murderous ideological fashions. These fashions proved fatal in the Balkans because national unification could be realized only by ripping apart the plural fabric of Balkan village life in the name of the violent dream of ethnic purity.”
From Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, Michael Ignatieff
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On top of being a mosque “that was built on the site of a basilica dedicated to St. John, which was built on the site of a Roman temple to Jupiter, which was built on the site of an Aramean temple of Hadad-Ramman, god of thunder and lightning,” the Great Mosque is also an important Shi’ia shrine because several events from Shi’ism’s core Karbala drama are said to have taken place here. This building must have the most exhalted religious pedigree of any house of worship in the world.
External view of the gate that the prisoners of Karbalā were made to stand at for 72 hours – “Bāb as-Sā‘at” [The “gate of the hours”?]
The place where all the other heads of those who fell in Karbalā were kept within the Mosque.
The white pulpit marks the place where ‘Alī ibn Husayn addressed the court of Yazīd and the raised floor in front of it marks where the prisoners of Karbalā stood during that time.
The place where ‘Alī ibn Husayn used to pray while imprisoned.
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Shrine of St. John in the Umayyad Great Mosque of Damascus, said to contain the head of John the Baptist. The mosque was built on the site of a basilica dedicated to St. John, which was built on the site of a Roman temple to Jupiter, which was built on the site of an Aramean temple of Hadad-Ramman, god of thunder and lightning. (Click on photo; also Google Image this magnificent building; it gets much less visual exposure than it deserves — a spectacular extra wide-angle shot of the mosque’s exterior.)
Walter Russel Mead reiterates what I’ve commented on in previous posts: What Russia doesn’t forget:
“The roots of Russia’s support for Butcher Assad go deep. This is much more than nostalgia for Russia’s last Middle East ally from Soviet days. This is about getting back in touch with Russia’s pre-communist foreign policy traditions, and about Putin’s relations with one of his most reliable and important bases of support: the Russian Orthodox Church. The Church has historically exerted a strong pull on Russian policies overseas, especially in defense of Christian minorities in the Balkans and Middle East. Throughout the events of the Arab Spring, Russia has been reluctant — to put it kindly — to join the efforts to unseat dictators like Hosni Mubarak and Bashar Assad. Though these tyrants have often been brutal toward many of their citizens, Christian minorities have, by and large, thrived under their rule.”
Some commentators, like Andrew Sullivan, find this “a novel explanation for Putin’s intransigence.” It’s not news to some of us. That Eastern Christians have been stuck between a rock (Western manipulation and imperialist intrusion) and a hard place (Islam when it grows intolerant, often, but not always, in response to the former) for something like a millenium now, is a fact that one has to know very little about the region to not be aware of. Mead’s historical run-down on the discomforts of that position is extremely thorough though pretty simplistic, but his post is full of good links if you want to check them out.
I have a substantial investment in being an Orthodox Christian: on one hand, because it’s simply a supremely intelligent and beautiful form of Christianity; on the other, because it’s simply the lesser of all Christian and, by extension, monotheist evils; Rebecca West’s observation that “The Eastern Church never forgot that the primary purpose of religion is magic” is at the heart of both those sentiments. I guess I feel some sense of Orthodox solidarity too — warily (and phenomena like Greeks going off to help Serbs kill Muslims in Bosnia or Orthodox skinheads in Moscow killing Central Asian migrants always pop up to keep me wary). But as I’ve mentioned before here and here, there’s no indication that Russia has ever done anything in the Balkans and Near East that was not in its own imperialist self-interest and that did not often end in disaster for those it was trying to “help.”
Even less, as Mead points out, should be expected from the West:
“Linked to that memory are memories of Western Christian treachery and betrayal. From the Fourth Crusade, ostensibly sent to protect Eastern Christians but turned into a piratical assault on Constantinople [“piratical assault”?? How about thorough and almost complete looting and destruction?], to memories of how the westerners made their help conditional on Orthodox submission to the authority of the Popes, a history of betrayal shapes the Orthodox political mind in many of these countries.”
The seed of this blog was a very early, indisputably emotional and personal, desire to heal Turks’ and Greeks’ feelings for each other, which I realized could only be accomplished by fixing Greeks’ warped sense of where they belong in the world (probably a hopeless project) and which later grew into a wider ideal of regional integration and community, so this issue is really one that goes to the heart of why I write here. Pretending that you’re French or Ancient Greeks that need help in a rough neighborhood won’t cut it. Islamophobic panic or seeing one’s self as the Christian frontier or bastion against the Saracens leads to the group pathology of Serbs or Maronites. Greek and Armenian alliance choices in the early twentieth century almost immediately resulted in the complete eradication of Christianity from Anatolia. Cultural emulation intended to garner support leads to the skewed self-image of contemporary Greeks.
Tying your survival to extra-regional players or regimes like Assad’s that are destined to soon make their exit is a losing strategy for the region’s Christians. The threat of Islamist violence is probably real. Iraq and even Egypt certainly seem to indicate that. But their only choice is probably the tricky dance of fostering, or just going with, the flow of democratic change while keeping themselves as least vulnerable as possible. Forget Russia. And, as Constantine XI had to heroically face in the end, there’s certainly no help coming from the Frangoi.* If you want to live in peace and security, look to your neighbor because, ultimately, he’s the only one who can provide it for you.
* I promised an explanation of this term but haven’t gotten to it yet; for now, let’s just say a derogatory term for Western Europeans.
The church above, which Read uses in his post, is the Church of the Savior in St. Petersburg, built in a Neo-Muscovite mediaeval style, which sticks out like a sore thumb amidst the Neoclassical elegance of the city, on the spot where Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, modelled on the style of the church of St. Basil on Red Square below. Both are routinely used to immediately signify “Russia!” and its exoticness or orientalness.
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…and Syrian Christians in particular…a bunch of frigging priests calling the shots:
(Pool photo by Alexander Nemenov)
From: The New York Times
“Someone once said George Soros was the only American citizen who has his own foreign policy,” said Andrei Zolotov Jr., a leading religion writer and chief editor of Russia Profile. “Well, the Moscow patriarchate is the only Russian entity with its own foreign policy.”
Three and a half months ago, intent on achieving a commanding win in presidential elections, Vladimir V. Putin sought support from Russia’s religious leaders, pledging tens of millions of dollars to reconstruct places of worship and state financing for religious schools…
Western analysts acknowledge the dangers faced by Christians in Syria, but say the church would be wise to distance itself from the Assad government and prepare for a political transition.
“What we see now in Syria is systemic failure — it’s brutal, it’s now an insurgency — but in the end it’s just systemic failure,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and an expert on Syria. “If the Christian population and those that support it want a long-term future in the region, they’re going to have to accept that hitching their wagon to this brutal killing machine doesn’t have a long-term future.”
The Russian Orthodox Church regularly meets with the Russian Foreign Ministry to discuss its agenda outside Russia’s borders, and is seen by most experts as eager to render support to the Kremlin.”
Obviously “hitching their wagon” to the Assad regime is not a strategy with a long-term future, just like hitching your hopes to Western — even, especially, Russian — protection has certainly always been a losing strategy for Middle Eastern Christians for a few centuries now, but resisting the temptations such ‘protection’ or ‘stability,’ wherever it comes from, seem to offer is easier said than done, especially once the sectarian killing machine has gotten rolling.
As for Russia, somebody needs to put a muzzle on the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Church generally — and this is from someone who thought Church freedom and the fall of communism would only happen at the Second Coming and who was overjoyed and stunned to watch it collapse so easily, but they’ve become way too powerful and vocal (fortunately, Russians have that finely honed Orthodox ability for maintaining emotional adherence to the faith while completely ignoring the clergy and the Church-as-institution generally.) Unfortunately, the only person who could muzzle them a bit is the man who’s muzzled the rest of the country, Putin himself, and as long as the reciprocal back-scratching continues… To watch this KGB murderer in church with his candle, crossing himself and bowing, turns my stomach.
A friend of mine in Petersburg told me at some point in the mid-nineties: “Everyone who was a communist before has become Orthodox and everyone who was Orthodox before has become Buddhist and the Buddhists just went back to drinking.”
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The New Yorker‘s Philip Gourevitch in this week’s Comment:
“Syria cannot be addressed in isolation. What concerns the United States most in the region is trying to avert war between Israel and Iran. (Last week, during negotiations in Baghdad to curtail Tehran’s nuclear program, Washington’s hopes ran prematurely high.) There is a risk of a regional Sunni-Shiite conflagration, as Saudi Arabia, which backed Bahrain’s crackdown on Shiite protesters, has advocated arming Syria’s opposition. There are Turkish misgivings about Kurdish rebels establishing bases in Syria; and Israeli anxieties about Assad’s accelerating military assistance to Hezbollah forces. There is also the question of Syria’s enormous chemical-weapons stockpiles: might Assad use them? Can they be secured if he falls? And there is the problem of Russia’s support for Syria—its lone remaining client state in the Middle East—and China’s support for Russia, particularly after both countries were angered by NATO’s use of its U.N. mandate to provide humanitarian protection in Libya to achieve regime change there. (Russia has called on the International Criminal Court to investigate allegations of NATOwar crimes in the campaign against Qaddafi.)…
“…none of the conditions that worked to NATO’s advantage in Libya—its geographical and political self-containment, Qaddafi’s abandonment, the efficacy of the opposition forces, the ease of executing the mission from the air—pertain in Syria. Instead, the situation has all the makings of just the sort of quagmire that NATOis impatient to get out of: the main item on the agenda in Chicago was to declare the plan to withdraw all combat troops from Afghanistan in 2014 “irreversible.”
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/06/04/120604taco_talk_gourevitch
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A mass burial was held Saturday in the Houla area of Syria, according to an activist network that distributed this photograph. (Shaam News Network, via Reuters)
“The effort by countries including the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Bulgaria, Australia, Spain, Italy and Canada to expel the senior Syrian diplomatic officials appeared timed to underscore the extreme isolation of the Syrian government and pressure Mr. Assad into honoring the terms of a nearly two-month-old peace plan negotiated by Mr. Annan.”
And good news?
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…till Syria got me asking: that there are Alawites in Lebanon too; that Hezbollah supports the Asad regime even though (I would’ve previously thought) they’re Alawite; that Alawites and Anatolian Alevis aren’t as consciously related as lots of people think, though they’re similar in many concepts and rites and are probably both a product — or remnant — of inherently heterodox frontier zones between Byzantine-Arab-Turkic-Iranian spiritual worlds, before the lines hardened; that the relationship of both to “mainstream” Shi’ism varies in intensity and in the degree to which they’re accepted by that mainstream as part of the fold (Alawites, as in the Asad-Hezbollah relation, more than Anatolian Alevis, who are kind of a world of their own); that Iran’s support of Hezbollah is part of a relationship that’s neither new nor one-way — that, in fact, Shi’ia clerics and theologians from southern Lebanon/Jabal Amil (including the Sadr clan) were instrumental in establishing Shi’ism as Safavid Iran’s state creed in the sixteenth century; that that happened in a kind of simultaneous, binary process, as such things tend to, with Ottoman Turkey becoming more orthodoxly Sunni…and more.
This is a cool, very informative book, though sometimes so personal and emotional and out-there-Persian that it becomes confusing as straight history or sociology:
Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest, Hamid Dabashi: http://www.amazon.com/Shiism-Religion-Protest-Hamid-Dabashi/dp/0674049454/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337903598&sr=1-1
and Distant Relations: Iran and Lebanon in the Last 500 Years, H.E. Chehabi: http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Relations-Iran-Lebanon-Years/dp/1845112555/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337903763&sr=1-1
Otherwise not good though…not Syria, not another spillover into Lebanon or its again becoming the catch-basin of Levantine conflict. None of it…
Men in a Beirut suburb burned tires and blocked roads after fellow Lebanese Shiites were abducted in the Syrian city of Aleppo. (Anwar Amro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)
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Guns. Men. The poppies that carpet the Mediterranean at springtime.
Fighter from the Free Syria Army in a foxhole in Homs province in Syria, (baysontheroad), (click).
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Short Al Jazeera report that follows up and answers some questions I had in previous post: April 23rd, “Turkey and religious freedom: Wooing Christians — ‘We are ready to face the past, to make amends.'”
Christ, I hope they end up on the right historical side of this one. Not that they may have a choice — as Iraqi Christians didn’t.
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 
