Heart of Darkness

OpinionJournal ^ | 09/28/2005 | Fouad Ajami

[Hunden]

Heart of Darkness BY FOUAD AJAMI,  WSJ, 28 September 2005 From Zarqawi to the man on the street, Sunni Arabs fear Shiite emancipation. The remarkable thing about the terror in Iraq is the silence with which it is greeted in other Arab lands. Grant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi his due: […] The extremist is never just a man of the fringe: He always works at the outer edges of mainstream life, playing out the hidden yearnings and defects of the dominant culture. Zarqawi is a bigot and a killer, but he did not descend from the sky. He emerged out of the Arab world's sins of omission and commission; in the way he rails against the Shiites (and the Kurds) he expresses that fatal Arab inability to take in "the other." A terrible condition afflicts the Arabs, and Zarqawi puts it on lethal display: an addiction to failure, and a desire to see this American project in Iraq come to a bloody end. Zarqawi's war, it has to be conceded, is not his alone; he kills and maims, he labels the Shiites rafida (rejecters of Islam), he charges them with treason as "collaborators of the occupiers and the crusaders," but he can be forgiven the sense that he is a holy warrior on behalf of a wider Arab world that has averted its gaze from his crimes, that has given him its silent approval. He and the band of killers arrayed around him must know the meaning of this great Arab silence. There is a cliché that distinguishes between cultures of shame and cultures of guilt, and by that crude distinction, it has always been said that the Arab world is a "shame culture." But in truth there is precious little shame in Arab life about the role of the Arabs in the great struggle for and within Iraq.

[Hunden]

" Zarqawi is a bigot and a killer, but he did not descend from the sky. He emerged out of the Arab world's sins of omission and commission; in the way he rails against the Shiites (and the Kurds) he expresses that fatal Arab inability to take in "the other."

[Billthedrill]

Outstanding find. BTT.

Zarqawi is a bigot and a killer, but he did not descend from the sky. He emerged out of the Arab world's sins of omission and commission...

Just so. The silence of the Arabs is damning. What will they tell the Iraqis when the latter ask them why they murdered so many of their people?

[Hetty_Fauxvert]

This is a terrific article: long, but well worth reading in its entirety. This bit explained an awful lot to me, regarding the ferocity of the "insurgents":

No one is under any illusions as to what the Sunni Arabs would have done had oil been located in their provinces. They would have disowned both north and south and opted for a smaller world of their own and defended it with the sword. But this was not to be, and their war is the panic of a community that fears that it could be left with a realm of "gravel and sand."

[RedStateRocker]

There is hope if people like Mr. Ajami are teaching the youth today; THAT is what a political thinker is supposed to do!

I sometimes wonder how a Muslim or Buddhist would feel if they got in the middle of a typical Irish protestant/Catholic conflict; about like most Americans trying to keep track of Shiite vs Sunni:-)

[wildcatf4f3]

bitterly LOL

[wildcatf4f3]

forwarded

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great--thanks

[Red Boots]

I found these words of hope at the end :

A Kuwaiti businessman with an unerring feel for the ways of the Arab world put it thus to me: "Iraq, the Internet, and American power are undermining the old order in the Arab world. There are gains by the day."