Reflections on Al Qaeda in Mali, and Other Radicals at the Gates

By Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer, July 17th, 2013
Rebels from the militant Islamist sect Ansar Dine in Mali © Anne Look | voanews.com

I recently read a fascinating and disturbing article in The New Yorker, by Jon Lee Anderson, on the rise and defeat of Islamists in Mali. I was struck by two particular descriptions of the Islamists’ behavior:

“In the central square, Idrissa had witnessed the beating of one of the jihadis’ own men, who had been accused by his comrades of raping a young girl. The spectators loudly criticized the jihadis for a double standard. “Everyone was angry because they didn’t kill him,” Idrissa said. Afterward, the jihadis had gone on the local radio station and warned that anyone who spoke badly about their men would be killed.”

The other:

“Then, on day two, the Islamists came,” he recalled. He had asked the leader what he wanted. Naming the northern towns of Mali, he had said, “Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal are Muslim towns, and we want to make Sharia in them. We are not asking. We are saying what we are doing, and we’re here to make Sharia.”

What I found so troubling was not only “the usual” Al Qaeda-related atrocities, but even more so the Islamist’s clearly voiced goal of destroying an existing social system through violence, devastation of cultural heritage (vandalizing local temples and libraries). This was tied together with the idea of creating a different social order based on sexual control, and the replacement of any traces of modern knowledge by radical interpretations of old religious texts. The irony is that these readings are just as contemporary as the lifestyle the Islamists try to erase.

In my opinion, these two quotes illustrate the power of violence combined with unquestionable certainty, able to undermine an entire civilization—its customs, morals, social order, and authorities. They fall apart in the presence of arrogant brutality. The people are too “civilized,” too cultured to defend themselves. The Islamists reject a civilization they claim is morally corrupt, and instead attempt to replace it with a modern essentialist take on an imagined Golden Age of religious purity.

The case of Islamists in Mali is an extremely . . .

Read more: Reflections on Al Qaeda in Mali, and Other Radicals at the Gates

July 17th, 2013 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Christopher Hitchens’s Hitch-22: Confessions of a Political Romantic

By Vince Carducci, June 22nd, 2011
Book cover © Twelve, 2010

I’ve been trying to figure out Christopher Hitchens for some ten years now. My first encounter with “Hitch” was in the fall of 2000 when he gave an impromptu talk on the writer’s life in the Mechanics Conference Room at the New School for Social Research in New York City. I had recently quit my longtime corporate-suit job in the Midwest and moved to Manhattan to go to grad school, and he was just coming onto the faculty as a visiting professor in my MA program in liberal studies. Hitchens spoke extemporaneously on a dizzying array of topics, from the evils of religion to the necessity of reading George Orwell to the benefits of grain spirits, punctuating important points with blasts of exhaled cigarette smoke. I was often reminded of that experience, minus the noxious tobacco fumes, while reading his memoir, Hitch-22, now out in paperback.

Indeed, Hitchens’ style in person and in print is tailor-made for the memoir form. Anyone familiar with his much-published writing, his frequent media appearances, and lectures will recognize the facility, abundant throughout the book, with which Hitchens moves from personal experience to grandiloquent pronouncement, tying things together with erudite disquisitions on literature, history, and the darker art of muckraking. A familiar tic is the construction “my dear friend [INSERT FAMOUS PERSON’S NAME]….” In that regard, most of the dramatis personae are familiar to regular Hitchens readers so there isn’t a whole lot that’s revelatory in these particular pages, except for the details, which admittedly tend to be more than interesting enough.

A couple of times in the book, Hitchens remarks on his being a late bloomer. And so it is that some have seen the core of Hitch-22 as the story of the author’s inner journey in adulthood from firebrand 1960s campus radical to geezery Tory. It’s a familiar Baby Boomer trope, of course (The Big Chill, anyone?), but one whose narrative trajectory has a longer history within modern liberal thought. (As nineteenth-century historian and statesman Francois Guizot said: “Not to be a republican [in the 1789 French Revolutionary . . .

Read more: Christopher Hitchens’s Hitch-22: Confessions of a Political Romantic

June 22nd, 2011 | Tags: , , , , ,