A magnet for European tourists, with a new young king intent on reform, Morocco seemed set for a bright future. But modernisation, the rise of Islamism and a wave of al-Qaeda-linked bombings have left the country at a crossroads
An empty square in front of the ferry docks in the northern Moroccan port city of Tangiers. It's after midnight on a fresh spring night and scruffy teenagers fight and shout under a palm tree. The narrow lanes leading up to the old town - the medina - with its shops, winding passageways and windowless walls, are silent but for the footsteps of the occasional shift-worker hurrying home. A dog barks, the waves slap on the dockside and beyond the gravel of the long beach a ship's horn sounds dully in the darkness. To the north, across the nine mile-wide Straits of Gibraltar, is Europe. A sign in Arabic and French points the way to the docks serving Italy, France and Spain. To the east, beyond the curve of the bay and the rows of half-constructed apartment and office blocks, and the new railway station, lies the southern coast of the Mediterranean, sliding away towards the heart of the Arab and Muslim world. And to the west is the headland where you can stand facing the heavy breakers of the Atlantic and imagine the entire continent of Africa at your back. Morocco has always been at a crossroads. And never more than now.
The first sight of Morocco for tourists arriving from the UK is not of Tangiers but of Marrakesh in the south. An estimated 150,000 British holidaymakers (and 800,000 French) travelled to the desert city last year. For most Britons, Marrakesh - and Morocco - is one of three things: either the latest fashionable celebrity destination, somewhere to go clubbing and stay relatively cheaply in a magnificently restored 16th-century palace; or it's a mystical oriental paradise, a land of camels, water-pipes, rugs and hashish; or it is Arab, Muslim and poor, and therefore on the point of turning into a factory for illegal immigrants and suicide bombers. In fact, Morocco is all of these things and none.
Near a school in a good area of Marrakesh, teenagers flirt, gossip and talk on mobile phones. Hassan, one of the leather-jacketed adolescents doing wheelies on scooters, tells me the new king, Mohammed VI, is 'cool' and that the future of the country is 'brilliant'. Watching from across the street is Turia, a 17-year-old maths student, who does not think Morocco is heading in the right direction at all.
'I like things calm and it's too noisy here now,' she says. 'There is too much immorality. Things change too quickly.' She is wearing a headscarf, 'because it suits [her]', because it is her 'religion' and because her mother wears one too. Turia tells me that her father is dead and that life is difficult. A friend, also veiled, joins her. She is with a young, poorly-dressed man. They have been holding hands during a walk in the nearby park. 'There are a lot of problems for young people now,' he tells me. 'Relationships, work, accommodation.' 'Things are changing too much here,' says Turia again.
Change is now the theme in Morocco. The first thing you see at Marrakesh airport is a sign apologising for inconvenience caused by building work. It could apply to half the country. The airport is just one of hundreds of massive developments which, for good or ill, are changing the face of the nation. Around Marrakesh are new stations, huge new villa complexes, a giant cinema, Africa's biggest nightclub, and even, an hour's drive through the desert towards the sea, an entire town built with mosques, nurseries and communal kitchens.
That change is needed - Morocco sits below Ghana and Namibia in the UN's human poverty index. The new era is symbolised by the new 43-year-old king. Though something of a playboy - critics call him His Majetski because of a taste for water sports - Mohammed VI wants to modernise his country after years of repressive dictatorship under his father. 'Modernity with tradition,' says another giant advertising hoarding in front of one new residential development. Like the signs at the airport, it applies to more than just a single site. The construction is just the most visible part of a huge project aiming at changing the values and perspectives of the nation.
Turia is not alone in worrying that the changes are taking Morocco in the wrong direction. On the site of one slum clearance, local residents are demonstrating against 'the venal advisers' of the king who, they say, 'have kicked them out of their homes'. The fruits of Marrakesh's property boom are not equitably distributed. There is also a strong security establishment which has little interest in Morocco becoming a happy, prosperous democracy. Within minutes of my stopping to interview the demonstrators, a secret policeman has appeared and wants to know who I am, what I am doing and where I am staying.
'You see,' says Turia. What I see is a country with a long and complex history - a monarchy stretching back centuries, decades as a colony, the scars of Cold War geo-politics - groping its way through the conflicting ideologies and identities of the 21st century. Europe is close, but a long way away too.
I take the train to Casablanca, the central coastal city and the economic heartland of the country. Morocco was a de facto colony for 44 years and one of the legacies - along with the French language spoken by the elite, the lycees, good coffee and croissants, and passable wine - are the trains, crowded perhaps but, at least in second class where I am travelling, cheap. The very poor take the bus - my fellow travellers are businessmen, students, junior bureaucrats, families. Marrakesh is considered the south of Morocco but it is less than halfway down the spine of the country. Vast tracts of the Sahara extend to the south and, once over the Atlas mountains, to the east.
Half of Morocco's 33 million citizens live in the cities, mostly along the coastal strip, and many, particularly in rural areas, are desperately poor. According to the UN, illiteracy rates are around 50 per cent and a quarter of the country is without sanitation. We pass donkey carts, shepherds and mangy flocks, dirt roads strewn with rubbish. The approach to Casablanca is marked by building sites.
The city streets are bustling with smartly dressed office workers, the women wearing matching suits and headscarves. A year ago I was struck by the economic activity here. A new view of Morocco is now common in business circles in Europe and American: a country now open for business, where European firms install big, cheap factories; a country of investment opportunities, of growth, of money being made. Annual growth rates of up to 7 per cent, massive investment in the country's infrastructure, a rush of European firms, all support such a vision of the country. But as with the other images of Morocco, it is both true and unrepresentative.
I find Nourredine Ayouch, a public relations expert who is president of three NGOs (working on political, cultural and development projects) in his vast office on the Boulevard d'Anfa. Charming and voluble, he launches straight into a critique of the king. That he can do so is evidence of how things have changed. To say that the king has too much power would have been extremely dangerous a decade ago. But reforms have not gone far enough, he complains. 'This is a monarchy that is heading towards democracy,' he tells me, but there is a long way to go. 'The ruler is not answerable for what he does.'
This autumn there will be new elections which, if they follow those of five years ago, will be largely free and fair, executive power is still very much in the hands of the monarch. 'We are nothing like other countries in the Middle East,' stresses Ayouch. 'The king viscerally wants modernity for his country. But no one is going to give us democracy on a plate.'
What is clear is that for Ayouch - and the king - modernity and democracy are inextricably linked. Their model is not the US, despite a historic pro-American stance, but Europe. The way forward lies just across the Straits of Gibraltar.
Art critic Kinza Sefrioui has reversed the journey so many of her compatriots hope to make. A fine French education led her back to Casablanca three years ago. Now she writes for one of the few independent news magazines. We meet in a bar in the busy commercial centre of Casablanca, a few hundred yards from the gates of the old city. After years spent in other 'Islamic' countries, I am unused to openly ordering a beer. We talk about both the energy and diversity of the cultural scene in Morocco and the difficulties for writers and artists. Little of the boom money is finding its way into culture, though the king, a fan of visual arts, has ordered the construction of a number of galleries and artistic centres. There is, however, a big music scene - fusions of local and Western music, rap, 'metal' - and festivals where 'you can go with your boyfriend or girlfriend and no one will want to see your marriage certificate'. 'It's not a case of being Westernised,' Kinza says, 'it's just about partying.' We speak about Marock , last year's controversial film portraying the lives of the spoiled children of Casablanca's elite: sex, drugs, alcohol, fast cars and the nightclubs like those along the famous seaside strip, the Corniche. 'The criticism did not focus on whether the film was any good or not,' says Kinza, 'but on the bad image of the country.' For many overseas, the open hedonism of a tiny proportion of the urban population is taken as a sign of the new Morocco, yet another image, partially true, partially deceptive.
Certainly the huge gulf between the richest and poorest in Morocco remains stark. I visit a home for destitute street kids, and then a shanty town where entire families subsist on pounds 1 a day. I meet 38-year-old Fatima, who sells hard-boiled eggs on the beach for a living, and lives in a single room with two teenage daughters in an old mental hospital, home to scores of families. Later I stop by the opening of a private exhibition in a wealthy suburb with champagne and canapes. The owner says that business has never been better. Tonight he has sold several large abstracts for between pounds 4,000 and pounds 7,000. His partner gives me a lift back into town in her brand new Land Rover. Her car barely turns heads these days, such is the wealth flowing into Casablanca, she tells me. But there are problems, she says, as we drive past an enormous new Zara store. 'The Moroccans have changed... Islamism is rising and that breaks my heart,' she says. 'Before, no one was interested in whether you were Muslim, Christian or Jewish. It was very tolerant, very moderate. Now the Moroccans are becoming very... Moroccan. They always had an inferiority complex towards the Arabs of the Middle East. Now they want to show they are more Arab than anyone else. And more Muslim. But it's sad. Maybe they need an identity or something, I don't know.'
Abdelwahed Motawakil knows. Or at least he thinks he does. Motawakil, 52, is secretary general of The Union of Faith and Social Charity, an Islamic group that, though the government and observers distinguish between it and the militants who were responsible for suicide attacks in Casablanca in 2003 that killed 50, is not officially recognised as a political party and is seen by many as 'potentially very dangerous'. A more moderate Islamic party has already made a serious impact on the street and in parliament, and is set for big gains in the elections this autumn.
'People turn to us and to Islam because we want a free political order where people are free to choose their leaders and a have a decent life, and because we fight for the fundamental right of a man to know his creator. We want a just system and spirituality. And the two cannot be separated,' he tells me. I list the recent reforms - the new law bolstering the rights of women, a form of peace and reconciliation process dealing with human rights abuses by the state, the king's well-thought-of human development initiatives, praised by Bayti and other NGOs in Casablanca. Motowakil dismisses them all. 'Are there any benefits for the Moroccan people?' he asks. 'Just for a small minority. We have a despotic, autocratic rule. The reforms are a game played by the monarchy to distract people's attention.'
Motawakil is the very picture of the modern Islamist politician. His language is reasonable and his message appeals to large numbers of ordinary Moroccans who are fed up with corrupt and incompetent local administrators. He insists that, if in power, his party would respect the will of the people. 'We are against violence. We do not believe that you can impose any solution by force. Democracy is the only practical possibility,' he says, nodding sincerely. 'This country has been Islamic for many centuries,' he says when I raise the 'resurgence of Islamism' that many analysts talk about. 'There is no identity problem.' But when asked who he thinks is responsible for the 9/11 attacks, he is too canny a politician to openly put forward the anti-semitic conspiracy theory that the attacks were the work of the Israeli secret services and the CIA, but he comes close. 'I don't believe that a man like bin Laden up in the mountains could do it, so it must have been someone else... there are powerful people who would benefit from something like that... There are international interests,' he says. Outside, the taxi driver who deposited me outside Motowakil's office an hour before has returned to tell me that he has since been questioned by the secret police about who I am.
The spooks will not be too stretched if tempted to check on my next meeting - with the minister for youth, whose office, in the aseptic diplomatic quarter of the capital of Rabat, is directly opposite the headquarters of the national gendarmerie. I take a collective taxi - one of the old Mercedes that routinely carry eight passengers wedged across the passenger seats in a happy chaos of bags, flowing djellaba robes, plastic bags and pots - for a few dirhams. As we pass the massive site where a new marina is being built below the huge walls of the ancient city, perched on a crag above the rolling Atlantic, the young driver sneers at the expense of the project, and is told off by one of his older clients.
I am expecting self-promoting, diplomatic flannel from the minister, but instead get nearly two hours of acute analysis. Mohammed Al-Ghass is 43, the same age as the king, and is a believer in building a new Morocco, a prosperous, stable, democratic, open and tolerant nation that will act as an example for other states in Africa and the Middle East. He says clearly that Morocco has embarked on a massive project of social, economic and political engineering: reducing the monarchy to something resembling that of the UK or Holland, pump-priming the economy to stimulate equitable growth. This is all very ambitious, difficult and risky, he says. 'We are in the middle of trying something that lots of people have said is impossible. It is absolutely essential that we make it work... I don't even want to imagine the consequences if we fail.'
We talk about the threat from the Islamists. Motawakil and men like him have no intention of allowing elections once in power, asserts Ghass. To fight back, he says, 'democracy must be strong and certain of its own values, principles and its superiority. Democracy must be able to convince people; but in a society such as this one the risks, the dangers are greater than elsewhere.' And the Islamists have some advantages. 'Inculcating democratic values takes time,' Ghass argues, 'and the Islamists surf on the poverty, the intense frustration in our society or [that] felt against the West. There is a love-hate thing happening, a sort of fascination and rejection. The West is so close to us here and we see how they live well and are happy and have what we want, and we would love to be part of these open, content societies. But they don't want us, so we find a way to say that we are rejecting them, not vice versa.'
Can, though, Morocco become the prosperous democracy he is talking about? Ghass points out that 40 years ago everyone said that Spain was doomed to dictatorship and poverty. 'We simply cannot fail,' he says.
In Akshour Farda, a cluster of mud-walled houses, orchards and snotty children that clings to the steep slopes of the Oued Farda valley, many hundreds of miles to the north of Casablanca and Rabat, this spring is different. Now there is television. Mohammed, a 44-year-old farmer, proudly shows me the wooden cabinet he has built for his own set, which now dominates the small room where he sleeps with his wife, father and four children. What does he watch? Spanish television for the most part - and mainly football. His village, still without a water supply other than a natural well, has no sanitation, and is now divided between Real Madrid and Barcelona fans.
Mohammed pulls out a pipe and packs it with hash. He lives in the centre of the Rif mountains, the world's biggest hash-producing area, the vast proportion of which is sold in Europe. The electricity is part of a government programme and, like the new olive plantations, is aimed not only at developing the area but at convincing the local farmers that they should stop growing cannabis. Though the new push to restrict cultivation is having some effect, there is work to be done - last year 120,000 hectares were sown with cannabis in and around the Rif. The farmers themselves do not earn much - a gram of hash costs about as much as a text message. 'What do you expect?' said one local teacher. 'The people here are poor. They have been ignored for years. It's a good crop and there's a ready market.' Along with major smuggling and people trafficking, hash is one of the less official links between Morocco and mainland Europe.
Up in the Rif, the children shout 'Ola!' when they see a foreigner.
Between the Rif and the coast is the city of Tetouan. For years it has had a bad reputation - as a city of smugglers, criminals and lately as a hotbed for radical Islamism. The American government has leaked a series of investigations into the origins of suicide bombers who have blown themselves up in Iraq and a clutch appear to have come from the city. I am not the first journalist to investigate this. When I hail a taxi to Jemaa Mazuuk, the area from where the bombers are meant to have come, Mowsef, the 22-year-old driver, laughs at my 'al-Qaeda tourism'. But we drive off happily enough, along a long boulevard bathed in evening sunlight and with a magnificent view out onto the foothills of the Rif. There is a rowdy demonstration under way - of support for the local football side that has just beaten Casablanca. Mowsef is a trainee mechanic and earning pounds 200 a month as a driver and is very happy, because he is saving up to go to France and marry his French-Moroccan girlfriend.
Mowsef takes me to an old schoolmate's house. There is no one in, because the friend, linked to the bomb attacks in Madrid in 2004 which killed 200 people, blew himself up when the Spanish police closed in on him afterwards. 'He was a nice bloke,' says Mowsef. 'He told his mum he was going to Spain for work, went for a year or so and then, boom!'
Back in the centre of town it is an animated Sunday evening. The streets are full of promenading couples. The markets are full of bustle. Older men in djellabas, younger men in leather jackets, some women in veils, some not. Old Mercedes taxis work their way through the throng under the Thirties Spanish-built buildings, with their mix of art deco white and green lines, local arches and Spanish shutters. It is nine o'clock and the street lights have flickered on in the main square, dominated by the huge timber doors to the royal palace. In the cafes around the square men play dominos and watch football and the news (there has been a suicide bombing in Casablanca) as they drink tea. There is a queue outside the cinema for a variety of Western films. The internet cafes are full of teenagers. Hawkers sell beans and snails. The streets begin to empty. It is late and there is a mountain chill in the air.
I drive down to Tangier, to an empty square in front of the ferry docks. There are scruffy teenagers, the medina, the waves slapping on the dockside, a ship's horn sounding dully in the darkness, and the multiple signposts, of which some point the way to Europe.
An empty square in front of the ferry docks in the northern Moroccan port city of Tangiers. It's after midnight on a fresh spring night and scruffy teenagers fight and shout under a palm tree. The narrow lanes leading up to the old town - the medina - with its shops, winding passageways and windowless walls, are silent but for the footsteps of the occasional shift-worker hurrying home. A dog barks, the waves slap on the dockside and beyond the gravel of the long beach a ship's horn sounds dully in the darkness. To the north, across the nine mile-wide Straits of Gibraltar, is Europe. A sign in Arabic and French points the way to the docks serving Italy, France and Spain. To the east, beyond the curve of the bay and the rows of half-constructed apartment and office blocks, and the new railway station, lies the southern coast of the Mediterranean, sliding away towards the heart of the Arab and Muslim world. And to the west is the headland where you can stand facing the heavy breakers of the Atlantic and imagine the entire continent of Africa at your back. Morocco has always been at a crossroads. And never more than now.
The first sight of Morocco for tourists arriving from the UK is not of Tangiers but of Marrakesh in the south. An estimated 150,000 British holidaymakers (and 800,000 French) travelled to the desert city last year. For most Britons, Marrakesh - and Morocco - is one of three things: either the latest fashionable celebrity destination, somewhere to go clubbing and stay relatively cheaply in a magnificently restored 16th-century palace; or it's a mystical oriental paradise, a land of camels, water-pipes, rugs and hashish; or it is Arab, Muslim and poor, and therefore on the point of turning into a factory for illegal immigrants and suicide bombers. In fact, Morocco is all of these things and none.
Near a school in a good area of Marrakesh, teenagers flirt, gossip and talk on mobile phones. Hassan, one of the leather-jacketed adolescents doing wheelies on scooters, tells me the new king, Mohammed VI, is 'cool' and that the future of the country is 'brilliant'. Watching from across the street is Turia, a 17-year-old maths student, who does not think Morocco is heading in the right direction at all.
'I like things calm and it's too noisy here now,' she says. 'There is too much immorality. Things change too quickly.' She is wearing a headscarf, 'because it suits [her]', because it is her 'religion' and because her mother wears one too. Turia tells me that her father is dead and that life is difficult. A friend, also veiled, joins her. She is with a young, poorly-dressed man. They have been holding hands during a walk in the nearby park. 'There are a lot of problems for young people now,' he tells me. 'Relationships, work, accommodation.' 'Things are changing too much here,' says Turia again.
Change is now the theme in Morocco. The first thing you see at Marrakesh airport is a sign apologising for inconvenience caused by building work. It could apply to half the country. The airport is just one of hundreds of massive developments which, for good or ill, are changing the face of the nation. Around Marrakesh are new stations, huge new villa complexes, a giant cinema, Africa's biggest nightclub, and even, an hour's drive through the desert towards the sea, an entire town built with mosques, nurseries and communal kitchens.
That change is needed - Morocco sits below Ghana and Namibia in the UN's human poverty index. The new era is symbolised by the new 43-year-old king. Though something of a playboy - critics call him His Majetski because of a taste for water sports - Mohammed VI wants to modernise his country after years of repressive dictatorship under his father. 'Modernity with tradition,' says another giant advertising hoarding in front of one new residential development. Like the signs at the airport, it applies to more than just a single site. The construction is just the most visible part of a huge project aiming at changing the values and perspectives of the nation.
Turia is not alone in worrying that the changes are taking Morocco in the wrong direction. On the site of one slum clearance, local residents are demonstrating against 'the venal advisers' of the king who, they say, 'have kicked them out of their homes'. The fruits of Marrakesh's property boom are not equitably distributed. There is also a strong security establishment which has little interest in Morocco becoming a happy, prosperous democracy. Within minutes of my stopping to interview the demonstrators, a secret policeman has appeared and wants to know who I am, what I am doing and where I am staying.
'You see,' says Turia. What I see is a country with a long and complex history - a monarchy stretching back centuries, decades as a colony, the scars of Cold War geo-politics - groping its way through the conflicting ideologies and identities of the 21st century. Europe is close, but a long way away too.
I take the train to Casablanca, the central coastal city and the economic heartland of the country. Morocco was a de facto colony for 44 years and one of the legacies - along with the French language spoken by the elite, the lycees, good coffee and croissants, and passable wine - are the trains, crowded perhaps but, at least in second class where I am travelling, cheap. The very poor take the bus - my fellow travellers are businessmen, students, junior bureaucrats, families. Marrakesh is considered the south of Morocco but it is less than halfway down the spine of the country. Vast tracts of the Sahara extend to the south and, once over the Atlas mountains, to the east.
Half of Morocco's 33 million citizens live in the cities, mostly along the coastal strip, and many, particularly in rural areas, are desperately poor. According to the UN, illiteracy rates are around 50 per cent and a quarter of the country is without sanitation. We pass donkey carts, shepherds and mangy flocks, dirt roads strewn with rubbish. The approach to Casablanca is marked by building sites.
The city streets are bustling with smartly dressed office workers, the women wearing matching suits and headscarves. A year ago I was struck by the economic activity here. A new view of Morocco is now common in business circles in Europe and American: a country now open for business, where European firms install big, cheap factories; a country of investment opportunities, of growth, of money being made. Annual growth rates of up to 7 per cent, massive investment in the country's infrastructure, a rush of European firms, all support such a vision of the country. But as with the other images of Morocco, it is both true and unrepresentative.
I find Nourredine Ayouch, a public relations expert who is president of three NGOs (working on political, cultural and development projects) in his vast office on the Boulevard d'Anfa. Charming and voluble, he launches straight into a critique of the king. That he can do so is evidence of how things have changed. To say that the king has too much power would have been extremely dangerous a decade ago. But reforms have not gone far enough, he complains. 'This is a monarchy that is heading towards democracy,' he tells me, but there is a long way to go. 'The ruler is not answerable for what he does.'
This autumn there will be new elections which, if they follow those of five years ago, will be largely free and fair, executive power is still very much in the hands of the monarch. 'We are nothing like other countries in the Middle East,' stresses Ayouch. 'The king viscerally wants modernity for his country. But no one is going to give us democracy on a plate.'
What is clear is that for Ayouch - and the king - modernity and democracy are inextricably linked. Their model is not the US, despite a historic pro-American stance, but Europe. The way forward lies just across the Straits of Gibraltar.
Art critic Kinza Sefrioui has reversed the journey so many of her compatriots hope to make. A fine French education led her back to Casablanca three years ago. Now she writes for one of the few independent news magazines. We meet in a bar in the busy commercial centre of Casablanca, a few hundred yards from the gates of the old city. After years spent in other 'Islamic' countries, I am unused to openly ordering a beer. We talk about both the energy and diversity of the cultural scene in Morocco and the difficulties for writers and artists. Little of the boom money is finding its way into culture, though the king, a fan of visual arts, has ordered the construction of a number of galleries and artistic centres. There is, however, a big music scene - fusions of local and Western music, rap, 'metal' - and festivals where 'you can go with your boyfriend or girlfriend and no one will want to see your marriage certificate'. 'It's not a case of being Westernised,' Kinza says, 'it's just about partying.' We speak about Marock , last year's controversial film portraying the lives of the spoiled children of Casablanca's elite: sex, drugs, alcohol, fast cars and the nightclubs like those along the famous seaside strip, the Corniche. 'The criticism did not focus on whether the film was any good or not,' says Kinza, 'but on the bad image of the country.' For many overseas, the open hedonism of a tiny proportion of the urban population is taken as a sign of the new Morocco, yet another image, partially true, partially deceptive.
Certainly the huge gulf between the richest and poorest in Morocco remains stark. I visit a home for destitute street kids, and then a shanty town where entire families subsist on pounds 1 a day. I meet 38-year-old Fatima, who sells hard-boiled eggs on the beach for a living, and lives in a single room with two teenage daughters in an old mental hospital, home to scores of families. Later I stop by the opening of a private exhibition in a wealthy suburb with champagne and canapes. The owner says that business has never been better. Tonight he has sold several large abstracts for between pounds 4,000 and pounds 7,000. His partner gives me a lift back into town in her brand new Land Rover. Her car barely turns heads these days, such is the wealth flowing into Casablanca, she tells me. But there are problems, she says, as we drive past an enormous new Zara store. 'The Moroccans have changed... Islamism is rising and that breaks my heart,' she says. 'Before, no one was interested in whether you were Muslim, Christian or Jewish. It was very tolerant, very moderate. Now the Moroccans are becoming very... Moroccan. They always had an inferiority complex towards the Arabs of the Middle East. Now they want to show they are more Arab than anyone else. And more Muslim. But it's sad. Maybe they need an identity or something, I don't know.'
Abdelwahed Motawakil knows. Or at least he thinks he does. Motawakil, 52, is secretary general of The Union of Faith and Social Charity, an Islamic group that, though the government and observers distinguish between it and the militants who were responsible for suicide attacks in Casablanca in 2003 that killed 50, is not officially recognised as a political party and is seen by many as 'potentially very dangerous'. A more moderate Islamic party has already made a serious impact on the street and in parliament, and is set for big gains in the elections this autumn.
'People turn to us and to Islam because we want a free political order where people are free to choose their leaders and a have a decent life, and because we fight for the fundamental right of a man to know his creator. We want a just system and spirituality. And the two cannot be separated,' he tells me. I list the recent reforms - the new law bolstering the rights of women, a form of peace and reconciliation process dealing with human rights abuses by the state, the king's well-thought-of human development initiatives, praised by Bayti and other NGOs in Casablanca. Motowakil dismisses them all. 'Are there any benefits for the Moroccan people?' he asks. 'Just for a small minority. We have a despotic, autocratic rule. The reforms are a game played by the monarchy to distract people's attention.'
Motawakil is the very picture of the modern Islamist politician. His language is reasonable and his message appeals to large numbers of ordinary Moroccans who are fed up with corrupt and incompetent local administrators. He insists that, if in power, his party would respect the will of the people. 'We are against violence. We do not believe that you can impose any solution by force. Democracy is the only practical possibility,' he says, nodding sincerely. 'This country has been Islamic for many centuries,' he says when I raise the 'resurgence of Islamism' that many analysts talk about. 'There is no identity problem.' But when asked who he thinks is responsible for the 9/11 attacks, he is too canny a politician to openly put forward the anti-semitic conspiracy theory that the attacks were the work of the Israeli secret services and the CIA, but he comes close. 'I don't believe that a man like bin Laden up in the mountains could do it, so it must have been someone else... there are powerful people who would benefit from something like that... There are international interests,' he says. Outside, the taxi driver who deposited me outside Motowakil's office an hour before has returned to tell me that he has since been questioned by the secret police about who I am.
The spooks will not be too stretched if tempted to check on my next meeting - with the minister for youth, whose office, in the aseptic diplomatic quarter of the capital of Rabat, is directly opposite the headquarters of the national gendarmerie. I take a collective taxi - one of the old Mercedes that routinely carry eight passengers wedged across the passenger seats in a happy chaos of bags, flowing djellaba robes, plastic bags and pots - for a few dirhams. As we pass the massive site where a new marina is being built below the huge walls of the ancient city, perched on a crag above the rolling Atlantic, the young driver sneers at the expense of the project, and is told off by one of his older clients.
I am expecting self-promoting, diplomatic flannel from the minister, but instead get nearly two hours of acute analysis. Mohammed Al-Ghass is 43, the same age as the king, and is a believer in building a new Morocco, a prosperous, stable, democratic, open and tolerant nation that will act as an example for other states in Africa and the Middle East. He says clearly that Morocco has embarked on a massive project of social, economic and political engineering: reducing the monarchy to something resembling that of the UK or Holland, pump-priming the economy to stimulate equitable growth. This is all very ambitious, difficult and risky, he says. 'We are in the middle of trying something that lots of people have said is impossible. It is absolutely essential that we make it work... I don't even want to imagine the consequences if we fail.'
We talk about the threat from the Islamists. Motawakil and men like him have no intention of allowing elections once in power, asserts Ghass. To fight back, he says, 'democracy must be strong and certain of its own values, principles and its superiority. Democracy must be able to convince people; but in a society such as this one the risks, the dangers are greater than elsewhere.' And the Islamists have some advantages. 'Inculcating democratic values takes time,' Ghass argues, 'and the Islamists surf on the poverty, the intense frustration in our society or [that] felt against the West. There is a love-hate thing happening, a sort of fascination and rejection. The West is so close to us here and we see how they live well and are happy and have what we want, and we would love to be part of these open, content societies. But they don't want us, so we find a way to say that we are rejecting them, not vice versa.'
Can, though, Morocco become the prosperous democracy he is talking about? Ghass points out that 40 years ago everyone said that Spain was doomed to dictatorship and poverty. 'We simply cannot fail,' he says.
In Akshour Farda, a cluster of mud-walled houses, orchards and snotty children that clings to the steep slopes of the Oued Farda valley, many hundreds of miles to the north of Casablanca and Rabat, this spring is different. Now there is television. Mohammed, a 44-year-old farmer, proudly shows me the wooden cabinet he has built for his own set, which now dominates the small room where he sleeps with his wife, father and four children. What does he watch? Spanish television for the most part - and mainly football. His village, still without a water supply other than a natural well, has no sanitation, and is now divided between Real Madrid and Barcelona fans.
Mohammed pulls out a pipe and packs it with hash. He lives in the centre of the Rif mountains, the world's biggest hash-producing area, the vast proportion of which is sold in Europe. The electricity is part of a government programme and, like the new olive plantations, is aimed not only at developing the area but at convincing the local farmers that they should stop growing cannabis. Though the new push to restrict cultivation is having some effect, there is work to be done - last year 120,000 hectares were sown with cannabis in and around the Rif. The farmers themselves do not earn much - a gram of hash costs about as much as a text message. 'What do you expect?' said one local teacher. 'The people here are poor. They have been ignored for years. It's a good crop and there's a ready market.' Along with major smuggling and people trafficking, hash is one of the less official links between Morocco and mainland Europe.
Up in the Rif, the children shout 'Ola!' when they see a foreigner.
Between the Rif and the coast is the city of Tetouan. For years it has had a bad reputation - as a city of smugglers, criminals and lately as a hotbed for radical Islamism. The American government has leaked a series of investigations into the origins of suicide bombers who have blown themselves up in Iraq and a clutch appear to have come from the city. I am not the first journalist to investigate this. When I hail a taxi to Jemaa Mazuuk, the area from where the bombers are meant to have come, Mowsef, the 22-year-old driver, laughs at my 'al-Qaeda tourism'. But we drive off happily enough, along a long boulevard bathed in evening sunlight and with a magnificent view out onto the foothills of the Rif. There is a rowdy demonstration under way - of support for the local football side that has just beaten Casablanca. Mowsef is a trainee mechanic and earning pounds 200 a month as a driver and is very happy, because he is saving up to go to France and marry his French-Moroccan girlfriend.
Mowsef takes me to an old schoolmate's house. There is no one in, because the friend, linked to the bomb attacks in Madrid in 2004 which killed 200 people, blew himself up when the Spanish police closed in on him afterwards. 'He was a nice bloke,' says Mowsef. 'He told his mum he was going to Spain for work, went for a year or so and then, boom!'
Back in the centre of town it is an animated Sunday evening. The streets are full of promenading couples. The markets are full of bustle. Older men in djellabas, younger men in leather jackets, some women in veils, some not. Old Mercedes taxis work their way through the throng under the Thirties Spanish-built buildings, with their mix of art deco white and green lines, local arches and Spanish shutters. It is nine o'clock and the street lights have flickered on in the main square, dominated by the huge timber doors to the royal palace. In the cafes around the square men play dominos and watch football and the news (there has been a suicide bombing in Casablanca) as they drink tea. There is a queue outside the cinema for a variety of Western films. The internet cafes are full of teenagers. Hawkers sell beans and snails. The streets begin to empty. It is late and there is a mountain chill in the air.
I drive down to Tangier, to an empty square in front of the ferry docks. There are scruffy teenagers, the medina, the waves slapping on the dockside, a ship's horn sounding dully in the darkness, and the multiple signposts, of which some point the way to Europe.
Western analysts are forever bleating about the strategic importance of the middle east. But despite its oil, this backward region is less relevant than ever, and it would be better for everyone if the rest of the world learned to ignore it
Why are middle east experts so unfailingly wrong? The lesson of history is that men never learn from history, but middle east experts, like the rest of us, should at least learn from their past mistakes. Instead, they just keep repeating them.
The first mistake is "five minutes to midnight" catastrophism. The late King Hussein of Jordan was the undisputed master of this genre. Wearing his gravest aspect, he would warn us that with patience finally exhausted the Arab-Israeli conflict was about to explode, that all past conflicts would be dwarfed by what was about to happen unless, unless… And then came the remedy—usually something rather tame when compared with the immense catastrophe predicted, such as resuming this or that stalled negotiation, or getting an American envoy to the scene to make the usual promises to the Palestinians and apply the usual pressures on Israel. We read versions of the standard King Hussein speech in countless newspaper columns, hear identical invocations in the grindingly repetitive radio and television appearances of the usual middle east experts, and are now faced with Hussein's son Abdullah periodically repeating his father's speech almost verbatim.
What actually happens at each of these "moments of truth"—and we may be approaching another one—is nothing much; only the same old cyclical conflict which always restarts when peace is about to break out, and always dampens down when the violence becomes intense enough. The ease of filming and reporting out of safe and comfortable Israeli hotels inflates the media coverage of every minor affray. But humanitarians should note that the dead from Jewish-Palestinian fighting since 1921 amount to fewer than 100,000—about as many as are killed in a season of conflict in Darfur.
Strategically, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been almost irrelevant since the end of the cold war. And as for the impact of the conflict on oil prices, it was powerful in 1973 when the Saudis declared embargoes and cut production, but that was the first and last time that the "oil weapon" was wielded. For decades now, the largest Arab oil producers have publicly foresworn any linkage between politics and pricing, and an embargo would be a disaster for their oil-revenue dependent economies. In any case, the relationship between turmoil in the middle east and oil prices is far from straightforward. As Philip Auerswald recently noted in the American Interest, between 1981 and 1999—a period when a fundamentalist regime consolidated power in Iran, Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war within view of oil and gas installations, the Gulf war came and went and the first Palestinian intifada raged—oil prices, adjusted for inflation, actually fell. And global dependence on middle eastern oil is declining: today the region produces under 30 per cent of the world's crude oil, compared to almost 40 per cent in 1974-75. In 2005 17 per cent of American oil imports came from the Gulf, compared to 28 per cent in 1975, and President Bush used his 2006 state of the union address to announce his intention of cutting US oil imports from the middle east by three quarters by 2025.
Yes, it would be nice if Israelis and Palestinians could settle their differences, but it would do little or nothing to calm the other conflicts in the middle east from Algeria to Iraq, or to stop Muslim-Hindu violence in Kashmir, Muslim-Christian violence in Indonesia and the Philippines, Muslim-Buddhist violence in Thailand, Muslim-animist violence in Sudan, Muslim-Igbo violence in Nigeria, Muslim-Muscovite violence in Chechnya, or the different varieties of inter-Muslim violence between traditionalists and Islamists, and between Sunnis and Shia, nor would it assuage the perfectly understandable hostility of convinced Islamists towards the transgressive west that relentlessly invades their minds, and sometimes their countries.
Arab-Israeli catastrophism is wrong twice over, first because the conflict is contained within rather narrow boundaries, and second because the Levant is just not that important any more.
The second repeated mistake is the Mussolini syndrome. Contemporary documents prove beyond any doubt what is now hard to credit: serious people, including British and French military chiefs, accepted Mussolini's claims to great power status because they believed that he had serious armed forces at his command. His army divisions, battleships and air squadrons were dutifully counted to assess Italian military power, making some allowance for their lack of the most modern weapons but not for their more fundamental refusal to fight in earnest. Having conceded Ethiopia to win over Mussolini, only to lose him to Hitler as soon as the fighting started, the British discovered that the Italian forces quickly crumbled in combat. It could not be otherwise, because most Italian soldiers were unwilling conscripts from the one-mule peasantry of the south or the almost equally miserable sharecropping villages of the north.
Exactly the same mistake keeps being made by the fraternity of middle east experts. They persistently attribute real military strength to backward societies whose populations can sustain excellent insurgencies but not modern military forces.
In the 1960s, it was Nasser's Egypt that was mistaken for a real military power just because it had received many aircraft, tanks and guns from the Soviet Union, and had many army divisions and air squadrons. In May 1967, on the eve of war, many agreed with the prediction of Field Marshal Montgomery, then revisiting the El Alamein battlefield, that the Egyptians would defeat the Israelis forthwith; even the more cautious never anticipated that the former would be utterly defeated by the latter in just a few days. In 1973, with much more drama, it still took only three weeks to reach the same outcome.
In 1990 it was the turn of Iraq to be hugely overestimated as a military power. Saddam Hussein had more equipment than Nasser ever accumulated, and could boast of having defeated much more populous Iran after eight years of war. In the months before the Gulf war, there was much anxious speculation about the size of the Iraqi army—again, the divisions and regiments were dutifully counted as if they were German divisions on the eve of D-day, with a separate count of the "elite" Republican Guards, not to mention the "super-elite" Special Republican Guards—and it was feared that Iraq's bombproof aircraft shelters and deep bunkers would survive any air attack.
That much of this was believed at some level we know from the magnitude of the coalition armies that were laboriously assembled, including 575,000 US troops, 43,000 British, 14,663 French and 4,500 Canadian, and which incidentally constituted the sacrilegious infidel presence on Arabian soil that set off Osama bin Laden on his quest for revenge. In the event, two weeks of precision bombing were enough to paralyse Saddam's entire war machine, which scarcely tried to resist the ponderous ground offensive when it came. At no point did the Iraqi air force try to fight, and all those tanks that were painstakingly counted served mostly for target practice. A real army would have continued to resist for weeks or months in the dug-in positions in Kuwait, even without air cover, but Saddam's army was the usual middle eastern façade without fighting substance.
Now the Mussolini syndrome is at work over Iran. All the symptoms are present, including tabulated lists of Iran's warships, despite the fact that most are over 30 years old; of combat aircraft, many of which (F-4s, Mirages, F-5s, F-14s) have not flown in years for lack of spare parts; and of divisions and brigades that are so only in name. There are awed descriptions of the Pasdaran revolutionary guards, inevitably described as "elite," who do indeed strut around as if they have won many a war, but who have actually fought only one—against Iraq, which they lost. As for Iran's claim to have defeated Israel by Hizbullah proxy in last year's affray, the publicity was excellent but the substance went the other way, with roughly 25 per cent of the best-trained men dead, which explains the tomb-like silence and immobility of the once rumbustious Hizbullah ever since the ceasefire.
Then there is the new light cavalry of Iranian terrorism that is invoked to frighten us if all else fails. The usual middle east experts now explain that if we annoy the ayatollahs, they will unleash terrorists who will devastate our lives, even though 30 years of "death to America" invocations and vast sums spent on maintaining a special international terrorism department have produced only one major bombing in Saudi Arabia, in 1996, and two in the most permissive environment of Buenos Aires, in 1992 and 1994, along with some assassinations of exiles in Europe.
It is true enough that if Iran's nuclear installations are bombed in some overnight raid, there is likely to be some retaliation, but we live in fortunate times in which we have only the irritant of terrorism instead of world wars to worry about—and Iran's added contribution is not likely to leave much of an impression. There may be good reasons for not attacking Iran's nuclear sites—including the very slow and uncertain progress of its uranium enrichment effort—but its ability to strike back is not one of them. Even the seemingly fragile tanker traffic down the Gulf and through the straits of Hormuz is not as vulnerable as it seems—Iran and Iraq have both tried to attack it many times without much success, and this time the US navy stands ready to destroy any airstrip or jetty from which attacks are launched.
As for the claim that the "Iranians" are united in patriotic support for the nuclear programme, no such nationality even exists. Out of Iran's population of 70m or so, 51 per cent are ethnically Persian, 24 per cent are Turks ("Azeris" is the regime's term), with other minorities comprising the remaining quarter. Many of Iran's 16-17m Turks are in revolt against Persian cultural imperialism; its 5-6m Kurds have started a serious insurgency; the Arab minority detonates bombs in Ahvaz; and Baluch tribesmen attack gendarmes and revolutionary guards. If some 40 per cent of the British population were engaged in separatist struggles of varying intensity, nobody would claim that it was firmly united around the London government. On top of this, many of the Persian majority oppose the theocratic regime, either because they have become post-Islamic in reaction to its many prohibitions, or because they are Sufis, whom the regime now persecutes almost as much as the small Baha'i minority. So let us have no more reports from Tehran stressing the country's national unity. Persian nationalism is a minority position in a country where half the population is not even Persian. In our times, multinational states either decentralise or break up more or less violently; Iran is not decentralising, so its future seems highly predictable, while in the present not much cohesion under attack is to be expected.
The third and greatest error repeated by middle east experts of all persuasions, by Arabophiles and Arabophobes alike, by Turcologists and by Iranists, is also the simplest to define. It is the very odd belief that these ancient nations are highly malleable. Hardliners keep suggesting that with a bit of well-aimed violence ("the Arabs only understand force") compliance will be obtained. But what happens every time is an increase in hostility; defeat is followed not by collaboration, but by sullen non-cooperation and active resistance too. It is not hard to defeat Arab countries, but it is mostly useless. Violence can work to destroy dangerous weapons but not to induce desired changes in behaviour.
Softliners make exactly the same mistake in reverse. They keep arguing that if only this or that concession were made, if only their policies were followed through to the end and respect shown, or simulated, hostility would cease and a warm Mediterranean amity would emerge. Yet even the most thinly qualified of middle east experts must know that Islam, as with any other civilisation, comprehends the sum total of human life, and that unlike some others it promises superiority in all things for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilisational defeat. That fully explains the ubiquity of Muslim violence, and reveals the futility of the palliatives urged by the softliners.
The operational mistake that middle east experts keep making is the failure to recognise that backward societies must be left alone, as the French now wisely leave Corsica to its own devices, as the Italians quietly learned to do in Sicily, once they recognised that maxi-trials merely handed over control to a newer and smarter mafia of doctors and lawyers. With neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the middle east should finally be allowed to have their own history—the one thing that middle east experts of all stripes seem determined to deny them.
That brings us to the mistake that the rest of us make. We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world's population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all. Not many of us would care to work if we were citizens of Abu Dhabi, with lots of oil money for very few citizens. But Saudi Arabia's 27m inhabitants also live largely off the oil revenues that trickle down to them, leaving most of the work to foreign technicians and labourers: even with high oil prices, Saudi Arabia's annual per capita income, at $14,000, is only about half that of oil-free Israel.
Saudi Arabia has a good excuse, for it was a land of oasis hand-farmers and Bedouin pastoralists who cannot be expected to become captains of industry in a mere 50 years. Much more striking is the oil parasitism of once much more accomplished Iran. It exports only 2.5m barrels a day as compared to Saudi Arabia's 8m, yet oil still accounts for 80 per cent of Iran's exports because its agriculture and industry have become so unproductive.
The middle east was once the world's most advanced region, but these days its biggest industries are extravagant consumption and the venting of resentment. According to the UN's 2004 Arab human development report, the region boasts the second lowest adult literacy rate in the world (after sub-Saharan Africa) at just 63 per cent. Its dependence on oil means that manufactured goods account for just 17 per cent of exports, compared to a global average of 78 per cent. Moreover, despite its oil wealth, the entire middle east generated under 4 per cent of global GDP in 2006—less than Germany.
Unless compelled by immediate danger, we should therefore focus on the old and new lands of creation in Europe and America, in India and east Asia—places where hard-working populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past.
Why are middle east experts so unfailingly wrong? The lesson of history is that men never learn from history, but middle east experts, like the rest of us, should at least learn from their past mistakes. Instead, they just keep repeating them.
The first mistake is "five minutes to midnight" catastrophism. The late King Hussein of Jordan was the undisputed master of this genre. Wearing his gravest aspect, he would warn us that with patience finally exhausted the Arab-Israeli conflict was about to explode, that all past conflicts would be dwarfed by what was about to happen unless, unless… And then came the remedy—usually something rather tame when compared with the immense catastrophe predicted, such as resuming this or that stalled negotiation, or getting an American envoy to the scene to make the usual promises to the Palestinians and apply the usual pressures on Israel. We read versions of the standard King Hussein speech in countless newspaper columns, hear identical invocations in the grindingly repetitive radio and television appearances of the usual middle east experts, and are now faced with Hussein's son Abdullah periodically repeating his father's speech almost verbatim.
What actually happens at each of these "moments of truth"—and we may be approaching another one—is nothing much; only the same old cyclical conflict which always restarts when peace is about to break out, and always dampens down when the violence becomes intense enough. The ease of filming and reporting out of safe and comfortable Israeli hotels inflates the media coverage of every minor affray. But humanitarians should note that the dead from Jewish-Palestinian fighting since 1921 amount to fewer than 100,000—about as many as are killed in a season of conflict in Darfur.
Strategically, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been almost irrelevant since the end of the cold war. And as for the impact of the conflict on oil prices, it was powerful in 1973 when the Saudis declared embargoes and cut production, but that was the first and last time that the "oil weapon" was wielded. For decades now, the largest Arab oil producers have publicly foresworn any linkage between politics and pricing, and an embargo would be a disaster for their oil-revenue dependent economies. In any case, the relationship between turmoil in the middle east and oil prices is far from straightforward. As Philip Auerswald recently noted in the American Interest, between 1981 and 1999—a period when a fundamentalist regime consolidated power in Iran, Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war within view of oil and gas installations, the Gulf war came and went and the first Palestinian intifada raged—oil prices, adjusted for inflation, actually fell. And global dependence on middle eastern oil is declining: today the region produces under 30 per cent of the world's crude oil, compared to almost 40 per cent in 1974-75. In 2005 17 per cent of American oil imports came from the Gulf, compared to 28 per cent in 1975, and President Bush used his 2006 state of the union address to announce his intention of cutting US oil imports from the middle east by three quarters by 2025.
Yes, it would be nice if Israelis and Palestinians could settle their differences, but it would do little or nothing to calm the other conflicts in the middle east from Algeria to Iraq, or to stop Muslim-Hindu violence in Kashmir, Muslim-Christian violence in Indonesia and the Philippines, Muslim-Buddhist violence in Thailand, Muslim-animist violence in Sudan, Muslim-Igbo violence in Nigeria, Muslim-Muscovite violence in Chechnya, or the different varieties of inter-Muslim violence between traditionalists and Islamists, and between Sunnis and Shia, nor would it assuage the perfectly understandable hostility of convinced Islamists towards the transgressive west that relentlessly invades their minds, and sometimes their countries.
Arab-Israeli catastrophism is wrong twice over, first because the conflict is contained within rather narrow boundaries, and second because the Levant is just not that important any more.
The second repeated mistake is the Mussolini syndrome. Contemporary documents prove beyond any doubt what is now hard to credit: serious people, including British and French military chiefs, accepted Mussolini's claims to great power status because they believed that he had serious armed forces at his command. His army divisions, battleships and air squadrons were dutifully counted to assess Italian military power, making some allowance for their lack of the most modern weapons but not for their more fundamental refusal to fight in earnest. Having conceded Ethiopia to win over Mussolini, only to lose him to Hitler as soon as the fighting started, the British discovered that the Italian forces quickly crumbled in combat. It could not be otherwise, because most Italian soldiers were unwilling conscripts from the one-mule peasantry of the south or the almost equally miserable sharecropping villages of the north.
Exactly the same mistake keeps being made by the fraternity of middle east experts. They persistently attribute real military strength to backward societies whose populations can sustain excellent insurgencies but not modern military forces.
In the 1960s, it was Nasser's Egypt that was mistaken for a real military power just because it had received many aircraft, tanks and guns from the Soviet Union, and had many army divisions and air squadrons. In May 1967, on the eve of war, many agreed with the prediction of Field Marshal Montgomery, then revisiting the El Alamein battlefield, that the Egyptians would defeat the Israelis forthwith; even the more cautious never anticipated that the former would be utterly defeated by the latter in just a few days. In 1973, with much more drama, it still took only three weeks to reach the same outcome.
In 1990 it was the turn of Iraq to be hugely overestimated as a military power. Saddam Hussein had more equipment than Nasser ever accumulated, and could boast of having defeated much more populous Iran after eight years of war. In the months before the Gulf war, there was much anxious speculation about the size of the Iraqi army—again, the divisions and regiments were dutifully counted as if they were German divisions on the eve of D-day, with a separate count of the "elite" Republican Guards, not to mention the "super-elite" Special Republican Guards—and it was feared that Iraq's bombproof aircraft shelters and deep bunkers would survive any air attack.
That much of this was believed at some level we know from the magnitude of the coalition armies that were laboriously assembled, including 575,000 US troops, 43,000 British, 14,663 French and 4,500 Canadian, and which incidentally constituted the sacrilegious infidel presence on Arabian soil that set off Osama bin Laden on his quest for revenge. In the event, two weeks of precision bombing were enough to paralyse Saddam's entire war machine, which scarcely tried to resist the ponderous ground offensive when it came. At no point did the Iraqi air force try to fight, and all those tanks that were painstakingly counted served mostly for target practice. A real army would have continued to resist for weeks or months in the dug-in positions in Kuwait, even without air cover, but Saddam's army was the usual middle eastern façade without fighting substance.
Now the Mussolini syndrome is at work over Iran. All the symptoms are present, including tabulated lists of Iran's warships, despite the fact that most are over 30 years old; of combat aircraft, many of which (F-4s, Mirages, F-5s, F-14s) have not flown in years for lack of spare parts; and of divisions and brigades that are so only in name. There are awed descriptions of the Pasdaran revolutionary guards, inevitably described as "elite," who do indeed strut around as if they have won many a war, but who have actually fought only one—against Iraq, which they lost. As for Iran's claim to have defeated Israel by Hizbullah proxy in last year's affray, the publicity was excellent but the substance went the other way, with roughly 25 per cent of the best-trained men dead, which explains the tomb-like silence and immobility of the once rumbustious Hizbullah ever since the ceasefire.
Then there is the new light cavalry of Iranian terrorism that is invoked to frighten us if all else fails. The usual middle east experts now explain that if we annoy the ayatollahs, they will unleash terrorists who will devastate our lives, even though 30 years of "death to America" invocations and vast sums spent on maintaining a special international terrorism department have produced only one major bombing in Saudi Arabia, in 1996, and two in the most permissive environment of Buenos Aires, in 1992 and 1994, along with some assassinations of exiles in Europe.
It is true enough that if Iran's nuclear installations are bombed in some overnight raid, there is likely to be some retaliation, but we live in fortunate times in which we have only the irritant of terrorism instead of world wars to worry about—and Iran's added contribution is not likely to leave much of an impression. There may be good reasons for not attacking Iran's nuclear sites—including the very slow and uncertain progress of its uranium enrichment effort—but its ability to strike back is not one of them. Even the seemingly fragile tanker traffic down the Gulf and through the straits of Hormuz is not as vulnerable as it seems—Iran and Iraq have both tried to attack it many times without much success, and this time the US navy stands ready to destroy any airstrip or jetty from which attacks are launched.
As for the claim that the "Iranians" are united in patriotic support for the nuclear programme, no such nationality even exists. Out of Iran's population of 70m or so, 51 per cent are ethnically Persian, 24 per cent are Turks ("Azeris" is the regime's term), with other minorities comprising the remaining quarter. Many of Iran's 16-17m Turks are in revolt against Persian cultural imperialism; its 5-6m Kurds have started a serious insurgency; the Arab minority detonates bombs in Ahvaz; and Baluch tribesmen attack gendarmes and revolutionary guards. If some 40 per cent of the British population were engaged in separatist struggles of varying intensity, nobody would claim that it was firmly united around the London government. On top of this, many of the Persian majority oppose the theocratic regime, either because they have become post-Islamic in reaction to its many prohibitions, or because they are Sufis, whom the regime now persecutes almost as much as the small Baha'i minority. So let us have no more reports from Tehran stressing the country's national unity. Persian nationalism is a minority position in a country where half the population is not even Persian. In our times, multinational states either decentralise or break up more or less violently; Iran is not decentralising, so its future seems highly predictable, while in the present not much cohesion under attack is to be expected.
The third and greatest error repeated by middle east experts of all persuasions, by Arabophiles and Arabophobes alike, by Turcologists and by Iranists, is also the simplest to define. It is the very odd belief that these ancient nations are highly malleable. Hardliners keep suggesting that with a bit of well-aimed violence ("the Arabs only understand force") compliance will be obtained. But what happens every time is an increase in hostility; defeat is followed not by collaboration, but by sullen non-cooperation and active resistance too. It is not hard to defeat Arab countries, but it is mostly useless. Violence can work to destroy dangerous weapons but not to induce desired changes in behaviour.
Softliners make exactly the same mistake in reverse. They keep arguing that if only this or that concession were made, if only their policies were followed through to the end and respect shown, or simulated, hostility would cease and a warm Mediterranean amity would emerge. Yet even the most thinly qualified of middle east experts must know that Islam, as with any other civilisation, comprehends the sum total of human life, and that unlike some others it promises superiority in all things for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilisational defeat. That fully explains the ubiquity of Muslim violence, and reveals the futility of the palliatives urged by the softliners.
The operational mistake that middle east experts keep making is the failure to recognise that backward societies must be left alone, as the French now wisely leave Corsica to its own devices, as the Italians quietly learned to do in Sicily, once they recognised that maxi-trials merely handed over control to a newer and smarter mafia of doctors and lawyers. With neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the middle east should finally be allowed to have their own history—the one thing that middle east experts of all stripes seem determined to deny them.
That brings us to the mistake that the rest of us make. We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world's population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all. Not many of us would care to work if we were citizens of Abu Dhabi, with lots of oil money for very few citizens. But Saudi Arabia's 27m inhabitants also live largely off the oil revenues that trickle down to them, leaving most of the work to foreign technicians and labourers: even with high oil prices, Saudi Arabia's annual per capita income, at $14,000, is only about half that of oil-free Israel.
Saudi Arabia has a good excuse, for it was a land of oasis hand-farmers and Bedouin pastoralists who cannot be expected to become captains of industry in a mere 50 years. Much more striking is the oil parasitism of once much more accomplished Iran. It exports only 2.5m barrels a day as compared to Saudi Arabia's 8m, yet oil still accounts for 80 per cent of Iran's exports because its agriculture and industry have become so unproductive.
The middle east was once the world's most advanced region, but these days its biggest industries are extravagant consumption and the venting of resentment. According to the UN's 2004 Arab human development report, the region boasts the second lowest adult literacy rate in the world (after sub-Saharan Africa) at just 63 per cent. Its dependence on oil means that manufactured goods account for just 17 per cent of exports, compared to a global average of 78 per cent. Moreover, despite its oil wealth, the entire middle east generated under 4 per cent of global GDP in 2006—less than Germany.
Unless compelled by immediate danger, we should therefore focus on the old and new lands of creation in Europe and America, in India and east Asia—places where hard-working populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past.
Catholicism's dwindling presence in Europe has less to do with people losing faith than it does with their rejection of authoritarian institutions
What does it mean to be a European? Though it does not entail a common language or cuisine, these days, we're told, a growing number of young people on the continent are more likely to describe themselves as European than by any identity drawn from the language they speak, or their home country. Yet perhaps the most obvious aspect of European identity that transcends the continent's national borders stands rejected by the continent's citizens: despite the entreaties of Pope Benedict XVI, Europe, it seems, is loath to claim its Christian (largely Catholic) heritage as a common bond. Benedict argued hard for a mention, in the European Union Constitution, of Christianity as the root of European values, and lost.
In his quest to return Europe to its former status as the Christian continent, Pope Benedict XVI lays the blame for Catholicism's loss of Europe to many things: modernism, relativism, multiculturalism. But never, it seems, has he looked in the mirror to find the true reason the church has lost its status as Europe's foremost expression of faith. Europe's rejection of Catholicism has less to do with a loss of spirituality by the people of God (as the worldwide congregation of Catholics became known during Vatican II) than with a rejection of an authoritarian institution many regard as, at best, morally inept; at worst, morally bankrupt.
Earlier this month in the New York Times Magazine, Russell Shorto introduced American readers to the pope's quest to restore (Catholic) Christianity as the first pillar of European identity. Benedict's effort comes as Islam claims its prize as the fastest-growing religion on the very continent that was once a wholly-owned subsidiary of Rome.
The pope, Shorto shows us, views the phenomenon of Europe's famously empty pews as the result of the modernity that flowed from the Enlightenment. As he wrote in 2005, just before his election to the papacy:
Curiously, though, in the speech he delivered at his alma mater in Germany -- the speech that set aflame the Muslim world last September -- Benedict seemed to attribute the violence of religious terrorism by Muslims to what he saw as a lack of reason in Islam. Christianity was great, he explained, because of its roots in the philosophical traditions (wherein reason lies) of the ancient Greeks. What Benedict seemed to be saying was that faith divorced from reason leads inevitably to violence, and that reason absent faith leads in the same direction -- bringing with it, as well, a host of other societal ills. As stated here, I have no great argument with that sentence. But it has little to do, I think, with why Europe no longer goes to church, and why I believe the church is destined to fail in its mission to restore the Catholicism of yore. The answer to the question of Catholicism's dwindling presence in Europe belongs to history far more recent that that favored for citation by this pope.
When assessing Europe's lack of Christian religiosity, much is made of modern philosophy and modern, secular democracy. Almost never is the impact of the world wars on the European psyche factored in, and no one dares to examine Germany's National Socialist Party and Hitler's murderous reign in the context of once-Christian Europe. The blood-soaked fields of Europe after the First World War proved fertile ground for existentialism and its bitter cousin, nihilism. But without centuries of church-sanctioned anti-Semitism, would Europe have so easily looked away while the Nazis exterminated millions of Jews?
To Europeans, the Roman Catholic Church represents not simply a spiritual tradition or a repository of culture. It is arguably the most significant actor in European history, much of it not pretty. It wasn't until 1870, during the Prussian Wars, that the Church lost the last of its temporal power, with the seizure of the Papal States by Italy after the capture of Napoleon III. With the formation of France's Third Republic in the wake of those wars, self-declared anti-Semites, supported by the Church, agitated for a reunited, Catholic France, which had lost territory to the Germans during the war. The Dreyfus affair is often described as an expression of these forces. The tensions between Germany and France eventually gave way to World War I.
During the revolution in Spain, the Church didn't exactly side with the angels, with most clergy choosing to ally themselves with the dictator Francisco Franco. In Croatia, during World War II, the Church sided with Ante Pavelic, whose murderous Ustaše committed atrocities against Serbs, Jews, and Roma. Then there's the Church's weak response to Nazism, which, I believe, is why it suffers so now.
The Roman Catholic Church simply never recovered from World War II. And then the Church blew its one big chance to make itself relevant in the modern age, when the Second Vatican Council rejected its own commission's conclusion that the church should sanction the use of birth control. The more recent scandal of sexual abuse in the Church, for which the Vatican has never taken responsibility, has only compounded its alienation from the public.
Two years ago, the Boston Globe's Charles Sennott gave us some numbers:
I'm not surprised to read in Shorto's piece and elsewhere that Christianity in Europe continues to thrive in lay movements, where worship is conducted outside the official church. Given the history of bitter and bloody division that Europe has endured over the last century and a half, I think it would be more surprising to find the majority of its people embracing any organized religion, seeing how the God of priests and ministers and rabbis failed to spare so many Europeans the wrath of their neighbors. To expect them to venerate, in the preamble of a new E.U. Constitution (the document intended to herald the dawn of a new day), the Roman Catholic Church requires nothing short of hubris. And at a time when the continent could use some spiritual guidance, the Church is too often AWOL on the most difficult questions of the age, choosing instead to chase the past.
What does it mean to be a European? Though it does not entail a common language or cuisine, these days, we're told, a growing number of young people on the continent are more likely to describe themselves as European than by any identity drawn from the language they speak, or their home country. Yet perhaps the most obvious aspect of European identity that transcends the continent's national borders stands rejected by the continent's citizens: despite the entreaties of Pope Benedict XVI, Europe, it seems, is loath to claim its Christian (largely Catholic) heritage as a common bond. Benedict argued hard for a mention, in the European Union Constitution, of Christianity as the root of European values, and lost.
In his quest to return Europe to its former status as the Christian continent, Pope Benedict XVI lays the blame for Catholicism's loss of Europe to many things: modernism, relativism, multiculturalism. But never, it seems, has he looked in the mirror to find the true reason the church has lost its status as Europe's foremost expression of faith. Europe's rejection of Catholicism has less to do with a loss of spirituality by the people of God (as the worldwide congregation of Catholics became known during Vatican II) than with a rejection of an authoritarian institution many regard as, at best, morally inept; at worst, morally bankrupt.
Earlier this month in the New York Times Magazine, Russell Shorto introduced American readers to the pope's quest to restore (Catholic) Christianity as the first pillar of European identity. Benedict's effort comes as Islam claims its prize as the fastest-growing religion on the very continent that was once a wholly-owned subsidiary of Rome.
The pope, Shorto shows us, views the phenomenon of Europe's famously empty pews as the result of the modernity that flowed from the Enlightenment. As he wrote in 2005, just before his election to the papacy:
While Europe once was the Christian Continent, it was also the birthplace of
that new scientific rationality which has given us both enormous possibilities
and enormous menaces ... In the wake of this form of rationality, Europe had
developed a culture that, in a manner hitherto unknown to mankind, excludes God
from public awareness ... A culture has developed in Europe that is the most
radical contradiction not only of Christianity but of all the religious and
moral traditions of humanity.
Curiously, though, in the speech he delivered at his alma mater in Germany -- the speech that set aflame the Muslim world last September -- Benedict seemed to attribute the violence of religious terrorism by Muslims to what he saw as a lack of reason in Islam. Christianity was great, he explained, because of its roots in the philosophical traditions (wherein reason lies) of the ancient Greeks. What Benedict seemed to be saying was that faith divorced from reason leads inevitably to violence, and that reason absent faith leads in the same direction -- bringing with it, as well, a host of other societal ills. As stated here, I have no great argument with that sentence. But it has little to do, I think, with why Europe no longer goes to church, and why I believe the church is destined to fail in its mission to restore the Catholicism of yore. The answer to the question of Catholicism's dwindling presence in Europe belongs to history far more recent that that favored for citation by this pope.
When assessing Europe's lack of Christian religiosity, much is made of modern philosophy and modern, secular democracy. Almost never is the impact of the world wars on the European psyche factored in, and no one dares to examine Germany's National Socialist Party and Hitler's murderous reign in the context of once-Christian Europe. The blood-soaked fields of Europe after the First World War proved fertile ground for existentialism and its bitter cousin, nihilism. But without centuries of church-sanctioned anti-Semitism, would Europe have so easily looked away while the Nazis exterminated millions of Jews?
To Europeans, the Roman Catholic Church represents not simply a spiritual tradition or a repository of culture. It is arguably the most significant actor in European history, much of it not pretty. It wasn't until 1870, during the Prussian Wars, that the Church lost the last of its temporal power, with the seizure of the Papal States by Italy after the capture of Napoleon III. With the formation of France's Third Republic in the wake of those wars, self-declared anti-Semites, supported by the Church, agitated for a reunited, Catholic France, which had lost territory to the Germans during the war. The Dreyfus affair is often described as an expression of these forces. The tensions between Germany and France eventually gave way to World War I.
During the revolution in Spain, the Church didn't exactly side with the angels, with most clergy choosing to ally themselves with the dictator Francisco Franco. In Croatia, during World War II, the Church sided with Ante Pavelic, whose murderous Ustaše committed atrocities against Serbs, Jews, and Roma. Then there's the Church's weak response to Nazism, which, I believe, is why it suffers so now.
The Roman Catholic Church simply never recovered from World War II. And then the Church blew its one big chance to make itself relevant in the modern age, when the Second Vatican Council rejected its own commission's conclusion that the church should sanction the use of birth control. The more recent scandal of sexual abuse in the Church, for which the Vatican has never taken responsibility, has only compounded its alienation from the public.
Two years ago, the Boston Globe's Charles Sennott gave us some numbers:
In Italy, where 97 percent of the population considers itself Catholic, church
attendance has fallen to 30 percent, according to figures compiled by Famiglia
Cristiana, a popular Catholic weekly magazine. In large cities such as Milan,
the figure is no more than 15 percent, church officials say.
In France, where 76 percent of the population considers itself Catholic, only 12 percent
say they go to church on Sunday, according to Georgetown University's Center for
the Study of Global Christianity, and Vatican officials say the percentages
attending Mass drop as low as 5 percent in cities, such as Paris.
I'm not surprised to read in Shorto's piece and elsewhere that Christianity in Europe continues to thrive in lay movements, where worship is conducted outside the official church. Given the history of bitter and bloody division that Europe has endured over the last century and a half, I think it would be more surprising to find the majority of its people embracing any organized religion, seeing how the God of priests and ministers and rabbis failed to spare so many Europeans the wrath of their neighbors. To expect them to venerate, in the preamble of a new E.U. Constitution (the document intended to herald the dawn of a new day), the Roman Catholic Church requires nothing short of hubris. And at a time when the continent could use some spiritual guidance, the Church is too often AWOL on the most difficult questions of the age, choosing instead to chase the past.
"I WOULD ban religion completely," British pop-music star Elton John said in a much-noted interview last November. "It turns people into hateful lemmings, and it's not really compassionate."
It isn't exactly news that many people find religion odious, but what is being called the New Atheism has lately become a booming industry. A profusion of books, articles, and lectures extols secularism and derides faith in God as pernicious and absurd. Such antipathy to religion was once relegated to the edges of polite society. Today it shows up front and center.
A California congressman is cheered for announcing that he is an atheist. A New York Times Magazine cover story -- "Why Do We Believe?" -- considers "evolutionary adaptation" and "neurological accident" as explanations for religious belief, but not the possibility that God may actually exist. A forthcoming book by Christopher Hitchens, a noted journalist, is titled "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything."
Yet you rarely have to look far to be reminded of the indispensability of God and religion .
On the front page of Sunday's Boston Globe, a photo shows the Rev. Wayne Daly walking with two Boston police officers through Grove Hall in Roxbury. "Targeting areas racked by deadly violence," the caption explains, "members of the Black Ministerial Alliance began an effort yesterday to pair with police as intermediaries."
Some 50 priests and ministers will fan out across the city's most dangerous precincts, knocking on doors and introducing residents to the police officers patrolling their neighborhoods. The goal is to break through the intimidation or distrust that often keeps residents from speaking up about criminal activity. "Underpinning the alliance's strategy," a news story notes, "is the idea that residents in these neighborhoods . . . may be more willing to talk to law enforcement officials in the future if ministers have paved the way."
No doubt Hitchens and Sir Elton would find this unfathomable. If religion transforms decent people into "hateful lemmings," why turn for help to the local clergy? If religion "poisons everything," who in his right mind would trust men for whom religious witness is a way of life?
Of course, most of us have no trouble understanding why the pastors are regarded as honest brokers, or why officials hope their involvement will make the city safer. But here's a better question: What prompts these ministers to stick their necks out? Why do they want to be allies of the police in neighborhoods where gangs are ruthless toward "snitches" and other good citizens? For that matter, why do they go into urban ministry in the first place? Surely there are easier, safer, or more lucrative ways to make a living.
There are. But the ministers are driven by a Judeo-Christian moral calculus in which goodness and devotion to others are worth more than an easy, safe, or lucrative career. Judeo-Christian morality demands decency and loving-kindness of its followers -- not as a matter of reason or opinion or "evolutionary adaptation," but of God's will. And from that moral impulse comes the selflessness and strength to rise above oneself.
"I see that moral impulse at work every day," Christian leader Charles Colson has written, "when 50,000 volunteers in Prison Fellowship . . . go into horrid holes, loving the most unlovable people in the world. You don't do that out of any kind of human instinct -- it is contrary to selfish human nature."
Can ardent secularists, firm in their belief that there is no God to whom we must answer and no morality except that which human beings devise, be good and loving people? Sure they can. And yet when acts of charity and goodness are most needed, it isn't generally groups of New Atheists who are seen answering the call. Who is more likely to care for paupers dying in the streets of Calcutta? Secular humanist associations? Or Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity, who take God's word -- "Therefore love the stranger" -- as a binding obligation? When Boston's police need moral and trustworthy intermediaries, do they find them in an organization that campaigns against religion? Or in the Black Ministerial Alliance?
The world Elton John dreams of -- a world in which religion is banned -- is one we have already glimpsed. Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot showed us what lies at the end of that road. Of course there are exceptions to every rule; of course not everyone who believes in God is good; of course dreadful things have been done in the name of all religions. But a world without God would be an evil place indeed.
It isn't exactly news that many people find religion odious, but what is being called the New Atheism has lately become a booming industry. A profusion of books, articles, and lectures extols secularism and derides faith in God as pernicious and absurd. Such antipathy to religion was once relegated to the edges of polite society. Today it shows up front and center.
A California congressman is cheered for announcing that he is an atheist. A New York Times Magazine cover story -- "Why Do We Believe?" -- considers "evolutionary adaptation" and "neurological accident" as explanations for religious belief, but not the possibility that God may actually exist. A forthcoming book by Christopher Hitchens, a noted journalist, is titled "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything."
Yet you rarely have to look far to be reminded of the indispensability of God and religion .
On the front page of Sunday's Boston Globe, a photo shows the Rev. Wayne Daly walking with two Boston police officers through Grove Hall in Roxbury. "Targeting areas racked by deadly violence," the caption explains, "members of the Black Ministerial Alliance began an effort yesterday to pair with police as intermediaries."
Some 50 priests and ministers will fan out across the city's most dangerous precincts, knocking on doors and introducing residents to the police officers patrolling their neighborhoods. The goal is to break through the intimidation or distrust that often keeps residents from speaking up about criminal activity. "Underpinning the alliance's strategy," a news story notes, "is the idea that residents in these neighborhoods . . . may be more willing to talk to law enforcement officials in the future if ministers have paved the way."
No doubt Hitchens and Sir Elton would find this unfathomable. If religion transforms decent people into "hateful lemmings," why turn for help to the local clergy? If religion "poisons everything," who in his right mind would trust men for whom religious witness is a way of life?
Of course, most of us have no trouble understanding why the pastors are regarded as honest brokers, or why officials hope their involvement will make the city safer. But here's a better question: What prompts these ministers to stick their necks out? Why do they want to be allies of the police in neighborhoods where gangs are ruthless toward "snitches" and other good citizens? For that matter, why do they go into urban ministry in the first place? Surely there are easier, safer, or more lucrative ways to make a living.
There are. But the ministers are driven by a Judeo-Christian moral calculus in which goodness and devotion to others are worth more than an easy, safe, or lucrative career. Judeo-Christian morality demands decency and loving-kindness of its followers -- not as a matter of reason or opinion or "evolutionary adaptation," but of God's will. And from that moral impulse comes the selflessness and strength to rise above oneself.
"I see that moral impulse at work every day," Christian leader Charles Colson has written, "when 50,000 volunteers in Prison Fellowship . . . go into horrid holes, loving the most unlovable people in the world. You don't do that out of any kind of human instinct -- it is contrary to selfish human nature."
Can ardent secularists, firm in their belief that there is no God to whom we must answer and no morality except that which human beings devise, be good and loving people? Sure they can. And yet when acts of charity and goodness are most needed, it isn't generally groups of New Atheists who are seen answering the call. Who is more likely to care for paupers dying in the streets of Calcutta? Secular humanist associations? Or Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity, who take God's word -- "Therefore love the stranger" -- as a binding obligation? When Boston's police need moral and trustworthy intermediaries, do they find them in an organization that campaigns against religion? Or in the Black Ministerial Alliance?
The world Elton John dreams of -- a world in which religion is banned -- is one we have already glimpsed. Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot showed us what lies at the end of that road. Of course there are exceptions to every rule; of course not everyone who believes in God is good; of course dreadful things have been done in the name of all religions. But a world without God would be an evil place indeed.
Indonesia: Gambling That Tolerance Will Trump Fear
0 Comments Published by LeBlues on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 at 6:32 AM.
In Banda Aceh, women are caned under local Islamic law. SEVEN years ago, in the pre-9/11 fall of 2000, I was retrieving my luggage at the airport in Jakarta when a tall Indonesian man in a flowing white robe and green scarf accidentally bumped me off my feet.
He apologized and helped me up. Then I noticed he was part of a gang of grim young men stalking the airport with wooden rods.
He said they were from the Islamic Defenders Front and were searching for Israelis to kill. I doubt they found any, but I was shocked. Such bullying and militancy contrasted sharply with the Indonesia I had come to know on previous reporting trips: a model of Islam as a tolerant, compassionate, inclusive and peaceful religion.
The many varieties of culture and styles of life in this enormous archipelago had bred a unique form of Islam — or, more precisely, many such forms, thriving side by side and often drawing on a rich pre-Islamic history replete with magic, Buddhism and South Seas gods. I had thought the prospects for retaining this style had only been enhanced by the coming of democracy in 1998.
It has not quite worked out that way, and now the big questions facing Indonesia are: Can Islam and democracy co-exist? And what would such a democracy look like?
Many optimists argue that there may be no place on earth better suited to be a Muslim democracy. Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population — some 207 million people, rivalling the number of Muslims in the Middle East — and the optimists say its relaxed and varied traditions are one reason that the vast majority of Indonesians remain committed to a tolerant form of Islam. The fastest-growing Muslim movements, in fact, are moderate and outspoken in their promises to compete only through democratic processes.
But there is also fear that the global rise of militant fundamentalism has begun to change Indonesia. With democracy’s arrival, radical Islamists were allowed to return from exile, where the former military government had sent them. That was followed by the terrorist bombing of a nightclub on the predominantly Hindu island of Bali in 2002, in which 200 people died, then by other bombings in Jakarta and Bali, again. The government says it has seriously weakened Jemaah Islamiyah, a terrorism network blamed for those attacks. But the Islamic Defenders Front, less lethal but more numerous, still vandalizes bars and discos in Jakarta and beats up their patrons, trying to force the businesses to close.
Meanwhile, Islamic observance has turned more conservative. Many more women wear the veil. And Islamic political parties have gained strength by arguing that they can do something about Indonesia’s endemic corruption and violence.
“Indonesia is an experiment in Muslim democracy, which if successful could have ramifications for other parts of the world,” said Sidney Jones, director of the International Crisis Group’s Jakarta office. “If the United States wants to advance democracy in the Islamic world, then Indonesia takes on added importance.”
Experts don’t think Indonesia is at risk of a takeover by Islamic militants anytime soon. The two largest Muslim organizations, the Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, stress tolerance and freedom of thought, and together have 70 million members.
Those groups were big winners in the transition to democracy. In the nine years since the fall of its last autocrat, Suharto, who limited religious expression in the name of nationalism, Indonesia has had three fair and open presidential elections, one of which put a woman in the presidency. Security officials have been able to arrest, convict and sentence more than 200 people for terrorist acts, using an open legal system that would seem familiar in the West.
Still, the Indonesia I knew in the late 1990s has become a more fearful place.
“We are so happy with the democratization process in Indonesia, but there is a blackness in this process,” said Eve Sundari, a legislator from the Indonesian Democratic Party. “Now the door is open. Everybody can fight for their power to control people. Suddenly Islamic groups want to impose to other Muslims their laws.”
The surprise that democracy would complicate, rather than simplify, the prospects for peace raises perplexing questions about Indonesia’s example: Is democracy the best antidote to terrorism? Even if so, can a culture of tolerance survive that contest? Why are Indonesians appearing to turn more observant and traditional just now? And does that mean they would accept violence, repression, or sexism in the name of Islam?
The questions, yet to be answered, point to a conundrum: Pluralist democracy, by definition, requires tolerance. Fundamentalist religion, by definition, demands uniformity.
Indonesia’s history, optimists say, may point the way to a compromise.
A leading explanation for Indonesia’s traditional liberalism is that Islam did not go there by force. It arrived in the 13th century on trading ships from the Indian subcontinent, and island dwellers often layered its beliefs atop existing Buddhist or Hindu practices. Allah had to keep company with Dewi, goddess of the rice paddy; Nyai Loro Kidul, Queen of the South Seas; and Nini Tawek, the angel of the Javanese kitchen.
Part of Islam’s popularity in Indonesia has always been its adaptability. Early Islamic preachers used Indonesian shadow puppet shows to disseminate the religion — culture instead of force. Even today, many Indonesian Muslims regularly consult shamans — mystical healers believed to have paranormal powers — to have fortunes told, or to have spells cast and removed.
That is the backdrop against which Azyumardi Azra, an Islamic scholar based in Jakarta, says that the vast majority of Indonesia’s Muslims “believe in democracy and fully embrace its principles.”
“While there is a growing sense of Islamic identity or piety among Muslims in Indonesia — people are free to practice religion in ways that were forbidden under the dictatorship — far less than 1 percent of the population subscribes to extremist, global jihadist views,” he says.
He and others argue that political and economic concerns, rather than religion, have propelled the turn to Islamic parties — issues like sectarian and ethnic violence, poverty and corruption. A 43-year-old man named Rudy, who runs my favorite warung, or food stall, in Jakarta, put it this way: “Indonesians are turning to Islam for help because everything else we have tried has failed us — the Dutch, the military dictatorships, even democracy. My life is really no better today than it was under Suharto.”
But any turn to religious movements worries some experts. It means, they say, that the terms of political debate have already begun to change, with many questions being framed around Islamic values.
Yenny Wahid, an outspoken critic of fundamentalism, says many would-be leaders now feel a need to look pious. “When you’re close to god, you are a good person and you have a certain level of impunity,” she said.
An Indonesian government official said: “It seems counterintuitive for us to be worried about Indonesia’s small bands of religious radicals in a country of tens of millions of moderates. But there is a battle for the soul of our religion going on here, and the voices that ring loudest these days are the extremists.”
A fresh chapter on the ultimate betrayer
0 Comments Published by LeBlues on Wednesday, March 28, 2007 at 5:32 AM.
Judas Iscariot has been intriguing and dividing writers for almost 2000 years. The four gospel scribes were the first to comment on the apostle whose name usually comes at the end of the roll call of Jesus's inner circle.
Matthew portrayed him as a man willing to betray his master with a kiss for 30 pieces of silver, Luke presented him as possessed by Satan, while John gave him a father, Simon, and a role, as treasurer of the Jesus movement.
Each detail was a small but significant embellishment on what would otherwise simply be (like more than half of the other apostles) a name on a list.
It started the process by which Judas has become one of the most instantly identifiable characters in Christianity and beyond, the personification of wickedness and the original fifth columnist.
This week that enduring fascination took a fresh turn with the publication of Jeffrey Archer's book, The Gospel According to Judas (Macmillan). He enlisted as his unlikely co-author Professor Francis Moloney, a distinguished Catholic theologian, papal adviser and priest. The launch of the book took place in Rome. Hovering over the launch was the question of why a man who has, over the years, been accused of betraying his wife, his party and his own past should now so publicly want to rehabilitate the ultimate betrayer.
In fact, Archer does little more than tread a well-worn road in painting Judas as more scapegoat than betrayer, blamed for Jesus' death when he was in reality just a pawn in a bigger game. The most recent pilgrim to have walked along this same path was the New Zealand poet and novelist, C.K. Stead in My Name Was Judas (Harvill Secker). Like Archer, he presents us with an ageing Judas, rejecting tales that he hanged himself from a tree and providing an alternative perspective on the Jesus mission.
What hooked Stead on Judas, he has said, was the potential he gave him as a writer to inhabit "a sceptical voice standing out against the building of new orthodoxies". So Jesus' miracles, for instance, are debunked by Stead's Judas. Lazarus was really just a bed-ridden weakling who needed a kick up the backside to get him out from under the duvet.
Judas, the insider who was also the outsider, provides rich pickings for those wanting to debunk the claims of Christianity. The subtext of both Archer's and Stead's accounts is that Jesus wasn't all he's made out to be, that Judas alone saw through him, and that it was this, not the betrayal, that has made him a hate figure in Christianity ever since.
Interest in Judas has been sustained by one of those wonderful historical what ifs. What if Judas wrote his own gospel to counterbalance Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, a text that was then lost for centuries but which suddenly re-emerged?
Simon Mawer turned this teaser into a well-received historical thriller in 2000 with The Gospel of Judas (Abacus), while Michael Dickinson's The Lost Testament of Judas Iscariot (Brandon, 1994) made an excursion into the same territory, allowing his hero to elope post-betrayal with Martha, Lazarus's downtrodden sister.
Fictional speculations such as these should have ended with the publication last year by the American National Geographic Society of the real thing. In the 1970s, a copy of The Gospel of Judas, translated into Coptic from its original second-century Greek, had been unearthed at Al Minya in Egypt. It took 30 years for it to emerge from the shadows into print, but when it did, it presented Judas' betrayal as unequivocally part of the divine plan. For Jesus to rise from the dead, it suggested, he had first to die and, by enabling that to happen, Judas was doing God's work.
But The Gospel of Judas has not proved the last word, as Archer's book flamboyantly demonstrates. One problem is that the rediscovered manuscript dates back only as far as AD150-180. Was this a later edition of an earlier text in which Judas had told "my own story", or was it simply part of the Apocrypha, the writings about Jesus from the first and second centuries which didn't make the cut for the New Testament?
A publishing cottage industry is now growing to pick over such questions. There is Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the shaping of Christianity by Elaine Pagels and Karen King (Allen Lane), a scholarly analysis by internationally renowned professors from Harvard and Princeton. Somewhat lighter and more polemical in tone is The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed by Bart Ehrman (Oxford). Both books struggle with the Judas who emerges from the lost manuscript - angry, homophobic and anti-Semitic. Yet one of Judas' assumed identities over the centuries, especially in Christian-inspired literature, has been as the archetypal Jew.
In medieval times, in particular, Judas the Jew was regularly portrayed as sinking to new depths of depravity as a way of reinforcing and justifying Christianity's witch-hunt of Jews in Europe. So, in the 13th century, in The Golden Legend the Dominican priest, Jacob of Virragino, gave Judas a chilling fictional back story as a serial murderer whose victims include his father, killed so that Judas can have sex with his mother.
The link between the wicked Judas and anti-Semitism has more recent form too, as the Jewish historian Hyam Maccoby showed in his 1992 book, Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil. Among Nazi propaganda from the 1930s are depictions of Judas as a sinister Jew. Maccoby's book inspired novelist Howard Jacobson's 1993 film, Sorry Judas, a debate between 12 theologians staged round the Last Supper table.
Judas' supposed collusion with dark forces, prompted above all by his image, second only to the Devil, as the Bad Boy of the New Testament, has also made him popular in the horror and science fiction genres. The American sci-fi writer, George R.R. Martin, author of the best-selling Song of Ice and Fire series, has published a short story, The Way of Cross and Dragon, that describes a secret religious sect who meet to worship Saint Judas in pseudo-Satanic rituals.
Biblical characters offer an odd combination of instant name-recognition, archetypal significance but inadequately fleshed-out personal stories. Like the "whore" Mary Magdalene, that other fashionable (thanks to Dan Brown) bit-part player in the New Testament drama, Judas "the betrayer" seems set to enthral long after his entanglement with Jeffrey Archer is forgotten.
Matthew portrayed him as a man willing to betray his master with a kiss for 30 pieces of silver, Luke presented him as possessed by Satan, while John gave him a father, Simon, and a role, as treasurer of the Jesus movement.
Each detail was a small but significant embellishment on what would otherwise simply be (like more than half of the other apostles) a name on a list.
It started the process by which Judas has become one of the most instantly identifiable characters in Christianity and beyond, the personification of wickedness and the original fifth columnist.
This week that enduring fascination took a fresh turn with the publication of Jeffrey Archer's book, The Gospel According to Judas (Macmillan). He enlisted as his unlikely co-author Professor Francis Moloney, a distinguished Catholic theologian, papal adviser and priest. The launch of the book took place in Rome. Hovering over the launch was the question of why a man who has, over the years, been accused of betraying his wife, his party and his own past should now so publicly want to rehabilitate the ultimate betrayer.
In fact, Archer does little more than tread a well-worn road in painting Judas as more scapegoat than betrayer, blamed for Jesus' death when he was in reality just a pawn in a bigger game. The most recent pilgrim to have walked along this same path was the New Zealand poet and novelist, C.K. Stead in My Name Was Judas (Harvill Secker). Like Archer, he presents us with an ageing Judas, rejecting tales that he hanged himself from a tree and providing an alternative perspective on the Jesus mission.
What hooked Stead on Judas, he has said, was the potential he gave him as a writer to inhabit "a sceptical voice standing out against the building of new orthodoxies". So Jesus' miracles, for instance, are debunked by Stead's Judas. Lazarus was really just a bed-ridden weakling who needed a kick up the backside to get him out from under the duvet.
Judas, the insider who was also the outsider, provides rich pickings for those wanting to debunk the claims of Christianity. The subtext of both Archer's and Stead's accounts is that Jesus wasn't all he's made out to be, that Judas alone saw through him, and that it was this, not the betrayal, that has made him a hate figure in Christianity ever since.
Interest in Judas has been sustained by one of those wonderful historical what ifs. What if Judas wrote his own gospel to counterbalance Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, a text that was then lost for centuries but which suddenly re-emerged?
Simon Mawer turned this teaser into a well-received historical thriller in 2000 with The Gospel of Judas (Abacus), while Michael Dickinson's The Lost Testament of Judas Iscariot (Brandon, 1994) made an excursion into the same territory, allowing his hero to elope post-betrayal with Martha, Lazarus's downtrodden sister.
Fictional speculations such as these should have ended with the publication last year by the American National Geographic Society of the real thing. In the 1970s, a copy of The Gospel of Judas, translated into Coptic from its original second-century Greek, had been unearthed at Al Minya in Egypt. It took 30 years for it to emerge from the shadows into print, but when it did, it presented Judas' betrayal as unequivocally part of the divine plan. For Jesus to rise from the dead, it suggested, he had first to die and, by enabling that to happen, Judas was doing God's work.
But The Gospel of Judas has not proved the last word, as Archer's book flamboyantly demonstrates. One problem is that the rediscovered manuscript dates back only as far as AD150-180. Was this a later edition of an earlier text in which Judas had told "my own story", or was it simply part of the Apocrypha, the writings about Jesus from the first and second centuries which didn't make the cut for the New Testament?
A publishing cottage industry is now growing to pick over such questions. There is Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the shaping of Christianity by Elaine Pagels and Karen King (Allen Lane), a scholarly analysis by internationally renowned professors from Harvard and Princeton. Somewhat lighter and more polemical in tone is The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed by Bart Ehrman (Oxford). Both books struggle with the Judas who emerges from the lost manuscript - angry, homophobic and anti-Semitic. Yet one of Judas' assumed identities over the centuries, especially in Christian-inspired literature, has been as the archetypal Jew.
In medieval times, in particular, Judas the Jew was regularly portrayed as sinking to new depths of depravity as a way of reinforcing and justifying Christianity's witch-hunt of Jews in Europe. So, in the 13th century, in The Golden Legend the Dominican priest, Jacob of Virragino, gave Judas a chilling fictional back story as a serial murderer whose victims include his father, killed so that Judas can have sex with his mother.
The link between the wicked Judas and anti-Semitism has more recent form too, as the Jewish historian Hyam Maccoby showed in his 1992 book, Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil. Among Nazi propaganda from the 1930s are depictions of Judas as a sinister Jew. Maccoby's book inspired novelist Howard Jacobson's 1993 film, Sorry Judas, a debate between 12 theologians staged round the Last Supper table.
Judas' supposed collusion with dark forces, prompted above all by his image, second only to the Devil, as the Bad Boy of the New Testament, has also made him popular in the horror and science fiction genres. The American sci-fi writer, George R.R. Martin, author of the best-selling Song of Ice and Fire series, has published a short story, The Way of Cross and Dragon, that describes a secret religious sect who meet to worship Saint Judas in pseudo-Satanic rituals.
Biblical characters offer an odd combination of instant name-recognition, archetypal significance but inadequately fleshed-out personal stories. Like the "whore" Mary Magdalene, that other fashionable (thanks to Dan Brown) bit-part player in the New Testament drama, Judas "the betrayer" seems set to enthral long after his entanglement with Jeffrey Archer is forgotten.
In public, at least, they seem remarkably unfazed by what they have done. And in some senses of course they needn't be. They are a loving couple, who have been together for seven years and want to be with no one else. They have had four children. Beyond these details, however, the story gets more troubling. Patrick and Susan Stübing, who live in Zwenkau, near Leipzig, are brother and sister. Two of their four children have developmental problems and all four have been taken into care. Patrick, 30, has served more than two years of a prison sentence for incest.
Their case is raising much prurient speculation in Germany, not least because their reaction to the threat of further imprisonment for him has not been apology and shame but defiance - an attempt to overturn paragraph 173 of the German legal code, which forbids sex with a close relative.
The Stübings seem to be a textbook example of a phenomenon called genetic sexual attraction (GSA). It occurs between blood relatives who have been separated for most of their lives and meet in adulthood. It has been known to happen in all sorts of permutations - father/daughter, birth mother/son, siblings - even occasionally same-sex relationships between people who would not otherwise identify themselves as homosexual.
Patrick had already been put in a children's home in East Germany when his sister was born, the third of eight children, five of whom died. (Asked in an interview what the others died of, Susan, 22, simply shrugged.) After a lifetime spent in and out of care homes and foster families, Patrick finally found his mother in 2000, but she died of a heart attack six months later. Brother and sister - neither of whom had known of the other's existence before this - had only each other for comfort. But it would probably be fair to say that there would have been more to it than grief. Those who experience GSA speak of what they feel in terms we all recognise as romantic ideals of perfect love.
"As we looked at each other over lunch it was as if a light was turned on. Something had happened which was difficult to control," Tony Smedley told the Daily Mail in 2003, a week after he was found guilty at York crown court of having an incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Janet Paveling. "It was terrifying," Paveling said. They spoke of feeling like mirror-images of each other. "Watching her was like watching myself," said Smedley. "Whatever was happening seemed awesomely powerful. When we made love, it was very moving. Very intimate. Nothing could stop us. I know it's disturbing, but it felt right." Paveling added: "Each day we fight the impulse to be together. It has been like an obsession. We feel complete only when we are together."
There is more going on than simple attraction between strangers. "It was something to do with recognition. It was like kinship, the proof you're finding each other. It was just mutual, unspoken," said a respondent in one of the only scientific studies conducted of the phenomenon, by Maurice Greenberg and Roland Littlewood of University College London, published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology in 1995. They were surprised to find that more than 50% of people who sought post-adoption counselling "experienced strong sexual feelings in reunions".
These days people are often warned that this might be a possible reaction before they meet blood relatives - yet except for the occasional memoir, such as Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, which is an account of her incestuous relationship with her father - it is rarely talked about in public.
The term "genetical sexual attraction" seems to have been coined by Barbara Gonyo, who was taken aback by the lust she felt when she was reunited with a 26-year-old son she had given up as a baby.
The relationship was never consummated, but she wrote a book about it in which she suggests "that romantic love and erotic arousal may be the delayed by-product of 'missed bonding' that would have normally taken place between a mother and her newborn infant, or between siblings had they not been separated by adoption. Many such people, as adults, need to go through that early missed closeness. It may become sexual, or it may not."
When relationships such as this do become sexual, they tend to complicate knee-jerk assumptions about abuse and incest. "There is no force, coercion, usually no betrayal of trust," Dr Greenberg said. "And no victim. If sex occurs, it involves consenting adults."
This seems to have been the case with the Stübings, although Susan was only 16 when they met, one reason she has not yet been prosecuted. (Described as "slow" by her carers, she became pregnant for a fifth time when Patrick was imprisoned, by a 49-year-old man who described himself as her boyfriend. Their child, born last year, lives with her father.)
The Stübings' lawyer insists that the main scientific arguments behind Germany's law banning incest no longer hold. "Sociologically speaking, incest is not the cause of difficult problems in families, rather the consequence of them. The risks of inheriting defects are as high as the chance of inheriting positive things," he claims, pointing out that people with inheritable conditions are not forbidden sexual intercourse.
What is unusual about the Stübings is the number of children involved. Apart from two of them having developmental difficulties (it is not certain whether this is because they were premature or because they share so much genetic material) the fact that they have been taken into care, as Patrick was, means that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the whole cycle could begin again.
In the meantime Patrick has been voluntarily sterilised, in the hope of avoiding further prosecution.
All the Stübings want, their lawyer says, is to be left alone. "They want to be a family - to have that which was impossible to have in their own childhoods."
But the question is how far apart we are since Adam and Eve
Their case is raising much prurient speculation in Germany, not least because their reaction to the threat of further imprisonment for him has not been apology and shame but defiance - an attempt to overturn paragraph 173 of the German legal code, which forbids sex with a close relative.
The Stübings seem to be a textbook example of a phenomenon called genetic sexual attraction (GSA). It occurs between blood relatives who have been separated for most of their lives and meet in adulthood. It has been known to happen in all sorts of permutations - father/daughter, birth mother/son, siblings - even occasionally same-sex relationships between people who would not otherwise identify themselves as homosexual.
Patrick had already been put in a children's home in East Germany when his sister was born, the third of eight children, five of whom died. (Asked in an interview what the others died of, Susan, 22, simply shrugged.) After a lifetime spent in and out of care homes and foster families, Patrick finally found his mother in 2000, but she died of a heart attack six months later. Brother and sister - neither of whom had known of the other's existence before this - had only each other for comfort. But it would probably be fair to say that there would have been more to it than grief. Those who experience GSA speak of what they feel in terms we all recognise as romantic ideals of perfect love.
"As we looked at each other over lunch it was as if a light was turned on. Something had happened which was difficult to control," Tony Smedley told the Daily Mail in 2003, a week after he was found guilty at York crown court of having an incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Janet Paveling. "It was terrifying," Paveling said. They spoke of feeling like mirror-images of each other. "Watching her was like watching myself," said Smedley. "Whatever was happening seemed awesomely powerful. When we made love, it was very moving. Very intimate. Nothing could stop us. I know it's disturbing, but it felt right." Paveling added: "Each day we fight the impulse to be together. It has been like an obsession. We feel complete only when we are together."
There is more going on than simple attraction between strangers. "It was something to do with recognition. It was like kinship, the proof you're finding each other. It was just mutual, unspoken," said a respondent in one of the only scientific studies conducted of the phenomenon, by Maurice Greenberg and Roland Littlewood of University College London, published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology in 1995. They were surprised to find that more than 50% of people who sought post-adoption counselling "experienced strong sexual feelings in reunions".
These days people are often warned that this might be a possible reaction before they meet blood relatives - yet except for the occasional memoir, such as Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, which is an account of her incestuous relationship with her father - it is rarely talked about in public.
The term "genetical sexual attraction" seems to have been coined by Barbara Gonyo, who was taken aback by the lust she felt when she was reunited with a 26-year-old son she had given up as a baby.
The relationship was never consummated, but she wrote a book about it in which she suggests "that romantic love and erotic arousal may be the delayed by-product of 'missed bonding' that would have normally taken place between a mother and her newborn infant, or between siblings had they not been separated by adoption. Many such people, as adults, need to go through that early missed closeness. It may become sexual, or it may not."
When relationships such as this do become sexual, they tend to complicate knee-jerk assumptions about abuse and incest. "There is no force, coercion, usually no betrayal of trust," Dr Greenberg said. "And no victim. If sex occurs, it involves consenting adults."
This seems to have been the case with the Stübings, although Susan was only 16 when they met, one reason she has not yet been prosecuted. (Described as "slow" by her carers, she became pregnant for a fifth time when Patrick was imprisoned, by a 49-year-old man who described himself as her boyfriend. Their child, born last year, lives with her father.)
The Stübings' lawyer insists that the main scientific arguments behind Germany's law banning incest no longer hold. "Sociologically speaking, incest is not the cause of difficult problems in families, rather the consequence of them. The risks of inheriting defects are as high as the chance of inheriting positive things," he claims, pointing out that people with inheritable conditions are not forbidden sexual intercourse.
What is unusual about the Stübings is the number of children involved. Apart from two of them having developmental difficulties (it is not certain whether this is because they were premature or because they share so much genetic material) the fact that they have been taken into care, as Patrick was, means that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the whole cycle could begin again.
In the meantime Patrick has been voluntarily sterilised, in the hope of avoiding further prosecution.
All the Stübings want, their lawyer says, is to be left alone. "They want to be a family - to have that which was impossible to have in their own childhoods."
But the question is how far apart we are since Adam and Eve
