In The Atlantic Shadi Hamid has interesting article, The Roots of the Islamic State’s Appeal, which is basically a precis of his recent book Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East. This is on my “to-read” list, so I’ll get to it at some point, though Hamid has been expressing his views for years now, so I don’t anticipate any new big picture analyses. Since my post on ISIS this summer he’s been pointing to some of my posts of interest to him now and then (e.g., ISIS’ Willing Executioners. I don’t always agree with Hamid, but he is a serious thinker. In contrast, most of the public discussion is performed in a manner where it is clear that the interlocutors have in mind only idealized cartoons. The sort of multiculturalist Left liberalism which fixates upon Islamophobia reduces Islamic civilization as an colonized adjunct to the Western experience. On the other side you have the type of intellectual whose comprehension of Islamic civilization does not extend much beyond the latest bombings. To truly grasp issue and affairs across geographic space and the vast spans of history requires some modicum of scholarly learning, which most who offer their opinion do not have. This is why I often dismiss readers who “explain” to me their understandings gleaned from a few books here and there, because if I agree their opinions are irrelevant, and if I disagree why exactly would I take the opinions of those far less informed than me on anything? Everyone has a right to their opinion. What concerns me is when the uninformed are on the ones who are influencing policy decisions.
More to the point in relation to Hamid’s piece, one of the implications is that this anti-Islamist phase in the Arab world is a correction, but that the arrow of history will probably lead to a second rise of Islamism and illiberalism. In other words, it will get worse before it gets better (if it gets better, Hamid seems to be skeptical of taking the Western arc of history as anything but a specific contingency). What immediately comes to mind then are the Copts. It seems clear that much of the Fertile Crescent excluding Israel and Lebanon will be cleansed of its ancient communities. The numbers work, insofar as these are minorities on the order of percents in populations of millions. But the Copts of Egypt number millions in a population of tens of millions. The second Islamist age in Egyptian politics and society will not be pretty for this minority, who will experience repression and exclusion as a matter of ideological commitment from the powers that be.
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