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Kamal Al-Solaylee and family. (Globe & Mail / Kamal Al-Solaylee)

In Saturday’s Globe & Mail, Kamal Al-Solaylee weaves a doleful tale of his family’s regression from wealth and progressive enlightenment to soul-destroying darkness in the span of a single generation.  Mr. Al-Solayee’s young sisters once took joy in perusing Alexandria’s stores for bikinis, Beatles albums and other trappings of Western pop-culture; today their existence is markedly different.

The photo captures a moment of bourgeois life in the Middle East, before the region became associated in the Western collective psyche with exporting terror or the subjugation of women. It’s an image of a large and admittedly privileged family, led by enlightened, secular parents from southern Yemen.

…Yemen’s new notoriety doesn’t surprise me; what does is how all the warning signs went unnoticed for so long. I saw it in my own flesh and blood: An open-minded family defined by its love of arts and culture embraced hard-line interpretations of Islam and turned its back on social progress and intellectual freedom.

…I paid a visit to my family in the spring of 1992, my first in almost six years, and was shocked to see how just a few years changed us both so dramatically. There was a defeatist quality to their lives, while mine had hopes of a better future. My sisters seemed especially dispirited. Four of them worked for a living, but although their jobs gave them some economic independence, their lives remained limited. Beyond their commute to work, they rarely ventured anywhere other than grocery or clothing stores.

Returning again in the summer of 2001 – my first visit since I had moved to Canada in 1996 – I encountered a family that was a lot closer to the stereotype of regressive Muslim culture than I had ever known.

The veils were in full view. Everybody prayed five times a day. My brothers were unapologetically sexist in their dealings with their wives. Was this the same family that once took turns reading the great works of literature and subscribed to four newspapers daily, three in Arabic and one in English?

One of my brothers was actually suggesting that his eldest daughter need not go to university because education wouldn’t help her much as a housewife…

– Al-Solaylee, Kamal.  “From bikinis to burkas.” Globe & Mail, 9 January 2010. [Emphasis mine.]

Although Yemen has long been on a slow slide to anarchy, one of the many turning points Mr. Al-Solaylee highlights is the 1991 Gulf War.  In that conflict, the Republic of Yemen publicly supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia expelled hundreds of thousands of migrant Yemeni workers in retaliation.  The country was thus flooded with unemployed men who had been thoroughly immersed in the Saudis’ corrosive brand of austere, reactionary Islam.  And from there, the Republic of Yemen’s downward deck-angle accelerated.

Left and right sides of the political spectrum tend to disagree over whether it is poverty of opportunity or toxic ideology which is at the root of the issue; what Mr. Al-Solaylee’s story shows us is that the ideology can afflict the wealthy and comfortable just as easily.

The world has since realised that widespread hopelessness mixed with nihilist ideology can create a very toxic and potent brew; something of the same cocktail was effective in October of 1917, October of 1922, and March of 1933.  But while the West is at great pains to revitalise the economies and civil infrastructure of lands like Iraq and Afghanistan, the ideology has by and large gone unchecked.  In March of 2009, Afghanistan’s President Karzai still signed into law the repressive Shia Personal Status statute, which permits spousal rape and child marriage.  And the world’s foremost exporter of Wahhabi intolerance—Saudi Arabia—is still at it, with foreign workers comprising two-thirds of its total workforce and a staggering 95 percent of labour in the private sector.  It would seem that attacking poverty and hopelessness, while admirable, is not the sole (or even primary) solution.

If the world is to have any victory over Islamists, it will have to start tackling the central tenets of the ideology head-on.  To have fought the effects of Fascism or Communism for decades, without also exposing the cruel, humanity-denying theories at their cores would be nonsensical.  So it is with the war on Islamism.

See also:

• When your old life catches up with your new life (0)
• The Semiotic Steamroller (1)
• The Pitfalls of Confessional Culture (0)
• The fundamental flaw of the Islamic state (0)
• Sultans of Spin (0)

Giulio Rosati (1858-1917). Inspection of the New Arrivals. Oil on canvas

Mr. Ahmet Riza, Minister of Education for the ailing Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, diagnoses the problems of the ummah.  Keep in mind that this was written thirty to forty years before the ideology we would call Qutbism came into being.  Also be warned that there are casually derogatory remarks about Jews.

“Though many famous scholars emerged among the Arabs in the fields of geometry, algebra, astronomy, geography, and medical sciences during the times of Prophet Muhammad and of his successors, a thousand years later the ummah of Muhammad have descended so low as to request a shopping tally of three and a half gurush from the clerk of grocer Georgos. This is due to the fact that the Prophet’s words have been so misconstrued by our God damn ignorant imams and softas as to claim that when the Prophet used the term science he referred only to readings from the Quran… It is for such reasons that nobody read the works of the Western scholars…  These cowardly scoundrels effected the annihilation and wretchedness of a great ummah! … Today the Muslims have declined to the level of Jews. If you ask my own opinion: From the viewpoints of education and knowledge they are certainly at a level lower than the Jews. The ummah is dissolved, weakened, and from this point it will never recover and regain vitality. The believers in the heaven which has houris, cold sherbets, and rivers are decreasing.

Were I a woman, I would embrace atheism and never become a Muslim. Imagine a religion that imposes laws always beneficial to men but hazardous to women such as permitting my husband to have three additional wives and as many concubines as he wishes, houris awaiting him in heaven, while I cover my head and face as a miller’s horse. Beside these I would not be allowed to divorce a husband who prevented me from having any kind of fun, but would be required to submit to his beatings. Keep this religion far away from me.”

– Ahmet Riza, as quoted in a letter to his sister, Fahire.  Hanioglu, M. Sukru.  “The Political Ideas of the Young Turks.” The Young Turks in Opposition.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.  p200-212. [Emphasis is mine.]

If the minister were a woman, however, he would have been butchered by his own family for the public disgrace of renouncing Islam for atheism.  A small hurdle some of today’s Muslim women may also face.

A hundred years later, not much has changed.  Islam is still temperamentally inclined to reject any research and science that might be at odds with the Quran, and Muslim women are still de facto and de jure lesser entities under sharia law.  Perhaps most sadly, the decisionmakers of our time are even less willing to confront this engine of human misery and call it by its true name.

See also:

• When your old life catches up with your new life (0)
• The Semiotic Steamroller (1)
• The Pitfalls of Confessional Culture (0)
• The fundamental flaw of the Islamic state (0)
• The Death of Enlightenment (0)