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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

@HusseinAboubak

Jan 1

This is happening in most museums I visited in the UK, Spain, and Germany. The informational plaques are often just exercises in narcissistic resentment talking about the white gaze, constructing whiteness, orientalizing, and all the cacophomisms that are clearly American in origin.

This was from the Thyssen museum in Madrid. Just read the bolded words

Currently, the Kurpfälzisches museum in Heidelberg has a special exhibition on Orientalism and the construction of whiteness. As a historical corrective, they staged portraits of a bunch of black people in European 16th-century attire to de-orientalize them. If I were black, I would have been very insulted.

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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

@HusseinAboubak

Oct 20, 2024

There is a beautiful conflict that has been playing out between bourgeois Arabs whose path to white liberal status goes through the trauma of Western colonialism and others whose path to the same status goes through guilt over Islamic imperialism and terrorism.

Both paths ultimately involve achieving the same goal: elite liberal status, which is the contemporary form of whiteness. One strategy hinges on victimhood, the other on guilt. Still, both end up reinforcing the same liberal orthodoxy—essentially playing into the larger framework that privileges these narratives in the first place. They’re both trying to prove their worth to the same ideological gatekeepers but from different sides of the historical ledger.

Some less sophisticated ones are confused and alternate between both strategies. They don't quite get it.

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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

@HusseinAboubak

Apr 2, 2024

I have a lot of reservations about the New Atheists, especially with their atheism as a socio-cultural and political project, but their atheism remains a thousand times more preferable and acceptable than the radical Feuerbachean atheism of Žižek and Marxist thinkers. 🧵

The former, while locked in a truly cartoonish understanding of religion and of the self, remains infinitely more honest and safer. It is very cartoonishness is indeed a testimony to its sincerity.

Its superficiality makes it much safer, like a child who thinks he built his treehouse all on his own and doesn't know that the work was actually done by his father. What the child thinks is of secondary importance to the fact that the treehouse is sturdy and safe for the child.

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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

@HusseinAboubak

Jan 27, 2024

Israel should never concede real advantages in exchange for mere promises which their fulfillment is left to circumstance and good-will. The world of states is not determined by legal commitments or moral principles but by interest.

What determines the policy of the United States in the Middle East is not any moral or ideological considerations but how American interests in the region are conceived by Washington.

The only other considerations that historically qualified these considerations have always been the Jewish and later the Evangelical votes for the D and R respectively.

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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

@HusseinAboubak

Dec 16, 2023

I have been engaged in pro-Israel circles for over a decade, watching them losing, and sadly only forseeing them to lose even more. The complete denial of the reality of what is the Palestinian Cause actually and the dogmatic insistance on making it /1
newyorker.com/news/annals-of…

exclusively an Islamist/Jihadist issue, a rude intruder on pristine Western political life, the only instance in which the American liberal Jewish establishment actually links up with hawkish conservatives, is both the result of complete mystification of reality as well as /2

the ideological refusal of aknowledging the reality of the tent in which one made their bed. Making it a foreign import of an exotic type of fascism from faraway lands, can make us comfortably delinate identity boundaries in which the forces of civilization and Western glamor /3

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Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

@HusseinAboubak

Oct 23, 2023

While Jihad, both as a historical concept and as an institution, has a long and complex history, in the 20th century, it meant one thing for the overwhelming majority of Muslims: religious war. Denying this is a lie.

In Arabic, jihād, as it is often correctly pointed out, means struggle or strife towards a pre-defined aim. The term is used in the Quran with both the meanings of combat against unbelievers and the personal struggle against one's desires to maintain a life of piety, generally known as jihādu ạlnãf̊si, or self-jihad. In early Islamic history, jihad, as conquest of non-Muslims, was the main institution through which Muslims were able to expand both socially and geographically. It was ạl̊jihādu fī sabīli ạllhi, jihad in the path of God, which often marked the full membership of an adult male in the community. From what we are able to know about the earliest forms of these military conquests, they greatly resembled desert raids of the Arabian tribes against one another.

In time, and with more tribes joining the early community of believers, later to be known as Muslims, the raids evolved into super raids by what could be described as a pro-believers tribal coalition. As these military efforts culminated in major conquests and the establishment of the first Muslim states, jihad was gradually institutionalized and regulated from its raw desert-raid-like form into a fully-fledged medieval warfare institution, one of the world's largest. By the 9th century, Jihad was fully integrated into a fabric of socio-economic and political organization. It was no longer a raid by tribes, each led by their chief, but it became something only the state did and grew into a large tradition of warfare. Medieval jihad was a state institution with a professional class, hierarchy, political loyalties, land endowments, economic mobility, and a large body of legal canons, warfare manuals, and administrative regulations, and it is precisely these texts that we inherited today as part of the legacy of Islamic cultures and civilizations.

Given the nature, concerns, and questions that animate law in general and not just Islamic ones, in the legal classical texts of Islam, one seldom encounters the concept of jihad referring to anything but institutionalized warfare. In their works, Islamic jurists were positively generating legal structures regulating public life, whether in personal hygiene or tax collection practices. Thus, they left us a large body of work regulating every aspect of Muslim wars. Yet, it would be foolish to assume these works were produced for individual Muslims or were meant as part of a believer's piety. To reemphasize, jihad was a state activity, and thus, these works were meant for authorities to serve as manuals of conduct and warfare and not guides for the perplexed and the seekers. Moreover, this large body of works naturally included an extensive legacy of propaganda of every kind: seeking to incentivize and encourage recruitment and promising religious rewards, seeking to demonize enemies, and generally legitimate military actions. It naturally also included, with significant consequences, the ideology legitimating the imperialist expansion of Muslim dynasties through the declaring the necessity of spreading Islam, which naturally in propaganda takes the inverted form of spreading Islam through imperialist expansion.

Thus, jihad is indeed war, and declaring jihad always meant declaring war.

But how about jihad as a struggle against one's desires for the sake of self-improvement? This meaning was also as common, however, not in legal works but in piety literature and Sufism. This meaning, more relevant to the individual and to everyday social life, was so settled that even European orientalists and Arab Christians used it in most Arabic Bible translations, including the most commonly used Arabic one, Smith and Van Dyck of 1865. For instance, Saint Paul's iconic commandment in 1 Timothy 6:12 to "fight the good fight of faith" uses the word jihad both as a verb and a noun. In non-political and non-legal Islamic religious literature, this jihad, considered to be "the greater jihad," was the most commonly referred to.

Confusing? Keep reading, and it may get clearer.

When the two European missionaries Eli Smith and Cornelius Van Alen Van Dyck were sitting in Syria finishing their Arabic translation of the Bible, they were not the only ones engaged in an intensive translation project. As a matter of fact, centers of Arab urban life, notably in Egypt and Syria, were engaged in the most intense cultural program, seeking to translate European works into Arabic, modernize the Arabic language, and revive Arabic culture and society from their decadence. Printing presses were bought from Europe, young Arab students were sent to school in Paris, and state resources were dedicated to book production. During that era, mid-19th-century, one of the important works translated was Montesquieu's most well-known work and a major part of the canon of liberal political philosophy, Spirit of the Laws, which was translated by a young Egyptian Islamic jurist by the name of Rifa'a Tahtawi and commissioned by, wait for it, the diwan al-jihadyyia, or the Department of Jihad.

By the mid-19th century, jihad had become the oldest, largest, and most central state institution in Muslim states, which had been handed down, modified, evolved, and developed from one Muslim state to the other. In its last iteration under the Ottomans, who had inherited from the Mamluks, who had inherited it from the Ayyubids, etc., the Department of Jihad did the functions of nearly ten modern government ministries, such as war, public works, education and training of the state bureaucracy, and public order. Jihadyyia largely meant working in the service of the state, whether it was through being a soldier, digging a canal, or translating French political philosophy. This meaning was generally found among all other Muslim states and not just the Ottomans. In the 19th century, working for the Department of Jihad was the primary form of employment many Western expert expats found in Muslim lands, helping to train bureaucracies, modernize armies, and transfer Western technical knowledge.

By the late 19th century, and as most Muslim states embarked on ambitious programs of state reform seeking to quickly bring the administrative structure of their states to resemble Western states, the term Department of Jihad was dropped and replaced with terms like nizarat al-harbiyaa, which was a direct translation of the European term, Ministry of War. (Later, after WWII, most Muslim countries again followed the Western practice and started using the name Ministry of Defense). With the change of name also came a greater degree of modern technical specialization, with which, for instance, public works and education no longer needed to be bundled with military and police, but each received its own specialized government ministry, leaving the Ministry of War, formerly known as Jihadyya, entirely dedicated to military matters.

By the beginning of the 20th century, both Arabic and Ottoman cultures were thoroughly transformed, at least in the urban centers, that political, social, and economic forms of life were no longer what they were a century earlier. With the move of the secular elites towards European-like secular culture, those who practice politics in Muslim countries no longer imagined their activity was a continuation of a historical Muslim tradition from the past but an imitation of European practices from the present. The model of political thinking was no longer the stories of the distant ancestors but the news cables from the distant contemporaries. The two times jihad had any relevance in the early 20th century was largely due to European requests during WWI in which the Germans asked the Ottomans to declare jihad against the British, and the British asked the Indians and the Arabs to declare jihad against the Ottomans and the Germans. Both were still strictly embedded in the context of state actions and international relations, and none left any enduring effect on social relations, whether among Muslims and each other or between Muslims and Western non-Muslims.

After WWI, and following the wave of state and feudally-sponsored secularism and modern culture, a new generation of Arab bourgeoise intellectuals rose to show interest in European-style mass politics, political activism, and political ideologies: nationalism and communism. This period, the interwar years, produced the Arabic political literature that is the foundation of modern Arab political culture today. These new Arab intellectuals, mostly Christian, embarked on a major project of not merely translating European works but translating European political revolutionary consciousness itself. To do so, they heavily relied on classical religious motifs and symbols taken from Arab and Islamic history, secularized them, and used them to articulate the new revolutionary consciousness. One of the symbols that was appropriated, secularized, and used was that of jihad, which was then used to translate the German term kampf or struggle.

An example of this use was the historically significant work, "Our Struggle/Jihad in Palestine," by one of the godfathers of Arab Marxism, Raif al-Khouri, written at the beginning of the Arab Revolt of 1936. The book was a militant propaganda against Zionism, imperialism, and capitalism, which agitated its readers and asked them to self-sacrifice in the jihad/struggle against the trinity of evil. This work was not an isolated incident but was the discursive norm of all Arabic political revolutionary literature in the period seeking to secularize Islamic legacy and used by all the major political figures, including in nearly all the foundational literature of Arab Nationalism. The Christian founder of Syrian nationalism, Antoun Sa'adeh, the Christian founder of Arab Nationalism, Constantine Zureiq, and the Christian founder of Ba'athism, Michel Aflaq, all heavily used the symbol of jihad in their works, as well as the character of the prophet Muhammad as the proto Arab revolutionary.

Accompanying this secularization was also the use by the less secular and more Islamic political groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which also called for jihad in Palestine, which must have carried more religious connotations, yet, given the context, was indistinguishable from the Marxist or nationalist calls for jihad. It was in Palestine against the Jewish residents that direct appeals to individual Muslims made by intellectuals, not by states and not to states, to conduct jihad were made for the first time in modern history.

For three decades, in the 40s-60s, the word jihad was publically used by the Arab revolutionary government and most Arab political media and political literature to mean either nationalist or socialist struggle. The duality of the religious meaning of jihad, either as war or as an inner spiritual struggle, was itself also secularized into a new duality in the life of the nation, either as a jihad against Imperialism, Zionism, and capitalism or inner jihad against reaction, social stagnation, and economic backwardness. During that time, two Arabic synonyms rose to become interchangeable with jihad to express the ideal of political, existential struggle, and those are kifāḥ and niḍāl.

By the mid-1960s, Arabic political culture, which was engaged in a major war against Israel and the West, had three words to express its conceptualization of this activity in which it was engaged: jihād, kifāḥ, and niḍāl. Jihad, was no longer the historical institution that once dug canals and sent students to Paris but a fetishized concept of self-affirming dialectical struggle in a Hegelian saga of a historical protagonist. With the advance of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, the collapse of the Arab old left, the rise of the Arab and global New Left, and the rise of new anti-imperialist reading of Islam as a vehicle for revolutionary mass politics, ideological specialization started to happen to those terms: kifāḥ became more associated with nationalism, niḍāl became more associated with leftists and communists, and jihād with the new rising power of revolutionary Islamists. This process of mitosis should not obfuscate the common origin and shared epistemology of the three groups.

Until the late 1960s, and under the guise of Arab absolutist states, this new secular idea of struggle remained a state affair. It was not up to individuals or groups, except for those sponsored by revolutionary Egypt such as the Algerian FNL, to engage in jihad/kifah/nidal on their own. Those who did, such as the nidalist communists, usually ended up in prison. The collapse of this moment of hegemony gave rise to the first major armed militias of international terrorism in the Middle East, the groups of Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was engaged in ạlkifāḥ ạlmusalãḥ, or Armed Struggle, an endeavor which they copied from Latin American revolutionary strategy.
During the same time, the Palestinian Fatah and the PFLP were starring the newly popular colored TVs with images of plane hijacking, face-covered gun-toting terrorists, and Arab guerilla warfare, new off-shoots of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood were forming under the influence of the revolutionary inflation. Of those, Hizb ut-Tahrir in the revolutionary Levant and the Islamic Group in Egypt were the pioneers, later followed by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and other groups. With these groups, we see for the first time the concept of jihad, as we came to know it today in terms of rogue spontaneous terrorist activity by non-state actors acting against states and seeking legitimacy from Islam as a religion, emerging. The fact that these groups were acting in societies already thoroughly revolutionized and radicalized into believing there are engaged in an existential struggle against Imperialism, Zionism, and Capitalism meant that the receptive audience was already there.

One of the major innovations that these new Islamic revolutionary groups brought was to internalize the struggle that the Arab revolutionary states had externalized against Israel and the West. Thus, in the 1970s, we see jihad primarily emerging not against Israel (kifah and nidal were the ones against Israel) but jihad was an inhouse battle against Muslim rulers and states. From here, the rest is a common history.

The aggregate result of this history and the triumph of revolutionary thought, in one version or the other, in Muslim societies, is that jihad settled its meaning in the mainstream of Islam today as a holy war against the enemies of Islam, usually defined as the West and Israel. (Note the interesting absence of China, Russia, Latin America, African non-Muslims, etc.) It was through the portal of "Palestine" that modern jihadism was born, and the historical concept of jihad transformed into the savage nihilism it became. Rarely do lay Muslims discuss jihad as pious self-restraint or self-improvement. Moreover, the decline of Sufism and Islamic spirituality, itself initiated by 19th-century modernization efforts that sought to crush mysticism and superstition, means that very little of such public discourse remains but in the limited Sufi circles and communities of piety. Even major Islamic institutions of learning, for the most part, no longer have a memory of what jihad was prior to the 20th century. Tragically, the only question Muslims left debating is whether revolutionary violence is a legitimate jihad or must be a state-initiated effort. Most Muslims, including al-Azhar University and all major Shia authorities, at least consider revolutionary violence against Israelis and Jews to be religiously justified, permissible, and even advisable. With the theocratic revolutionary Iranian regime, the picture gets more complicated because, by virtue of being a state, it has a right to declare jihad without controversy.

So, while in principle yet, jihad means many things to many people today, for most Muslims, sadly, it means war or revolutionary violence. Insisting otherwise would only work to further lock Muslim societies in the present problems with which they need to deal.

Did it get clearer? Maybe not, and I do not believe there can ever be full clarity when discussing historical intellectual developments during such a long duree, let alone on Twitter. However, for me, at least, one thing is clear: it is the idea of "Palestine" and the Palestinian Cause that initiated so much destruction, death, and nihilism in the world I'm from.
Now, I may be right, and I may be wrong. But, put yourself in my shoes: if this is how I see the world and the destruction that happened to my world, how do you think I see every Westerner, every progressive, every liberal, and even every Jew, every know-it-all professor, who lets me know that they feel very compassionately about the Palestinian cause?!

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