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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (156465)	1/19/2005 2:09:26 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The fact that Arabic is spoken from the borders of Iraq to West Africa indicates not the expansion of the Indigenous, but the imposition of the Imperial, and Arabic nationalism is predicated on a return to the glory of the Caliphate. The Palestinian Question has to do with the reassertion of Arab Imperialism in the territories of North Africa and the Middle East. I get the impression that modern Arab society is rather deeply ahistorical. Which is not to say they forget history, on the contrary, to them it all happened yesterday - but they basically reject the notion that time and change happens to everybody and everything. Before Islam was "Ignorance", so it's not worth knowing, then came Islam, which is by definition Perfection; directly after Islam came the flowering of Islamic civilization (taught in extremely idealized form which little resembles actual history), which ought never to be have been allowed to diminish and ought to be returned to. It's not just the Islamists who believe this stuff, it's the way everybody has been taught. I have read accounts of this sort of teaching from Egyptians, Palestinians and Iraqis - naturally, those who have gotten a Western education and freed themselves from this kind of thinking. So the notion that they themselves imposed Arab culture on the previously indigenous cultures or not-so-indeginous Greek cultures, is one that many Arabs just can't think about.