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Showing posts from January, 2015
Islam "Islam is a religion adapted to Orientals, especially Arabs, i.e., on one hand to townsmen engaged in trade and industry, on the other to nomadic Bedouins. Therein lies, however, the embryo of a periodically recurring collision. The townspeople grow rich, luxurious and lax in the observation of the "law." The Bedouins, poor and hence of strict morals, contemplate with envy and covetousness these riches and pleasures. Then they unite under a prophet, a Mahdi, to chastise the a postates and restore the observation of the ritual and the true faith and to appropriate in recompense the treasures of the renegades. In a hundred years they are naturally in the same position as the renegades were: a new purge of the faith is required, a new Mahdi arises and the game starts again from the beginning. That is what happened from the conquest campaigns of the African Almoravids and Almohads in Spain to the last Mahdi of Khartoum who so successfully thwarted the E

Lineages of Revolt

Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East by Adam Hanieh. "Conventional accounts of political economy in the Middle East tend to adopt a similar methodological approach, which begins, typically, with the basic analytical categories of “state” (al-dawla) and “civil society” (al-mujtama’ al-madani). The former is defined as the various political institutions that stand above society and govern a country. The latter is made up of “institutions autonomous from the state which facilitate orderly economic, political and social activity” or, in the words of the Iraqi social scientist Abdul Hussein Shaaban, “the civil space that separates the state from society, which is made up of non-governmental and non-inheritable economic, political, social and cultural institutions that form a bond between the individual and the state.” All societies are said to be characterized by this basic division, which sees the state confronted by an agglomeration of atomized individuals, organiz
The Peculiar Modalities of Capitalism in the Arab Region Excerpts and notes from  The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising  Gilbert Achcar  2013  The 23 July 1952 coup of the Free officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser "unquestionably led to a transformation of Egypt much more radical than anything that has so far resulted from the Revolution of 25 January 2011.  The 1952 coup led to the overthrow of a dynasty, the abolition of the monarchy and parliamentary regime, the creation of a republican military dictatorship, the nationalisation of foreign assets, the subversion of the old regime's property-holding classes (big land property, commercial and financial capital), a major drive to industrialise and far-reaching progressive social reforms. These changes certainly better deserve to be called a 'revolution' than do the results of the uprising set in motion in January 2011..." The People Want, p. 15  "The Tunisian and Egyptian political revo