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Showing posts with the label “Lawrence of Arabia”

Dune and the ‘Arab World’

“Without knowing the fate of Arrakis and Paul, the current  Dune  appears no different from  Lawrence of Arabia  (1962): the story of a proud if uncivilised people born in a coarse if rich terrain who await a white messiah to grant them the peace and freedom that colonising forces have long denied. While the  Dune  saga starts as an allegory for colonisation, it ends as a warning against man-made ecological development and the danger of inherited myths.” Interstellar epic avoids Middle East cliches

Arab History

“I  was astonished to learn, first of all, that members of the secret Arab nationalist group Fatat had read President Woodrow Wilson’s political textbook,  The State.  Second, I was also fascinated to discover how closely Prince Faisal worked with Sheikh Rashid Rida. His presence in Damascus and his central role in drafting a democratic constitution have not been previously studied. Third, I realized that the constitution drafted at Damascus disestablished Islam eight years before Ataturk did so in Turkey. Syrian Arabs did so through peaceful negotiation, not by crushing the religious class. Finally, I was horrified to learn that the French deliberately mistranslated the constitution to make Article 1 read “Islam is the religion of the state” and so to suggest that the Syrian Arab Kingdom was a theocracy intolerant of Christians. In fact, Article 1 read “Islam is the religion of the King,” not the state, precisely because Congress delegates rejected an Ottoman-style religious state. T