By Andrew Bieszad · Saturday, April 21, 2007 Islam began as one of many religions in Arabia. It taught simple monotheism, emphasized divine justice, and encouraged helping the poor, widowed, and orphaned. Mohammed was convinced that he had divine truth, but few paid attention to him except to mock him. After twelve years of unsuccessful preaching and persecution, he went to Medina with his followers in 622 AD. There he unsuccessfully attempted to convert the city’s inhabitants. Historically, this failure marks the beginning of the politicization of Islam and the subjugation of non-Muslims within Muslim-ruled areas.
Mohammed’s revelations changed. He began talking about Islam as both a religion and a divinely mandated way of life for mankind, to be imposed by force if necessary. Politics married theology, and Mohammed started a bloody military campaign to conquer and convert Arabia. This spelled the end of religious pluralism in the Arab and Muslim world.
It has been almost 1400 years since Mohammed claimed his first revelation, and the Muslim mixture of politics and religion remains a problem. But this past spring witnessed a historical first with the Secular Islam Summit in St. Petersburg, Florida. Religious Muslims, secular Muslims, and ex-Muslims from around the world gathered to discuss how to separate Islam as a religion from political affairs. While there many differences, all speakers agreed that Islam cannot remain both a political and religious teaching. For its own survival, it needs to choose.
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By Jean-Claude Paye · Monday, April 9, 2007 Now available!
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The war on terrorism feeds a paradoxical form of discourse: an emergency demands urgent and compelling measures, yet these are part of a long-term, indeed endless, confrontation. The state of emergency becomes a lasting form of government. It comes to be seen as a new political regime that is called upon to stand firm for democracy and Human Rights. In other words, citizens must be ready to give up immediate rights and a well-defined freedom for the sake of an abstract and self-proclaimed democratic order, not only today and tomorrow, but for an indefinite period. As it suspends law and inscribes such suspension into a new legal order, war on terrorism gives legitimacy to a change in the political regime.
The war against terrorism allows power to be reorganized at the world level. The procedures of exception set up in its name become the basis of a new legal order that gives judicial powers to administrative authorities. Thus the war against terrorism is constitutive. It alters the exercise of internal and external sovereignty. It leads to an organic solidarity among various governments in the surveillance and repression of their populations. The boundary between the maintenance of order and war is blurred. Real wars are presented as police operations and control over citizens is carried out by procedures that belong to counter-espionage. In this globalized process, the United States occupies an exceptional place. It rules an imperial political structure in which the American administration has the privilege of determining the exception and inscribing it into law.
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By Catherine Pickstock · Thursday, April 5, 2007 Descartes flattened the sun and flattered our vision when he imagined that to know, all one need do is open the window of an underground cellar for all to become apparent. This is to suppose that because light is the presupposition for clarity, it must be a simple matter. But does not a moment’s (infinite) reflection show that it is neither simple nor even a matter? Never can we stand in daylight without being aware that the fundamental element of light nonetheless has a point of concentrated origin which we cannot gaze upon nor encompass, and which is therefore a dark mystery. Moreover, pure light would not illuminate at all. To be light, it requires the very things opposed to its nature that it illuminates; dense dark things which halt its passage and at the same time alone make manifest any passage whatsoever. And without manifestation, who can say that this passage would exist since light is Being as manifestation? Thus light lies somewhere between an infinitely dark source and the immeasurable matrix of solidity. In this no-man’s-land, light boasts its brightness and yet this absolute condition of all truth itself dissembles (though without deceit, since it has no other side, no substance to deny) from the outset, since all it shows is what it is not. Although light is the first source, it only begins to be when it leaves its unrevealed origin and even these beams do not become visible until they have been reflected back from some quiddity.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, March 26, 2007  The November elections and the new Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate have been widely interpreted—or misinterpreted—as rejections of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, which itself has been widely labeled—or mislabeled—as the “neo-con” agenda. In fact the election outcomes were both more complex, as evidenced by the Lieberman victory in Connecticut over Lamont’s anti-war candidacy, and more sordid: when all is said and done, the elections probably turned on the congressional page sex scandal rather than on any debate over military strategy in the streets of Baghdad. The adage that one should be careful with one’s wishes applies in no small ways to the Democrats: it was comfortable for them to be able to attack Iraq policy, while basking in the opposition party’s luxury of not having to come up with any programmatic alternative. Too few troops? Too many troops? It made little difference as long as one did not have to make the decisions. How sweet it was. Now, after the November results, the new majority party ought to come up with something better on its own. So where’s the beef?
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By Danilo Breschi · Sunday, February 18, 2007 Last February 3, a policeman, Filippo Raciti, 38 years old, was killed by a “fan” during an urban battle outside the stadium of Catania after the soccer match Catania-Palermo. As of this writing, the murderer has not been identified. He could well be a teenager. He could have used a steel bolt or perhaps a basin ripped out of a stadium bathroom to pummel the policeman’s liver. The investigations continue. The policeman was married and the father of two young sons.
In Italy the violence of soccer fans is not a new phenomenon. It could be largely solved through legitimate repression, an appropriate application of legal violence by the state to establish a respect for law in order to prevent its violation. Yet there has not been adequate legislation to address the problem, and the best current laws have never been enforced. The primary issue has never been money—even though soccer is big business in Italy.
The key problem is that there is no civic culture to sustain law and order (a formula which most of the Italian intelligentsia reject as “fascist”). A pseudo-sociological culture has similarly rejected the term “repression,” replacing it with “pre-emption,” even though very little has been pre-empted during the past thirty years. The result? Every year there is plenty of fighting around soccer games, and sometimes someone dies, but nothing changes.
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By Jay A. Gupta · Sunday, January 28, 2007 In the streets of Beirut, one notices a preponderance of Lebanese flags—hanging out of windows, on cars, in doorways, on buildings. A nationalist gesture, it paradoxically signifies the opposite. Both the “opposition” and government supporters are equally zealous flag wavers. Meant to signify the universal of nationalism, the flag in fact symbolizes fragmentation and impermeable particularity. In this sense, the flag truly represents Lebanon.
It is difficult to imagine what a “united” Lebanon would be. There is a deep and chronic lack of acknowledgement of genuine otherness. In order to unite, there first has to be acknowledgement and tolerance of genuine difference. Lack of respect for boundaries seems to be a nationwide difficulty, seen at both the individual and collective levels. One is indeed tempted to demand a theory—psychoanalytic, speculative, or otherwise—of social boundary malformation. From traffic patterns, to interpersonal relations, to sectarian violence, Lebanon is beset with problems that appear diagnosable in such terms. At the individual level, it does not seem to be particularly inspired by belligerence that people do not recognize lines in banks and airports, or do not honor norms of basic courtesy such as reflexively yielding partial passage on sidewalks and in doorways. These seem rather to be microsocial, sensuous indications of broader social attitudes that fail to recognize the genuine existence and autonomy of others. I believe that, at the highest cultural level—politics—these attitudes achieve their full expression and significance in and as sectarianism.
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