It’s easy to forget that the organization of the world into countries is less than a century old. In fact this process was not fully completed until after World War II. Between 1945 and 1975, some one hundred new countries were born, and every inch of earth finally belonged to some nation-state or other.

Nationalist sentiment was not in short supply; lots of that was sloshing around in the Middle World at this time. The trouble was, most of the new nation-states were rather artificial. Afghanistan, for example, had been created by Russia and Britain. Iran, until recently, had been a loose conglomeration of disparate parts, an empire, not a country. Turkey was a nation-state because Atatürk said so. As for India, where does one even begin?But the most problematic region for nationalism was the Arab heartland.

— Destiny Disrupted

After the war, the United Nations imposed sanctions that virtually severed Iraq from the world and reduced Iraqi citizens from a European standard of living in 1990 to one that approached the most impoverished on Earth. Incomes dropped about 95 percent. Disease spread, and there was no medicine to stem it. Over two hundred thousand children—and perhaps as many as half a million—died as a direct result of the sanctions. One U.N. official, Denis Halliday, resigned because of these sanctions, claiming that “Five thousand children are dying every month. . . . I don’t want to administer a program that results in figures like these.”

The only sector of Iraqi society on whom the sanctions had little impact was the Ba’ath Party elite, Saddam Hussein and his cohorts, the very people the sanctions were intended to punish.

— Destiny Disrupted

باختصار: الأُمم المتحدة فرضت حصار دولي عزل العراق تمامًا عن العالَم الخارجي. الحجّة جانت أنّ هالحصار هو لإضعاف حزب البعث والضغط على صدام حسين، بس اللي صار هو العكس، صدام استمر بنفس اسلوب حياته المُترَف ونظامه استمر بقتل العراقيين، بينما المواطن العراقي نزل دَخله بنسبة 95% وانتشرت الأمراض بالمجتمع وانعدمت الأدوية وصارت الناس تشتغل أي شغلة وتبيع أي شي بس علمود تحصل فلس واحد. فترة الحصار هي نفسها الفترة اللي طشت بيها سوالف أبو طبر والسوق السوداء والرشاوي والحواسم، لأن الناس كاموا يلجأون حتى للأعمال غير المشروعة والفلوس الحرام بس علمود ما يموتون من الجوع همة وعوائلهم

بوكتها انتشرت سالفة أنّ الدوة رح يبقى يشتغل حتى لو اكسباير صارله شهر أو شهرين

ابن الرافدين ميدري منين يتلكاها، من الدولة لو من الأُمم المتحدة

As people forget them, objects tend to fade and lose detail. A classic example is that of the doorstep that lasted as long as a certain beggar huddled there but was lost from sight upon his death. On occasion, a few birds or a horse have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre.

— From a short story by J. L. Borges

On that day, September 11, 2001, two world histories crashed together, and out of it came one certainty: Fukiyama was mistaken. History was not over.

One side charges, “You are decadent.” The other side retorts, “We are free.” These are not opposing contentions; they’re nonsequiturs. Each side identifies the other as a character in its own narrative. In the 1980s, Khomeini called America “the Great Satan,” and other Islamist revolutionaries have echoed his rhetoric. In 2008, Jeffrey Herf, a history professor at the University of Maryland, suggested that radical Islamists are the Nazis reborn, motivated at core by anti-Semitism and hatred of women. It’s a common analysis.

— Destiny Disrupted

خلصت الكتاب أخيرًا...

الكتاب قائم على فكرة أنّ القصة اللي نسميها "تاريخ العالَم" تختلف تمامًا من وجهة نظر العالَم العربي الإسلامي (الكاتِب يسميه بالعالَم الأوسط The Middle World) عن تاريخ العالم من وجهة نظر أوروبا. كل حضارة منهن تنظر للعالَم بطريقة مختلفة وتمتلك مبادئ وقيم مختلفة عن الثانية بسبب تاريخها وأُصولها المختلفة.

بالنتيجة، فالخلاف اللي يصير ببعض القضايا بين الغرب والشرق، مثل قضايا الدين والمرأة وغيرها، هو مو سوء فهم أو خلاف بين وجهة نظر رجعية ووجهة نظر تقدمية وممكن يُحَل بالنقاش والمنطق... الأمر أعمق من هيج: الخلاف ناتج من أنّ كل حضارة تنظر للعالَم بشكل مختلف تمامًا عن الأُخرى. بقضايا المرأة مثلًا، الشرق يولي الأهمية الأكبر للشرف والأخلاقيات قبل كل شي ثاني وينظر للفرد بصفته جزء من تكوين أكبر وأهم هو العائلة أو العشيرة، بالنتيجة لما يطّلع على نساء الغرب، رح يشوف "الإنحلال وانعدام الشرف والأخلاق." بالمقابل، الغرب يولي أهمية للحرية الفردية والمتعة قبل كل شي ثاني، وبالنتيجة لما يشوف نساء الشرق (ما يشوفهن لأن منقبات/محجبات) رح يشوف "الإضطهاد والتقييد والرجعية." القضية الفلسطينية أيضًا هي وحدة من هاي القضايا اللي الخلاف بيها بين الشرق والغرب هو خلاف جوهري ما ينحل بـ "بوس عمك وبوس خالك."

مثل هكذا أُمور لا تُحل بالنقاش والحوار لأنها ما ناتجة من اختلاف آراء، هي ناتجة من اختلاف مبادئ، وما يتم حلها إلا بتبني مبادئ الآخر، أو بالآخر يتبنى مبادئك، أو بأنّ كل حضارة تعيش ضمن حدودها الخاصة وما تحشر خشمها بمبادئ الثانية. جزء جبير من التوتر العالمي اللي ديصير اليوم ناتج من شعور الإحتلال الثقافي اللي سببه إنفتاح أجزاء العالَم على بعضها بحيث تفتح التلفزيون وتلكة الحضارة الغربية كاعدة بالمطبخ وياك، أو بنتك صارت مثقفة ودتقرة لدي بوفوار. وبنفس الوقت الألماني العايش بفرانكفورت يطلع من بيته يشوف محل فلافل براس الفرع وبصفه أربع زلم ملتحين ديتمشون للجامع Downtown ديصلون الجمعة، وبلدية المدينة دتحتفل بفد مناسبة إسمها رمضان.

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The conflict wracking the modern world is better understood as the friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting. Muslims were a crowd of people going somewhere. Europeans and their offshoots were a crowd of people going somewhere. When the two crowds crossed paths, much bumping and crashing resulted, and the crashing is still going on.

There are actual incompatibilities here, not just “misunderstandings.” When I started working on this book, I read my proposal to a group of fellow writers, two of whom declared that the conflict between the Muslim world and the West was promoted by hidden powers because “people are really the same and we all want the same things”; the conflict would fade away if only people in the West understood that Islam was actually just like Christianity. “They believe in Abraham, too,” one of them offered. This sort of well-meant simplification won’t get us very far. On the other side, I often hear liberal Muslims in the United States say that “jihad just means ‘trying to be a good person,’” suggesting that only anti-Muslim bigots think the term has something to do with violence. But they ignore what jihad has meant to Muslims in the course of history dating back to the lifetime of Prophet Mohammed himself. Anyone who claims that jihad has nothing to do with violence must account for the warfare that the earliest Muslims called “jihad.” Anyone who wants to say that early Muslims felt a certain way but we modern Muslims can create whole new definitions for jihad (and other aspects of Islam) must wrestle with the doctrine Muslims have fleshed out over time.

It is problematically misleading to think of Islam as one item in a class whose other items are Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. Not inaccurate, of course: Islam is a religion, like those others. But Islam might just as validly be considered as one item in a class whose other items include communism, parliamentary democracy, fascism, and the like, because Islam is a social project like those others, an idea for how politics and the economy ought to be managed, a complete system of civil and criminal law. Then again, Islam can quite validly be seen as one item in a class whose other items include Chinese civilization, Indian civilization, Western civilization, and so on, because there is a universe of cultural artifacts from art to philosophy to architecture to handicrafts to virtually every other realm of human cultural endeavor that could properly be called Islamic. Or, as I have tried to demonstrate, Islam can be seen as one world history among many that are unfolding simultaneously, each in some way incorporating all the others.

So, what to do? Which stance to take?