The reality of Arabism was misted, and presently this inner uncertainty , expressed in endemic feuds and rivalries, led to the collapse of Arab power. The decline was more protracted than the rise…
The Arabs burst out of their peninsula in 633; by 750 they had reached the limits of their expansion. But it was not until 1258 that the last of the caliphs was deposed, and Granada remained a Moslem capital until 1492. Internally, the empire crumbled in bits and pieces. Externally, it was assaulted from all quarters. From the east came the Mongols, from the north the Turks. The forces of Christian Europe counterattacked in Spain and Sicily and followed the twin banners of Faith and Profit to expel Islam from the Holy Land. By the end of the eighteenth-century most of the Islamic countries were under Turkish rule-Moslem itself, and expressing itself in Arab script, but still an alien imperialism.
Al Sufi, Book of Fixed Stars, 1009 A.D. —The standards of House of Saud media are rather funny. Take its politically sleazy news station, Al-Arabiyyah, and its website. They report “news” of defections and when they don’t materialize they basically remove the story. For the last two days, they reported on the defection of Faruq Ash-Shar`. Today, they kept the story despite denials and then they changed the story into: conflicting accounts of the defection of Ash-Shar`. They then report on the defection of `Abdullah Al-Ahmar (a longtime Ba`th functionary).
PS The station of King Fahd’s brother-in-law later interviewed Michel Kilu to discuss the defection. He said: I don’t know whether he defected or not but he was not in agreement with the method of the regime’s handling of the uprising early on. —Read More:http://angryarab.blogspot.ca/ image:http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/alsufi/alsufi_constellations.htm
A second Ignorance ensued. The Arabs languished once again, enervated and impoverished, scattered now across the Mediterranean littoral and split into diverse schools of Islam. The Middle East was no longer the world’s fulcrum, the Great Powers of Europe having shifted their attention westward to the Americas and eastward to China and India; when Napoleon called Egypt the most important country in the world, he was thinking of it only as a key to the Far East. The Arabs were left on the fringes of great events, and they lapsed into splintered apathy. Their scholarship was vulgarized into tradition and superstition. Their religion became ever more fatalistic. Even their numbers shrank, as the techniques of irrigation, production, and medicine were forgotten.
—Nasrallah went on to disparage Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, whom he compared to the leaders who served in their positions during the Second Lebanon War, Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz.
“In 2006, foolish Olmert and Perez made a mistake that led to a strategic loss for Israel,” he said. “I’m telling you Zionists: The two fools that are leading you today, Barak and Netanyahu, are making a mistake when it comes to Iran, and it will annihilate your pillaging entity.”
Nasrallah noted that Israel is fully aware that it is lying to the world by claiming that Iran’s nuclear program has a military element. He said that the internal Israeli debate over the consequences of a military strike in Iran is testimony to the courage and strength of the regime in Tehran, and that the question of whether to attack or not has nothing to do with morals or international law, but rather the price Israel will have to pay.—Read More:http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4269799,00.html image:http://angryarab.blogspot.ca/
When, in the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire gave way to the more thrusting imperialism of Western Europe, the Arabs changed masters flaccidly, almost without raising a voice in their own interest. This degradation survived until our own time; the Arab post WWII world was effectively divided among several Western powers, notably France and England. Only the two desert kingdoms of the peninsula, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, remained independent, but even there the power of Western oil interests was growing so fast that independence had its limits. Two world wars, far from emancipating the Arabs or reviving their lost sense of destiny, seemed only to have deepened their subjection.
—You would have to be very naïve to think that transitioning from primordial identities to “citizens” would be easy, or even likely. It took two centuries of struggle and compromise for America to get to a point where it could elect a black man with the middle name Hussein as president and then consider replacing him with a Mormon! And that is in a country of immigrants.
But you would also have to be blind and deaf to the deeply authentic voices and aspirations that triggered these Arab awakenings not to realize that, in all these countries, there is a longing — particularly among young Arabs — for real citizenship and accountable and participatory government. It is what many analysts are missing today. That energy is still there, and the Muslim Brotherhood, or whoever rules Egypt, will have to respond to it.
Precisely because Egypt is the opposite of Las Vegas — what happens there never stays there — the way in which the newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, ultimately learns to work with the secular, liberal, Salafist and Christian elements of Egyptian society will have a huge impact on all the other Arab awakenings: Thomas Friedman—Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/27/opinion/the-fear-factor.html?_r=1&ref=thomaslfriedman image:http://benatlas.com/2009/07/life-in-israel-in-1948-part-2/
Nowhere in the world could be more dismal than an ordinary Arab town of the 1940′s- a town in Iraq say, which had once supported a thriving and advanced population, but which had sunk into a condition of feckless squalor; in style totally hangdog, its inhabitants dragging a sustenance from a few incompetently irrigated fields. They are poor and blindingly ignorant, possessing not a single luxury, almost all illiterate, and knowing nothing whatsoever of the world outside their district. They had no radio, could read no newspaper, had no teacher to inform them, no sage to inspire them, no memory of past glory, no hope of change. Their life was a drab emptiness.
Such a place was like a cage in which the spirit of the Arabs lay trapped and stifled; and each poky village of the Tigris or the Nile , each poor city back-street in Oman or Tunisia, was a paradigm of Arabism as a whole. Unity of the Arabs seemed a chimera, and even their brotherhood seemed beyond redemption.
But looking today upon the wide crescent of the Arab world today, that argument no longer applies. Whatever its disabilities, it does not stagnate. Squabbling, bickering, half-cocked, it remains, but it bursts with life; how attentively, fulsomely even, the entire world listens to each successive assertion of the undying, united, unextinguishable Arab will….. ( to be continued)
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