Maybe out of our tragedy in Amman we’ll gain some deeper understanding. Some tough reading is in order.

Below are some excerpts from an amazing article by the Syrian intellectural Sadik Jalal Al-Azm. I highly encourage you to read it in full here.

I just selected some paragraphs below..

Time Out of Joint

Western dominance, Islamist terror, and the Arab imagination

Sadik J. Al-Azm

Despite current predictions of a protracted global war between the West and the Islamic world, I believe that war is over. There may be intermittent battles in the decades to come, with many innocent victims. But the number of supporters of armed Islamism is unlikely to grow, its support throughout the Arab Muslim world will likely decline, and the opposition by other Muslim groups will surely grow. 9/11 signaled the last gasp of Islamism rather than the beginnings of its global challenge.

…

Although unique in its horror, in its desperation 9/11 can be compared to past terrorist acts that foretold the ends of the movements in whose names they were committed: for example, the abduction and murder of the German industrialist Hans Martin Schleyer by the Bader-Meinhoff gang in the summer of 1977 and the abduction and murder, a year later, of Aldo Moro, the dean of Italy’s senior political leaders after World War II, by the Italian Red Brigades.

Today the hard-core Islamists’ spectacular terrorist violence reflects a [..] desperate attempt to break out of the historical impasse and terminal structural crisis reached by the world Islamist movement in the second half of the 20th century.

…

I predict this violence will be the prelude to the dissipation and final demise of militant Islamism in general. Like the armed factions in Europe who had given up on society, political parties, reform, proletarian revolution, and traditional communist organization in favor of violent action, militant Islamism has given up on contemporary Muslim society, its sociopolitical movements, the spontaneous religiosity of the masses, mainstream Islamic organizations, the attentism [i.e the wait-and-see policy] of the original and traditional Society of Muslim Brothers (from which they generally derive in the way the 1970s terrorists derived from European communism), in favor of violence. Both were contemptuous of politics and had complete disregard for the consequences of their actions.

…

A cultural form of schizophrenia is also attendant on the Arab (and Muslim) world’s tortured, protracted and reluctant adaptation to European modernity. This process has truly made the modern Arabs into the Hamlet of our times, doomed to unrelieved tragedy, forever hesitating, procrastinating, and wavering between the old and the new, between asala and mu’asara (authenticity and contemporaneity), between turath and tajdid (heritage and renewal), between huwiyya and hadatha (identity and modernity), and between religion and secularity, while the conquering Fortinbrases [the character who suddenly prevails at the end of Hamlet] of the world inherit the new century. No wonder, then, to quote Shakespeare’s most famous drama, that “the time is out of joint” for the Arabs and “something is rotten in the state.” No wonder as well if they keep wondering whether they are the authors of their woes or whether “there’s a divinity that shapes [their] ends.”

For the Arabs to own their present and hold themselves responsible for their future, they must come to terms with a certain image of themselves buried deep in their collective subconscious. What I mean is this: as Arabs and Muslims (and I use Muslim here in the historical and cultural sense), we continue to imagine ourselves as conquerors, history-makers, pace-setters, pioneers, and leaders of world-historic proportions.

In the marrow of our bones, we still perceive ourselves as the subjects of history, not its objects, as its agents and not its victims. We have never acknowledged, let alone reconciled ourselves to, the marginality and passivity of our position in modern times. In fact, deep in our collective soul, we find it intolerable that our supposedly great nation must stand helplessly on the margins not only of modern history in general but even of our local and particular histories.

We find no less intolerable the condition of being the object of a history made, led, manipulated, and arbitrated by others, especially when we remember that those others were (and by right ought to be) the objects of a history made, led, manipulated, and arbitrated by ourselves. Add to that a no less deeply seated belief that this position of world-historical leadership and its glories was somehow usurped from us by modern Europe fi ghaflaten min al-tarikh—while history took a nap, as we say in Arabic. I say usurped—and usurpation is at the heart of Hamlet’s tribulations and trials—because this position belongs to us by right, by destiny, by fate, by election, by providence, or by what have you.

With this belief goes the no less deeply seated conviction that eventually things will right themselves by uncrowning this usurper, whose time is running out anyway, and by restoring history’s legitimate leaders to their former station and natural function.

…

When this unexamined, unexorcised, highly potent, and deep-seated self-image collides with the all-too-evident everyday actualities of Arab-Muslim impotence, frustration, and insignificance, especially in international relations, a host of problems emerge: massive inferiority complexes, huge compensatory delusions, wild adventurism, political recklessness, desperate violence, and, lately, large-scale terrorism of the kind we have become familiar with all over the world.

There is no running away from the fact that the Arabs were dragged kicking and screaming into modernity on the one hand, and that modernity was forced on them by a superior might, efficiency, and performance on the other. Europe made the modern world without consulting Arabs, Muslims, or anyone else for that matter and made it at the expense of everyone else to boot.

…

The clash of civilizations between Islam and the West [referring to Huntington’s ideas here] indeed exists in the weak, ordinary sense of clash, but not in the strong and more dramatic meaning of the term. Islam is simply too weak to sustain in earnest any challenge to an obviously triumphant West.

The two supposedly clashing sides are so unequal in power, military might, productive capacity, efficiency, effective institutions, wealth, social organization, science, and technology that the clash can only be of the inconsequential sort. As one literary metaphor says, If a stone falls on an egg the egg breaks, and if an egg falls on a stone the egg breaks too. From the Arab Muslim side of the divide, the West seems so powerful, so efficient, so successful, so unstoppable, that the very idea of an ultimate “clash” is fanciful.

Read these related posts on 360east:

• A million Jordanian signatures against terror
• Unsettling analysis on home grown terror in Jordan.. and what to do about it
• Open your mind. Say no to terror.
• A question for the Israeli blogosphere!!
• Jordan’s Al-Rai newspaper to start publishing a “Reform and Enlightenment” weekly supplement