Islam Inc.
The enthusiasm has quelled for the Arab Spring and re-shifted to other grids of humanitarian logic. The current fashions are concern by humanitarians on how to adopt the Syrian revolution by way of NGOs and microfinancing. Another intellectual urgency is focussing criticism on the admittedly Neo-Stalinist regime of Putin's Russia for continuing its client state support of Bashar Assad as massacres continue—though well-intentioned they conveniently have been led to ignore the US and British support of identical massacres in Bahrain.
Enthusiasm has shifted elsewhere: to the hysterotopias of occupy movements and Zeitgeist movements, inspired originally by Arab Spring.
Perhaps the Western solidarity will return as humane support of such establishments as Ennahda, the Tunisian Moderate Islamist party. Ennahda sells itself to the Orientalists claiming it is a new kind of Islamism, inspired by European Christian-Democrat parties, violently pro-business and ultra-liberal in its financial and labor policies, pacifistic as violent Islamic revolution does not work, earning support from France, the United States and the Emiratis, especially Qatar.
Islam and Islamism in this century has become capitalistic and about investment, enterprise, jobs, favoring those who want to be managers and cynically against the arts and higher culture. The Europeans and Americans will likely now give their solidarity to this campaign of Islam Inc. which as well takes responsibility for the history of shameful Arabness. These body-politics will receive such external protection even as they estrange and suppress some of the secular voices who were integral to this Arab revolution, one of the many Arab revolutions in a century and like all one that was betrayed and corrupted.
Arab Demeter
A few nights ago on the Tunisian radio, a scholar was interviewed on the subject of the Pre-Islamic Mecca and its nexus of odd cults.
This pre-Islamic Mecca, as a center of idolaters, cults and forbidden thought is traditionally vilified in the Islamic tradition as jallihiya, 'the barbarism', or 'the savagery.'
This 'primitive' fetishism was allegedly dispensed of and prohibited by Mohammed in his Islamic political campaigns of violent emancipation and education out of pre-Islamic dark ages. Our Tunisian radio-scholar described findings and observations on how the Arabs like much of the Mediterranean of antiquity had a strikingly similar mythology to that of ancient Greece: mythological systems of the ancient Mediterranean were a complex case of parallel lines of development, plagiarizing from one another. The monotheistic Bible emerged out of this world, influenced by it as an artist is influenced by his forerunners.
There was some euphoria in listening to this inspired, wine-drinking Tunisian scholar on the car radio as my beautiful Tunisian girlfriend drove past fields and such sites as the new Islamic bank, opened in 2003 by Ben Ali's RCD, or the RCD mosque—the one jemma whose calls to prayers go unheard by the Islamist voters, which now no one attends in Tunisia.
Some Mecca Arabs may have been cultic Hellenizers—meaning they directly included among their gods and idols those of Greece, Demeter, Apollo, Dionysus. The keeping of Greek idols probably went further, in terms of influences of Hellenicist literary thought—pre-socratic—impacting Arabia.
Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi regime still forbids any excavations by archeologists within the Arabian peninsula where the Arab people emigrated to the rest of the Mediterranean. This concerns excavations of ancient pagan sites, as well as the anti-literate Saud's prohibition of access to sites for archeologists, who were banned after they found older Korans of Late Antiquity, shortly after the final divisions of Shia and Sunni. The Korans had texts with different content than the present-day Koran currently accepted as the standard undiluted word from Arcangel Jibrail's mouth to Mohammed's dreaming ear in the cave.
The scholar-poet's findings point to the complexity of Arabness. It is important to mention one of many possible dimensions to the Arab heritage that bears little direct relation to Islam.1 At this time Tunisians of the middle classes are arguing in the media whether their identity is theologically Islamic or closer to Europe, an insane set of illusory alternatives according to some dissidents and intellectuals who participated in the 2011 uprisings.
The Arab Rites of Spring were celebrated as a revolution against the retrograde confines of the Arab soul as understood by the common Western orientalist, only to be replaced by the worst representatives of internalized orientalism: the pro-investment-banking Islamists. The new Islamists feel that a historically idealized Caliphate, static, immune to history and totalitarian is a defense against the residue of past colonization.
During the revolution some artists made signs and propaganda posters with such movingly romantic, though perhaps too intellectual, slogans as "RCD deja, Dionysus Reviens" RCD, fuck off, Dionysus return to us.
In this time the people bravely hold on to their romantic illusions of grand rebellion like holding on to bedouin idols such as those Mahmoud Darwich referred to in his nomadic poems.
In the face of all the dissapointments and betrayals against their revolution, it is necessary to unearth and seek an Arab Demeter, or to go more deeply to the roots and origins of goddesses, to an Arab Artemis, an Arab Aphrodite.2
1 In such enthusiasm loom dangers of nationalist and humanist cults of antiquity and modernist Renaissance—such revivals would not necessarily be an improvement on Islamist idealization of medieval achievements. Both these tendencies can run the risk of becoming nationalisms that aim to reconnect with sensations of blood and soil. Though they present themselves as secularist rational sobriety or morality they are really neo-paganisms, new kinds of mystical cults against reason, militant gatherings in the tombs and necropolis.
2 The jahilliya-Arabian names of these love-goddesses Semitic equivalents are as yet unknown to the limited knowledge-database of this author, who is a revolutionary tourist and poet-orientalist.
Arturo Desimone, 28 years old, was born and raised on Aruba, in the Dutch Caribbean, but of immigrant origins foreign to the island (mother-father-entity was half Argentinean, half Russian-Polish.) He left high school when he was 15 of age to sell tobacco and replicas of Japanese swords while writing stories. At 22, left Aruba for Amsterdam but quickly decided not to stay. He recently spent seven months living in Tunisia observing the post-revolutionary society. Also a visual artist, his drawings have been exhibited in Paris.
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