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Title: Jihad Revisited Author: Hakim Bey Date: 2004 Language: en Topics: Africa, anti-globalization, colonialism, Islam, religion Source: Retrieved on December 21, 2009 from http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=04/06/08/6775773][news.infoshop.org]]. Proofread online source [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=4196, retrieved on November 19, 2020. Notes: Special to WORLD WAR 3 REPORT, June 5, 2004Reprinting permissible with attribution
In the mid-’90s I was invited to a big philosophy conference in Libya. I
wrote a little paper on the influence of “Neo-Sufism” on Col. Qaddafi
and his Green Book. I wondered if the Libyans would even allow me to
read it. After all, Q came to power in 1969 by overthrowing a king who
was also a Sufi master. Perhaps he had repudiated the influence of
Sufism on his own life and thought?
Turned out the Libyans loved the paper and told me I was correct: in a
sense the Libyan Revolution had been directed against corrupt Sufism on
behalf of reformed Sufism. Unfortunately, Q himself never showed up at
the conference to confirm or deny this, but I’m sure they were right.
Neo-Sufism arose in the 19^(th) century in response to the corrupt
authoritarian Sufism of colonial times and partly in response to
colonialism itself. Anti-French resistance in Algeria was spearheaded by
the great Emir Abdel Kader, guerrilla chief and brilliant Sufi shaykh in
the school of Ibn Arabi.
Neo-Sufis broke with the medieval concept of the all-powerful “master.”
Instead, they sought initiation in dreams and visions. In North Africa,
the Sanussi Order and the Tijani Order, amongst others, were founded by
seekers who’d been empowered in dreams by the Prophet Mohammed himself.
The Neo-Sufi orders were also conceived and shaped to some extent as
reform movements within Islam, in competition with modernism &
secularism on one hand and Salafist/Wahhabi neo-puritan “Islamism” on
the other. Education & health and economic alternatives to colonialism
were stressed in the Sanussi Order in Libya. And when armed struggle
against Italian rule erupted, Sanussi fuqara (dervishes) led the
uprising.
After independence, the head of the Order became King Idris I. Young
Moammar Qaddafi, born in a Sanussi village to Sanussi parents, attended
a Sanussi elementary school and high school. In England for military
training in the ’60s, the young officer read Colin Wilson’s The Outsider
and absorbed some New Left ideas, including “council communism” and the
notion of the Spectacle. (See The Green Book, esp. the section on
sports.)
Libyan Islam is not “fundamentalist,” as so many Americans seem to
believe. In fact it’s anti-fundamentalist. The Islamists hate Q as a
heretic, innovator & crypto-sufi. The Libyan ulema (religious
authorities) declared the Ahadith (the Prophetic traditions) to be
non-canonical, an extremely “liberal” position. There is still a Council
of Sufi Orders in Libya, and the Sanussi Order still exists (“Just not
the royal branch of it,” as a Libyan delegate told me).
Elsewhere in the Islamic world, however, Neo-Sufism largely failed to
provide a paradigm for contemporary spirituality or politics.
“Westernization” and its reactionary double “Islamism” have swept the
field. The old Sufi ideals of tolerance, difference, cultural depth, the
arts of peace — as the Tunisian poet Abdelwahab Meddeb asserts in The
Malady of Islam (Basic Books, 2003) — are despised by both secular
modernists and rabid neo-puritans.
Mebbed also points out that the Islamists by no means adhere to
“anti-materialist values.” They adore technology and Capital as
fervently as Westerners — provided it’s “Islamic” tech and “Islamic”
money, of course.
The synthesis of mysticism and socialism, envisioned by
anti-Capitalist/anti-Soviet thinkers of the ’60s and ’70s like Ali
Shariati of Iran, or Col. Q himself, appears to be a lost cause — along
with “third world socialism” in general, and “third world neutralism” as
well. The very terms indicate their historical emptiness: how can there
be a third world when the “second world” has imploded and vanished?
The conference in Tripoli turned out to be a curious circus of “lost
causes,” including two anarchists from New York (we were cheered as
heroes for defying the “travel ban”), countless African liberation
fronts, the interesting French “New Right” philosopher Alain de Benoist
and some Australian Red/Brown types, two charming Turkish Greens, a
Slovenian anarchist, a clique of Parisian Maoists, etc., and a phalanx
of hospitable Libyans, all fuelled by excessive coffee intake. A German
doctor gave a paper on depleted uranium in Iraq, the first time most of
us had heard of such a thing. A New Zealand delegate told horror stories
about privatization of water; ditto.
At one point I overheard one of the Parisian Maoists say that the real
objectively-existsing enemy of humanity was not neo-liberal/Global
Capital, but the USA. At the time I considered this view misguided, in
part because of my enthusiasm for Zapatismo, in part because the Maoist
line sounded so old-fashioned. At that time neo-liberalism was on the
ascendent and a nuanced global response seemed more vital than any
Vietnam-era anti-Americanism.
In a collection of essays, Millennium (Autonomedia, 1996), I speculated
on the need for new ways to express anti-Capitalist strategies in a
post-Spectacular situation. If Zapatismo could draw on Mayan
spirituality as well as anarchist influences, perhaps something similar
could happen with Sufism. Islam contains a potential for socialism in
its strictures against usury and its communitarian idealism (according
to Ali Shariati, for example). “Lawless” (bishahr) Sufism and some types
of Islamic heresy have anarchistic aspects. At the time, I thought
Islamism was on the wane.
Sufism itself is sometimes defined as the “greater jihad,” while holy
war is called the “lesser jihad.” The struggle to “become who you are”
takes precedence over even the most righteous cause. But esotericism is
not always quietistic in Islam. Sufis have launched revolutions,
including 19^(th) and early 20^(th) century anti-colonialist/imperialist
struggles. Perhaps, I fantasized, it’s now time for a kind of Islamic
Zapatismo to emerge. I actually proposed this in a preface for the
recent Turkish translation of my now-quite-elderly book, TAZ: The
Temporary Autonomous Zone (Autonomedia, 1985).
Since 1996, two changes seem to have occurred within the so-called End
of History. First appeared neo-conservative neo-liberalism, a.k.a. the
USA as sole superpower and hegemon of Global Capital’s final triumph —
a.k.a. the Empire.
Second, it turned out that puritanical Islamism was given new life
during the Soviet gotterdamerung in Afghanistan. American Intelligence
discovered a magic lamp and rubbed it — once, twice, thrice — and then
the genie escaped and became the Old Man of the Mountains. The US then
invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and committed itself to the Israeli Right.
Islamism somehow became the new Evil Empire of Pure Terror. It also
became anti-Americanism.
A few people have misguidedly complimented me on “predicting” this New
Jihad. Anyone who ever wrote a word on Islamism before 9/11/01 is now
burdened with this dreary mantle. In fact the jihad I “predicted” (or
rather imagined) has not come to pass. By now it’s probably too late.
From the US Empire’s p.o.v., Islamism makes the perfect enemy because
it’s not really anti-Capitalist or anti-technocratic. It can be subsumed
into the one great image of Capital as Law of Nature, and also
simultaneously used as a bogeyman to discipline the masses at home with
fear-of-terror, and to explain away the miseries of neo-liberal
readjustment. In this sense Islamism is a false ideology or “Simulation”
as Baudrillard put it.
America makes a perfect enemy for the Islamists because Americanism
isn’t a real ideology either. Brute force, McDisney-kultur, an Orwellian
“Free Market” and a frothy “post-industrial” economy based on
out-sourcing the entire misery of production to the former third world —
all of this fails to achieve even the tarnished and untrustworthy status
of “ideology” — it’s all simulation. “Money talks,” as the popular
wisdom has it. Money is the only master of speech here and money speaks
only to itself. “Democracy” is now a codeword for coca-colonization by
cluster-bomb — “Islam” for the emotional plague. It’s the wrong jihad.
At present (May ’04), the Empire seems to be choking on an overdose of
its own image addiction, stupid lies, suffocating mass media, politics
as snuff porn. Staying in Iraq or “pulling out” of Iraq: both seem
equally impossible to imagine — the Vietnam Syndrome, complete with
atrocity photos.
If the current US regime is changed, presumably the best we can expect
is a return to the neo-liberal Globalism of the ’90s. But this may prove
impossible and it’s not clear that the Democrats intend any such
retreat. How do you step down gracefully from imperialism?
That Parisian Maoist: was he correct after all? The USA seems to have
positioned itself quite deliberately by alienating Europe and horrifying
the Islamic world. It has rushed to embrace the role of
enemy-of-humanity and thrown away the last of its diminished popularity
as defender of freedom.
But Islamism will never provide the dialectic negation of this Empire
because Islamism itself is nothing but an empire of negation, of
resentment and reaction. Islamism has nothing to offer the struggle
against Globalism except desiccated theofascist spasms of violence.
Americanism & Islamism: a plague on both their houses. As for true
jihad, there’s more going on in South America and Mexico now than
anywhere else. Maybe while President Tweedledee and the Imam ibn
Tweedledum bite each other’s throats out on CNN, something interesting
might have a chance to emerge from the barrios of Argentina or
Venezuela, or the jungles of Chiapas.