The De-Saudification of the Middle East.

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After Hezbollah’s last war with Israel, swathes of Lebanon lay in heaped ruins. Proud and distinct, the country quickly set itself the goal of rebuilding – a goal it met with staggering speed. Within months, there were office blocks, shiny new transport hubs and large, well-equipped schools. Where did the money for this come from?

Excepting Western aid, the money came from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and it came with a price-tag. In exchange for the flow of cash, Islamic institutions designed to cater to Lebanon’s small Sunni community were erected, most of them set up to preach the uniquely hateful brand of Islam that is Saudi’s most notorious export.

Similarly when Pakistan hit dire economic times in 2010, having been struck by natural disasters and waves of terrorism, Saudi money poured in like never before. New schools, Mosques and madrassas were built on the banks of the flooded plains, all of them designed to adhere to the Saudi religious tradition.

And in Europe, a large proportion of the new ‘Mega-Mosques’ sprouting up in Berlin, London and Paris are likewise funded by Saudi money, the same kind of theology central to their intended operation.

With the power and influence that naturally comes from limitless financial resources, the Saudi royal establishment has radicalized much of the modern Middle East, and from that base, now seeks to Islamise the world.

The motivation behind this project is obvious. Saudi Arabia, being the birthplace of Sunni Islam and in control of its holiest sites, aspires to be the executive of the Muslim world, with Riyadh as the Islamic capital, Saudi wealth funds as the Islamic bank, and the Saudi military (best-described as the world’s largest arms-dump) as the Islamic armoury.

You would be wrong to think that the rest of the Middle East approves of this arrangement. Far from it in fact. The Saudi elite are generally recognised for what they are; a corrupting influence holding restless millions back in a savage, unworkable past.

If you type the words “We are not Arabs” into google or facebook (and manage to scroll past the Iranian websites and blogs) you will find the same protest from Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, Algerians, Moroccans and even Palestinians. The ‘Arab world’ is an empire of language, held together by the influence of the original Arabian nation, now called ‘Saudi Arabia’ but best described as simply ‘Arabia’.

And it’s certainly accurate that little loyalty binds a Moroccan to a Sudanese, a Syrian to a Yemeni, or a Lebanese to an Algerian. Little if anything at all. Understood this way, Saudi Arabia is the head of an ’empire of the imagination’, and this means the West has considerable leeway to fragment a hostile bloc and diminish its collective power.

It is often pointed out by the Islamic world’s apologists that prior to the Iranian revolution in 1979, Muslim countries enjoyed a very long period of docility and reform. Before that unwholesome climacteric, Egypt, Syria, Iran and even Afghanistan were taking steps to democratise, liberalise and secularise. There are photographs of women wearing Western dress in 1920s Iraq, 1940s Afghanistan, 1960s Egypt and 1970s rural Pakistan. Multi-sex schools of Western design used to peacefully operate in places now fully segregated by Islamic custom. Music, even Western music, used to be played openly in Afghan villages. Locally brewed beer used to be a significant Egyptian export. And for most of this period, Socialism not Islamism was the main repository of popular discontent.

Something changed all this. Something served to derail it. It is easy (and conventional) to blame the Iranian revolution itself, which certainly ruined a lot of progress both in and outside the sphere of Iranian influence. But this is not enough to satisfy.

I think it more likely that the Saudi regime, having recently demonstrated its economic power in the 1973 oil boycott, took over at this point as the Islamic world’s political kingpin – and soon after, as the premier source of Islamic theology.

How might we encourage the de-Saudification of the Middle East? How might we wind the clock back to the period of slow but real modernisation that was interrupted by the growth of Saudi economic power?

One answer to this may be fracking, a method of energy extraction that will see America go energy independent in this decade and could provide a similar liberty for Europe.

Only Environmental concerns (often misguided) are preventing the West from unlocking the full benefits of this technology. The protests from Saudi and Russian officials are inevitable and loud but can be safely ignored if we redevelop our confidence.

I believe that by sinking Saudi we will not only liberate ourselves, but also the third world from a demonic monopoly, a regressive authority and the leading cause of violent Islamism.

D, LDN.

Thomas Carlyle, Goethe and the Prophet Muhammad.

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Very few writers either merit or can withstand comparison with William Shakespeare. The only two I would dare to suggest are Edward Gibbon and Thomas Carlyle.

The first, in his Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, demonstrated a perfection in writing that has never been (and may never be) surpassed. The second, in his history of the French Revolution and his essays on Heroism, exposed the wilder possibilities of language, blurring the boundaries of thought and emotion, poetry and prose.

So in the past few months of frantic intra-national diplomacy, it’s been saddening to hear so little about Scotland’s greatest writer. Andrew Marr’s ‘Great Scots’ BBC series surveyed in detail the likes of Hugh Mcdiarmand and James Boswell, but had nothing to say of a man who influenced history in a greater and more dynamic way than either of them.

War leaders and men of power are particularly drawn to Carlyle’s thrilling voice. When the meth-addicted dictator Adolf Hitler lived out his last few days in the Fuhrerbunker, the book at his bedside (which – I’m pleased to say – he never got the chance to finish) was Carlyle’s history of Frederick the Great. On the other side, Sartor Resartus (Carlyle’s satirical novel) was referenced approvingly by the allied commander in the Pacific.

Carlyle’s writing is in some ways alike Wagnerian music. It makes the reader want to become something better than himself. Through its chaotic poetry, it breeds an orderly ambition.

Consider the beauty of the following paragraph:

“Behold therefore, the England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer’s Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil, between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell.”

Alongside the connection with Hitler, you may have also heard Carlyle’s name associated with that of the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims are known to bring him up because of the author’s portrait of the prophet in ‘Heroes, Heroism and the Heroic in History’ – a book advancing the Great Man Theory of history.

The following quote is taken from that work:

“Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments, — nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men toil for.”

Other positive comments are forthcoming from the same work. This use (or rather misuse) of Carlyle is typical of Muslim dishonesty. Carlyle, though he admired the impact of any great figure of world-history, retained a more exact part of his intellect for comparative judgement.

“Only a sense of duty could carry a European through the Qur’an.” he wrote in a section of the same book quoted less often by Muslim observers. In that same paragraph, he pronounces the book in general to be a “wearisome confused jumble” and Islam to be greatly lacking relative to his own (fiercely held) Protestant faith.

The same dishonesty that allows Muslims to make use of Carlyle also permits mistreatment of the reputation of Goethe. Regarded by Germans to be the equal of Shakespeare, the polymath Goethe was a notably cosmopolitan figure, run through with a very optimistic kind of xenophilia. His poems took elements from numerous foreign traditions, including in his ‘West-Eastern Divan’ volume, the traditions of the Middle East. That book contains poems which glorify the Prophet of Islam, sometimes comparing him to the giants of Greek and Roman mythologies and more or less (unlike Carlyle) maintaining a positive tone throughout.

However, the truth of the matter is that Goethe (writing in a less-informed age than Carlyle) had very little knowledge of the Middle East and Islam as they actually were (and still are). Indeed, his kindly impressions of the culture of Islam were drawn almost exclusively from the poetry of the Persian (pantheist) Hafiz. This is hardly valid.

More generally, the Muslim longing to find in Western thought a validation for their own historical glories is really quite revealing. Do they concede (even if just inwardly) that the West has the clearer mind and the intellectual upper-hand?

D, LDN