May 21, 2004: Headlines: COS - Iran: Islamic Issues: Culturalism: Criticism: NGO's: Iran Bulletin: The objective complicity is also officiated by western NGOs which are today the heirs of the US Peace Corps, as purveyors of culturally-specific aid, virulently anti modernist-state, and as providers of culturalism. This connection is not lost on Islamism: from the use of NGO sympathies and lobbies, under the title of appropriate forms of democracy (connected to Islamism, as our origin and our fate), no less than in the post-modern (but consummately modernist) critiques of Enlightenment notions of progress and of reason

Peace Corps Online: Directory: Iran: Peace Corps Iran : The Peace Corps in Iran: May 21, 2004: Headlines: COS - Iran: Islamic Issues: Culturalism: Criticism: NGO's: Iran Bulletin: The objective complicity is also officiated by western NGOs which are today the heirs of the US Peace Corps, as purveyors of culturally-specific aid, virulently anti modernist-state, and as providers of culturalism. This connection is not lost on Islamism: from the use of NGO sympathies and lobbies, under the title of appropriate forms of democracy (connected to Islamism, as our origin and our fate), no less than in the post-modern (but consummately modernist) critiques of Enlightenment notions of progress and of reason

By Admin1 (admin) (pool-151-196-115-42.balt.east.verizon.net - 151.196.115.42) on Saturday, May 22, 2004 - 4:16 pm: Edit Post

The objective complicity is also officiated by western NGOs which are today the heirs of the US Peace Corps, as purveyors of culturally-specific aid, virulently anti modernist-state, and as providers of culturalism. This connection is not lost on Islamism: from the use of NGO sympathies and lobbies, under the title of appropriate forms of democracy (connected to Islamism, as our origin and our fate), no less than in the post-modern (but consummately modernist) critiques of Enlightenment notions of progress and of reason

The objective complicity is also officiated by western NGOs which are today the heirs of the US Peace Corps, as purveyors of culturally-specific aid, virulently anti modernist-state, and as providers of culturalism. This connection is not lost on Islamism: from the use of NGO sympathies and lobbies, under the title of appropriate forms of democracy (connected to Islamism, as our origin and our fate), no less than in the post-modern (but consummately modernist) critiques of Enlightenment notions of progress and of reason

The objective complicity is also officiated by western NGOs which are today the heirs of the US Peace Corps, as purveyors of culturally-specific aid, virulently anti modernist-state, and as providers of culturalism. This connection is not lost on Islamism: from the use of NGO sympathies and lobbies, under the title of appropriate forms of democracy (connected to Islamism, as our origin and our fate), no less than in the post-modern (but consummately modernist) critiques of Enlightenment notions of progress and of reason

Now, finally, for the present moment. I have sketched a picture of broad trends and there is no scope to author an impromptu treatise here, except to say that the organismic and Romantic politics of restoration in Arab Islamism was firmly stated by the Sayyid Jamal al-Din Asadabadi, and further specified in shar`ist terms by Rashid Rida, propagated by the Muslim Brothers, and further amplified by the increasing control over communications no less than educational and ideological agendas by petro-Islamic infrastructures world-wide, supported throughout by the conception of Islam as a bulwark against Communism, or what I would call the cultural tranche of the Truman Doctrine in the Arab World (and of course, in Indonesia and Malaysia in the 1950s and 60s also, a development not unconnected with the renewed patronage of religious education by the Turkish state from the early 1960s; and of course the Pakistan-Afghanistan connection).

At the present moment, with the collapse of the post-war Keynesian consensus (Welfarism in the West, developmentalism at our place), a situation is arising in which the conservative ideologies that had been removed from central locations in public discourse in the West no less than in the East are again coming to the fore. The increasing segmentation of the labour market on ethnic and other ascriptive lines is leading to a ghettoization, locally and internationally, in spatial, cultural, and other terms.

Hence culturalism, which is fundamentally inspired by the dissolution of civility in favour of community, most potently in the United States, where it was inspired by the highly successful paradigm of the Jewish lobby. This transformation of communalist sentiment into a political ideology cannot be unmediated, and the mediating element is the available module of Romantic notions of society, of group closure, of organism, which until World War II went under the name of race, and today takes the name of culture.

In close connection with this are the xenophile and xenophobic adulation of Difference and particularity, with an Islamist mirror-image in notions of specificity, individuality, and authenticity.

The objective complicity is also officiated by western NGOs which are today the heirs of the US Peace Corps, as purveyors of culturally-specific aid, virulently anti modernist-state, and as providers of culturalism. This connection is not lost on Islamism: from the use of NGO sympathies and lobbies, under the title of appropriate forms of democracy (connected to Islamism, as our origin and our fate), no less than in the post-modern (but consummately modernist) critiques of Enlightenment notions of progress and of reason.

The preposterous notion that the Enlightenment is an imperialist project is closely connected to this: it was not, of course, and European history itself has not been one of Enlightenment but one in which the anti-Enlightenment was profoundly constitutive, and what was consciously exported to us was exploitation and racism, not the Enlightenment: this we had to reproduce ourselves, against tremendous odds, states and societies alike.

As for what you refer to as the “particularity of the Islamic world”: I do not think, first of all, that the Islamic world exists in the order of nature, but is something being constructed by both Islamists and Westerners (Huntington is only representative, not an original mind) re-dividing the world ideologically, along culturalist lines, at a time when developmentalism has gone into abeyance, replaced by structural adjustment, cross-conditionalities, and the like.

Just as there is a natural theology of the market, there is one of culture, culture deregulated and sundered from the state, the main agency of our modernity in the last century and a half, relegated to communities-individuals. Specific conditions in different Muslim groups provide the symbolic but not the ideological armature of Islamism.

If we replace the names of Muhammad and the Shari`a by Ram and the Dharma, we will arrive at the same ideological tropes as characterise Hindu fundamentalism fascism, and if we substitute for them Christ or Jeanne d'Arc, we will join up with evangelical fundamentalism and French racism.

Where particularity also comes in, is in the social networks through which Islamism operates, but this again has global analogues in the vast areas of marginality and structural unemployment I have spoken of. And finally, one should not underestimate the populist and hyper-nationalist functions carried by many fundamentalist groups, including those in Iran .




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Story Source: Iran Bulletin

This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Iran; Islamic Issues; Culturalism; Criticism; NGO's

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