Iraq - The Language Culture Puzzle

That "great victory," as he calls it, is the June 30 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq's cities. That "foreign presence," as he calls it, is the United States — the thousands of mainly young American men who have fought a vicious enemy under the harshest conditions for more than six long years, with 4,321 Americans killed, many thousands wounded, often grievously so, and some small, tortured number wrongfully ensnared by the U.S. military justice system in apparent deference to Iraqi political considerations.

"Ingrate" doesn't begin to describe this al-Maliki creep — or, as all too many conservatives and Bush loyalists persist in thinking of him, our Iraqi "ally." But let's skip the labels and stick to the implications of the Iraqi prime minister's rhetoric: He has transformed long-term American sacrifice on Iraq's behalf into a residual "foreign presence" over which he now declares Iraqi victory.  [1]

Columnist Diana West has slammed into hardest and thickest wall in the Islamic Small Wars: the difference between a dispassionate development of language in the evolving open societies for the beauty of it, for brotherhood, equality, justic, and truth, for its own ideal and accommodating organic qualities and the alternative exploitation of language to serve the speaker by pandering to the main body of his listeners for the purpose of keeping it subject.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been fast to climb back on the old horse: Iraq is Islam; Islam has enemies, including the Great Satan; Iraq will always defeat its enemies.  Such words may comfort and mollify Iraqis, but they're not going to modernize or update the society in terms of its ethics, plurality, or tolerance.

For most states and statesmen in the Middle East, alliance with Israel and the United States continues to serve as an invitation for bombs and bullets.

One cannot drive a tank into the Qur'an plus the 1400 years of related development of an insular, insulated, corrupt, and powerful lliterary culture.

Furthermore, onne cannot bomb away the revenue stream produced by the khums and zakat and subsequent and autocratic flows, partial or large, of Big Payola to cronies and favored families, a system of patronage and loyalty most apparent today in Iran as it shuts down its proto-democratic movement (much as the Islamic Revolution did the secular communists, socialists, and internationalists of its early years).

Iraq?

Iraq has been hiding itself from the "regime change" through this period of U.S. withdrawal, a sort of high-level taqiyya for the culture Saddam Hussein wrestled with throughout his tenure.

Supposedly, the term "taqiyyah is derived from this verse of the Quran : "Let not the believers take disbelievers for their friends in preference to believers. Whoso doeth that hath no connection with Allah unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them [tattaqu minhum. from the same root tqy as taqiyah], taking (as it were) security [tuqatan. again from the same root as taqiyah]. Allah biddeth you beware (only) of Himself. Unto Allah is the journeying" (Quran, III, 28). This history would appear to indicate that Taqiyah is especially allowed in the case of dealings with nonbelievers. [2]

I've pulled this from similar recent news:

“Foreign forces have to withdraw from the cities totally,” said Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. “This is a victory that should be celebrated in feasts and festivals.”

It was the first time so many commanders had gathered in Baghdad to meet Mr. Maliki. Iraqi and foreign reporters were invited, but when a senior American military officer arrived, a major general from Mr. Maliki’s Office of the Commander in Chief told him to leave. “We apologize to you, but this is an Iraqi meeting and you’re not invited,” the general said. Neither officer would give his name. [3]

Language is a cultural technology.

As a technology, it has its forms and levers, its core concepts and values, but it has another and more fluid aspect: language is also the suspension in which cultures exist. 

Languages lend reference, sign, and symbol to our swimming through the world.  They define how we may perceive and describe many things, and while we may consciously coin, forge, and invent many additions and alterations to one langugage or another, each has in its larger aspect an organic nature (i.e., the existance of a language needs must precede detection of its grammar).

For the modern, today's mission is to grasp the language and language culture developed around the Qur'an and its aspects extant in the most conflicted areas of its reach, and reformulate its evolved misguidance.  Whatever the militant reasoning, and however complicated by human personality, the agenda has not been working out in Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Pakistan, or Somalia, and as much has been rejected recently in Lebanon.

The New York Times article goes on to note, "Mr. Maliki’s careful avoidance of the topic of his government’s continued dependence is clearly a political tactic as he positions himself for Iraq’s national elections in January, and United States officials do not believe it reflects any personal enmity toward the Americans."

That may be all good and well, but it will be hard to separate the posturing from the posture; moreover, at least today, it is not possible to separate or cordon Mohammad's broad Islamic instruction and narrative and the profound internal disagreements associated with it from the comparatively delicate and socially integrating requirements of more complex and productive contemporary political, social, and technology systems and their cultures. 

Moreover, in addition to state failures singalled by disruptive conflicts in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and Somalia (for a start), the world must face a complicating third source of societal cancer: the entrenchment of many corrupt "cultures of impunity" or political mobsterism that dot the globe from the Philippines to Russia.  While that's another subject, and one I will get to soon, it's hard to displace popular yearnings across Islam for something like a just and peaceful society as laid out in a 7th Century blueprint while one's own affluent or more privileged society may be riddled with criminal trade in arms and narcotics, gray areas across the banking and investment landscapes, and nascent aristocracies reliant on favors and nepotism for position.

Reference

1. West, Diana.  "Iraq is victorious . . . over the 'foreign' U.S.?"  Jewish World Review, Insight, July 3, 2009: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0709/west070309.php3

2. Encyclopedia of the Middle East.  "Taqiya": http://www.mideastweb.org/Middle-East-Encyclopedia/taqiyah.htm

3. Nordland, Rod and Marc Santora.  "Iraq Leader Omits a Bit in Lauding U.S. Pullout."  The New York Times, June 11, 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/world/middleeast/12iraq.html

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