Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteIslam: Security and Administration
Islam may represent humans in thrall to a poem and, in life, the poetic and romantic, but as any poet may care to tell you, poetry and the achievement of beatitude by the grace of the divine seldom, if ever, cover the rent or produce a good meal.
For those things, somebody has to work at other than poetry.
The delivery of contemporary universal essentials--food and medicine first, improved energy, housing, security, trade, and transportation next--come through highly evolved and integrated administrative, manufacturing, and service systems. Societies that approach both administrative, logistical, and security challenges in fair and practical ways go on to produce peace and security in ways that enable their poets and romantics, also clerics and priests, in their quest to behold the divine and transfer that knowledge into the heads and hearts of their people.
Recently, and notably, at least three societies have produced evidence of progress in their own interests along both practical and spiritual paths.
This past week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli President Shimon Peres engaged in a visit in Peres's residence, an unthinkable first in the history of coveted antisemitic anger, fear, jealousy, and hate prized by Islamic militants. Each affirming their will to create peace, that peace may well arrive as neither particularly Jewish or Islamic but rather as a thing universally good, practical, and strong and having its own helpful and loving nature.
In Somalia, finally, Islamist leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys has vowed to protect aid workers in his war zone. As much may spell the end of an horrific campaign of violence having for victims the least militarized of Somali natives and foreign aid workers.
One may have to wait for Sheikh Aweys to vow to protect journalists, but may the end of the cynical manipulation of events and news come into sight.
While the powers that want to be in Mogadishu and surrounds figure out that love, integrity, practicality, and trust have more do with day-to-day administrative cares and the consideration of others than with dressing up with Kalashnikovs, the good neighbor to the north, independent Somaliland, quite happily fills its coffers through port revenues and related trade; generous funding from its hard working children in the Diaspora; related administrative and technical expertise out of Canada, Europe, and the United States; and local industries in communications, education, and even business travel and some leisured tourism too.
Where Mogadishu has suffered some 17-plus years of anarchy and bloodshed beyond all reckoning, Somaliland has held together as a coherent state, predominantly democratic and open, minimally thug-o-cratic, although stories that start like this from 2007 may have a persistent presence in a society that openly acknowledges the existence of "extra-judicial" quasi-governmental committees:
"The sentencing of 18 butchers (10 of whom are women) to 6 months in prison for demonstrating against the city’s doubling of Hargeysa abattoir fees is just one more example that shows the intolerable condition of Somaliland’s justice system. By taking one draconian action after another, it is as if the government wants to convince the people that there is no such thing as justice in Somaliland." [5]
Whether or not there may be impartial justice in Somaliland, there has been some kind of unified government and administration, and it tells in the region's relative good fortune, good relations with neighboring Ethiopia and foreign trade interests, and very good--not perfect but on the whole reliable--day to day civil security.
1. Cashman, Greer Fay. "Peres, Abbas optimistic about peace." The Jerusalem Post, July 22, 2008.
2. Reuters. "Somali Islamist leader vows to protect aid workers." July 24, 2008.
3. Lough, Richard. "Africa's isolated state." Aljazeera, July 20, 2008.
5. "Somaliland's Scandalous Justice Systems." The Somaliland Times. n.d. circa 2006.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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