Dean's World

It is a fact that Iraq is a much better place than it was under Saddam, unless you were an Iraqi Baathist. It is also a fact that Iraq is now, thanks to American intervention, the freest Arab country in the world.

It is to the great shame of the Muslim community in the United States that they did not do more to try to help, and instead spent most of their time on Bush-bashing.

I eagerly look forward to the day that the American Muslim community gets off its collective, whiny Americaphobic duff and actually takes action to help improve the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Bush-bashing and talking about how awful the situation supposedly is is so much easier, isn't it?

I come to you with great sadness and heartbreak.

I also come to you guys to get an objective opinion. Should I put Eteraz.Org in hiatus? Here are my reasons:

1 - Due to time, personal and professional constraints, all of the frontpagers (Willow, H, and Thabet) have had to excuse themselves. There are many reasons for this and I really do not want to get into them. As they left, I only managed to pick up two new frontpagers. They were inadequate for our purposes and were let go. At the moment the only contributors to the frontpage are myself and a philosopher (Christian) friend who is helping to keep the site ticking. I cannot do this by myself.

2 - I cannot do this by myself because of my personal situation which has required me to relocate and essentially begin my life anew, while still dealing with the specter of my earlier life. Nor am I certain where exactly I am going to settle, nor what my profession will be (I have left the legal practice), and as such, I do not have money to throw around.

3 - I cannot do this by myself because I am writing a book. All the tracks are laid in the publishing industry. Now I have to finish the product. When the original frontpagers were around they were planning on picking up the slack. They also were very much in step with my vision, and, as such, I did not have to worry about someone with an agenda coming in and effectively hijacking the project. I do not have this luxury anymore. Nor can I find another Ali Eteraz; certainly many budding ones, but they would require mentorship, and for reasons already mentioned I cannot do that.

4 - While the reader diaries have been a success, they have often derailed the project of the website. They quite often deal with issues of Muslim identity rather than Muslim constructiveness. I didn't launch Eteraz.Org to fight Islamophobia. That is a fight that doesn't interest me and is not part of the Islamic Reform project.

5 - The good writers that the reader diaries have produced are almost all theoreticians and not activists. I know real life activists and they simply do not have time to come and write of their works on a website. This is due to the fact that being an activist in the Muslim community is very lonely, individual work. The entire staff of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers, for example, is one person. She is also the staff for two other national organizations.

6 - Our tech person has had to recuse himself due to the fact that he has to feed his family, get a master's, be involved with his mosque, and raise two children. PERL is a notoriously difficult and time consuming system and there aren't very many Muslim PERL experts out there. I could "buy" such experts but I am not currently working.

7 - For the most part, Muslim academics in the United States have NOT taken to the website. A few very prominent ones did. However, Muslim graduate students in Near East and Middle East studies programs (in the hundreds or even thousands) have not. Again, most of them want to "defend" Islam. Certainly this could have been remedied over time. I will admit that I was counting on these academics to be there for me. They haven't been. Part of this has to do with the fact that they are all theoreticians. Thus, when I need an answer to what school of jurisprudence so and so belonged to in the 11th century, I have many helpers. If I want to know what kind of legislation is being passed in the Muslim world today, they are useless. Thabet, our British frontpager, called them "wine and cheese Muslims." I don't see how this can be remedied. I am not about to start offering tours through the Muslim world.

8 - American Muslims are the wrong community to talk Islamic Reform about. Ultimately every American Muslim is an American first. Their concerns, if they are black Muslim are things like relations with immigrant Muslims, and local social problems; if they are immigrant Muslims are things like sending kids to college, not get discriminated, and maybe have a nice mosque somewhere. To be more stark, the immigrant Muslims in America are the "quitters" of the Muslim world. They left because they knew that a better life in the Muslim world was not possible. Now that they have a better life here, it is hard to shake them from their wealth worship. Those that do take an interest are the aforementioned wine and cheese Muslims.

9 - The premise of the site was to turn individual opinions into collective opinions. This did not work. I believe that the better approach would be the one that Avaaz.Org is taking: have a closed set of dedicated activists who pre-fashion both the message and the delivery method and collective action comes in via petitions or text message campaigns. Getting individual people to write letters, sign letters, deliver letters, contact Muslim leaders around the world, is just way too hard.

10 - The premise of Eteraz.Org is wrong. There is no way of taking action on "Islam." In the real world there is no Islam, but Islams. Not only that, but these Islams are all beholden to temporal and political power called the nation-state. As such, real reform occurs on a country by country basis. Theological reform is certainly necessary but if you want to do that, you cannot be a hedonist, party loving, liberal like Ali Eteraz, you have to be a long bearded, thowb wearing, old man with certifications from religious schools. However, like I said, theological reform is not even the first thing that is necessary as long as there is legislative reform. I just conducted a massive media analysis of how Islam has been discussed over the last three decades and found that until very recently no one discussed "Islam." We only discussed individual Muslim countries. Only after 9/11 did we start talking in terms of "Islam." Methinks that we are now going back to the original position: country by country discussions. If you check out the news, you'll see that to be the case. Eteraz.Org was "States of Islam." Wrong premise.

11 - I believe that given the fact that many Muslims simply never became net savvy the way the American left did, I first need to be exposed in the media before I can start trying to talk people into "joining" anything. This requires me to go out and show my face and talk and travel. I am willing to do those things, however, as I already mentioned, I have no help. Besides, these things would be received better if I have a book in hand.

12 - The website we set up is technologically unable to handle multiple languages. Our aim was to make the frontpage posts in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and English. Between the four original members we had all those languages covered and could have done our own translations. So, even if I go on a platform (for which I do not have money) that can handle multiple languages, I now don't have the core.

So those are my reasons. What are your thoughts?

We did launch a couple of excellent projects. These would be the Muslim Countries Legislation Project and the Muhammad Asad Quran Distribution Project. For the sake of these two projects I'd leave the website online. I actually believe that I can do more for these projects by myself, on my own, if I can give them more regular attention than I am currently able to do. For example, the Muslim Countries Legislation Project requires talking to people out in the Muslim world. Thus, instead of just keeping it on the web, I should head out to the Muslim world and start talking to people and make in-roads. I am, in fact, leaning in this direction. Without the responsibility of a job or a community to run, I can easily get away for the requisite travel. The Quran project I can keep as a paypal on my personal blog and somewhere prominently on .Org and only appeal to it when I do speaking engagements (instead of collecting honorarium).

The rest, i.e. the articles on apostasy and extremism that I wrote, can go back on my personal blog. Since I will still be in the blogosphere, once the book is out, and a new set of frontpagers can be found, and new technology can be paid for, I can re-ignite Eteraz.Org

I have not yet had a chance to read Ali's latest, or really anything else on the Dean's World front page today. I've been too busy. But I've had all day to think about this and I'm going to lay out something I've been thinking for a long time:

It's very hard for me to look at American Muslims, or Muslims in general, or anyone who considers themselves "liberal" or "progressive" or "humanist," who claim to stand for freedom and human rights and then attack everything America has done and tried to do in Iraq over the last four years.

The fact is that the naysayers claimed we weren't really striving for liberation. We were. They claimed we'd install a new puppet dictator. We did not. They claimed that we wouldn't really try to set up a democracy. We did. They claimed there would be no legitimate elections. The Iraqis had three national elections in a row, all certified as legitimate by international observers, not even counting the local elections that were held before that.

They claimed we'd do everything possible to get out of the country "before the next elections"--they claimed that before the 2004 elections and again before the 2006 elections. It didn't happen. Now these same people in many cases are cheering for a Congress that's trying to force us out of Iraq even though the war supporters consistently say "no, that would be morally and strategically wrong."

Time after time the naysayers have proven themselves both morally and intellectually incoherent, and yet they never have the introspection to acknowledge this.

Furthermore, anyone calling himself a "liberal" or a "humanist"--Muslim or not--is in my view faced with a stark choice:

You either sit around pretending that a vicious, murderous, fascist "insurgency" that routinely cuts people's heads off and shoots children in the face is the "legitimate voice of the Iraqi people," or you recognize that there is in Iraq a government elected by the Iraqi people working under a Constitution written entirely by Iraqis that recognizes human rights better than any in the Arab world.

No matter how many reservations you have about how it was done or how imperfectly that elected government implements the ideals expressed in that ratified Constitution.

If you take the former position you have no business calling yourself a liberal or a progressive or a humanist. If you take the latter position, then maybe you have to swallow the bitter pill that someone named George Bush, whom you don't like and maybe think is incompetent, was the instigator of something that damn well needs to be supported.

But you can't have it both ways. Indeed, by declaring the whole thing illegitimate, all you're doing is siding with the Islamophobes of the world who claim the Muslims and the Arabs are far too savage, backward, and primitive to respect things like democracy and human rights. Indeed, you're implicitly siding the the Jihadwatch crowd.

It's high time someone told you people this, whether you're Muslims or not.

The progressive, humanist position is not, and never has been, the "anti-war" position.

Mike Fitch passes on this link to an interview with one of the guys "doing the heavy lifting to engage an enemy that would rather be here blowing up your shopping malls."

(Are we at war with Howard Roark?)

Excerpt:

What gives you the greatest satisfaction with your current mission? What gives you the least?

The best part is seeing the Iraqis take charge of situations in the area. From IED discoveries to crowd control to providing security for pilgrims moving through the area, the Iraqi Army and Police are performing more and more of those tasks with less involvement from Coalition Forces. We are able to mentor and guide more than having to take charge and lead them by the nose. The least satisfaction comes on days when we can’t do what we planned, for example, our medic planned and coordinated for a three-day combat lifesaver course for the Iraqi Army troops. The IA medics would train the IA Soldiers under his supervision. He coordinated this training several weeks prior and even confirmed the training the day prior. At the appointed time, nobody showed for the training, not even the medics. When the IA battalion staff was asked what was going on, they simply forgot. Frustrating. Not the end of the world, I know, but a distinct challenge in maintaining motivation and mission focus. Is it merely a cultural difference? I’m not sure, but I am disappointed by it.