Iraq War III, Syria War II, Yemen War II

Man, I get sick to death of this culture of remakes. Hollywood really doesn’t have any new or original ideas, do they? It’s just Iron Man this, Batman that: military abuses abroad, police abuses at home. And even the focus group-tested corporate-boardroom storylines don’t change. Or rather, I should say, the lies. We have to bomb Iraq because of… wait, what again? Weapons of mass destruction? Oh, wait, no, it’s those evil Eye-ranians up to their no-good tricks. Because three soldiers are dead who… wait, what were they doing there, again? Why were they there? I thought the Iraqi government had already given us the eviction notice? Or several? Why were they even there in the first place?

So, under Biden we have another war. Another unilateral illegal military action, without Congressional approval, open-ended, with no strategy for either victory or exit. And we have declared it, make no mistake, on the people of Iraq—who apparently haven’t suffered enough these past two decades on our account—and on the people of Syria, who apparently also haven’t suffered enough these past dozen years. Oh, and on the people of Yemen just for good measure, because why not? Clearly 377,000 dead people, mostly children, in that country didn’t get that message across firmly enough. And of course, we have also declared war on truth, because American imperium has no greater enemy than reality.

But tell me again how it’s those evil Eye-ranians who are to blame. Or the Russians, always the Russians. As Ginsberg put it: ‘Its them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.’ Point the finger anywhere but at Washington, anywhere but at Hollywood, anywhere but at Wall Street, anywhere but at yourself—in short, anywhere but at those actually responsible.

I’m sick. I’m not motion-sick; there is no motion, and that’s the problem. I’m sick to death. I’m sick of the lies. And I’m sick that children die, under the flag that I’m told is mine, while we all clap along passively in the theatre and wait for the after-credits teaser that previews the next million children to die. I beg God to let me leave the room, but I can’t. What else can I do? They’re not going to stop the reel no matter how much I object, and attract the heckling of the people in back who are still in their trances. But there’s nothing else for me to do, except pray.

Does God take sides?

Sometimes one hears it said in American theopolitical discourse, that God does not take sides in politics. There is one sense in which this is a true and worthy impulse to say. And there is another sense in which this glib characterisation becomes dangerously wrong.

Firstly, I tend to believe that it is fully right and accurate to hold that the God of the Holy Scriptures, the Creator of the cosmos, has little to choose in terms of American politics. I believe it is proper to say that God is neither a Democrat nor a Republican.

The first reason that such a characterisation is true, is because the agendas of both parties take moral positions which would be thoroughly and irreconcilably repugnant to the early Church. The first-century Apostolic text called the Didachē, to take one example, explicitly condemns the practice of abortion. This practice is, sadly, ‘unequivocally’ countenanced as a ‘reproductive right’ by the official platform of the Democratic Party.

The Republican Party is no better than the Democratic Party—indeed, in one fundamental way it is worse. The Didachē condemns idolatry as thoroughly as, and in fact more often than, it condemns abortion. And the Republican Party upholds, from the very first sentence of the preamble of its own platform, an explicit form of idolatry: the idolatry which exalts the nation-state as ‘exceptional’ and ‘unlike any other nation on earth’, and which exalts the US Constitution as a sacred ‘covenant’. What does God have to choose between one party for which destroying innocent children is a sacred right, and another party which proclaims aloud with the priests of the Sanhedrin that they have ‘no king but Cæsar’?

Although for a long time I have personally refused to support either major party with my vote, I say this not to cast aspersions on the ordinary American Christians who decide to vote with one major party or the other. Most people have independent reasons, driven by pragmatism or by personal and contextual considerations, for preferring, even strongly preferring, one party over the other. I assuredly do not believe that having such reasons makes one evil or an enemy of God. I say this merely to demonstrate that the God Who created the whole of the cosmos, Who revealed Himself by the law and the prophets to ancient Israel, and Who Himself took human flesh from a certain virgin in first-century Galilee, has nowhere to lay His head when it comes to the halls of power in Washington.

But does this mean that God does not take sides in politics, full stop?

First-order, it strikes me as rather presumptuous for American Christians to assume, that simply because the two main Coke-and-Pepsi options in their own particular powerful nation-state are both distant from God, that God must be equally distant from all possible forms of political expression. Yet many high-minded and well-intentioned evangelicals, Catholics, even Orthodox Christians, make an explicit and public point that ‘God is not political’ and that it is the job of Christians to ‘rise above politics’.

However well-intentioned this apolitical impulse may be in its attempt to engender benefit of the doubt between neighbours on opposing sides of the political divide, it nevertheless confuses a particular point. Politics is, at its basis, merely the art of learning to live together with one’s neighbour. The call to love one’s neighbour is a fundamentally political statement, and even the strictest hermits and most cloistered monks in Christian history were enjoined by their vows to uphold this particular substance in their politics. But then comes the question of the scholar of the law to Christ: ‘Who, then, is my neighbour?’

Christ answers this in the immediate sense with the parable of the Good Samaritan. However, He also more generally answers the question of this scholar of the law in the Beatitudes of Matthew 5. If nothing else, the Beatitudes tell us, in their apportioning of blessing, the political position of God. In short: God does take sides. God takes the side of the poor; of those who sorrow; of the meek; of those who hunger and thirst for justice; of the merciful; of the innocent; of the peacemakers; of the persecuted.

Worth noting is that these categories are not merely symbolic or transcendental. The Beatitudes are not a parable—in fact, they are one of the few places in the Greek Scriptures where Jesus is not speaking in a way that points primarily to the symbolic. The Beatitudes are specific, direct and concrete. And they have immediate ramifications to present-day political situations.

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Iraqi people who still suffer from poverty, infant deformity and internal displacement—or would He be found on the side of their invaders and occupiers?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Yemeni people, overwhelmingly children, who still suffer from the attacks of bombs and rockets and the threat of starvation—or would He be found on the side of the Croesuses of Saudi who launch those bombs and rockets and blockade Yemen’s ports?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Syrian people who still suffer from the effects of war, invasion, religious persecution, starvation, sanctions—or would He be found on the side of the Turkish, Saudi, Qatari, Emirati, Uighur and other CIA-funded Wahhâbi religious extremists who invaded and murdered them?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Palestinian people whose livelihoods are destroyed, who are evicted from their homes, and who are shot dead and detained on the streets of their own cities and villages—or would He be found on the side of the settlers and military who do the destroying, evicting, shooting and detaining?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Haitian people who are protesting in the streets against the dysfunction of their state and the theft of their country’s wealth—or on the side of those who would send in tanks and planes to oppress them?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the ordinary people in Donbass who have suffered from nearly nine years of non-stop shelling and from deliberately-engineereed lack of access to schools and hospitals—or would He side with the race-nationalist paramilitaries, SBU, AFU and NATO forces who are doing the shelling?

Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Venezuelan people—or on the side of the foreign operatives and mercenaries who tried to overthrow their elected government? Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Bolivian people—or on the side of the lithium mining consortiums which foisted a coup on them? Would Jesus be found on the side of Indigenous water and land defenders—or on the side of huge multinational energy conglomerates who use police forces and National Guard to harass and repress them? Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Africans—or on the side of the French and British and American governments who continue to siphon off Africa’s wealth? Would Jesus be found on the side of innocent children—or on the side of those who traffic and exploit their bodies, or kill them in the womb?

In my own humble opinion, even to pose these questions in the light of the Beatitudes, is to answer them. Unfortunately, in each of these cases, the considerations and interests of worldly power—sometimes soft-pedalled into the conversation under the guise of soi-disant ‘democracy’, ‘rule of law’, ‘nuance’, ‘impartiality’, ‘objectivity’—serve to cloud and muddy the consciences of those who would otherwise clearly answer in each of these instances. But if Jesus does promise the blessings He did in the Beatitudes, then we must say that He would take the side of the Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, Palestinians, Haitians, New Russians, Venezuelans, Bolivians, Indigenous nations, African nations, children—over their oppressors and persecutors. Jesus Himself took just such a political side when He chose to be crucified by the Roman authorities in conjunction with the Sanhedrin and their Herodian puppets… between two bandits. They discredited Him and crucified Him as a political agent, as a would-be ‘King of the Jews’.

Those of us who live in an empire with pretensions of universality, a latter-day Rome, where the primary political choices are between infanticidaires on one side and open idolaters on the other, have a responsibility to choose a radical third option, and to side with those throughout the world who suffer at the hands of Cæsar. And we must do so even at the risk of being called ‘communists’, ‘tankies’, ‘campists’ and worse. To do otherwise would be to betray the Gospel, and the Beatitudes in particular which place God on the side of those who suffer, rather than those who of design and intent inflict suffering.

Five points on the Ukraine conflict

1. The Russian assault on the Ukraine is morally wrong, full stop. Ukrainians do not in the least deserve what Russia is doing to them as we speak. Indeed, they have not deserved what has been done to them by multiple actors since (and including) the ouster of Yanukovych in 2014. I stand firmly with Metropolitan Onufriy of Kiev, and support and endorse his call upon President Vladimir Putin for an immediate cessation of violence.


2. This war was entirely preventable from multiple sides. It is an expression of a long-standing failure of diplomacy between NATO countries and Russia, going back at least to 2008, possibly even to 2004. Given what happened to Yugoslavia five years prior to that, Russian distrust of NATO is entirely legitimate and warranted.


3. It is also an expression of long-standing failure of peace-keeping in afflicted areas like the Donetsk Basin. The people in the Donetsk Basin have been suffering mortar attacks and wanton destruction of their schools, hospitals and homes for the past eight years, and the culprits of this waste of human life and limb have been overwhelmingly the Ukrainian Army.


4. The long ignorance of people for the humanitarian suffering in Donbass, over the past eight years, is intolerable. The people who are only now discovering that being mortared non-stop by a hostile army from across a line of control is bad, have some deep soul-searching to do.


5. Reiterate point 4, a fortiori, for Yemen, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. Remember the commandment: Thou shalt give equal worth to tragedies that occur in non-English speaking countries, as to those that occur in English speaking countries.

May peace and justice prevail. May God have mercy upon the Ukraine. May God have mercy upon the Donbass. May God have mercy upon Russia. And may God have mercy upon us all.

Update from Arabia tristis

The worst humanitarian crisis in the world continues unabated, thanks to the Saudis and the UAE, and thanks to continuing American support for both of those hideous anti-human governments. Airstrikes against Ṣan‘â’, using American-made bombs, have cut off access to the internet for thousands of Yemenis, and killed or injured at least 140 people. The silence regarding these atrocities from American outlets is deafening. In fact, the sole response to this, this democide of a Yemeni populace already suffering from starvation and preventable disease, from the Biden Administration has been to talk about reclassifying Ansarallâh as a terrorist organisation. Do not be fooled: God is taking note of all. And for the sake of a suffering Yemen, there needs to be a complete freeze on arms sales to the Saudis until a peace agreement is reached, and Biden needs to be held to account for the blood that is now on his hands, as it was on Trump’s, and as it was on Obama’s.

Another brief, belated warning about Trumpism

Trump’s promises to ordinary Americans were all hot air. But I could have told you that four years ago.

‘Build the wall’? It was never built. It was never even properly planned or funded. All Trump has managed to do on questions of immigration, was to empower an increasingly-unaccountable quasi-fascist fœderal agency to carry out detentions and deportations (as well as beatings, rapes and forced sterilisations). And also add another layer of uncertainty and ambiguity to an opaque DHS which was already growing more hostile to legal immigrants and even tourists under the Obama Administration. (This is why visas were a key issue for me this time around, and neither Biden nor Trump has come close to delivering.)

‘Lock her up’? Actually, that’s a good question. Why isn’t that warmongering harpy spending the rest of her life in a fœderal prison where she clearly belongs? But the Trump Justice Department has made no real effort to indict Hillary Clinton on any charges, regarding ‘her e-mails’ or anything else for that matter. He never appointed a special counsel to investigate her. And Trump’s blustering at Barr over this situation now, one month out from the general election? Sad!

‘Drain the swamp’? Trump’s administration stands a fair shot at being one of the single dirtiest, most self-dealing and most nepotistic in our nation’s history – his rivals in that area being Jackson, Buchanan and Harding. The delegation of administration jobs to Kushner and to Trump’s own children is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the Trump extended family is plundering the public. The Department of Education, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Energy – are all staffed by industry lobbyists whose clear financial interests are in subverting or dismantling the very agencies they oversee.

Bringing back manufacturing jobs? Trump’s record on this is actually no better than Obama’s was… not much worse, but also not one whit better. Expanding the economy by four percent a year? To be fair to him, Trump had a pretty good year in fiscal year 2018 – growth that year was 3.18%. But even in 2019, long before COVID hit, Trump’s œconomy was in slowdown mode as it became clear that the wheels were spinning without input. The trade war with China, together with the continued rollback of any kind of regulation on capital movement, actually hurt American workers more than they helped.

Taxes? Was Trump going to cut my taxes? Have you looked at your taxes lately, dear readers? I’ve got my returns right here in front of me. Our family paid $174 in fœderal income taxes in 2017, the last year of Obama’s tax scheme. In 2018, under Trump’s new tax plan, we paid $1,001 in fœderal income tax. That’s right – Trump increased my taxes during his first year in office by almost a factor of six. That’s largely on account of my 1099 schedule. That is to say, because I was working for myself and making income on my own rather than for a corporation, my taxes went up. Trump’s tax plan has actually punished entrepreneurship and individual initiative… at least when it comes from working-class people like me. I wasn’t alone. Lower- and middle-income families across the United States saw their fœderal income tax go up.

Peace in the Middle East? Trump conducted more drone strikes in one year than Obama did over his entire eight-year term. He is still murdering over 130 innocent children a day in Yemen together with the Saudis. He has moved the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem over the objections of Palestinians and not-insane Jews. He has bombed Syria twice. Trump keeps sending troops over there. He had a plan to assassinate Syria’s president Baššâr al-’Asad, and only Mattis was able to stop him. He actually did assassinate Qasem Soleimani and ’Abu Mahdî al-Muhandis, provoking a war with Iran which, thankfully, they declined to join. The treaties he is busy vaunting now as proof of his diplomatic acumen do little more than solidify a de facto alliance between Turkey, Israel and the Gulf States which has been in the making since at least 2008 – and increases tensions between the Shi‘a powers and the Sunnî powers in the region, making a future regional war more likely.

Fighting for life? The ‘most pro-life president ever’, even though this was one of his campaign promises, has done nothing at all to decrease fœderal funding to Planned Parenthood. Quite the opposite, in fact. In fiscal year 2017 Planned Parenthood self-reported that it performed a record-high number of abortions: 345,672. In response, in fiscal year 2018 (the first fœderal budget Trump was directly responsible for), the president increased taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood to $563 million, and then in 2019 he increased it again from $563 million to $617 million.

Remember: Planned Parenthood is a capitalist corporation masquerading as a non-profit. This is something Trump can easily understand and sympathise with. They are also the enemies of the working class – not just because they target working-class people to destroy their children and turn a buck in the process, but also because they abuse and oppress workers, bust unions and call in the fœds to break up strikes. And the Trump Administration has been more than happy to oblige them in this. As an aside – it’s appalling to me that anyone who considers themselves leftist could support this anti-worker, anti-human business. That’s where culture war logic has led us, sad to say. But I digress.

Pro-life justices? Please. Trump’s appointments mean exactly nothing. Kavanaugh is literally pro-choice, and Barrett – whatever her personal convictions – will do nothing on Roe. As I’ve said before, culture war battles at the fœderal level are almost completely irrelevant to what actually happens on the ground. Legislative action is needed, but the Republicans simply don’t want to let go of that ace in their hand that means they can turn out the pro-life Evangelical and Catholic vote for them whenever they want. All that effort wasted in trying to overturn Roe through the executive branch and literally nothing to show for it.

It’s really hard to overstate this. Trumpism is a dead letter. It’s smoke and mirrors. It’s a shell game. It’s a con. It’s as fake as pro wrestling and reality TV. As I’ve said before, Biden’s record is really not that much better – that’s why I voted third party again this year. I am really not saying anything new here, however, that was not already apparent in 2016.

Where does the Holy Spirit sit? Where does Christ sit?

Icon of the Pentecost

We’re right on the verge of the Feast of the Holy Pentecost – the first revelation of the mystery of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles. The drama of the moment for the Apostles is startling, even as Saint Luke puts it before us. The sound came from heaven like a mighty rushing wind. It filled that little upper room in that little house in Jerusalem where they all twelve were gathered. And then ‘appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire’, and the flames struck their heads and caught upon them. And they were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit moved them to speak.

This week, in the Twin Cities, we have been touched by other mighty winds, and far less obliging cloven tongues of fire. We have seen before us the spirit of life depart, undeservedly, from a man innocent of any real crime, George Floyd. We have seen the force of a state whose correct end is to protect order and serve justice, behave in a way which is neither orderly nor just. And in response, we have seen the town erupt into division and strife, with curfews being imposed and disorderly behaviour destroying and disrupting entire blocks of the city. And we are trying to restore justice to our state.

Consider, though, how it must have been for those twelve Apostles, huddled up in that corner of that upper room of that house in al-Quds, where they had just come from the Jabal az-Zaytûn in witness of the Ascension. They, too, had just seen brutalised, mocked, humiliated, stripped of His clothes and crucified between two thieves, by two authorities both sæcular and religious, pretending to justice but manifestly unjust, their Saviour and their God. And then they had seen Him rise again from the tomb – and ascend into Heaven.

It is clear from the ending of the Gospel of Saint Luke that many among the Apostles were dismayed, scattered, confused. In the wake of the Crucifixion they were scattered and did not know what to think or to do with themselves. When the Myrrh-bearing Women came from the empty tomb and related what they saw to the male disciples, Luke tells us they dismissed what they had to say as ‘idle tales’. Indeed, Luke says that even when they saw Christ risen from the tomb, in the flesh, the male disciples were ‘terrified and affrighted’. From before His Crucifixion and even after His Resurrection, many among those same Apostles had been expecting Christ to arrive in Jerusalem in glory, to ascend the throne in majesty, retake Judæa and conquer Rome by force for the chosen people of God. Indeed, even as He was about to ascend, the Apostles asked Him: ‘Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?’ And Christ had answered them: ‘ It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judæa, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.’

There was no political programme for the disciples to follow, not even on Pentecost. Yet we cannot ignore the political meaning in these words, which bridge the end of Saint Luke’s Gospel to the beginning of his Book of the Acts. Indeed, we cannot understand Acts without understanding the political implications of these last words of Christ to His disciples. The question of the disciples to their Master was political. Essentially, ‘are you restoring the Kingdom now?’ And His answer back to them was also. As it was not for them, so it is not for us to ‘know the times or the seasons’. But we have been told to be witnesses in the world.

But how is this done? This – being witnesses in the world – is a commandment which poses as much as a challenge to us, as it had to Peter or Andrew or James or John or any of the other disciples. And that, without knowing the times and the seasons. We must therefore understand in the context of the text, how and why this commandment is still enforced upon us, and what it means today to be a witness to Christ in a world that seems on the verge of breaking – because, just like them, neither do we know the times or the seasons which God has in His own power. We must therefore look at the context in which the disciples lived, and attempt to read the political we live in a typological fashion – rather than attempting to project Christian witness into an unknown future through adaptation to modern ‘knowledge’ on the one hand, or pretending to a knowledge we do not have about ‘the times or the seasons’ on the other.

Because, if we are to take the Liturgical theology of the Cross seriously – that is the world-historical moment of Judgement, and all things will be tried at the foot of the Cross: the Cross is the judgement seat before which we shall stand at the end of our lives and at the end of all things. All people and all actions will be tried before the example of Christ. It is not an accident that the Orthodox Church opens the Lenten Triodion and Pentecostarion at the Sunday of the Last Judgement, and closes it two weeks from now on the Sunday of All Saints: this is the procrustean bed of the Church’s own Liturgical wisdom, which bookends the Last Judgement and Holy Pentecost together, around the mystery of the Cross and the Holy Pascha. I’m going to be honest here: I had planned to write much more about the typological ‘landscape’ of Christ’s political context, but I checked myself as soon as I ran up against the awesome and terror-inspiring fact of the Last Judgement in which I am now standing. I wish to tread here with extreme caution, because I know I could get it very badly wrong – many people do get it very badly wrong – and I do not want to mislead people about something so important. I shall refer, then, to authorities beyond me: the late great Fr Thomas Hopko, who writes with reference to the homilies of the wonderful Saint John Chrysostom:

It’s important to see also that the judgment is simply the presence of Christ. Jesus said that already in St. John’s Gospel when he was on the earth when he said, “I didn’t come to condemn the world. I didn’t even come to judge the world.” He said, “My words are a judgment. My presence is a judgment. You are making the judgment, not me. I have come to save you,” but this is the judgment that he said had come. In St. John’s Gospel he says, “The light has shined in the darkness, but some people did not accept it because they loved darkness more than light because their deeds were evil.” And the light of God itself is a judgment. It makes things known. It makes things clear. Things are then seen for what they really are. We Christians believe that that is what happens when we die, and when we die we are somehow projected immediately into the final end of the world, the final coming of Christ.

St. John Chrysostom, whom we often refer to, said, “What a strange kind of a judgment it is. In fact, there’s no judge. There’s no defense lawyer. There’s no prosecuting attorney. There’s even no jury. There’s just Christ and us. That’s it.” And we pronounce the judgment on ourselves. How do we do it? The Lord tells us in this parable. He said when all the nations and all the people are gathered before him, he will separate them. By the way, that verb, “separate,” that’s where you get the verb “judge, krisis.” It means to kind of set a line down the middle to show how things actually are. In fact, you might say even judging means to make that decision: where do you stand? Where do you put yourself at this judgment?

Then in the parable—it’s very interesting how the Lord says that he will sit there as the King, and he will say to some on his right hand, “Come, blessed of my Father; inherit the kingdom prepared [for] you from before the foundation of the world.” Then he says the reason that they are inheriting the kingdom that is prepared for them is because, “I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty; you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in, you welcomed me. I was naked; you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison; you came to me.” Amazingly, the righteous, the just, those who will be saved, those who will stand the judgment, they ask him, “When did we see you? When did we actually see you hungry or thirsty or homeless or naked or sick or imprisoned?” Then the King, the Lord, Christ, will answer, “Truly, I say to you: as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”

Sadly, we do not live in a time or in a place in which ‘the least of these my brethren’ are valued. We live in a coarse, callous time that has come to view the vulnerable as a nuisance, as a pestilence, as disposable. Christ spoke to a ‘wicked and adulterous generation’ which ‘seeketh after a sign’; and we live in an age where one ‘side’ burns a church to seek after a sign, while the other ‘side’ seeks after a president through a cloud of tear gas, holding up a Bible and making a speech as a sign. (But no sign is given except the sign of Jonah – and of course that story has to be read as a type, too!) If we want a sign in these times, we need to look for it among those who lack bread, those who lack water, those who have lost their homes, those who have lost their clothes, those who have lost their health and those who have lost their freedom. If this was the standard spoken of at the Last Judgement, this is also the work of Pentecost.

And the least of these our brethren – they simply do not line up neatly on one ‘side’ or other of our culture wars. On the world stage, among those who stand in judgement of us will be: the starving infants of Yemen, the thirsty children of Gaza, the homeless people of the Donetsk Basin, the displaced people of Iraq, the jobless young men of Greece, the elderly and the uninsured, the incarcerated people within our borders – as well as the migrants in detention, the targets of racial prejudice and the vulnerable unborn already mentioned. It is our obligation to love them no matter how inconvenient it may be. On the present question, we are challenged to love both the protesters, and those who have lost their homes and businesses to rioting. God knows I have been found wanting enough, with some of these who will judge me.

Once again: I had planned to write a whole long exposition that tried to superimpose the politics of Christ’s time on our own – as I have done before as a blogger much younger and much less wise. Instead, I’m letting Fr Thomas Hopko do most of that work for me, because he does it better than I could. But really, the material fact is this. On Golgotha, Christ was crucified – a punishment broadly but not exclusively reserved for slaves and rebels and lower-class criminals – by the powers of Cæsar and of the Sanhedrin. And he died between two robbers or lēstas, the same word lēstēs which is used to describe the Sicarius Barabbas whose place on the Cross Christ took. Christ our God chose to die surrounded by men who rebelled against the worldly order, against an unrighteous imperium mundi – though we are told that even among these men there were those (like Dismas) who were saved even as they were killed, and those (like Gestas) who were not. The Judgement does not cut along neat lines such as those that the world likes to impose on us.

And yet at Pentecost we are called to remember the descent of the Holy Spirit. This is also a ‘moment of judgement’ in that it is the first moment in the works of Saint Luke since the Crucifixion that the Apostles are moved to take action for themselves: to go forth into the streets, and to speak to the peoples of the world – even to the forgotten and crucified peoples – in their own tongues. Holy Pentecost is where we take the mystery of Pascha, the moment of joyous revelation of a transfigured life in God, and translate it into action in our communities. The opening of the book on the Last Judgement, and the closing of the book on our temporal judgement, are bound together through the work of the Holy Spirit.

The icon of the Last Judgement

Our God-bearing father Mâr ’Ishâq an-Naynuwî

Saint ’Ishâq of Nineveh

Today, the twenty-eighth of January, is the Orthodox feast day also of Mâr ’Ishâq مار إسحاق, or Saint Isaac, the Syrian of Nineveh. Mâr ’Ishâq was at one point the Bishop of Nineveh, but resigned the office after five months in order to dwell in desert solitude in the mountains.

Mâr ’Ishâq was born in Beth Qatraye – modern-day Qatar – on the Persian Gulf, around the year 613. At the time there was a flourishing community of Christians there, though they fell into schism from the other Persian Christians around the year 648. The schism between the Christians of Beth Qatraye and the Christians of Persia ended in 676, when Catholicos Mâr Gîwargîs visited Qatar and made reconciliation with the elders of Beth Qatraye at the Synod of Dairin. As part of the agreement, Mâr Gîwargîs appointed ’Ishâq as bishop of Nineveh (now Mosul in Iraq) at this time; according to ’Ishâq’s hagiography, the consecration was held at the Monastery of Beth ‘Abe on al-Zâb al-Kabîr in what is now northern Iraq.

Mâr ’Ishâq struggled as a bishop for the people of Nineveh. The people of Nineveh have long had a reputation for hardness of heart, and this was something Mâr ’Ishâq tried to address. There is one anecdote from his brief time as bishop there that is particularly illustrative. Two men came before the holy father, the very first day after his consecration as bishop, in bitter dispute – one of them a debtor and the other his creditor. The creditor was demanding the immediate return of his loan, with interest. The creditor exclaimed to Mâr ’Ishâq: ‘If this man refuses to pay back what belongs to me, I will be obliged to take him to court.’ Mâr ’Ishâq answered him: ‘Since the Holy Gospel teaches us not to take back what has been given away, you should at the very least grant this man a day to make his repayment.’ The exasperated creditor burst out: ‘Leave aside for the moment the teachings of the Gospel!’ and Mâr ’Ishâq’s reply to this was: ‘If the Gospel is not to be present, what have I come here to do?’

Personal hardheartedness like this was only half of the story, however. There were also bitter doctrinal disputes between the Persian and the Miaphysite residents of Nineveh, and Mâr ’Ishâq had little interest in refereeing such disputes. Mâr ’Ishâq abdicated his bishopric onto someone else, and went into Mount Matout, a remote refuge in the mountains of Khuzestan in Iran. Matout was apparently a mountain which many anchorites chose to struggle against their passions. There he lived a life of solitary prayer, asceticism and contemplation.

After living for some time in Khuzestan, Mâr ’Ishâq returned to Nineveh and retired to the monastery of Rabban Shabir in nearby al-Qûš. There he spent his days immersed in the studies of the Holy Scriptures, in committing to writing his purest thoughts on the nature of God and on the ascetic struggle, and – not keeping this light hidden to himself – also teaching the monks, postulants and students at Rabban Shabir the mysteries of God. So committed was he to spreading the teachings of divine love, and committing them to writing, that he spoilt his eyes in reading and transcribing. By the end of his life he was fully blind, but he continued by dictating his writings to his students, who wrote them down for him. We see a description of his ascetic habits in the Studia Syriaca:

They called him the second Didymos, for indeed, he was quiet, kind and humble, and his word was gentle. He ate only three loaves a week with some vegetables, and he did not taste any food that was cooked. He composed five volumes, that are known unto this day, filled with sweet teaching.

Mâr ’Ishâq reposed in the Lord at the age of eighty-six, around the year 700. His legacy as a saint of the Church – he is glorified both in the Eastern Orthodox Church and in the Church of the East – is assured. But although we can see from his short bishopric that he preferred not to enter into the Christological disputes of his day, nonetheless his writings were not without controversy. His hagiography mentions a particular bishop of Beth Garmai, a certain Daniel bar-Tubanitha, who disputed three points of his ascetical writings, but, according to Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeev) of Volokolamsk, no extant sources inform us of the nature of Daniel’s dispute with Mâr ’Ishâq. The ‘three propositions’ of Mâr ’Ishâq which prompted such controversy in the Christian East ‘remain’, in his words, ‘an enigma’. However, already by 900, Mâr ’Ishâq’s writings were accepted as authoritative and holy in the Church of the East. When his ascetical writings were translated from Syriac into Greek about 100 years later, they were elevated among the works of the holy Church Fathers almost at once among the Byzantine church authorities, and incorporated into the apophthegmatic Synagogē of Paul Evergetinos around 1050. The holy Qatari Syrian was quickly thereafter venerated as a Father of the Church among Orthodox Christians in the Eastern Roman Empire.

For Mâr ’Ishâq, the greatest and deepest truth about God is His nature and personality as love. Such love was the Incarnation, so important to ’Ishâq’s thought, and the concomitant interruption of ‘normal’, fallen reality that it embodied. It’s important to stress that to ’Ishâq, the acknowledgement of God’s reality as love is not mere sentimentality. This is not a reality to be lightly or cavalierly acknowledged. ’Ishâq’s vision of divine love is as ineffable, pure, protean creative power, far beyond human comprehension. The inexhaustible reserves of God’s self-giving, of His forbearance, of His constant and unchanging, meek and sustaining nature are in fact a terrible reality to attempt to grasp. For example: when Mâr ’Ishâq speaks of hell, it is not as a willing and conscious torment inflicted by a wrathful God upon sinners. In Mâr ’Ishâq’s telling, the all-pervading presence and reality of God’s love is given to all souls without distinction. For the soul mired in sin, unrepentant, the presence of this creative, persistent and boundless healing power is perceived as pain – pain at the very core and foundation of one’s being.

There is in Mâr ’Ishâq’s work an eschatological expectation that approaches Origen’s and Saint Gregory of Nyssa’s vision of apokatastasis, but this expectation is (perhaps blessedly) not informed by Greek metaphysical speculations inherited from, say, Plotinus. What governs this vision is the understanding that every created being and act of God, down to the most miserable and fleeting of creatures, is in fact an act of love and partakes in the providence and care of God, and thus cannot but partake in the ends of God’s will, that the ‘world will be swallowed up in the great mystery of Him who performed all these things’.

Mâr ’Ishâq takes this teaching to some uncomfortable extremes. He anathematises any who would ascribe vengeance to God, and even insinuates that such people are engaging in hæresy: ‘The man who chooses to consider God as avenger, presuming that in this manner he bears witness to His justice, the same accuses Him of being bereft of goodness!’ And he goes further than this. He goes so far as to say it is wrong to ascribe justice to God, for this would abrogate the consideration of God’s mercy. The only possible reaction to the love of God is one of gratitude, and at that gratitude for something given gratuitously and not earned. Only from such a posture of gratitude is it possible to acquire the merciful heart toward all things which Mâr ’Ishâq emphasises.

’Ishâq’s writings reflect a desert spirituality, however far removed from Ægypt he was both theologically and gæographically. From a posture of gratitude, the beloved of God may begin to emulate God by loving her neighbours with the same kind of selfless and all-giving dispassion. The diminution of the self – stilling and silencing the self – becomes something desirable. For that one needs to flee from her neighbours, not because she does not love them, but because their lack of silence produces a false image. True stillness can only begin from gratitude toward God’s total and all-sustaining love. The purpose of this stillness is the acquisition of humility which is a fundamental likeness to God. ’Ishâq is quite insistent that humility is not the natural state of the fallen human being (and is thus contrasted with gentleness, mildness and meekness, which are traits of the ‘natural’ fallen human being and which are not necessarily humility), it has to be relearnt. Asceticism and stillness are not ends in themselves, nor are they deserving of reward: in ’Ishâq’s accounting these disciplines and works are meant to teach humility. All subsequent spiritual progress is rooted in humility; as such humility is a subject which – as Metropolitan Hilarion says – Mâr ’Ishâq returns to time and time again.

Mâr ’Ishâq taught primarily monks and ascetics, but his teachings are not all meant to stay merely among monastic communities or eremitical cells. As Metropolitan Hilarion says: ‘Every Christian who now reads Isaac can find something appropriate to himself.’ Mâr ’Ishâq speaks of the ihidaya, the ‘solitary’ or the hermit, as the exemplar of the Christian life. But the way he uses the Syriac term is such that – without abridging the specific context of the ‘solitary’ hermit he is ideally addressing – every soul before God, regardless of vocation, is an ihidaya. (This is fitting: God being boundless and inexhaustible, even wild and terrifying, as Love, every soul is called to respond!) Every soul can prostrate herself in gratitude before God. Every soul can learn humility by taking up a fitting burden of prayer and asceticism, and giving thanks for the mercy which is shown. May our remembrance of this great and illuminated ascetic serve to kindle in us gratitude and show us the way to humility. Holy Mâr ’Ishâq, meek, gentle and humble ascetic, teacher of Christ to the ages, pray unto Him who loves all of creation, that we sinners may be saved!

He that thundered on Sinai with saving laws for man
Hath also given thy writings as guides in prayer unto monks,
O revealer of unfathomable mysteries;
For having gone up in the mount of the vision of the Lord,
Thou wast shown the many mansions.
Wherefore, O God-bearing ’Ishâq,
Entreat the Saviour for all praising thee.

What comes afterward? redux: post-liberalisms rising

Given the somewhat worried tone of my non-hagiographical blog posts of late (like ‘Hindsight and foresight’, ‘Ideological history’, ‘Solovyov and the problem of the post-sæcular’), I felt it might be wise to spend some time speaking a bit more dispassionately and analytically about what I’m observing at this point in world news.

I don’t think that the news on that end is all bad; not a bit of it. I am merely asserting that those of us in the West who are sceptical of the legacy of liberalism need to tread carefully because we are setting out onto uncharted territory. It is very difficult for any of us to reference or chart a future without the complex of liberalism-slash-nominalism-slash-capitalism-slash-technocracy hanging over us. We have – and I very much include myself here – a tendency to look to winged visions of prisca theologica and other past manifestations of præ-liberal order in our attempts to envision what a post-liberal order will look like. But what is happening on the global scale, as history keeps proving itself to be very far from a Fukuyama-style end, is both terrifying and exhilarating. Instead of one post- or alter-liberalism popping up to assert itself, we have a whole plethora of them, and some of them are very clearly preferable to the others.

What I’m going to try to do here is to organise them in a systemic way, such that they can be placed in perspective with each other. The ‘liberal international order’ centred in Washington and New York which finds itself still in power but with ever-dwindling reserves of moral or theoretical legitimacy, is also playing favourites. That needs to be very carefully borne in mind. That said, the global backlash against liberalism, the Washington Consensus, neoliberal technocracy and austerity politics has afforded us a moment of fertile experimentation in terms of political organisation. It’s worth taking account of where all these options are coming from, what is prompting their rise, and where they are likely to go.

1. Illiberal democratic socialism. This ‘option’ is the one I’ve been talking up for a long while now. It combines the œconomic priorities of democratic socialism (including public ownership, public infrastructure, state-mediated wage bargaining, strong welfare-state initiatives) with a strong Tory paternalist streak in social policy. Illiberal democratic socialists tend to be pro-natalist, pro-family, civic-communitarian, immigration-sceptical (but not racialist), classical in their architectural tastes. They also have a penchant for the preservation of wilderness and wildlife. Their star is currently ascendant in Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Moldova and Slovakia), and has echoes in the ‘Russkiy Mir’ politics of the Baltic states.
   
   One of the reasons I’m so bullish on the illiberal democratic socialism of Eastern Europe is because it so easily bears the peculiar Byzantine marks of Yugoslav and Czechoslovak politics that I’ve come to value so deeply. As such, they bear a kin resemblance – not at all accidental, in my own humble opinion – to the Tory socialisms of John Ruskin and William Morris which were so influential on me. At the very least, this illiberal democratic socialism may be a means for Yugoslavs and Eastern Europeans to assert a strong regional identity.





2. Civilisational realism. This is the option that is being put forward primarily by the state and the leading theorists of Russia. As articulated by Dr Boris Mezhuev, civilisational realism is not so much an ideology as it is a strategy of engagement and an attempt to mitigate the effects of the modern de facto multipolar world order. The civilisational realists are noticeably informed by the conservatism of Karamzin, Il’in and Berdyaev, and very much opposed to manifestations of liberal ideology. But they are nonetheless quite mild and quiet on the topic of ideological issues of any sort, whether œconomic or social. The civilisational realists are not crusaders; they bear neither the Western nor the Islâmic world any animus unless either attacks them. Likewise, they aren’t particularly voluble on domestic issues, apart from critiquing the culture of corruption that has accompanied Russian society since the years of Gorbachev and Eltsin. As I have mentioned before, the intimation of loss is a strong constant undercurrent in the creative thinking of the Rodina. Civilisational realism is an expression of the Russian nation’s desire to be given an autonomy and dignity she (rightly) feels she’s been denied for decades.
   
   At the same time, though, the civilisational realists are keenly attuned to the questions of particularity and historical contingency that were originally raised by Herder. This is, without a doubt, a legacy of the Slavophil impress on Russian conservatism. Likewise, the willingness to engage the West on positive terms is a deliberate echo of the Slavophil engagements of the early-to-mid nineteenth century. But civilisational realism tends in a very different direction than Slavophilia. It doesn’t bear the messianic marks of the original Slavophils. Its historical awareness has given its proponents a degree of humility that is lacking in the likes of Kireevsky, Khomyakov or Aksakov. They do not pretend to be giving to the world the unique ‘new word’ that Russia was supposed to speak; instead, they are trying to allow Russia time to catch its breath again.





3. Marxism. Far from being the dead or moribund ideology that our élites have been telling us it’s been for the past three decades, the Marxist parties of southern India, Nepal, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Venezuela, (until recently) Bolivia and (yes) China have shown themselves to be resilient, flexible, tough and pragmatic. Whether or not you agree with their outcomes or the means by which they keep power, they have shown themselves to be politically stable in the face of active attempts to bludgeon them into submission or oblivion with sanctions, interventions and colour revolutions.
   
   More than that: Marxism has proven to be surprisingly dynamic. I can attest from experience that actually-existing Marxist parties operate in an intellectual space heavily-dosed with inaccessible, inane, soporific jargon. At the same time, there is valuable intellectual work being done at the fringes of the ‘big red circle’. Marxism is creatively making contact with environmentalism; with religion; even with culturally-conservative traditionalism – and the results are, to say the least, interesting to watch. Marxism is likely to remain a significant alternative to liberalism for the foreseeable future throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia.





4. Red Shî‘ism; Black Shî‘ism. The title of Dr Ali Shariati’s article is an apt description of the politics – on both sides of the coin – of the Mihwar al-Muqâwamah. It represents, like the civilisational realism described above, a strategy rather than an ideology per se, and it is a strategy that is shared by both sæcular Arab nationalists and theocratic Persians. But it is an offensive rather than a defensive strategy; a strategy for pursuing asymmetric warfare rather than a strategy for détente.
   
   ‘Red’ Shî‘ism, informed as it is by the martyrdoms of ‘Alî and Husayn on behalf of the helpless and by the eschatological ideal of righteous kingship inherited from Zoroastrianism, takes a natural and instinctive solidarity with the oppressed and uses it as a revolutionary rallying-cry. The ‘red’ Shî‘ism of Hizbullâh which actively takes up the cause of the Christians in Lebanon, just as readily in the case of Ansârullâh takes up the cause of the starving and deprived Yemeni people. The idea of martyrdom on behalf of the defenceless in Shî‘a Islâm is strong enough that its passion extends to the welfare of non-Muslims.
   
   But as Dr Shariati notes, ‘red’ Shî‘ism – the religion of the martyrs – turns rapidly into the ‘black’ Shî‘ism of the Safavids – the religion of mourning. There is a certain note of cynicism that creeps in around the edges when Shî‘ism is exposed to the realities of power. Though Shariati is more emphatic on the nature of ‘red’ Shî‘ism and more apophatic on ‘the religion of mourning’, what he doesn’t say about the latter is eloquent. The ‘religion of mourning’ is one in which the fervour for the dignity of the oppressed cools and congeals into a set of theocratic dictums. The cleric takes himself into a masjid beside ‘Âlî Qâpû, his face long with resignation, and expounds with grim necessity the realities of power politics. This is not, I hasten to add, merely an Islâmic problem: we Orthodox Christians, too, have our problems with ‘mourning’ cynicism. But the words of the clerics in Tehran, however just their outward cause, are to be watched with care.





5. Nationalisme intégral. I have written before, at length, about how Christian democratic politics betrayed their radical roots in the 1950s and 1960s for a rapprochement with the bourgeois politics of ordoliberalism and austerity œconomics. It seems to be something of an irony that when you strip away this discredited layer of œconomic whiggery, what remains is not the humane radicalism of Mounier and Maritain, which has long since absconded, but instead something a good deal bleaker: a positivist, corporatist nationalism recalling that of Maurras.
   
   The crisis of social solidarity that the European Union suffered with the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008 spurred a massive backlash, particularly in Eastern and Southern Europe. The result in places like Poland (with the election of Duda) and Hungary (with the election of Orbán) was a certain coarsening of the national fibre. Both the PiS and the Fidesz parties lay claim to the Christian democratic mantle, but both of them avidly play to a certain narrative which links the salvation of Christendom to the fate of the nation-state, and furthermore posits the integral party apparatus as the sole means of saving both. This too-close and instrumentalist conceptual linkage between a higher and more primal form of solidarity, and a lower and more contingent one, is actually quite dangerous, and there are good reasons to be wary of it.
   
   Christians first and foremost should be wary of this kind of integral nationalism. It is not taking root only in Western nations culturally rooted in Christendom. It is also growing roots in India with the BJP under Modi, which self-describes as ‘integral humanist’. And it is also growing roots in Turkey with the AKP under Erdoğan, whose integralist ideology is drawn straight from Qutb’s articulation of political Sunnî Islâm – a connexion which the ‘Little Sultan’ still values in his current policy. The more integralist Hungaries and Polands are cultivated in the West, the more open and vulnerable we leave our brothers in the East to their enemies in places like Turkey and India.





6. Fascism. Speaking of far-right nationalisms, here’s another one that’s come slithering up from the gutter of the twentieth century’s mechanised total wars of ideology. Never mind, of course, that fascism is rooted in transhuman futurism and avant-garde æsthetics. Never mind that the resurgent alt-right shares similarly haute-moderne and post-moderne roots. It is still going to pretend to be the alternative to liberal decadence that Europe (and Latin America) has been missing. And, unfortunately, it looks likely to gain more than a mere handful of followers.
   
   I want to be very clear that I am using the term ‘fascism’ in a very narrow and technical sense. Fascism is not merely a byword for just any far-right nationalism with corporatist characteristics. It is not the same thing as the nationalisme intégral that I mention above, though it is a kissing-cousin. Intégrisme has problems, but it stops well short of claiming to regiment and militarise all aspects of social and individual life. Even in this strongly-restrictive definition, though, fascism is present enough in places like the Ukraine, Brazil and now Bolivia to be dangerous and worthy of mention as one of the illiberal ideological forces rising in liberalism’s shadow.





7. Salafi jihâdism. This fundamentalist ideology has been a distinctive danger around the globe since well before the World Trade Centre attacks on the eleventh of September, 2001 – arguably it’s been so since the late 1980s in Afghanistan. Now the fanatical toxin is spreading from Nigeria to Bosnia to Xinjiang and the Philippines. In Nigeria, Christians are being persecuted as never before. The headloppers of Dâ‘iš and al-Qâ‘idah are unfortunately a ubiquitous presence from Libya to Iraq, with Syria having borne a great brunt of the terrorist damage in recent years.
   
   The Salafis may receive aid from the United States intelligence services. However, they think of themselves as the ‘purifiers’ of Islâm from all the modern dross that has accumulated around centuries of Islâmic cultural practice throughout the world. That includes anything in the visual arts or in literature that does not conform to a rigid standard of Muslim piety. They adhere in lockstep to the most stringent and literal of textual interpretations of the Qur’ân and hadith, and increasingly they believe that the only right way to rectify Islâm is by the creation of a state purely founded on Islâmic law, which is to be rigidly and ruthlessly enforced uniformly across the entire body of believers and subject peoples. They are the Islâmic equivalent of the equally-literalist fundamentalist evangelicals in the United States.

Now, it should be crystal clear to the gentle readers of this blog that I harbour some robust partizan preferences among these options. I am avowedly a very strong supporter of the syncretic paternalistic leftism that has arisen in Eastern Europe: the closest thing on offer we have to the High Toryism of Britain’s better days. I also have strong sympathies toward the ‘civilisational realism’ of Russia’s conservatives. I have long felt such realism to be a healthy counterweight to the foreign policy we conduct here, based as it is on outdated ideologies on autopilot and a morass of private interests anchored in the military-industrial complex.

I have also been known, on occasion, to comment positively on political Shî‘ism and on Chinese Marxism. However, my true loyalties lie with Mosaddegh and the National Front in Iran’s case; and with the Democratic League in China’s case – both socialist-leaning organisations with healthy respect for tradition.

So it should come as no surprise as I finish this analysis, that I am deeply invested in what form the post-liberal order in the world will take. I do not want to live in a world dominated by the picayune hatreds and petty spats of a gross-odd bickering nation-states, each headed by the most clownish of bourgeois buffoons their pandering mass-medias can conjure to the baying rabble. It is an insult to lions to have to be governed by such rats. Neither do I want to be governed by a dour, joyless puritanical religious élite who would snatch the Christmas eggnog out of my hands and expect to be thanked for the favour. At the same time, it’s clear to me that actually-existing liberalism, exhausted as it is in a moral and intellectual sense, can no longer pretend to offer to the world a set of coherent rules for the pursuit of the good. That task now falls to others. But which others: that is a question that matters deeply.

It strikes me that all of these options have a certain investment in questions of theopolitics. That is not a surprise. The Enlightenment project was by and large a separation of the political sphere from the questions of ultimate meaning, and the relegation of those questions of meaning to the purely private sphere and the realm of the conscience. It is therefore no surprise that the ideologies now jockeying to take the place of liberalism are attempting to reconnect questions of governance to questions of meaning in various ways. Once again I have to reiterate: I agree with the religious intégristes on the stakes involved here. I also agree with them on two of their three sentences. But there are clearly a number of different ways in which the temporal and the æternal ends of man can be configured, and we would do well not to choose one which seems too easy or too glib.

China, Syria, Uighurs and the Silk Road redux

Syrian Foreign Minister Walîd al-Mu‘allem
with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi 王毅

In one of the least surprising headlines of the past few news cycles, the government of Syria is thus far the only government to defend China’s human rights record in Xinjiang, in response to the Uighur Act recently passed by the US House of Representatives.

The Syrian people have good reasons to distrust Uighurs, and good reasons to want them kept as much as possible within Chinese borders. The Uighur members of Jabhat al-Nusra affiliate Turkistan Islâmic Party (formerly the East Turkistan Independence Movement), who follow the radically-puritanical and grotesquely-violent Salafist form of Sunnî Islâm, have been active in northern Syria as some of the most vicious jihâdist groups outside of Dâ‘iš. The Uighur jihâdists have raped, tortured and crucified Arab Christians. They’ve beheaded civilian prisoners. They’ve kidnaped children as young as five to harvest their organs. This last charge should indeed render their accusations of organ harvesting against the Chinese government psychologically-suspicious. And they’ve done all this under the protection and logistical support of the Turkish government. So neither the Syrian government nor the people are going to shed too many tears about younger Uighur men being kept home by the authorities in China.

Of course, on the positive side, the Syrian government and the Chinese government have a relationship of long standing which can be traced in the immediate term to the 1960s. That’s when the Arab Socialist Ba‘ath Party began aligning itself globally with the Chinese Communists in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split. However, this relationship is not of recent provenance. It can with some justice actually be traced back to the An Lushan Rebellion 安史之乱 against the Tang Dynasty, when the Arab Caliphate sent cavalry to China to help them put down the rebellion. Notably, An Lushan was a tribesman of Central Asia, and the Arabs of the Levant clearly thought it to be in their best interests to aid the government of China instead. The Chinese (Nestorian) Christian general Guo Ziyi 郭子仪 fought alongside these Arabic knights.

More recently, the sæcular Arab nationalist states which were formed in the wake of the First World War formed some natural allegiances with the Hui Muslim minority in China. The Hui Muslims were, in fact, the descendants of Arab, Persian and Turkic traders on the Silk Road and their Chinese spouses. For the most part they practised a traditional, but moderate, form of Sunnî Islâm – that of the Hanafî school of jurisprudence – and they culturally assimilated to Chinese culture while still retaining the particular use of Arabic in religious settings. The Hui sought Arab help against Japan in the Second World War, and the Arab states which tended to be the most sympathetic were those led by left-wing nationalist figures who inclined to moderation in religious matters themselves.

The roots of Uighur discontent in China have a lot to do with the Hui Muslims, who have historically occupied a kind of ‘model minority’ status in China. Here I may be tipping my own hand a bit, but the Uighurs I worked with were intensely proud of being distinct. One Uighur co-teacher I had tended to look down on her Kazakh co-workers, which rather took me aback. But I learned that there was a historical reason for this. The Uighurs still consider themselves the heirs of the Chagatai Khanate, in which they still tend to place a great deal of civilisational pride. They have long held a certain kind of resentment against the Hui Muslims, who – like them – were Hanafî Muslims of a fairly tolerant form of devotion. But the Hui were culturally Sinicised, which offended the sensibilities of the Uighurs. The Hui became the symbols of cultural accommodationism, which also rendered them a target of nationalist violence and, later, fundamentalist terror. The Uighurs shed the first blood in this case, attacking a caravan of Hui civilians near Qeshger in 1933 and killing about 800 people.

This is not to say that the Hui themselves have been immune to the siren call of Salafism; indeed, the first Salafi group to enter China was largely through the Nationalist-aligned Xibei San Ma, and they called themselves the Yihewani 伊赫瓦尼, or the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ – though the relations between this group and the Ægyptian ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ of Sayyid Qutb are nebulous. However, these early waves of Salafism in China have generally been hostile to the newer ones, as well as to the historical Hanafî. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the Hanafî majority of the Hui largely sided with the Communists in the Civil War, against the Yihewani.

Even so: a lot of the cultural erosion of Uighur identity, over which Anglophone liberals are now crying such obnoxious crocodile tears, has actually occurred gradually, from below, over the past four decades. The primary agent of that erosion has actually not been the Chinese state! The Saudis and the Turks, who have been pushing on them this poisonous puritanical ideology of Salafism, have been encouraging the Uighurs to undercut their own traditional jurisprudence and the use of their own language in religious venues. Even traditional architecture has not been safe from Saudi influence!

What’s more, the Arab states, both sæcular and not, have been actively monitoring the situation in Xinjiang, and their analysis is far more relevant and trenchant than the usual yellow-peril tinged analyses coming out of the Beltway and the Anglophone press. The commentary of the Dubai-based and Saudi-funded Al Mesbar Studies and Research Centre is actually quite explicit about the history of Islâmic thought in Uighur nationalist circles. They are clear about its progression from the traditional devotions of the Hanafî school toward modern Salafism. They are also clear about the contradictions between the Hanafî and Sûfî majority in China and the Salafi minority.

The genesis of the roots of Salafism can be traced back to Mongol expansionism and its contemporary origins to European colonialism. Salafism assumed a new dimension after the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in the 20^th century and was reinvigorated with increased globalisation in 21st century. The Kingdom of al Saud aggressively promoted its brand of Salafism called Wahhabism. With religious exchanges and educational programs, Saudi influence and funding gathered momentum. With the oil money transformed the landscape of Islâm, the call to go back is Salafism found resonance among Muslims worldwide.

The fastest growing Islâmic movement in the world is Salafism. The ideological footprint of Salafism in China is growing. Salafism is an ideological spectrum from the peaceful to the violent. Like elsewhere in the world, the Muslims most susceptible to recruitment by extremist and terrorist groups are those who have embraced Salafism. With the increased contact with South Asia and the Middle East, the Chinese Muslims have been influenced by the Salafi-Jihâdi-Takfiri ideologies. With greater interaction, Chinese Muslims realized that Islâm in their own country has been adapted. Although most Salafists in China are peaceful, increasingly the version of Salafism influencing a growing minority of Chinese is of both religious and security concern.

The vast majority of the Chinese Muslims are Hanafi and Sufi, schools antithetical to Salafism and its virulent strains. Like other countries, China is challenged by the growth of Salafism especially the Jihâdist and Takfiri strain. As an ideology, Salafism in China is propagated on-line and in real space. Like in the real space, Salafism on-line is a spectrum from mainstream to extreme. The existing footprint of Salafi-Jihâdi-Takfiri ideology that has entered China from overseas is reinforced by an on-line version of Salafism, Cyber Salafism is influencing a segment of the Chinese Muslims especially the youth. Also called “cut and paste Islâm,” Cyber Salafists selectively take passages out of context from religious texts and drive Jihâdism and Takfirism, a departure from classical Salafism.

They are also quite clear about the nature and broader aims of Turkish influence there:

In China, the fight for the independence of Xinjiang was spearheaded by Uighur nationalists in the centre and north and Uighur Salafists in the southwest. Gradually, with influence from the bordering South and Central Asia and support from the distant Middle East and Europe, the entire movement assumed a Salafist orientation. Despite efforts by Beijing and Xinjiang governments to dismantle the underground Salafi infrastructure, ideological and operational threat persisted and grew. Although a Uighur militant infrastructure survive in Xinjiang, the sustained pressure to dismantle the group led many like Mahsum to flee China. They reorganised themselves in Munich, Dubai, and in Peshawar in the 1980s and 1990s with support from governmental, non governmental, community, and crime [sic].

As the Turks and segments of the Turkish government considered Uighurs as Turkic, they actively and tacitly supported unity moves by the divided Uighur migrant and diaspora organizations. Driven by the breakup of the Soviet empire and rise of Central Asian states, Turkey wished to expand its influence from Turkey through Central Asia to Xinjiang. The Uighur elite organized the first Uighur National Congress in Istanbul in December 1992. While Turkey remained a key centre, political activity expanded to Germany, fundraising emerged in the Gulf and militant activity in Pakistan spread to Afghanistan.

This is not necessarily to say that what China is doing to the Uighurs is all righteous and blessed. But as Americans, our memories tend to be frightfully short, and we tend to get outraged over all the wrong sorts of things. Not only should we be paying far more attention to our own racial profiling and mass incarceration problems than we currently are, both of which are far worse than China’s. But if we really had the interests of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia at heart – let alone those of the Christian peoples of the Middle East! – we would be doing our best to encourage the humbler, older, more tolerant and more devotional strains of Islâm that belong to the traditional Turkic heritage there. That is largely what the Central Asian ‘Stans’ are attempting to do. We would not now automatically be siding with the jihâdists and takfiris who have usurped that heritage and gutted it, and who are now making war on peoples across the Silk Road in the name of a globalising fundamentalist ambition.

At least Syria’s government does not seem liable to making such a mistake. So much the better.