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The Chris Hedges Report
The ‘Diseased Body’ of the Middle East (w/ Farah El-Sharif) | The Chris Hedges Report
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- [00:10]
Chris Hedges
The Muslim world has been tested with the weakest, most corrupt and most hypocritical scholars and rulers because as a community our priorities have long been in the wrong place, writes the Islamic scholar Farah Al Shariff. After being ravaged by colonialism, we no longer rallied behind the core characteristics of true leadership, prophetic knowledge, principle and integrity. We no longer valued what is just and true. We chased after the fickle mirages of autocratic power, wealth, charisma and status. This was our downfall. As a result, we today see tight lipped, impotent Muslim rulers idly watch the river of blood as it flows from Gaza. We see compromised scholars betray the Koranic command for justice and bend their heads in humiliation and fear of worldly powers. Save for a few, most Muslim rulers and scholarly elites have chosen self preservation and silence. The river of blood in Gaza is also a river of treachery and collusion with leaders like these, it is no wonder the Muslim world is in the sorry state that it is in today. Palestinians could see from the very beginning that there is nothing post about the post colonial world order, she continues. They have ever since got less and less of their rights, lands and dignity with each passing day. In the same era, the opium of nationalism spread like wildfire as the Muslim world was carved into colonial, constructed nation states. The rest of the Muslim world enjoyed its false sense of sovereignty and accepted its bridal, divorced from the lonesome plight of the Palestinian people, fooled into believing that the same system that gave birth to their sovereign states could guarantee their safety and protection. What, she asks, is the Muslim body today, if not diseased, aching and wounded? Joining me to discuss the state of the Muslim world, the connection between repressive Arab regimes and the so called war on Terror, and how the genocide in Gaza expresses or exposes the moral rot within Arab ruling elites and the efforts by the west to manufacture a compliant form of Islam is Farah El Sharif. She received her PhD from Harvard's Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department with a research focus on Islamic in Africa and the Levant, the modern nation state and Muslim political movements. She is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford. You can find her work at Sermons at court substack.com Farah let's begin with the state of the Muslim world. The Arab world, which from the quotes that I pulled from the introduction is you call it a diseased body, but it's also a created body by Western powers propped up by Western powers. You grew up in Jordan. The Hashemite rulers of Jordan were imposed on the Jordanian people. Jordan didn't exist of course at the beginning, Trans Jordan, whatever you want to call it, they are from Saudi Arabia. The oil interests created the rulers of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And this has just been a kind of legacy, whether it's, you know, Sisi in Egypt or you know, any other kind of pliant ruler. So let's talk about the state of the Arab world and let's talk about, and we were together in Jordan this summer, the failure on the part of Arab rulers to push back in any, with the exception of Yemen of course, push back in any meaningful way against the genocide of the Palestinian people and then in many cases actually collaborate with the Zionists to overcome the maritime blockade imposed by Yemen.
- [04:25]
Farah Al Shariff
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much Chris for having me and the generous introduction. Really if you ask any person in Gaza, they will tell you that the thing that hurt them the most was not the American, German and Israeli bombs. It was the cowardice of kin, it was the collusion, it was the abandonment with this kind of Zionist campaign to exterminate them that is what is the source of their true emotional and psychological scar. So to say that the Muslim community worldwide is stuck between a rock and a hard place is probably the understatement of this century. So if it isn't these bombs, quadcopters, drones that are shredding our bodies and burning our children alive, it's these colonially installed puppets that look towards this model of empire and salivate over it, competing in who gets to please it the most and who gets to bend over to be compliant towards it. So these security states have our people strangulated whether it is through surveillance, repression or intimidation. And if it isn't the horrific Sidnaya prison that we've seen footage of and other sadistic torture dungeons under Assad, Assyria, it is the hundreds of other unknown torture cells still operating in the West Bank, Egypt, Saudi, the uae, Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan, East Turkestan and India Kashmir where political prisoners are detained by the hundreds and held under gruesome conditions, often without charge. So if it isn't that it's the Israeli soldiers that relish in breaking the bones of Palestinian children prisoners, it's the Tyman concentration camp where Dr. Hussam Abu Sofia was abducted over a week ago with no word from him and where Dr. Adnan Al Bursh of a Shifa hospital was brutally raped and killed before him. It is the crude and sadistic Israeli parliamentarian urge to protect the so called right to rape. If not that, it is the moral stain of Abu Ghraib it is the Patriot act that detains people like Dr. Afiad Diqi, the rest of the Holy Land 5 and men like Abu Zubaydah, Guantanamo's so called forever prisoner, or America's tortured guinea pig who still resides in Guantanamo since 2002 and who we forget is of Palestinian descent himself. So this, like you rightly pointed out, Krish, this systemic repression that Muslim communities worldwide experience is inextricably linked to the interventionist, expansionist, supremacist American Israeli Western project. In a twisted way they kind of all work together, like this pharaoh behemoth protected by Orwellian buzzwords like liberal democracy or state sovereignty, or the so called rules based order which Gaza has exposed as nothing but a ruse based order. So it is as if this entire ecosystem of repression feeds on injustice and we've reached the abyss of the abyss of repression. And this world order is this Frankenstein like world whose horrors have been unleashed primarily on innocence. So what the great African American theologian James cone called structural sin. We've reached an alarming level of that of desensitization to atrocious mass violence. And what does all of this do? It kills and strangulates all of us, not just Muslims. It produces this endemic spiritual death which affects not only Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians, but humanity as a whole. So this pernicious web of carceral cancer is sustained by the politics of compliance to an empire which sees Muslims like me, Palestinians and Arabs as mere fodder for for this monstrous system. Nowhere is this collusion more evident than things like basic human rights and civil liberties being eroded in the West. Look at the state of Muslims in Germany. Or just last week, I think a senator from Florida, Randy Fine, tweeted, essentially a final solution, a call for a final solution, saying that it's high time we dealt with this fundamentally dangerous culture that is Islam. Well, what I would say to that is what is fundamentally dangerous and broken of a culture is one that has normalized genocide, one that is okay with watching images of people being burned alive and moving on with their day. That is what is fundamentally broken and that is what is dangerous. So this manufacturing, decades of manufacturing the Muslim menace, this idea of the war on terror, or let's change that proposition and call it a war of terror, a war of state terror that has Muslim political prisoners locked up and exterminated. And this same campaign also sustains and funds the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the ongoing land grab, annexation and colonization of land in Syria and Lebanon. And so all of this is part of a campaign to Dominate and redraw the Middle east straight out of a 21st century crusader cum Zionist colonial playbook. Except this campaign is more militarized, it's more advanced, it's more funded and supremacist than ever before. So I don't think that this is a controversial point, Chris, but I wrote this in my substack that we are currently living in an age of Muslim internment, but we don't call it as such. We've reached a point where we have normalized the genocide and extermination of a people deemed to be bad, wholesale, according to the logic of the Judeo Western Christian civilization. So yes.
- [11:00]
Chris Hedges
No, go ahead.
- [11:01]
Farah Al Shariff
No, I was just going to say that since World War II we've primarily normalized seeing images of torture basically on Muslim bodies from Bosnia, Abu Ghraib, the Rabba massacre, west bank and now in Gaza, the Rohingya, the Uyghurs. So it's definitely a time where a time of harrowing sort of desensitization and dehumanization on a global systemic level.
- [11:28]
Chris Hedges
Well, as you are well aware, the United States acted no differently from Israel as Israel is. Of course the genocide is more pronounced, but the kinds of the torture, the tactics, the indiscriminate killing, the racist language, this was all part of the project, the imperial project in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Syria. We have a kind of historical amnesia here in the United States, but certainly within the Muslim world, especially those people that have borne the brunt. I mean, how many, what is it, 1 million Iraqis were killed because of our occupation of the country? They don't forget, they know.
- [12:13]
Farah Al Shariff
No, absolutely, Chris, you're right. And I think that, you know, you talked about with Dr. Gabor mate, you talked about fragmented morality. But what we are seeing now in a lot of this knee jerk geopolitical reactions to what's going on in the region in the Middle east is a kind of fragmented vision. And what you were saying about amnesia is absolutely true. So I'm trained as an intellectual historian where my job is to look at the long duray of ideas and look at the kind of the macro arc of where we're going as a human whole. And so I don't say this to be an alarmist. I'm probably the most anti dog, dogmatic person that you, you could talk to. But I say this not to kind of play the victim card that oh, we Muslims, you know, we need help, we're so helpless and then turn that victimization into, you know, furthering another kind of oppression or Another kind of injustice. And we've seen that happen to many people who are oppressed or repressed. Suddenly they become the tyrant. And I think that for Muslims, Islam, we're at a kind of a turning point, a testing kind of Gaza has been kind of the litmus test for Western leadership to basically see if there truly are about the highest ideals of Western civilization, protecting the right to liberty, the right to life, the right to freedom. And it is clear, it is exceedingly clear that these freedoms only extend to the in kind group. They're only seen as worthy to Westerners, to white people. Whereas when it comes to these barbarians abroad, let's just decimate them, let's just destroy them. And this arrogant expansionist program is very reminiscent of the 18th and 19th century Colonial brutal campaigns that I read about when it comes to the French in West Africa or the Dutch in Indonesia. And it's exactly all from the same colonial playbook, except now it is fattened up with this, like I said, this Orwellian cover of civility and democracy. And we should not forget that this campaign that we are seeing now is exactly out of Netanyahu's kind of wet dream for the Middle east to take all of it essentially. And in 1996, you know better than me, Chris, about the clean breakpoint policy that was designed to take out seven countries in five years, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, and then swallow the region whole. And for anybody to look at one regime change and to say that that's not part and parcel of this campaign, even the war on terror was cooked up in Tel Aviv in 1982 or even before, in 1979, through the Yonatan Institute that Netanyahu himself founded. He said, we're done with the red threat now. Now, now is the green threat, that of Islamic terror. And so a lot of Muslims even internalize this war on terror rhetoric. And they themselves start being apologetic and say, oh, Islam is peaceful, Islam is this, Islam is compatible with democracy, Islam is compatible with civility. And I see that as a sign of decimated consciousness, not just double consciousness. They don't know their own faith, they don't know their own history. And so they start being apologetic about it. And that is a position of weakness.
- [15:54]
Chris Hedges
Well, that is, you've written about this. There's a huge push to create this kind of quizzing form of Islam. That's what the Abraham Accords are. So, you know, we divide, and this is classic colonial rule. We divide, let's put it in commas, the natives into the good natives. And the bad natives, those who are willing to serve in our colonial police force like the Palestinian Authority, which is currently attacking Jenin and has thrown Al Jazeera out of the West Bank. Imagine following, of course, Israel's example within Israel proper. Let's talk about that. The attempt to create divisions within the Muslim world and this insidious project and the Abraham Cords, I think, epitomize that to create, quote, unquote, the good Muslim.
- [16:46]
Farah Al Shariff
Yeah, I mean, it's a very archetypal story in a sense that in every struggle for liberation there will always be the collaborators, the native informants, if you will, who kind of throw their people under the bus and scurry the favor of the powers that be and try to kind of gain favor in exchange for petty crumbs. But ultimately, you know, history, scripture have shown us that it is a Faustian bargain at the end of the day. These people who think that by cozying up with repressive forces of empire like Israel and the United States at the expense of the actual lives of the people they govern, they do that thinking that they're securing their reign or that they are getting political expediency or perhaps their son might become king next or some kind of delusional worldly fantasy like that. But the funny thing that you mentioned about the Abraham Accords and how they are singularly pernicious, Chris, is that they use this language of kind of this prophetic authority. They invoke Abraham as the father of all three religions and hence gives this, you know, this kind of treacherous collusion, a kind of a prophetic theological tinge. And this is again part and parcel of this Orwellian doublespeak where, you know, this time they have Muslim scholars, even here in America, Muslim scholars who defend that, who are in cahoots with the UAE and Saudi who are mum about the genocide in Gaza. And so historically we've had Muslim scholars in the lead of anti colonial resistance movements. Today you see, they're fully co opted or they're in dungeon prisons like in Saudi right now. I read yesterday that every 25 hours one person is executed under MBS. Saudi Arabia the other day, just somebody I know was detained for around three months, a woman for wearing a kufiyya, a Palestinian kufiyya, and the holy mosque of Mecca. So this is the kind of cancerous kind of relationship that I was referring to earlier. And the funny thing is, Chris, the irony about the Abraham Accords is that in the Islamic intellectual tradition, the Prophet Muhammad was asked about the prophet Abraham and what he stood for. So one of his companions asked the Prophet, tell us about the Abrahamic scrolls. And you know what the Prophet said about that? He said, the prophet Abraham used to speak like this. Oh, you wretched, insolent, conceited king. I did not send you to this world to collect worldly benefits. Rather, I sent you to supplicate or to respond to the supplication of the oppressed on my behalf. To respond to the supplication of the oppressed on my behalf. And this is the exact opposite of what the Abraham Accords backed by the UAE and Saudi, Bahrain, Morocco, do they actually strangulate the oppressed? They are actually all the people living under the rubble or starving or dying from the cold in Gaza were only able to get to that point because of the collusion and collaboration of Arab and Muslim normalizers.
- [20:25]
Chris Hedges
For people who don't know what the Abraham Accords are, this is Jared Kushner's project under the Trump administration. Explain what it's. I mean, in its rough description, it essentially normalizes relationships, diplomatic relationships between Israel and Saudi Arabia at the expense of the Palestinians, of course. But talk about the Abraham Accords and why they are so pernicious.
- [20:51]
Farah Al Shariff
Yeah, so it was signed in 2020, like you correctly said, under the Trump administration. It was, you could say, Kushner's kind of vision alongside Netanyahu, of course. And it was signed between the US and people don't even realize that Palestine is not even part of this accord. They arrogantly cut out the people whose lives are affected. Primarily just this is about them, this is about Palestinians. And yet they weren't consulted. They weren't even present. And so this is part of this kind of effort to kind of enact this cultural change, to promote a kind of Islamic that is a quietest Islam, that is just cultural, that is just cosmetic. Women, hijabs, great. Men who go to the mosque, great. This rote ritual type of Islam that is devoid of its true spiritual core, its prophetic calling, which is what to speak a just word in the face of a tyrant. That is the greatest jihad we're taught in our tradition. So. And it's only later, actually, Saudi itself never signed this. There's an article, if you look it up, maybe one week before October 7th, MBS said, We're very close to signing peace with Israel. And so even now, after the Gaza genocide, that has not been a disqualifier for any of these Arab regimes to stop or take back those treaties. They still have kept their word on these accords on these peace treaties, these trade routes. And so when we say that these Arab armies, these militaristic behemoths, they've only been fighting their own people, they haven't been defending the oppressed that need them in places like Gaza. And now because of these Gulf states coming into the picture, we are seeing a more cancerous kind of form of normalization on the state level, where you see even ordinary journalists, Muslims going online say, oh, you know, we need to coexist, we need to do that. We need to do this. But then how can you coexist with an entity that is essentially trying to basically decimate your entire religious character, your identity, your beliefs, your core scriptural commitments, let alone your brethren's bodies and their right to exist?
- [23:38]
Chris Hedges
Before we talk about, I think you would agree, the kind of, to me, inexplicable silence on the part of most Muslim leaders over the genocide. Let's talk about what these Arab regimes are actually doing in Jordan, in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, the land bridge that was set up, the fleecing of Palestinians by Hala, the shooting down of the active assistance by the Jordanian. Well, they say it was Jordanian. It was probably heavily American. When I was in Jordan, I was a little surprised to see so many American contractors and soldiers, not in uniform, of course, in the hotel where I was at. But let's talk about what they're actively doing. They're not just passive, but the active support for the Zionist state in the midst of the genocide.
- [24:40]
Farah Al Shariff
Oh, yes. I mean, again, if we want to move away from having a fragmented vision in looking at specific states and how they approach Palestine. Palestine has been kind of a revealer and it's pointing us to the longer arc of history. I remind your listeners that these nation states were basically concocted out of a kind of a colonial kind of divide and conquer. Classic strategy after World War I. Things like the McMahon policy or the Sykes Pico. And so these states are cut from this kind of smelly leftovers of the French and the British empires. And people think that just when you declare independence or, you know, now you're sovereign, it doesn't actually mean that we are free or sovereign. On the contrary, it means that the level of control and coercion and repression has gone underground is more ambiguous. It's harder to locate. So that is why, for example, if you go to a protest and place like a Jordanian university and you say something, you could get snatched up, or in Egypt, you know, you express solidarity with the Palestinians, people are afraid to do that because they Think that that could be cause for them to basically disappear and go underground. So, again, this ecosystem of fear not only surveils and kind of mutes, people who are so called, not in a. Who are kind of not in the genocidal, you know, atmosphere. But I like what. There was an Egyptian taxi driver in a video that went kind of viral. He was. He rode with a gentleman from Gaza. And when he found out that he was from Gaza, he started crying and he said, no, no, no, I won't take your money. And this is the least I could do not to take your money. Forgive us. Forgive us, for we are occupied too, he said. And I think that is the sentiment that all Arabs feel, but that they cannot say that we are also occupied. We are also under this thumb of this brutal, repressive system, whereas Palestinians have had the courage to break free from that. So in a sense, Gazza, sometimes the. The Arabs say that it represents the most free place on earth because it broke out of that prison. And so a lot of these prisons that Arabs have, Muslims have, in these Muslim majority Arab countries are mental colonization. If you see a policeman on the street, perhaps they shrink and cower more even. I grew up in, you know, I grew up in Jordan. It's a police state. So I remember my dad, God rest his soul. He was a veteran journalist like you, Chris, and he was the editor in chief of Jordan's oldest daily. I remember it very well that when we started talking about something slightly taboo or slightly dangerous, they would say, oh, the walls. The walls can hear everything. Or he would crack a joke and he'd say, oh, you're the neighbor's daughter. You're not my daughter, just to kind of joke like that. But these were the kinds of jokes that we. Not funny. You know, this is the kind of climate that we grew up in. And now to see it become in this form where it's a form of insanity where you have your own people, your next of blood and kin being kind of exterminated right next door. And not only that, you see the trade route that goes and funds the occupation. Boxes and boxes of tomatoes and cucumbers and lettuce and produce that go to feed and sustain the settlers and the soldiers while Gaza starves.
- [29:12]
Chris Hedges
Let me just make clear that this comes in this pipeline, uae, Saudi Arabia, through Jordan over the King Hussein Bridge.
- [29:19]
Farah Al Shariff
Correct? Correct, Chris. And so, you know, we should probably shed light on the plight of Heba Abu Taha, who the journalist who merely conducted an investigative report about this trade route, this land, you know, lifeline for the occupation. And she is currently doing five years in jail and is paying very hefty penalties for so called cybercrime. And this is the kind of, you know, it's kind of a warning for others that don't you dare expose complicity or collusion or collaboration because you'll end up in a cell or a ditch like her. So it's just, you know, the nice thing about it, Chris though, it's like there's no ambiguity anymore that people can no longer say that, oh, you know, we should give them the benefit of the doubt. They're doing their best. It's a tough neighborhood. I hate this cliche. I hear it all the time. And they're always kind of invoking that, oh, it's a tough neighborhood, politics are dirty, but it's being blown off with crystal clear clarity that this is one occupation, it's one system, the enemy is one. And so it's up to people and their moral clarity and moral courage to every day shed a little bit of that fear because once they partake in it and once they accept it, they say, oh, generations of people who live in fear. And I accept this. I think my generation, and hopefully my children's generation will no longer accept that kind of degradation, denigration and fear based rule.
- [31:02]
Chris Hedges
Yeah, I'm glad you raised the plight of Hewa who as you know, I tried to visit, I filled out all the paperwork and then sat outside the prison, the women's prison in Amman all day and wasn't finally allowed in. How fragile are these regimes? Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt? I sense they're very fragile.
- [31:24]
Farah Al Shariff
Yeah, I mean we forget that the, the, this nation states structure that was cooked up in the kitchen of people like T.E. lawrence and Syka Spico. And basically our constructs, they're recent constructs and we think of them as something that is the status quo since time immemorial, but they're really not. They stand on very fickle ground. As we saw that things can change overnight. And so it reminds me of the story of Pharaoh who in the Quranic scripture that we share with our Jewish and Christian brethren, is that right before, when he got to the zenith of his power, right before he got to Moses, the sea split and swallowed him whole. And he became kind of, until this day, a sign and a kind of a lesson and a symbol for what happens to people who think that they are invincible, for people think that they will live forever. And so God knows what the future brings. But this level of foundational rot, I Don't think can hold much longer.
- [32:41]
Chris Hedges
Let's talk about. You and I were an event. It was a year ago in Toronto. We were talking about Palestine. And what struck me after we spoke is the number of young people who came up and asked me, and probably you, why the Muslim leaders, Muslim leadership didn't say what was not unequivocal in the condemnation of the genocide and unequivocal in the condemnation of the apartheid state of Israel. And I want to ask you that question. How do you characterize the response of the Muslim leadership in the United States?
- [33:25]
Farah Al Shariff
Yeah, I remember that, Chris. And it was heartbreaking and it still is. And I thought about this a lot. And I think it's largely due to the fact that this war on terror rhetoric that kind of weeds out the bad from the so called good Muslims, the good Muslims who are compliant, who don't support so called radical brutal acts of terror. So it's almost as if this colonial rhetoric has been internalized in the consciousness of Muslim scholars and leaders. And so that they say that when perhaps that if we stand with the oppressed, if we speak up for Gaza, the powers that be might think that I support Hamas or that I support this and that. So again, it's like this, not just decimated consciousness. Like I said, it's more than that. It's kind of capitulating completely because you're saying that the vernacular of justice has to be removed from Islam for me to have a seat at the table, for me to gain proximity to power, maybe get the ear of Biden or get the ear of Trump. And I see this happening a lot, that some Muslims are scurrying the favor of the right wing kind of platform and thinking that, oh, at least, you know, we meet on certain points regarding, you know, families and family values and whatnot. So to me, this just signals a huge crisis in our priorities. It signals terrible misunderstanding of the true aim and kind of point of being a Muslim. And that is standing firm in your own principles and ethics and higher morality. That is tethered to the throne of God, that is tethered to the oneness, the true oneness of God. So other than oneness, what do we have? Multiplicity. And multiplicity signals. I'm afraid. I'm afraid of this commitment. What if I do this? What if I say that? And so that is in a sense, a kind of a hidden polytheism. And so when someone who has a position of authority and scholarship and people look up to them and then they lapse in that responsibility, the Whole community is hurt. And the young people are like, where do I locate my Islam? Who am I? What does it mean? And so that is why I think we are in this place. We're too comfortable with ourselves, salaries, upgrading to our SUV and our nice, respectable suburban life while our brethren overseas get killed. It's a complete lapse of leadership and collective morality.
- [36:26]
Chris Hedges
Explain to me this conundrum of Muslims for Trump.
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Farah Al Shariff
I think I do.
- [36:34]
Chris Hedges
It's kind of like Jews for Hitler. I mean, maybe not that extreme, but.
- [36:39]
Farah Al Shariff
I mean, no, but I mean, that's where, you know, that gives you a window and how this destroyed kind of consciousness, this severe inferiority complex where you are willing to basically, you know, shut up and accept racist rhetoric about you and your people. And it's this amnesiac kind of just, you know, the Muslim ban is still. It's still ongoing. Like, it's not like it ended under Biden. And so it saddens me that Muslims for Trump is even a thing, because what you're buying into, you're buying into the very campaign that's going to probably deal the final blow. And already you can see how very vitriolic and toxic X and platforms like that are and full blown Islamophobia, xenophobia. And there's this, like, maybe strongman appeal to people who think that, oh, well, this is a leader. And maybe these are remnants from autocratic, you know, nostalgia that I see bumper stickers in Amman for Saddam Hussein. I guess this is idea that, okay, if this leader is strong and tells it like it is and he doesn't mince his words, then he must have something charismatic or strong.
- [38:12]
Chris Hedges
But at least Saddam Hussein was an enemy to the Zionist state. I mean, I remember I was in Ramallah this summer with Atef Abu Saif, and he said, if you go in these houses, you won't see a picture of Arafat, you'll see a picture of Saddam. But Trump has never done anything positive for Muslims.
- [38:29]
Farah Al Shariff
No, no, it's baffling and it signals a dangerous level of kind of maybe collective insanity. But there are pockets of hope. I think that I guess by and large, this election cycle was manic for everybody. And I think we've reached a point where this lesser of two evils conundrum has reached a point where it can no longer be replicated in future election cycles. People are sick of lesser of two evils. They just want no more evil, no more. They just want the good, the true something, other than, you know, an orange fascist in charge or a black woman who's you know, funded genocide. So this conundrum, it really, the strangulation, this chokehold that we're in, for me, is a good thing because it signals that, okay, at least this leviathan is probably taking its last breaths and that more sane, conscientious people with a moral conscience, with a real pulse, with a real concern for humanity, hopefully will be the ones to come next and inherit this ailing world.
- [39:45]
Chris Hedges
So where do you see us going in the months and years ahead? And then to close, what do you tell young people in particular, young Muslims? But let's just. I don't. For the foreseeable future. For me, it looks pretty dark.
- [40:03]
Farah Al Shariff
Yeah, it's a hard question. But also it keeps me up at night. I think about this a lot. I've always been this intense girl. My family makes fun of me, that even as a younger kid, I was always brooding and thinking about the Muslim world, our affairs, our conditions. So I'd like to refer to a lecture that I was at when I was a student at Georgetown in 2008. My favorite Catholic theologian, Hans Kung, gave the Nostra Aetate annual lecture at the time. And he said something that really blew my mind. He said that in his comparing Judaism, Christianity and Islam, he said that Judaism rests on kind of tribal, hierarchical commitments. And so its natural culmination, its natural telos is this, the ethno religious state of Israel. And that is its final conclusion. And then he went on to say that Christianity is beheld by the papacy and the institutionalization of the church. And that's its logical conclusion. When he talked about Islam, he said Islam is in its essence universalist. And it's tethered by this idea of oneness of man and Muhammad as a mercy to all of humankind, not just Muslims. But their final arc or their final culmination has not been decided yet. So I call on my fellow Muslims to take this opportunity of rampant moral rotation, of decay and destruction in the systemic world order that we live in that has exposed itself as hypocritical, essentially anti Muslim, brutal and completely inhumane to kind of lean in to their agency as Muslims. That can perhaps bring about a brighter future that can perhaps, you know, fulfill this untold role, a positive role collectively that Islam can offer the world. Because unless and until we remain shackled in our mental and spiritual colonized mentality, whether it is about how we know ourselves, how we know religion, how we conduct ourselves politically, we will never break free. And so we have the potential to do that. We have the potential to be Like Malcolm, for me, he's the greatest American Muslim exemplar and courageous leader. We call him the great American Shaheed, the martyr of America, who he himself visited Gaza in 1964, and he said the spirit of Allah was strong in Gaza. So look to these people. Instead of trying to wait for your average imam or your charismatic as shaykh to grow a backbone. You have plenty of exemplars within our tradition, living and dead, including the people of Gaza themselves. There is a Qur'anic kind of pointer there that the oppressed shall become the teachers. They shall become the role models of faith, similarly to how in Christianity the meek shall inherit the earth. So the kind of fortitude that the people of Gaza have let that not go in vain. The other day, I saw a video, Chris, that I can't get out of my mind of a father holding the shroud of his child in the ambulance. And he was speaking so clairvoyantly, so prophetically, that it gave me goosebumps all over. He's saying, ya Netanyahu, ya Arab, O Netanyahu, O you Arabs, O you colluders. Everybody who failed us. Allah is only raising you so that he can tear you down. So don't think that this what you see, all of this supremacy, this militarization, this ironclad power, this supremacy is going to be the name of the game forever. It's only this shocking in its dehumanization, this shocking in its genocidal bloodlust for it to hopefully wither away and usher in a different world, a better world.
- [44:37]
Chris Hedges
Great. Thank you, Farah. I want to thank Diego, Sophia, Thomas and Max, who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.