The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State    Author: Noah Feldman    A CFR Book. Princeton University Press    April 2008    200 pages    ISBN 978-0-691-12045-4     $22.95

Overview:

Perhaps no other Western writer has more deeply probed the bitter struggle in the Muslim world between the forces of religion and law and those of violence and lawlessness than Noah Feldman.

His scholarship has defined the stakes in the Middle East today. Now, in this penetrating book, Feldman tells the story behind the increasingly popular call for the establishment of the sharia—the law of the traditional Islamic state—in the modern Muslim world.

Western powers call it a threat to democracy. Islamist movements are winning elections on it. Terrorists use it to justify their crimes. What, then, is the sharia? Given the severity of some of its provisions, why is it popular among Muslims? Can the Islamic state succeed—should it?

On the night of July 13, 2001, tens of thousands of people poured into Tiananmen Square to celebrate the International Olympic Committee’s decision to award the 2008 Olympic Games to Beijing. Firecrackers exploded, flags flew high, and cars honked wildly. It was a moment to be savored. Chinese President Jiang Zemin and other leaders exhorted the crowds to work together to prepare for the Olympics. “Winning the host rights means winning the respect, trust, and favor of the international community,” Wang Wei, a senior Beijing Olympic official, proclaimed. The official Xinhua News Agency reveled in the moment, calling the decision “another milestone in China’s rising international status and a historical event in the great renaissance of the Chinese nation.”
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Summary: The Republic of South Africa is both engaging in a ‘vicious and ugly’ civil war and ‘waging an undeclared war against its neighbours’. After reviewing RSA intervention in Mozambique and Angola, and arguing that the front-line states are opposed to apartheid, not to whites or to Western interests, calls for US policy-makers to match words with deeds, namely by backing a policy of economic sanctions. Then prime minister, now president of Zimbabwe.

Robert G. Mugabe is Prime Minister of the Republic of Zimbabwe, and currently chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement.
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If I had a chance, I would kiss Mr. Muller’s forehead. You have “found” something what many knew, were able to see or were trying not to see it as it is. Economic and politic situation around the globe is banging onto our doors, windows and even heads that the ethnic factor is playing an influential role in both domestic and global affairs of countries. Kosovo-Serbia, Israel-Palestine, Azerbaijan-Armenia, Pakistan-India, EU-Turkey and many more – you name it and I will say it. It was mentioned before that ethnic problem is not only limited with political conflicts but surrounds much more wide area including economics too.

The main purpose of publishing this article in my blog was not to criticize it. I would like to share my own view on this multi-ethnicity problem but from a different perspective. World population in my view is mono-ethnic but this ethnicity’s roots are not related with skin, land, language or any other criteria that is needed to establish an ethnic background. In reality this ethnicity is based on status of the persons within the society. Top dogs in terms of economic and political power throughout the world make the first of the caste or varna, and it does not matter which language they speak, where they live, how many wives they have etc. The reason is that their only purpose in this life is to have more than they have right now. In economic terms they life ideology could be defined as “profit maximization” no matter what happens. People kill each other? So what, lets sell arms and weapons and make profit out of it. The world is gone stray? Lets support the casino, brothel, sex club, alcohol and other types of dirty businesses, and make profit out of it. The second caste in this pyramid could be classified as “idiots of society”. There are two types of them, first ones are the “greedy idiots” who would try all their life to be a top dog but they never understand that they are just used as a tool by first varna in their purposes. The others are “happy go idiots” who does not care about anything but themselves. As much as, there is a roof on my head – have food for today( in the best case for tomorrow) then they are happy and ready to die. The third caste is “the blacks”, these people have no value in this world. Does not matter, whether they are in Australia, US, Iraq or Zimbabwe.

In conclusion, I do not care whether people do agree with me, but the reality is that the most of the world is working the way as I have described it. Dignity, pride, love have no place in this world anymore. No more moral values can be seen. This can be changed – individuals have to change – search for better inner-self. We have to know who we are at the first place, where are we coming from and where are going to go.

Summary: Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But in fact, it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, it is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.

JERRY Z. MULLER is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. His most recent book is The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought.

Article:

Projecting their own experience onto the rest of the world, Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. After all, in the United States people of varying ethnic origins live cheek by jowl in relative peace. Within two or three generations of immigration, their ethnic identities are attenuated by cultural assimilation and intermarriage. Surely, things cannot be so different elsewhere.

Americans also find ethnonationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is a product not of nature but of culture, often deliberately constructed. And ethicists scorn value systems based on narrow group identities rather than cosmopolitanism.

But none of this will make ethnonationalism go away. Immigrants to the United States usually arrive with a willingness to fit into their new country and reshape their identities accordingly. But for those who remain behind in lands where their ancestors have lived for generations, if not centuries, political identities often take ethnic form, producing competing communal claims to political power. The creation of a peaceful regional order of nation-states has usually been the product of a violent process of ethnic separation. In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.

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