A Sceptical Islamist

The centrality of Arabic to the unity of the Ummah

"The fragmentation of the Ummah has been more than just political; just as serious has been its intellectual disintegration. Where once there was an Ummah-wide network of intellectual discourse that linked Muslims all over the world, today the Ummah is fragmented into Muslim communities with more interaction with the countries of their former colonial masters, be they Britain, France or Russia, than with each other; and increasingly even those channels of communication are being replaced by the cultural hegemony of America. One factor above all has been central to this process: that of language.

"Mustafa Kemal famously ripped Turkey away from its Islamic roots by westernising its language, replacing its Arabic script with Roman letters, and making the country’s Islamic heritage inaccessible to subsequent generations of Turks. Similar policies were pursued in other Muslim countries, particularly those under communist rule. What is less recognised is that Muslims all over the world have been similarly distanced from Islam by another linguistic process: the marginalisation of Arabic."

Palestinian politics settle into familiar pattern after hints of radical change

(News/Analysis, Crescent International, January 2009.)

For a few short weeks in the fall, after Palestinian president Mahmood Abbas announced that parliamentary and presidential elections would take place this month, and that he would not be standing for re-election, Palestinian politics seemed on the point of a radical shake-up. Last month, however, the various dislodged pieces settled back into a familiar, sterile pattern, and it quickly became clear that nothing had changed at all.