Miscellanea Islamica

1 A young lady of my acquaintance has discovered the Home of Sufism. She may visit the Islamic Center, and then the Sufis. The influence of Sufi thought was great and only began to change when the oil money began to flow into Arabia. Then rose the Wahhabis with their fundamental strictures and the mystically tinged Sufis were swept from many areas of Islam. To get an idea how different they were, in Arabia the Saudis destroyed architectural remains linked to the Prophet and the family of the Prophet lest the people of Arabia fall into idolatry and saint worship - much like the Shi'a whom the Saudi Wahhabis despised. The Sufis gave us the Mullah Nasruddeen. The Saudis gave us oil and the 19: the Tis'asher. 2 Daniel Pipes believes that teaching Arabic is the route to extremism. I suppose so. I suppose teaching Hebrew was the route that led to the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946. In a way, it was. http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/42501.html "...Only in the case of the Iris Becker Elementary School in Dearborn, Michigan, is the Arabic-language program not obviously pursuing a political and religious agenda. Its program may actually be clean; or perhaps the minimal information about it explains the lack of known problems."

3 Juan Cole on who delivered Iraqi into chaos: http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/42581.html "...With regard to the recent dust-up in the pages of the NYT between Bush and Bremer over the dismantling of the Iraqi Army, Ward Harkavy at the Village Voice reminds us that the mystery has already been solved by former British Home Secretary David Blunkett. He revealed in his memoirs that Cheney and Rumsfeld were the ones pushing for dismantling the Iraqi army, much to the dismay of the British. Bremer was taking orders from Rumsfeld, but being a good soldier has all along declined to blow the whistle on the Neoconservatives who ordered him to do implement several disastrous decisions. My guess? Dismantling the Baath army and the professional bureaucracy was intended as a way of ensuring there were no obstacles to putting corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi in charge of Iraq (that was the Rumsfeld- Wolfowitz- Feith plan). What they didn't know was that Bremer had been charged by his old boss, the State Department, with derailing the Chalabi conspiracy and ensuring that the US ruled Iraq directly for a year or two." 4 CNN's Wolf Blitzer and Representative Charles Boustany ( R-LA) on progress in Iraq: "BOUSTANY: We’re clearly seeing some major improvements. Clearly in the Anbar Province, we’ve seen significant improvement. We were able to walk the streets of Fallujah. Sectarian deaths are down.[…] BLITZER: And Congressman Boustany, you say that the number of casualties is going down. But we took a closer look — and The Los Angeles Times did as well — citing Iraqi Health Ministry numbers. In June, it was 1,227 civilian deaths in Iraq. In July, it went up to 1,753 civilian deaths in Iraq. And in August, the month that just ended, 1,773 civilian deaths in Iraq. Those numbers are going in the wrong direction. BOUSTANY: Well, Wolf, I want to point out that just two or three months ago, I would have never thought that four members of Congress would be able to walk through the streets of Fallujah. That’s a major… BLITZER: But you had a lot of security with you. You had a lot of U.S. military protection. BOUSTANY: We had a platoon of Marines. BLITZER: Yes, well, a platoon of Marines is a lot of Marines to walk through Fallujah. . .