Excerpt:
Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion. Paul Berman's best chapter, in Terror and Liberalism, is mildly entitled 'Wishful Thinking'—and Berman is in general a mild-mannered man. But this is a very tough and persistent analysis of our extraordinary uncertainty. It is impossible to read it without cold fascination and a consciousness of disgrace. I felt disgrace, during its early pages, because I had done it too, and in print, early on. Contemplating intense violence, you very rationallly ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.
Quiz: In what American town was Islamism "decisively shaped"? (You'll find the answer in the Part One of the article. Hint: the time was 1949.)
In the restaurant where I ate lunch today, I did a double-take when the server introduced himself. His first name was the same as the terrorist philosopher about whom Amis writes in the Guardian piece. I asked the server how he spelled his name. He spells it differently ("Saeed"), but it was pronounced the same way (if my interpretation of how "Sayyid" is pronounced is correct, that is).
ReplyDeleteCurious, I did a Google search on "saeed sayyid" and found this in Wikipedia (at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid):
Sayyid (Arabic: سيد ) (plural Saadah) is an honorific title often given to males accepted as descendants of the Islamic prophet Muhammad through his grandsons, Hassan and Husayn, the sons of his daughter Fatima Zahra and his son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib (who was Muhammad's younger cousin and had been raised in his household). Female descendants of the same lineage are given the name Sayyida, Alawiyah, Syarifah or Sharifah. However if one's mother is a descendant of the Prophet whilst one's father is not, then one cannot bear the title Sayyid, but may still claim descent.
Some Muslims also use the term sayyid for the descendants of Abu Talib, uncle of Muhammad, by his other sons: Jafar, Aqeel and Talib.
The term should not be confused with the popular name "Sa'id" or "Saeed", which is an Arabic and Persian word meaning "happy". Another word sometimes confused with sayyid is sha'hid, the Arabic term for martyr.
The word means literally "master"; the closest English equivalent would be Sir or Lord. In the Arab world itself, the word is still used as a substitute for Mister, as in Sayyid John Smith. The same concept is expressed by the word sidi (from Arabic word 'Sayyidi') in the western dialects of Arabic.
Alevis use seyyid (Turkish) as an honorific before the names of their saints.
Other Arabic honorific terms include sheikh and sharif. The line of Hassani sayyids who ruled Mecca, Medina, Iraq and now rule in Jordan, the Hashemites, bore the title Sharif. In the Arab World Sharif is usually reserved for descendants of al-Hassan whilst sayyid is used for descendants of al-Husain.