In a dispute between Hamas and Fatah, it's tempting to take the old
Kissinger line re the Iran–Iraq War: It's a shame they can't both lose. But, in
fact, only one side wins: In Gaza, al-Aqsa University has just announced that
female students will be required to attend in proper Muslim garb from head to
toe — i.e., the full body bag. At present, some still wear headscarf, trousers,
and a long coat, but that's too revealing for the new Gaza, so time to get fitted
for your burka, niqab, or abaya. Al-Aqsa University is funded by the
Palestinian Authority — i.e., Yasser Arafat's old Fatah — but it's controlled
by Hamas. The higher-education minister, Ali Jarbawi, fumed impotently from
Ramallah that the new dress code is illegal and must not be implemented, but
the hard men on the ground in the Gaza Strip regard him as just another
irrelevant member of a shriveling personality cult for a dead kleptocrat with a
taste for Aryan rent boys.
And so it
goes across the region: Regimes that represented nothing but their Swiss bank
accounts have fallen, and in their stead arises the only alternative — an Islam
purified by decades in opposition to the secularists and distilled to a
scorching 175 proof. What else is left?
Some
years ago, for a telly documentary, the BBC sent the novelist Lawrence Durrell
back to Alexandria, the setting of his eponymous Alexandria Quartet, his
"prose poem to one of the great capitals of the heart." Durrell had
lived in Egypt during the war years, and did not enjoy his return. "The
city seemed to him listless and spiritless, its harbor a mere cemetery, its
famous cafés no longer twinkling with music and lights," wrote Michael
Haag in Alexandria, City of
Memory. "His favourite bookshop, Cité du Livre on the rue Fuad, had
gone, and in others he found a lamentable stock."
Only on
the Western fringe of the Ummah, in a few Moroccan redoubts, can you still
discern the flickers of the way it was. Otherwise, to anyone who knew the
"Muslim world" of the mid–20th century, today's Maghreb and Levant
are dull places, drained of everything but Islam. And Durrell was returning in
1977: Another third of a century on, and Alexandria's stock is even more
lamentable. Indeed, his cast of characters would be entirely bewildering to
contemporary Alexandrians: an English writer (of course), a Greek good-time
girl, a homosexual Jew, a wealthy Copt. In the old days, Alexandria bustled
with Britons, Italians, and lots and lots of Greeks. All gone. So are the Jews,
homo- and hetero-, from a community 50,000 strong down to some four dozen
greybeards keeping their heads down. I got an e-mail a year or so back from the
great-grandson of Joseph Cattaui, a Jew and Egypt's finance minister back in
the Twenties: These days, the family lives in France — because it's not just
that in Egypt a Jew can no longer be finance minister, but that in Egypt a Jew
can no longer be. Now, in
the absence of any other demographic groups to cleanse, it's the Copts' turn to
head for the exits — as in Tripoli and Benghazi it's the blacks'. In the
once-cosmopolitan cities of the Arab world, the minority communities are
confined to the old graveyards, like the rubbish-strewn Jewish cemetery of
broken headstones, squawking chickens, and hanging laundry I wandered through
in Tangiers a while back. Islam is king on a field of corpses.
Nowadays,
for the cosmopolitan café society Durrell enjoyed, you have to go to the cities
of multicultural Europe, where "diversity" is not a quirk of fate but
the cardinal virtue. At Westminster, the House of Commons has just voted in
favor of same-sex marriage. Almost simultaneously, a group calling itself the
Muslim London Patrol posted a YouTube video of its members abusing a young man
for "walking in a Muslim area dressed like a fag." Another Londoner
is made to empty his beer can: "No drink in this area." An
insufficiently covered woman is warned, "This is not so Great Britain. This is a Muslim area."
The
"moderate Muslim" Maajid Nawaz writes in the New York Times that his youthful European-born
coreligionists, back from Islamic adventuring during the Arab Spring, are
anxious to apply the lessons learned abroad. The Danish group Kaldet til Islam
(Call to Islam) has introduced "Sharia-controlled zones" in which "morality
patrols" of young bearded men crack down on underdressed and bibulous
blondes. In the Balearic Islands, Muslims took against the local meter maids,
and forced the government to withdraw them. In Dagenham, 20-year-old Naomi Oni,
a black Londoner, suffered horrific burns after a woman in a niqab hurled acid
in her face. She was returning home from her job at Victoria's Secret. Not
secret enough.
Meanwhile,
the BBC reports that February 1 was the first World Hijab Day, in which
non-Muslim women from 50 countries took a stand against
"Islamophobia" and covered themselves to show how much they objected
to society's prejudice against veiled women. From Gaza to Alexandria to
Copenhagen to London, I don't think we'll have to worry about that. As
Balthazar, Durrell's homosexual Jew, muses, "Narouz once said to me that
he loved the desert because there 'the wind blew out one's footsteps like
candle-flames.' So it seems to me does reality" — for the footsteps of
Copts in Egypt, meter maids in Majorca, and Victoria's Secret clerks on the
streets of the East End.
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