Resurrecting Empire

by Rashid Khalidi



After searching and reading about 'Neocolonialism' I came to a conclusion that what is going on right now all over the world especially Muslim World is not coming under 'Neocolonialism' but we need to create new terminology 'Re-colonialism'. Neocolonialism - USA and Western Countries control other worlds indirectly influencing in their economical and social activities. Re-colonialism - It is like colonial power. Conquer other nations and occupy them (Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq etc) - Ismail

Passage from this book:

Page 26

Palestine was almost as hard for Great Britain to conquer in World War I as Iraq, obliging it to wage a hard campaign that took even longer than that in Iraq. After a series of disturbances and riots, the country erupted into a lengthy and bloody nationwide popular revolt against the British from 1936 until 1939. This revolt eventually succeeded in the rebels' taking over several urban centers, and could only be mastered by means of the largest single pre-World War II colonial deployment of British Forces. The Syrians resisted the French in similarly stubborn fashion, obliging them to bombard and subjugate Damascus three times in the course of major military efforts, in 1920, during the nationwide Syrian revolt of 1925-26, and again in 1945.

The numbers of people killed by colonial forces as they suppressed this resistance were so high. In the most lethal of the French bombardment of Damascus in 1925 in revenge for having been driven out of much if the city, French forces killed over 1,400 people, almost all of them civilians. Earlier in 1925, after a similar humiliation in Hama, the French had killed 344 people, again mainly civilians, during a punitive aerial bombardment of the town. french forces later to kill a mans as 1,000 in a similar attack in May 1926 after they once again lost control of the Damascus neighborhood of the Maydan. The number of those killed in the Syrian country side, especially in the Jabal Druze regioen where the revolt began, are much harder to determine, but were also undoubtedly very high.

Iraq, Morroco, Libya, and Syria were the laboratory where the military high-technology of the post-World War II era was first tried out, and where the textbook on the aerial bombardment of civilians were written. One Royal Air Force officer wrote of the 1920 Iraq campaign that after "the most prominent tribe which it is desired to punish" had been chosen, "the attack with bombs and machine guns must be unrelenting and unremitting and carried our continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, corps, and cattle. The RAF's "Notes on he Method of Employment of the Air Arm in Iraq" stated of this air campaign that "within 45 minutes a full sized village...can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed and injured by four or five planes which offer them no real target and no opportunity for glory or avarice. Not surprisingly, at least six thousand and perhaps as many as eighty five hundred or even ten thousand Iraqis were killed during the suppression of the 1920 revolt, many of them civilians. The casualities in Morocco and Syria among civilains during the French military campaigns were similarly high.

Overview

Begun as the United States moved its armed forces into Iraq, Rashid Khalidi's powerful and thoughtful new book examines the record of Western involvement in the region and analyzes the likely outcome of our most recent Middle East incursions. Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of the political and cultural history of the entire region as well as interviews and documents, Khalidi paints a chilling scenario of our present situation and yet offers a tangible alternative that can help us find the path to peace rather than Empire.

We all know that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Sadly, as Khalidi reveals with clarity and surety, America's leaders seem blindly committed to an ahistorical path of conflict, occupation, and colonial rule. Our current policies ignore rather than incorporate the lessons of experience. American troops in Iraq have seen first hand the consequences of U.S. led "democratization" in the region. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict seems intractable, and U.S. efforts in recent years have only inflamed the situation. The footprints America follows have led us into the same quagmire that swallowed our European forerunners. Peace and prosperity for the region are nowhere in sight.

This cogent and highly accessible book provides the historical and cultural perspective so vital to understanding our present situation and to finding and pursuing a more effective and just foreign policy.

Meet The Author

Rashid Khalidi, author of three previous books about the Middle East - Origins of Arab Nationalism, Under Siege, and the award-winning Palestinian Identity-is the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies and director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. He has written more than seventy-five articles on aspects of Middle East history and politics including pieces in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and many journals. Professor Khalidi has received fellowships and grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Rockefeller Foundation; he was also the recipient of a Fulbright research award. Professor Khalidi has been a regular guest on numerous radio and TV shows, including All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, Morning Edition, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and Nightline.

Table Of Contents: 

Introduction : the perils of ignoring history
Ch. 1 The legacy of the Western encounter with the Middle East 1

Ch. 2 America, the West, and democracy in the Middle East  37
Ch. 3 The Middle East : geostrategy and oil 74

Ch. 4 The United States and Palestine 118
Ch. 5 Raising the ghosts of empire 152

In the Shade of Qur'an

In the Shade of Qur'an

By Sayyid Qutb

Forward to ‘ In the Shade of the Qur'an’

By

Professor Muhammed Qutb

It gives me great pleasure to write this Forward to In the Shade of the Qur’an in its English version. The book is the fruit of the most productive years of its author’s intellectual life and, at that same time, a vivid expression of the sacred battle which he fought and which culminated in his martyrdom in 1966.

The larger part of this work was written when the author was in jail in the period 1954 -1964. This was a period of complete solitude, when writing was the main preoccupation of the author and during which he lived totally ‘in the shade of the Quran’.

The author’s vigorous struggle, for which he was imprisoned, then killed, was, at the practical level, an attempt to achieve the implementation of Islam in the shape of community which practises Islam in its life and preaches the need for its realization until it becomes the actual code of practice for the society as a whole. At the intellectual level, however, the author’s life struggle is embodied in a collection of books devoted to explaining the true nature of Islam, its fundamentals, values and laws. The largest and most important of these works is undoubtedly In the Shade of the Qur’an.

  

   The book is a ‘campaign of struggle’ because it is, indeed, much more than a commentary on the Qur’an.

   The Qur’an is the book of Islam. Hardly a generation has passed since the dawn of Islam without the appearance of one or more commentaries which explain the meaning of the Qur’an. Having spent a considerable part of his life ‘in the shade of Qura’n’and, having joined the struggle for the sake of Islam, the author of this work did not intend to write just another commentary. He had a different objective which he felt could be attained through writing his commentary.

   Our present age has its own features which, perhaps, have never existed in any period of history. They are the ones which gives this commentary its own colouring and determine its points of emphasis.

  

   Muslims, for their part, are now far removed in their practical life from the true nature of Islam. The image of Islam they present by their way of life is nothing more than the indistinguishable negative of the true image of  Islam as it was practiced by the early Islamic generations, who perfectly fulfilled God’s (Allaah’s) own description of them:

            “You are the best community that has ever been raised up for mankind: You enjoin the doing of what is right and forbid what is wrong, and you believe in God.” (3:110) Hence they were able to write that incomparable page in human history. They established truth and justice on earth and raised for mankind an inimitable civilization which builds up its structure in the material and spiritual worlds at the same time. It is a civilization which unites the two worlds and achieves harmony between body and soul, religion and politics, faith and science, the present life and the hereafter, the practical and the ideal.

   Non-Muslims, on the other hand, confront humanity which a host of philosophical, social, political and economic doctrines which banish religion from practical life. At best, such doctrines restrict religion to a tiny corner of man’s conscience so that it may become purely a relationship between the individual and his Lord that has no bearing whatsoever on society and its active life, or, at worst, fight it tooth and nail and bar its very existence. As a result, human life is full of many sorts of political, social, and economic injustice which know no limits. It witnesses various types of intellectual and moral perversion unknown in history. The advocates of such perversion and deviation try nevertheless to dress their erring ways in a scientific garment and they hold to them as if they were truth itself or the ideal sought after. This they do despite all that they suffer in consequence of nervous and psychological diseases – worry and restlessness, madness and suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction and crime.

   What is worse is that these deviant philosophical, social, political and economic doctrines now dominate the lives of contemporary Muslims, wearing the false disguise of a ‘modern’ human civilization. Thus they poison the lives of the Muslim peoples to a larger degree that they do the life of the West because the Muslims of today have deserted Islam and are unaware of its true nature and fundamental value.

   Hence the vigorous intellectual and practical ‘campaign of struggle’ to which the author devoted himself was an attempt to explain to contemporary Muslims the true nature of Islam. His driving objective was that the Muslims of today should be able to live and practice true Islam in the same way as the early Islamic generations. They would then rescue themselves and would be able to show all mankind the road to salvation.

...to read more buy the books (The Qur'an)