October 12, 2004
Virtual ummah
Dr Olivier Roy, professor at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, has a new book coming out called 'Globalised Islam: the Search for a New Ummah' which he is plugging in an article today in the FT (sorry no link available) and also at Chatham House tomorrow. From the FT article:
The ummah [universal community of Muslim believers] that the fundamentalists are fighting for is not based on a territory: it is a dream that finds on the internet its virtual existence. Websites and chatrooms compensate for the lack of real social roots.
As he says at the beginning of the article "few, if any, among the children of Europe's Muslim immigrants return to wage jihad in the land of their ancestors" and those that join the Iraqi Sunni insurgents tend to be Saudi, Syrian or Jordanian, not volunteers from the west. Salafism (neo-fundamentalist islam) is a tool for uprooting traditional cultures. It rejects cultural dimensions of religion and replaces them with a code of Islamic conduct to suit any situation, from US to Afghanistan. The prime target of the Taliban is not the west, but traditional Afghan culture.
"[Fundamentalism] appeals to an uprooted, disaffected youth in search of an identity beyond the lost cultures of their parents and beyond the thwarted expectations of a better life in the west... a chance to build a new and positive identity."
It brings to mind a fascinating article I read in the Atlantic Monthly a month or so ago called 'Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive' (subscription necessary), written by a journalist who managed to buy an Al Qaeda laptop with all the e-mails and files still intact. From the e-mail correspondence described, you certainly did get a sense of a group of people quite adept at networking with each other, keen to establish their own status and sense of purpose through bickering about budgets and office equipment - just like a multinational corporation in fact. So in their deadly and terrifying pursuit of trying to find a purpose, identity and belonging, these disaffected youths have succeeded in creating a virtual version of the kind of secular organisation they have rejected, or feel rejected by.
October 03, 2004
Text messaging in Kabul
Accoring to an article in the FT magazine yesterday (no online version, sorry), young middle class urbanites in Afghanistan are in the grip of an SMS craze, as a way of flirting with each other without it becoming public.
Farzan, a 22-year old engineering student, says he has seen his girlfriend on only a handful of occasions, when they snatched a few minutes together at the shop where he works, but he peppers her with messages."I send messages saying 'I love you; I miss you; I can't live without you.' Sometimes we fight over SMS for 10 minutes or so," he says. "If I have an hour to spare, I'd spend the whole hour sending messages."
Much of the romantic wireless traffic is kitsch picture messages (ready-made, such as a kitten's face surrounded by hearts) and soppy poems. Afghan men also trade ring-tones, jokes and poems on SMS, including Koranic quotations in Arabic script.
