(Your Voice in a World where Zionism, Steel, and Fire have
turned Justice Mute)

In the early part of the Twentieth Century, Arab culture began to experience a second awakening after having been deep-freezed for several centuries in the medieval dark caves of Ottoman rule.

However, that burgeoning Arab renaissance was never consummated in the kind of social and cultural transformation that Europe underwent in its Age of Renaissance. This was because European colonial policies in first part of the Twentieth Century could achieve their long-term objectives only in such conditions where the Arab World would remain precisely quasi-modernized, i.e., neither modernized enough to become a threat nor un-modernized to the point of being detached from the global economic system on which European colonialism thrived.

Hence the Arab World, and by extension Arab culture, made its exit from the dungeons of Ottoman stupor to the deformities of incomplete [and dependent] modernization.

Either way, the period of the second Arab awakening at the turn of the Twentieth Century contained sparks of original thinking and a genuine yearning for emancipation.

Below you shall find two articles from that period. The first of the two is from 1919, by the Islamic thinker Muhammad Rashid Rida commenting on the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and arguing that socialism is NOT necessarily opposed to Islam, except in certain aspects that those opposed to socialism are just as guilty of.

The second piece is from 1901, by Shibli Shummayil, who despite his opposition to the 'atrocious act of political assassination', or 'social killing' as he terms it, calls on people to not be all wrapped up in the act itself or its perpetrators, but to look beyond it into the social ills which caused it. He disapproves of anarchist methods, but refuses to ignore their motives as the mainstream media in Europe had been doing after the assassination of US President William McKinley. Given that Shummayil was writing in 1901, it seems that 'terrorism experts' in the West have not learned anything over the last one hundred years!!

They too might learn something from reading Shibli Shummayil's article...

FAV