A significant word choice in the Pakistani foreign minister's response at the UN today

[xiphias]

Today, US Sec. of State Colin Powell presented the US's case for Why to Attack Iraq to the UN Security council. Then, all the other members got a chance to speak.

Basically, all the other people made essentially the same speech: thanks, Sec. Powell for talking to us, sorry about the Columbia, glad you're doing this through the UN, sure, we should probably smack down Iraq, we should wait for Dr. Blix to say we should.

But the Pakistani foreign minister made a very interesting and telling statement:

Mr. President, in a statement issued this morning in Islamabad, the prime minister of Pakistan, Mir Zafarullah Jamali, stated, and I quote, "The Muslim Ummah, from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific, is deeply worried that war may break out, and its implications not only for the people of Iraq but for the future stability and polity of the Islamic countries. At this time, the need for inter-civilizational harmony has never been greater."

There's a lot in there. I just want to focus on one word -- "inter-civilizational".

By using that word, Prime Minister Jamali is stating that Iraq and Pakistan are part of one civilization, and the United States, Britain, Germany, France, and so forth, are part of another one. While Pakistan, at this point, is willing to go along with forcing Iraq to comply with UN Security Council resolutions, he is saying, we shouldn't try to push them too far: fundamentally, in the long term, they're on Iraq's side. Iraq and Pakistan are both dar al-Islam; that's an entirely separate civilization from dar al-Harb.

After all, that's the idea of Pakistan as a country: they split off from India because they're part of the Ummah, and India is not. And a lot of Pakistanis view Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb as inevitably in conflict, someday.

Comments

[redbird]

I wonder what they think of my several hundred thousand Muslim neighbors. Una gens sumus: part of our civilization is that there's room for lots of different religions and customs.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

And there are a lot of Muslims that believe that dar al-Islam is anywhere where Muslims are not oppressed, while anywhere they are is dar al-kufr -- even if the people doing the oppressing are Muslim themselves.

That's an attitude on which a world that I'd like to live in can be built.

[redbird]

Yes. This makes New York part of dar al-Islam--as it ought to be, this is home for anyone who claims it--and Saudi Arabia part of dar al-kufr.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

And a lot of Pakistanis view Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb as inevitably in conflict, someday

Unfortunately, they aren't the only ones who do. Of course, you weren't saying they were, but I thought this bore mentioning. It's deeply, dreadfully saddening, all of it.

A.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I was just reading Anthony Burgess's autobiography, and he says about visiting Malaysia, where he taught in the fifties, in the eighties, that they were rushing to the cities and abandoning their traditional culture, which was an oral village based culture, and taking up western tech without any of the cultural things that, in western culture, grew with the tech -- meaning Beethoven and Shakespeare. He said there's no reason why Malaysia should have concert halls and theatres, but if they don't have them and they don't have the things they had in their indigenous culture instead of them, then there's nothing to fill the hole of the oceanic except Islam, and Islam fills it in a potentially dangerous kind of way.

He wrote this in 1990, (and I'm paraphrasing) but it struck me as really interesting in the present, because while it's Malaysia he knew well, it probably applies to other Islamic countries which are modernising and not dealing well with it.

I think I know what he meant by nothing to fill that void except Islam, but I'm not quite sure I can explain it.