Passion Play

Chris Floyd

As'ad AbuKhalil (the "Angry Arab") shreds the lazy trope by which Western analysts "explain" the war in the Middle East: the "Shi'ite passion for martyrdom." Here, he takes The Nation to task: Adam Shatz figured it out. It is all about Shi`ite "passion for martyrdom." So that is what it is all about. A passion for martyrdom. I was raised by a Shi`te father (and a Sunni mother): he never inculcated "a passion for martyrdom" in his children. If anything, nobody loved life and its pleasures more than my Shi`ite father. My father did not even know how to pray, and never entered a mosque in his life, but Shatz thinks that all Shi`ite are religious fanatics. But surely As'ad is too angry on this point. After all, it's a radical, nearly incomprehensible concept we're dealing with here: the notion that Arabs – or indeed, any of the strange Others looming in the deserts and jungles "out there" – could be as complex and multifaceted and, dare we say it, as individual as real human beings...

continua / continued