The Last Straw

In 1812 Sultan Mahmut II sent an order from Topkapi that the wahhabis should be removed from the cities of Makkah, Madinah and Jeddah. It must be noted that the period of Mahmut’s rule, 1839-76, known as the Tanzimat, was, according to the confirmed Islamic perspective (differentiated from an Orientalist reading of events) the point of irreversible decline and fall of the Osmani Dawlah, otherwise known as the Ottoman Empire. This period was the one of disastrous ‘reforms’ from which the Muslim world has yet to recover. The modalities of Islamic governance, law and civic practice that had propelled a civilisation previously unequalled in its capacity to protect and assure the prosperity and freedom of its members, were traded in for a corruption-riddled French bureaucracy, and with it the most destructive of all alien innovations, an interest-bearing bank debt now payable in fiat money to the banks in France, and soon afterwards to those of England. On the back of the success of the Napoleonic Wars that saw the Russians defeated at Austerlitz, the Tanzimat government, having entered into ‘compromise’ with the French, found itself thrust into the Russo-Turkish war (1806-1812). The continual loss of territory as well as the rapidly eroding political prestige of the once powerful Muslim world had begun. It would not be until the heroic rise of the last authentic Sultan and Khalif, Sultan Abdulhamid II, that the banner of Islam would be raised again. For a short but glorious thirty-three years the light of the 7^th century miracle that had burst out from the city of Madinah on the Arabian Peninsula would shine again. In 1908 Sultan Abdulhamid would be deposed, and with that tragic event began 100 years of immitigable failure.

Returning to 1812, in the back-drop to Mehmut II’s order to dispel the wahhabi menace from the holy cities, we can recognise the inevitable ‘bad weather’ that was appearing throughout the entire Muslim world. There was then, as there is now in the 21^st century, no doubt to the pusillanimity and the maleficent behaviour of the deviant anti-Islamic sect commonly referred to in today’s media as ‘orthodox’ or ‘conservative’ Islam. With the collapse of the unifying core of knowledge that had lent power and strength to the Muslim world, the low pressure zones could not but bring about all the terrible storms and disasters that continue to this day to heap humiliation and contempt upon a people who sold away their religion.

The Khedive of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, received his instruction from Istanbul and discharged an expeditionary force to drive out and subdue these rebels. Abdullah ibn Sa’ud, tribal leader and warlord, who was the head of this movement, was captured and, we are told, subdued, and thereupon reaffirmed his allegiance to the Sultan. For the next few years the Hijaz remained relatively free of the wahhabi menace, while their activities continued in the hinterland of the Arabian Peninsula.

It should be noted that all the losses of territories in the Balkans and Eastern Europe were racing ahead, as was the mounting foreign debt owed to the banks. Any rapprochement between the Tanzimat government in Istanbul and their new ‘friends’ involved a further plunging into the abyss. The only time they would loose more and gain less would be when Mustapha Kamel, in his feeble attempt to appease the English at the time of WW I, would surrender the broken remains of what had been a most magnificent civilisation. Within a short period Abdullah ibn Sa’ud was once again sending out raiding parties from the wahhabi stronghold of Dhar’iyya and terrorizing the Muslim inhabitants of tented settlements and small towns. Consequently, in 1818, a second expedition was led by the Khedive’s son, Ibrahim Pasha, crossing from the Red Sea coast along 600 miles of desert to the coast of Dhar’iyya, and there laid siege to and defeated the Saudis. The wahhabi leader was taken prisoner and sent to Istanbul to appear before a court of law.

As a rebel against the Khalif, Sa’ud would simply be executed for high treason; an acknowledged punishment that has existed in nearly all society throughout history, and, moreover, has its precedent within Islamic Law. The rebel would be permitted to perform two raka’ts (a pair of ritual prostrations), as befits a Muslim before facing his death. Nevertheless, upon the insistence of the not yet impotent ulema, they argued that first Sa’ud’s Islam must be verified. This led Sa’ud to stand before the Shaykh al-Islam and be questioned by a body of highly respected scholars. The great Hanafi ulema found Sa’ud to be completely out of Islam, an extreme heretic (zindiq) by admission of his own beliefs, and thereby sentenced him without the privilege of performing two raka’ts. The Amir of the people of Najd was publicly beheaded at Topkapi.

Within time the leadership of the wahhhabi movement devolved to the notorious and equally nefarious Abdal’ Azziz ibn Sa’ud, who based himself in their historical homeland, the region known as Najd, from where they continued their war against Islam. Meanwhile, Britain, who was by then well ensconced in Egypt, having established a permanent presence from the mid nineteenth century, with Lord Cromer, of the Baring banking family, as Governor General, were now, at the opening of the twentieth century, actively perusing new alliances on the Arabian Peninsula. They had no trouble ingratiating themselves to their soon to be vassals. The flattering financial support of the British to Ibn Sa’ud added further impetus to their expansionist plans to control the entire peninsula. Fortified with British guns and a steady flow of money the Sa’udis were using the emblazoned and enraged wahhabi missionaries, named the Mutawwas, to force the remaining Bedouin Arabs into submission and allegiance to the House of Sa’ud. The newly settled Bedouins were placed in fixed colonies or camps called Ikhwans, which can be seen as the prototype for the Israeli nationalist kibbutz.

The Ikhwan colonies, the first of which was established around 1912 at Artawiyya, banded together peoples from the multifarious tribes that had previously travelled freely throughout the land, each one with their unique cultural and linguistic heritage that was expressed through a rich and variegated poetry and oral tradition. Forged into settled camps of zealots and fed on a daily diet of wahhabi doctrines, they found themselves cut off from their past, the roots of their memory of historical Islam severed, and their bonds of loyalty and brotherhood replaced by a new binding force of an extremist ideology.

A second colony was then established at Ghutghut, and as they had done at Artawiyya, the Sa’udis appointed a governor to run it. At its height the Ikhwan movement was comprised of some 200 settlements, and it was with this army of men Ibn Sa’ud was able to establish his hegemony over the Hijaz. By 1929 the two most powerful wahhabi governors, Faizal ad-Dawwish and Sultan ibn Bijad, had come to realize that the Sa’udis were themselves driven by an rapacious lust for wealth along with an obsessive ambition for their own tribal homogeneity – something that had been ripped away from all other tribal groupings. Together they rose up in rebellion. Faizel ad-Dawwish was captured and taken prisoner, but upon recanting was forgiven and set free, only to resume his insurrection against the tribe he had helped put in power. Ibn Bijad was also captured and subsequently imprisoned in Riyadh. Dawwish fled to Iraq but was shortly thereafter picked up by the British and handed back over to their Sa’udi friends. The Ikhwan settlements were razed to the dust, Artawiyya and Ghutghut blown into oblivion, while the doctrinal seeds of sedition against historical Islam had survived, lodged in the breasts of dispossessed and disenfranchised zealots. There you have the progenitors of the 21^st century suicide bombers.

The wahhabis, who had put a rebel zindiq into power, became an embarrassment to their English friends who had made them kings. Many will recall the more famous and glamorous Lawrence, immortalised by Hollywood, but in real life abandoned by his Government, as England dropped their support for T.E. Lawrence’s friend, Sharif Hussein of Makkah, to put their full force behind Sa’ud. On January 8, 1926 the rebel Najdi declared himself ‘king’ having been formally appointed by Britain and then officially recognized by them in 1927. When Winston Churchill, sitting on a barge on the Nile, broke the good news to Ibn Sa’ud that he was now recognized as the King of Arabia, Ibn Sa’ud said : “Sa’udi Arabia!” In 1932 the country’s name was officially recorded. The Saudis would in time prove equally embarrassing to their soon to be American friends, but not before the enormously lucrative ARAMCO (Arab American Oil Company) would bring unprecedented wealth to first the Americans then the Kingdom.

An overland trade route was opened from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf named the Darb an-Nasara or the Christian’s Road. Isolated airports and walled compounds that eventually developed into entire cities were constructed by the Bechtel Group. Inside these duty free zones all the societal and religious rules were removed. Likewise, in the gaudy Las Vegas styled palaces of the ruling family, the whisky could flow. Today Bechtel has moved aside for Halliburton, and the Saudi royal family are again attempting to distance themselves from the ‘strict wahhabi doctrines’ that have become synonymous with the perpetrators of the famous attack in New York on two sky-scrapers.

Between the heady days of Sir Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell (not Lawrence) in Arabia and today, many moves in this compelling ‘great game’ have been made. Jordan also got an English appointed king, so did Iraq, Syria and Egypt. Kuwait was later carved out of Iraq and it too was given its own a king, related to the ones in Saudi Arabia. By the mid 20^th century many of those then decrepit and decayed pseudo monarchies were replaced with modern secular governments that this time had been hatched by the Americans, as US hegemony had come to replace the faded British Empire. The invasion of Kuwait for their having engaged in ‘slant drilling’ into Iraqi oil fields, and the subsequent Desert Storm that ensued, and then the toppling of the criminal Saddam Hussein a decade later in Operation Iraqi Freedom, can been seen within a deeper historical background.

As the Global Economy remains in the throws of un-diminishing aftershocks, a most extraordinary development has occurred with one of the largest and most prestigious banks, one which is based in the UK. As it has been unequivocally determined that by the unrestrained and unconscionable greed of bankers and other related persons in the financial markets, a most foul and un-natural disaster befell the world. The fall-out continues as the great financial houses of America and Europe continue to collapse, spreading into other related industries dependant on the limitless expansion of credit. The collapse of the US housing market did not ‘start it all’, but rather the utterly irresponsible lending practices that were (while it lasted) wildly lucrative, and completely legal! Now Detroit’s Big 3, actually rather small and they have been for quite some time, are partitioning the US Government to bail them, as they did with Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, and on and on. Of course, this is State interference in the Free Market Economy, an absolute mortal sin within the sanctity of liberal Democracy, and in case everyone has forgotten, why the Cold War was fought, or why we were told it was fought. The introducing of parastatals to prevent the rampant theft of a country’s natural resources was why Achmed Sukano in Indonesia and later Salvadorian President Allende, both democratically elected, were overthrown by CIA backed coups. It is what was removed from the table when the ANC were handed political power at the end of the apartheid government in South Africa. It is thrown in the face of Putin by die-hard Reaganomics Republicans.

The politicians had been well paid to keep their noses out of The Market. Now they are being blamed for not having seen it coming. Quite frankly they have served their constituencies well, if you understand that the ones they have so ignominiously served were those that paid them, not (and we can not be so naive) those that vote for them.

The above mentioned prestigious UK bank, unlike the majority of their counterparts on both sides of the Atlantic, have gone to the oil rich Arabs, some of the very ones whose families were made kings by order of the British Crown at the hand of an exceedingly witty and most particularly inebriated Government Minister. And is it not fitting that this great institution of 19^th century global imperialism and 20^th century usury capitalism (that has orchestrated devastating wars against ordinary, albeit unfortunate, Muslim peoples) should now be propped up by those very same Arabs? Can this be the last straw?

A Look Into The Wooden O Of Shakespeare’s Political Plays

What follows are two essay questions that were in the Shakespeare final exam for the second year students at Dallas College, an institute of higher learning located in Cape Town, which offers a course in political studies.

After the two initial exam questions there follows a précis of the material covered in the preceding (first) semester. From there a brief sketch of what was examined with the first year class, followed by an elucidation of the material studied in the third and final year.  All together it makes up the three year course for Shakespeare & Rhetoric.


Essay Question 1

Many Elizabethans had a keen interest in Roman history plays, not least because the great military general Julius Caesar was purported to have set foot on British soil. Consequently, the period from the death of Julius Caesar to the crowning of Octavius as Emperor Augustus, marking the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of Empire, and continuing on to the birth in Britain of Constantine in the fourth century, who had an English mother and a Roman father, was of interest to the Elizabethan audience. Many believed that Elizabeth was a direct heir of Constantine. Certainly the people at that time were overwhelmingly monarchist, and only a few would have known much about republicanism. Caesar was a king in all but name, while thrice he refused the crown when offered it. Shakespeare’s audience would certainly have seen the assassination of Caesar as a form of regicide. “I do fear the people / Choose Caesar for their king,” was spoken by a gloomy Brutus; when heard by the calculating Cassius this cheered him up. Why did Cassius need Brutus to pursue his plot? Also in Act I Scene II, where Caesar and Anthony share an intimate moment amidst the noisy celebrations of Caesar’s latest victory against Pompey – paralleling the one just acted between Brutus and Cassius – it is an insightful Caesar who says: “Let me have about me men who are fat: / Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.” What is this but a gnawing ambition recognised by Caesar in the conspirator and soon-to-be murderer? Now go to the two funeral speeches. What is Caesar’s crime for which he was killed? Brutus tells us. Take the two famous orations, Brutus’s and Anthony’s, and compare them with each other. Then compare the two intimate asides that transpired in Act I between first Brutus and Cassius then Mark Anthony and Caesar.


Essay Question 2

While Queen Elizabeth reigned it was the Cecils, first Lord Burghley, William Cecil and then his son Robert Cecil, who effectively ruled Britain. Their enemy at Court was the handsome, audacious and at times reckless Lord Essex who had been a favourite of both the people (for his prowess and daring on the battlefield) and the Queen (for his incorrigible charm at Court), but ultimately he was executed by her (upon Cecil’s insistence). Essex’s friend and also Shakespeare’s, Lord Southampton, was imprisoned for his suspected role in the Essex Rebellion. Recall that the two long narrative poems by Shakespeare, Venus and Lucrece, were dedicated to Southampton, and some believe that the he address in the Sonnets is indeed Southampton.

Essex and his friends and supporters hoped to save the monarchy from being subjugated by a cabinet of powerful and influential lords, and planned a rebellion that would have effectively removed Robert Cecil and his coterie, including the powerful head of the Elizabethan secret service, Sir Frances Walsingham. Essex’s friends had commissioned Shakespeare’s company to perform Richard II as a rallying call. They used the need to remove an effeminate king, Richard II, as a stand-in for the actual feminine queen, Elizabeth. “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” was recorded as having been said by the queen in a register kept by her Keeper of the Rolls. She was not altogether pleased with the association.

King Richard, while known for his goodness, lacked the decisiveness to command and lead his kingdom. Shakespeare portrayed Richard’s advisors, Bushy, Bagot and Green as disingenuous flatterers, which the astute members of his audience would easily recognise as being a satire upon Robert Cecil and his inner circle. The historical event of the usurpation of Richard can be seen as the seed that gave rise to the Wars of the Roses. We may refer to this as hubris leading to nemesis. Shakespeare’s Henry VI Parts I-III, culminating in Richard III, explores the theme of this destructive civil war that tore the fabric of England. We know of Shakespeare’s involvement with Essex and Southampton and the dialogue he carried out on stage with his audience exploring vital contemporary issues, carefully embedded in plays depicting past historical events, some from earlier periods of English history and others as far back as ancient Rome. Therefore, from Richard II to Richard III we can recognise a form of gloss, an interpretation, through which Shakespeare explored contemporary social and political affairs. Write about this approach and give examples from the plays. Then see what you might extrapolate from those events to modern current affairs. ‘Shakespeare was not for an age but for all times,’ wrote Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare. Give examples and explain your points.

There then is the Final Exam in Shakespeare & Rhetoric for the second year students at Dallas College. Prior to this was the Mid-Term Exam, given a few months earlier, which also had two essay questions. The first was centred on the completion of the Henry VI trilogy plus its finale, Richard III. It dealt with the forceful, beautiful and at times cruel Queen Margaret who fought ferociously to retain her crown and protect her son’s inheritance, despite her husband’s flaccid will and cracked mind. She ended up a deranged prophetess left to wander the corridors of the palace now occupied by those who had dispossessed her. Opposite her was the master Machiavellian, Richard III, brilliant, dangerous and doomed. “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” The students were asked to create biographical profiles, derived from passages of the four plays, of these two main protagonists.

The second essay question was on Julius Caesar, which we were still studying, having moved from the English History Plays to the Roman Plays. The question was to compare Brutus, the final defender of the once highly acclaimed Roman Republic and co-murderer of Caesar, with Robespierre, a major ideologue of the French Republic and complicit in the killing of a king, a queen, other royals, aristocrats and some thousands of ordinary Frenchmen who did not conform to his idea of their freedom. ‘Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more’ was Brutus’s legal argument as he explained to the people why Caesar had to be killed.  With a rallying cry at the Capitol when Caesar was stabbed nearly identical to the famous mantra of the French Revolution, it is not surprising to learn that Robespierre greatly admired Brutus, “for Brutus was an honourable man”, and was known to have studied the play by the famous English bard. That completes the Second Year.

There is now the material of the First Year. It began with a brief introduction to the poet from Stratford-on-Avon. Then the fascinating scene in Elizabethan London as this famous city, now a burgeoning metropolis, was bursting with life from a vast world trade resulting from a most powerful and modern English navy that brought goods and people from every corner of the globe. There were new sciences, languages and some old vices all competing for the attention of a very bright twenty year old Will, who would soon capture the world. They called him ‘an upstart crow.’

The first play we studied was Richard II then the two Henry IV plays, centring on the forging of the character of Prince Hal. Lastly, the heroic Henry V “Once more unto the breach, dear friends” was read.

Going now to the third and final year of the course, it centres on two plays. The first is Coriolanus, reputably Shakespeare’s most political play. It is an exploration of democracy juxtaposed on the nature of personal rule, or tyranny as some refer to it, taking pros and cons from each side and retaining that breadth of ambiguity on Shakespeare’s part to allow his audiences to interpret the work. It has been used in different eras to support nearly every position on the political spectrum. Today it is hardly performed, since Western democracy is the only choice on the menu.

The remainder of the third year is dedicated to Hamlet. What a piece of work is a man. This play, more than any other in the entire opus of world literature, contains some of the greatest lines ever composed by man. Hamlet is studied as a psychological character as if he were an actual human being. Goethe placed the play into his seminal work, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. We started by simply reading the play, to enjoy it. We recited passages in class. There are the many great soliloquies. What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? The students gave oral commentaries on some of these most renowned passages. It is a play rich beyond our expectations. A play so fecund in meanings that it has not yet, after 400 years, exhausted appreciation for it. The masterful use of metaphor to say a thing so apropos, so sublimely, that we delight in what secrets the tongue can reveal.

For the last semester the entire focus is on reading Hamlet as a gloss for the most vital of all issues confronting Elizabethan England. Taking the excellent scholarship of Lilian Winstanley as a guide, in her 1921 study prepared at the University College of Wales, entitled Hamlet and the Scottish Succession, we re-read the play as a key to understanding those volatile political events involving James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Lord Darnley, James’s father, was murdered by the Earl of Bothwell, who then married Mary Queen of Scots, James’s mother. Compare this to King Hamlet who was murdered by his brother, Hamlet’s uncle, who then marries Hamlet’s mother. "A little more than kin and less than kind", replied Hamlet. We encounter Essex and Cecil (with William and Robert joined as one character) on stage in a play about Denmark which is, it turns out, Scotland.

The fourth year of Dallas College in Cape Town has just completed. The core syllabus of the college is comprised of Geo-Politics, Lit-Politics and Bio (biography) Politics. Added to this core a few languages have been offered. We started with Arabic which was then replaced by Osmanli Turkish, and Urdu. There are Qur’anic Studies, taught by some our best scholars in this time, and also IT to assist the learners in the necessary use of tools required in this 21st Century. In the midst of this challenging curriculum is Shakespeare & Rhetoric, concentrating on the political plays.

The approach of this new paideuma, classical yet radical for these times, was envisaged by Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, a Dallas from Scotland, who lent his name to the college. Its aim is to produce a new generation of leaders. There must be the will to support this undertaking commensurate with the commitment and will of the lecturers, the administration and its excellent students. The need for it could not be greater, and the age demands it, for what now passes for a modern education has failed young people who deserve much better.