Rocket State

This is essential viewing, especially after reading Seamus' post from last October. Hilarious stuff... A great little movie.

IR-IKU SINIFI

Some footage of our fellow international relations students in Turkey. A few of the folks in the class that graduated in 2005 made a video. Here is one of their descriptions:

"In 2005, I and my class were graduating from the university. I made two VCDs as a memory of university days and dealed them to my friends... I won't upload them to YouTube. However, I just wanted to make you watch the intro of the discs, because it is a summary of our university days and everybody in our class, except 2 persons which don't want to be shown in YouTube amd many lecturers of us, can be seen in this video. The music is composed by Melih Kibar and first used in the most famous Turkish comedy movie "Hababam Class"... Our class was called "IR-IKU Class 2000/2005"... IR means "International Relations", IKU means "Istanbul Kultur University"... I hope you'll enjoy this video..."

Class photos

In the distant past (October 2006), when our thesis was a vaguely threatening concept that was lurking somewhere in the future, some of us from the DCU part-time IR class of 2005-07 went for a meal in Da Pino. It has taken nine months for these photos to be born into cyberspace, but at long last I am posting a random selection of Sasha's photos from that night. Some people seemed to have been more camera shy than others. Apologies if anyone doesn't like how their photos came out - I certainly look ridiculous in the one with me in it...

Names are L-R or clockwise. Please feel free to post witty captions as comments...

A full table of students

Declan & Liz

Liz, Eva, Ian, & Kealan

Sasha, Liana, & Eva

Liana, Liz, Sasha, Declan, Lorna, & Paul

Eoin & Tom

Kealan, Ian, Eva, Eoin, Liana, & Tom

Some light reading on political Islam

I'm about halfway through Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East by Professor Fred Halliday. Halliday is originally from Dublin, and lectures about the Middle East in the London School of Economics. I usually read his column on Open Democracy, which gives a great analysis of events in the region.

Mecca

Political Islam is the use of Islam in the realm of politics. Actors who subscribe to this philosophy are known as Islamists. As well believing that Islam should be the basis of a political system, Islamists use the Muslim faith as a tool of popular mobilisation, and as the means to express political and social ideas in a religious language.

One of the academic questions that often comes up when studying political Islam is that of civilisational values. There are those who believe that we are currently in a situation where there is a 'Clash of Civilisations' between Islam and the West. Halliday is among those who suggest that the rise of political Islam in the Middle East and North Africa is linked to Western policies in the region, rather than some kind of essential Islamic values. He identifies political Islam as being essentially problem-driven in nature. According to this understanding, Islamist actors are responding to perceived social and political problems in the region, rather than some kind of hatred for the West.

Because Islamists are attempting to provide solutions to problems, Halliday believes that "the issue of development... is a useful starting point" (p. 128) in understanding political Islam. Halliday agrees that the region is faced with significant social problems. However, he doesn't have much faith in the potential for the Islamists to come up with effective solutions, making reference to "empty ideas about 'Islamic economics'". I do not fully agree with his dismissal of the credibility of political Islam. It seems to me to be too soon to tell whether the Islamists would provide any real answers if they were able to gain power.

Ayatollah Khomeini

One of the strengths of Halliday's analysis is his emphasis on the variety of political Islam. He demonstrates that it is the specific context of the political situation in different countries that explains the actions of Islamist actors. Therefore, for example, the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, can only be understood in the context of the Israeli occupation and the realities of life in Palestine. And the course taken by the Iranian revolution was influenced by the conditions during the Pahlavi dynasty. Thus political Islam should be understood as the result of a particular social and political context, and cannot be explained by reference only to qualities inherent within the Islamic religion.

One of Halliday's main points in the book is that the Middle East does NOT need to be studied using some unique category of explanation. It should be possible to study the region using the same analytical tools you would use to study any other area of the world. Halliday rejects the view that the only categories that can be used to describe Muslim societies are categories that are specific to the region; for example, that categories such as Marxism or Weberian sociology should be rejected in favour of authentic, local, often Islamic concepts.

Halliday can speak some Persian and Arabic and has a direct knowledge of the region. His particular area of expertise is Iran, and he devotes an entire chapter of the book to the Iranian revolution. I'd highly recommend this section to anyone with an interest in Iran. He has also met with Hizbollah's senior political strategist Sheikh Naim Qassem in Beirut.