20-Aug-06: Small Dots of Light in the Darkness

Voices that speak from within the world of extreme Islam delivering a message of hatred and triumphalism are hardly news, and if they are what you're seeking, this blog is not the place to find them. There are endless such voices and an unlimited number of forums to give them a public audience. Islamic hatred of Jews, of Christians, of non-Islam, is a plague, and not only on the web.

But when a voice is heard that speaks from deep inside that frightening, non-democratic world, and a Shi'ite Lebanese voice no less - a voice that questions some of the basics of that message of Islamic hatred and racism - it deserves some help so that it reaches a larger audience. (Thanks to Tom Gross.)

One such voice, an exceedingly rare one, is found in a scathing essay titled "To be a Shi'ite now", written by Mona Fayad, a psychology professor at a Lebanese university, in which she attacks her fellow Shi'ites for blindly following Hezbollah along a path she calls "no different from suicide." It's embarrassing (to the Lebanese) to have to point out that Dr Fayad is using suicide as something negative.

Published earlier this month in the An-Nahar daily newspaper , Fayad complains bitterly that to be a Shi'ite now "is to block your mind". It is to let Iran's supreme leader and ideologue-of-death Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "command you, drive you, decide for you what he wants from the weapons of Hezbollah, and force on you a victory that is no different from suicide."

Interviewed in the aftermath of her Arabic article by the Boston Globe, Fayad says: "People thank me, encourage me, and ask me if I am scared. But I am not scared because I live in a country where a bomb can fall on my head at any time, so I want to express my opinion... People have been lying to themselves, afraid of Hezbollah because it is loaded with weapons but it is time to stand up and ask why."

"We've been forced to shut up for decades because we are at war but we have to speak in critical periods so that the leaders know who are with them and who are not," Fayad said. "The future of Lebanon is at stake."

She's no friend of Israel, and neither is An-Nahar. But besieged (needless to say) by criticism from all parts of Shi'ite society, it's important for people outside the region to listen carefully when she says: "If I get to the point where I can't write what I believe in, life has no meaning." Google points to some other Lebanese who are bothered by these concerns.

The fundamentally anti-democratic and ideologically-extreme aspects of life in Arab societies are chronically swept under the carpet, most noticably by writers and so-called analysts from the west. Writing from robustly open, noisy Israeli society, the contrast with our side of the border could not be clearer. What's also very clear to us is that when non-Arabic-speaking mainstream media sources - the BBCs, the CNNs, the Times of London and of New York - purport to convey what Arab society thinks, they pretend that they are in a position to know. Most of the time they're not.