muammar gaddafi

So what should we do now? Nothing.

The tragedy of a dictatorship is that they so eviscerate their countries that, even after they are gone, it’s hard for people to pick up the pieces and move forward. But I am hopeful in seeing the banner of the pre-Qaddafi monarchy rooted in the Sufi orders that led the resistance to colonialism.

I, like many others, have found myself unable to turn away from the Arab revolutions. As a strong believer in the egalitarian nature of the Muslim religion, and a fervent critic of common assumptions that are held about Arabs and Muslims, these revelations were a welcome confirmation of my…

It is easy to blame the war machine or the pornography industry, but the more mundane problem is with our addiction to visual thrills. What some people see as a lack of moral vision (watching a porn video, for example) is perhaps better approached as an amoral astigmatism, a lazy eye, a privileging of the visual over our other evolved senses. The thrill of watching may mingle with compassion for those being harmed, but unless you as a viewer do something to actually alleviate that suffering, you are only a voyeuristic addict, entranced by the power of the gaze.

The desire to translate events like Qaddafi’s death into video games is an attempt to simplify complex issues into patterns that we can recognize and make sense of, with predictable rules, defeatable “bad guys,” and the hopeful celebration of an “epic win.”

It’s far more meaningful to ask who is interpreting Shari’ah; think of the argument over ‘what the bible says’ and you begin to get an idea.

Seeing what happened to Qaddafi, it is hard to deny there is not an epic arc of evil rising and consuming itself. Still, those who rage at dictators should also tremble at any tendency in their direction.

Amidst escalating calls for intervention from senior UN staff, the International Federation of the Red Cross, and Red Crescent, and widely reported satellite photos of what appear to be mass graves, it looked like the world might be poised to intervene before the U.S. doused those hopes.

It’s your duty as a Muslim to rebel.