One of the most frustrating aspects of the Western response to 9/11 has been the failure to articulate a secular case for rejecting the Wahhabi death cult. Instead, the administration’s emphasis (which almost certainly reflects its own PC reflexes and a certain tendency, shall we say, to piety) has been to stress moderate Islam as an alternative to al-Qaeda’s Cro-Magnon certainties. That’s all well and good – there are hundreds of millions of Muslims in the Arab world and elsewhere who need to know that the US is not their opponent and that the theological battle against Wahhabism is by no means lost – whatever Saudi-funded evangelists may claim.

However to regard Arabs as a people necessarily defined exclusively – or even primarily – by their religion is no more accurate than the all too often repeated suggestion that they are more comfortable in the embrace of an authoritarian state.

Contrary to the image created by all those pictures of the faithful rallying outside some mosque or other there is another alternative to the chant of the mullah – it’s secular, and, judging by this fascinating, and, I suspect, very important article by Charles Paul Freund, it may be being previewed on video. Here’s an extract:

“Can that be what is happening with Arabic videos? While they are entertaining and titillating viewers, they are also transmitting new ways of being to an apparently receptive audience, new and multiplying approaches to being an “Arab” that combine traditional forms of cultural self-presentation with forms borrowed from an array of other sources. The combinations that promise to emerge would not be mere copies of borrowed foreign models; they would be new and indigenous cultural creations, just as is the case in cultures around the world. This syncretism is already true of the music itself, which not only uses traditional Arabic instrumentation… in new ways but also borrows instruments and rhythms from the Caribbean, Europe, India, rock, rap… and numerous other sources.

What this low, “vulgar” genre is offering, in sum, is a glimpse of a latent Arab world that is both liberal and “modernized.” Why? Because the foundation of cultural modernity is the freedom to achieve a self-fashioned and fluid identity, the freedom to imagine yourself on your own terms, and the videos offer a route to that process. By contrast, much of Arab culture remains a place of constricted, traditional, and narrowly defined identities, often subsumed in group identities that hinge on differences with, and antagonism toward, other groups.

For nearly a century, a series of utopian political systems has been advanced in the region to attempt to break this cycle of conflict and stagnation: Pan-Arabism, Ba’athism, Nasserism, Islamism, etc. These have all failed, sometimes disastrously. What may yet work in the region is what has worked elsewhere for centuries: commercialism that does not transmit a regime’s utopian dreams but addresses the personal dreams of the audience. “

Exactly. It’s time to stop appeasing the clerics.