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December 31, 2006
Commentary: On Islam and Soviet 'Aloofness'
While reading The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for The Third World
The vast Soviet investment in Nasser's Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s rested on a far more precarious basethan Moscow was willing to acknowledge. The influx of Soviet advisers served only to underline the gulf between Soviet and Egyptian society. Russians and Egyptians rarely visited each other's homes. Though almost half of the 15,000 Arabs who studied in the United States during the late 1950s and 1960s married Americans, marriage between Soviet advisers and their Egyptian hosts was virtually unknown...
Author Christopher Andrew goes on to blame this state of affairs on the 'aloofness' of the Soviet advisors. Aloof they may have been, but Andrew is spectacularly wrong. Soviet advisors were happy to cavort with all sort of women around the World--German women from the German Democratic Republic, Cuban women, Ethiopian women--all were taken as wives in a smaller or larger proportion. The key to understanding the 'spousal taking' differences begins with understanding the fact that both the Soviet advisors and the 'Arab students' in the United States were males. The 'Arab' (Muslim) students were happy to take infidel women for themselves as Islam allows, while the Soviet advisors were not allowed to take Muslim women as Islam prohibits.
This is not, incidentally, to condemm Christopher Andrew or the heroic Vasili Mithrokin, whose two books should be read by those who wish to understand the workings of intelligence during the Cold War. The blame should be laid at the feet distinguish scholars of Islam who gloss over things like this, and at the feet of those who have supported the larger regime of 'political correctness', which makes a proper intellectual inquiry into the nature of Islam all but impossible. Errors like the one discussed crop into otherwise sound books with frightening frequency.
Posted by Ruy Diaz at December 31, 2006 12:28 AM
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