smokerblog

Blue-Fingered Nation

Reasonable people can disagree about the legitimacy of US intervention in Iraq. Reasonable people can even disagree about the legitimacy of the recent Iraqi election.

But no one can deny the symbolic power of the images of ink-stained-fingered Iraqis celebrating their first free election in 50 years. And as Harm points out, as stirring and inspirational as those images might be to us, they may hold an even more powerful, visceral impact for those watching events on al Jazeera.

The gesture you are seeing repeated over & over again--hand curled into a fist with the exception of the index finger, pointing skyward--is one of the basic gestures of Islam, on par w/ crossing yourself if you're a Christian. The posture, plus the sentence "there is no God but One God, and Muhammed is His Prophet" is the most basic declaration of Muslim identity--conflating it w/ participation in the election is the most effective way of negating the core argument of Islamicists, that democracy is inherently heretical.

(Emphasis, Harm's. Hyperlink, mine.)

Except, whoops! I can't find any of those kinds of images on al Jazeera. I wonder what's Arabic for "freedom of the press."