Episode 30: How the Middle East broke, a conversation with Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour was born and raised in Egypt before fleeing to the United States and dedicating his life to understanding how the Arab world came to be defined by state failure, religious extremism and all the rest of the region's many crises. His conclusions, laid out in a recent essay in the magazine Mosaic, are an extraordinarily innovative new path. It isn't a crisis of internal Islamic failure, as conservative thinkers argue, nor a crisis forged and sustained purely by Western imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and the other nefarious isms of the left-wing lexicon. It is something stranger and more interesting: An imbibing into Islamic form and language of European romantic ideas about nation, history and revolution that went so deep as to almost replace (Hussein speaks of a kind of forgetting) the traditional Islamic sense of what Islamic and Arab culture once were. In this longer-than-usual episode, we take a deep dive into Hussein's thesis, and then we try to apply it to the Jews. This episode was co-sponsored by Tovit and Mike on behalf of their son Rafi and his unit, Battalion 202 of the Paratroopers and all of our brave IDF soldiers protecting our country and fighting our enemies. “This episode was also co-sponsored by the family of Larry from Encino, California in in honor of his birthday. They asked to dedicate the episode to the IDF’s reservist pilots, who 10 -- even 20 -- years out of active service, with families and full-time jobs, continue to serve with incredible selflessness. Their achievements during the Iran war were nothing short of heroic. Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠. If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at haviv@askhavivanything.com⁠. Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.