I have been quiet on this site for a month or so because of some significant opportunities to record for television. Preparation time and actual recording have wiped out discretionary time lately, but the outcomes will be very positive over the long term. Those who have been following the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guides this quarter may be aware of the audio studies I have prepared on Galatians 3 and 4 and which can be accessed at www.pineknoll.org/sabbath-school-lessons. They include nearly six hours of teaching in the context of a highly intelligent class of some 50 people. While they follow the pattern of the above-mentioned Study Guides, they would also be helpful to anyone interested in Galatians 3 and 4. There are other projects as well which I will reveal on this site when they get a little closer to broadcast. But one recent interview is worth immediate mention.

On Tuesday, November 1 I gave a one and a half hour interview on the Christian Connections program of the Loma Linda Broadcasting Network. The interviewer was Ganim Hanna, an Iraqi Christian man who quizzed me about the events taking place in the Middle East over the last year. These events have been nearly a hundred years in the making and some Muslims would argue that they have been nearly 4000 years in the making. I would like to post that broadcast on this site and will work to get permission for that.

One aspect of the interview that might interest readers of this blog is the observation that the Muslim nations of the Middle East have had a triple dynamic going on for the last hundred years or so, in reaction to colonialism. When the European powers took control of the Middle East, the Arab peoples reacted in three main ways. There were those who collaborated with the Western powers, often educated people who could speak English, French or Italian (Libya was ruled by Italy, the French had control in Algeria, Tunisia, Syria and Lebanon, most of the rest were ruled by the British). These elite classes profited from colonialism and were often placed in positions of power. A second dynamic was people who were disenfranchised by colonialism yet were enamored of capitalism and democratic values and wanted to be free to embrace and practice these values for themselves. The third dynamic was an Islamic backlash by people who resented both the intruders and their values and wanted to go back to the day when the Islamic Empire was a major world power and islamic values governed the Middle East, including Sharia (Muslim) law.

When the grip of colonialism was weakened after World War II, the elite classes in most Arab nations managed to wrest control of these countries from the colonial powers. In the process, the democratic and islamic movements continued to be marginalized in these countries. Harsh crackdowns, often tacitly supported by the US, kept these forces in check for several decades. So opposition to the repressive Arab regimes was usually two-fold. It involved democratic groupings who wanted the kind of freedom and democracy typical of the West but not available at home and islamic groups like the Muslim Brotherhood who longed to return to an earlier period of history.

The first major break in this picture occurred in Iran (a non-Arab, but Muslim country at the edge of the Middle East) in 1979. Supported by Western media, the democratic opposition succeeded in overthrowing the Shah and establishing a more democratic government. But a few months later the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile and the revolution turned islamic with tragic consequences for the workers in the American Embassy, who were seen as collaborators with the Shah.

This same pattern seems to be happening in the Arab Spring uprisings. The opposition forces in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen are a mixture of people holding democratic and secular ideals on the one hand and people holding more islamic and traditional dreams on the other. While a revolution is in progress, the western media plays up the democratic side, because most of the people they can talk to (English speakers) support that side. And so Westerners get the impression that it is a democratic revolution primarily. But the Arab-language media paints a different picture based on people who speak only Arabic. And so in Tunisia and Libya revolutions that were seen as very positive in the Western media are now proving to have a strong jihadist element and could easily produce islamist governments that could prove more hostile to Western interests than the regimes they replaced.

Things are fluid right now, but in many ways these events were forecast as desired outcomes of September 11 by Osama bin Laden himself. While he is now dead, events he unleashed still affect the world today.