Pharaoh to Hitler to Assad to ISIS: let’s have our talk about power, personality, and politics.
Now.
I don’t know what metaphor suits that concept that is time when it is time for one to seal off a section of history, to have arrived at the end of a chapter of one’s own story, and to have to look across a river (in time) or desert (in time — add the biblical term of forty years for wandering lost in the foyer to the future) — and to leave one bank (in time) to wade, swim, or bridge and walk to that other shoreline.
Is there parochial time?
Is there universal time that contains parochial time?
I feel that with the destruction of Syria, which carnage has exceeded that involved in the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus (70 CE) and the challenge posed today by ISIS in Iraq, some Islamic introspection and review of Sunni-Shiite rivalry (throw in Arab anti-Semitism while at it) might be helpful.
Iraq is a test: will parochialism seek through blood letting a nation divided by sectarian identification that guarantees perpetual war — or will the middle, mild, and moderate of Sunni and Shiite humanity recognize ISIS as an alien force inimical to the survival of either and therefore band together to eject and destroy it?
What is the timeline for the development of either path?
The world would seem to have all of the time in the world for this conflict between (BackChannel’s trope coming right here) “two mad wasps in a bell jar”.
There’s a terrific political cartoon by artist Talal Nayer at this location: http://tnayer.blogspot.com/2014/01/sunni-vs-shiite.html.
Irshad Manji has featured the same on her Facebook fan page, and it has been shared about 500 times, a good indicator that others are seeing the same thing.
Power.
I think the Jews — because our stories compel us to argue about these things and one may have opinions — took the monotheist power represented by Pharaoh and threw it out into the universe — and beyond the universe — to an abstract conception of God (“King of the Universe”) — and that was that for the people who walked away from what Pharaoh represented as a power unto himself.
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