A little post-holiday levity. TIME has a photo essay on the storied history of the AK-47 and I had to share this incongruous photo from Somalia.

Read the accompanying blurb below and then inspect the weapon.

Dhushamareb, Somalia, 2009 – The Timeless, Ubiquitous AK-47 – Photo Essays – TIME:

Dhushamareb,Somalia, 2009
A Sufi Muslim fighter attends an outdoor religion class. Traditionally nonviolent and tolerant, Sufis in Somalia have only recently picked up guns in response to attacks from al-Shabab, a hard-line Islamist group that has subjected the country’s south to a reign of terror. So far, these moderates control an area in the center of the country, enjoy popular support and have fended off incursions.

I’m not sure I’d be able to focus my thoughts on the Sacred with my muṣḥaf (i.e., my copy of the Quran; literally, a manuscript or collection of sheets) resting on a machine gun, much less with it sharing my lap with with an advertisement for our time’s preeminent icon of pornography, but perhaps this particular gift of Globalization has yet to reach Somali village life (unlike the even more iconic, successful, nearly as pornographic and sexist–and, sadly, increasingly tame-seeming–TV series “Baywatch”).

Somalia’s Sufi orders have been getting a lot of press lately with their intervention on the side of the government against the Shabaab, who are destroying this already all too ravaged nation from within. Some media accounts have discussed this welcome development as if the Sufis are otherworldly pacifists who are rising up a la the “Ents” of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga, but the notion that Sufs are all cuddly pacifists who are opposed to shariah is, of course, an age-old orientalist stereotype (albeit one based on some kernels of truth, especially in comparison to contemporary Islamist movements). I am no Somalia observer, but while these Sufis no doubt are acting in great part simply to halt their nation’s slide even further into the abyss of anarchy, what really got the Shabaab thugs into trouble appears to have been their giving free rein to their iconoclastic neuroses.

Here is a report from Reuters:

The Sufis’ quarrel with the rebels is mainly ideological. [Actually, this primarily concerns theological questions, especially the proper understanding of Shirk or idolatry, though there are inevitable ideological manifestations. --Svend]

Somalia has a rich Sufi tradition going back more than five centuries. Sufis have been angered by the desecration of graves, the beheading of clerics, and bans on celebrating the birth of the Prophet imposed by the hardline Wahhabi insurgents.

The latest round of grave attacks occurred this week in Mogadishu after similar incidents in Kismayu and Baidoa in the south and in other areas, over the last two years.

“This is an unacceptable matter. The ones who are doing this are not true Muslims, they are far from the religion. We must launch a jihad against them,” Muhamud said, adding there were passages in the Koran allowing them to kill those who destroy graves.

It is a matter that gets me rather hot under the collar as a Muslim, as well. And not just in Somalia–when it comes to destroying the Ummah’s religious patrimony, the goons of the Shabaab are bush leaguers compared to these pros, but that is a depressing subject for another time.

The tactical mistake the Shabaab made was their Borg-like decision to open a front against the dead as well as the living. Which is in a way quite fitting, given how inimical to normal life these simplistic, rigid fundamentalist mindsets are.

Speaking of “Baywatch”, while researching this post, I came across a very interesting panel discussion of “the surprising popularity of American entertainment in places where American politics are reviled” at the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg fittingly entitled “We Hate You (But Please Keep Sending Us ‘Baywatch’): The Impact of American Entertainment on the World”–for which a description and a full transcript are available here after a search for “We hate you”–that might be stimulating if you are interest yourself in the cultural dimensions of Globalization.

In a time when America is represented the world over by such silly figures, I increasingly find myself missing the innocent days of when “Dallas” stood in for America in international consciousness (e.g., Thomas Friedman, a commentator for whom I rarely have much positive to say these days, tells an entertaining anecdote in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem concerning a harrowing encounter with a Beirut militia during the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s where instead of being shot at a checkpoint, he was quizzed at gunpoint about the fate of “J.R.“, the arch villain of this once internationally preeminent soap) .

With the often infantilizing and nihilistic schlock Hollywood churns out, J.R.’s seeming positively saintly and edifying these days.