The mirror image of England’s North-South divide is in Italy. Southern Italians joke about how stuck up Northerners are, and Northern Italians describe Naples as the only major Arab city without a European quarter, claiming that Garibaldi did not unite Italy, he partitioned Africa.
The joke will soon be on all of us, though. On a Radio Four programme about the British Council last night, a senior Libyan figure expressed not just her hope but her expectation that her country would join the European Union.
Gaddafi or no Gaddafi, while it is true that there remains a very strong Italian influence in at least urban or elite Libyan culture, at least one third of the population nevertheless adheres to the Sanusi synthesis of Wahhabism and popular Sufism. Eurabia, here we come.
But then, we knew that anyway.
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There is nothing such Eurabia except in the mind of some conspiracy theorists.
ReplyDeleteOh, but there is.
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