Culture and conflict in the Middle East

Many in our post-modern, "post-liberal" society, intimidated by the pseudointellectualism of the half-educated, stumble when they encounter the unfamiliar world of human societies very different from our own. It is here that the politically correct often find the most profitable point to ram home their confused but potent messages of cultural relativism and nihilism. The spread of higher education in the last 60 years hasn't helped: as an unexpected side effect, it's created an entire class of such people. They know less than they think, and what little they do is garbled and half-baked.

It's refreshing when an anthropologist, used to working in a specialized research in remote parts of the world, addresses the general educated reader with his decades of experience in studying pre-state and tribal societies and simultaneously illuminates an issue of pressing importance. Such are Philip Carl Salzman and his new book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East. Salzman has taught anthropology at McGill University in Montreal for many years and was a founder of the Commission on Nomadic Peoples of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. His main research has been the study of the tribal peoples of Iran and Pakistan, in the anthropological mode and thus mainly on the "structure" of their culture. (However, his book does have a fair amount of recent history and some memorable personalities as well.) Anyone familiar with so-called "primitive" peoples will recognize the general point: they're materially primitive and have no government or state; but at the same time, they have an elaborate culture of tribal custom and lore that takes an outsider many years to fully understand. That aspect of anthropology is anything but primitive.

Readers of this blog will recognize the general thrust of Salzman's argument about the nature of tribal society, especially its Middle Eastern version: the unique intertwining of Islam and tribalism, very different from the other great universalistic religions (Christianity, Buddhism, later Judaism) and even from most other, non-universalistic religions (Hinduism, earlier Judaism, classical Greco-Roman paganism); the pattern of conflict along the lines of "balanced opposition," familiar in somewhat different language as the "power challenging" of Pryce-Jones, in his classic, The Closed Circle.** In fact, the similarities to Pryce-Jones are striking, but Salzman's book is shorter, less dense, and focuses on just one large anthropological point. Like Pryce-Jones, Salzman has a precursor, the brilliant scholar and historian Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century North African author of a universal history with a famous, lengthy philosophical-anthropological preface, the Muqaddimah. Salzman makes liberal use of Ibn Khaldun's ideas about the cycle of Islamic history, the circling from tribal invasion and conquest of decadent, sedentary cities; to the tribal conquerors themselves becoming sedentary and decadent; to their being overthrown by another tribal invasion. The prototype was the original Islamic conquest itself, in the seventh century.

Tribal societies worldwide, Muslim or not, are based on "balanced opposition," with the power to use legitimate violence spread equally among all adult males, regulated only by charisma and luck. This system is incompatible with civilized life and the state, which monopolizes legitimate violence. It is perfectly adapted to nomadic life, but fails when transplanted to sedentary ways. "Balanced opposition" creates endless, unresolvable conflict by its very nature, because it contains no larger peacemaking power: no state, no social contract, no force of public opinion outside small tribal groups. It survives only because (and if) each segment of society is balanced in size against other segments. Oppressive and exploitative states emerge when one group acquires overwhelming power against other groups - then winner takes all. That is how most states emerged historically, in fact. They didn't come into existence to serve the public good. Anthropologists are typically sympathetic to non-state tribes if and when they are crushed by these classical tyrannies - it would be hard not to be. But don't romanticize: the freedom of tribal life is collective. It's not individual freedom, which is a late product of advanced civilization, with civil government and the rule of law.

It's not as if Middle Eastern peoples themselves are blind to the nature of this system. There is a famous Arabic saying: I against my brother, my brother and myself against my cousin, my cousin and I against the world. Islam might have overcome this problem to create a state or states founded on rule of law, but it failed to do that. Instead, the tribal way re-emerged, mixed with Islam (I and my cousin against the non-believer), within Islamic civilization itself. This system, incompatible with the traditional state, is obviously even more incompatible with the modern liberal-democratic state, with its essentials of rights, citizenship, and the public good. The tribal world has exact replacements for each of these, making it self-sufficient and self-contained. The autobiography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, reviewed here earlier this year, is one large demonstration of these truths by specific example.

It shouldn't need to be said, but I'll say it anyway: modern anthropology is not about social Darwinism or feeling superior to "savages." It's about the power of culture, because humans are cultural animals. They certainly do not function by instinct. Most humans through most of history (including the ancestors of everyone reading this blog) lived in something like this system. The same raw material of human nature is at work among civilized peoples as among as "primitive" peoples, but the collective shape of culture is different. Primitive peoples have many of the same values we do: individualism (at least among adult males), self-interest, notions of fairness and justice. But, in contrast to modern civilizations, nomadic peoples are dominated by group loyalty, with honor and shame typically the overriding motives. It's all there for a reason, because amongst us, we have a substitute that functions in their place: the rule of law, constitutionalism, and an openness to crossing group boundaries. It's just what makes peaceful cooperation and progress possible. At once a source of durability and backwardness, their lack is what makes progress in tribal society impossible.

Most of Salzman's message would have been unexceptional up until about 25 years ago. Since then, liberal academic and intellectual culture has been been subject to the obfuscatory fog of "post-colonialism" (Said). Many in the Arab-Islamic world itself are aware of these conflicting values and critical of the tribal system. The imposition of tribal ways on the Near East's civilized peoples by the Arab-Islamic conquest was the seed of their later decline and these societies' present difficulties in coping with the modern world.* But Said-ian doctrines are so many clubs with which to beat these critics. It's one of the most noxious contributions of the post-modern and post-liberal West to the rest of world and has crippled political debate and clear thinking in Western societies themselves.

POSTSCRIPT: Jared Diamond discusses conflict and revenge in tribal New Guinea here.

As he says, people living in state societies (societies with civil government) and, even more so, living as citizens in modern liberal democracies, have a hard time coping with the conflict between organized killing implicit in war, "civilized" warfare between armies or not, and peacetime life. In tribal societies, the conflict is not felt: there is no sharp boundary between peace and war, or between impersonal justice and simple vengeance. Men aren't ashamed of their killings, but boast of them. It's not exactly the way Hobbes conceived it - tribal life is far from solitary - but he came pretty close to depicting the "state of nature." What's particularly astonishing is that in many tribal societies, most adult males are involved in some way in the killing of other adult males. The obvious advantages of having governments were not strong enough, until recent human history, to overcome the ingrained taste of tribal peoples for their traditional collective freedom.

An interesting corollary of Diamond's analysis is that it explains why so many such tribal societies accepted colonial rule by outsiders so quickly: it reduced or eliminated internal conflict.

Diamond concludes with a relative's harrowing story of the Holocaust and the dilemma those of us who refrain from executing justice on our own face when the state doesn't keep up its end of the bargain.
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* Ironically, the Arab group that Israel has the fewest conflicts with is the Beduin of the Negev and Sinai deserts. Being nomadic, with no economic need for land to grow food or political claims to sovereignty, they view modern states and borders as little more than nuisances and just slide past them.

** Judaism is a bit of an odd duck here, no doubt because its origins lie in the late Bronze Age (second millennium BCE), before the rise of universalist religious and philosophical thinking in the first millennium. This epoch, the so-called Axial Age, saw the pre-exilic and post-exilic Hebrew prophets, Zoroaster, Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), Confucius, Lao Tzu, and the philosophical movement among the Greeks. Developments in later antiquity, such as Hellenistic science and philosophy (Stoics, Epicureans, Aristotelians, Platonists), Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, Islam, and Confucianism were secondary outgrowths of the Axial Age. Judaism straddles the earlier tribal/national and later universalist/philosophical eras, with its universal truths implicit and esoteric in biblical times, and open and explicit in later eras. No other religion has seen so much creativity generated by such a tension between the particular and universal.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Further thoughts

One of the most interesting features of Ali's thinking is her view of Islam as failed social utopia. She says: I'm from a clan in Somalia; long ago we accepted Islam and following the divine will as the path to an ideal society, and we have failed. This approach marks an arresting starting point and allows her to connect the civil war anarchy she escaped with the "theologico-political problem" of early modern Europe (à la Spinoza, Hobbes, etc.), as well as the great failed secular utopias of our own time. Of course, she is a political scientist by academic training - the University of Leiden in Holland, to be exact. Her drive to understand why the modern West has succeeded and the floundering of the tribal-theocratic world she came from is why she decided on graduate school in the first place. It was academic, but not just academic.

There is a line of thinking - exemplified by Pryce-Jones' The Closed Circle - that postulates the problem of the Islamic world, not as religion, but as a failed overcoming-of-tribalism. There is a serious case to be made for this view. The tribal world is not a "civil society" - there is no voluntary, peaceful cooperation, the kind required for progress. Instead, everything cancels everything else out - the closed circle. The relation of Islam to political power is different from Christianity or Judaism: there is neither a separate state with a monopoly on power, nor a voluntary self-organized community. Religion, politics, family or clan - all are mixed together in primitive society. This gives exceptional urgency to the problem of succession to Muhammad (khalifa). Without a single, agreed-upon successor, there is no legitimacy. Yet such a figure is a necessity in classical Islamic political thought for truly legitimate political authority. In reality, there is a void, filled by plausible or implausible claimants.

A completely different example of the impact of tribal custom is the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation.* Mentioned nowhere in the Qu'ran, female genital mutilation, where it is practiced (in some Muslim countries - not all - as well as some non-Muslim ones), is intended as a kind of female-chastity protector and female-sexual-pleasure-destroyer. It's rationalized as a way to keep girls and young women "pure." This sort of tribal-custom-rationalized-by-Islam is at work in the purist Wahhabi or Salafi Islam of Saudi Arabia and the tribal code (Pashtunwali) of the Pashtuns of Pakistan and Afghanistan.** One of the basic dilemmas posed by Muslim immigration to Europe is the assertion of tribal custom in Europe's cities, in a way not compatible with the rule of law or state sovereignty. In some ways, "Talibanism" is an assertion of extreme tribal reaction against urban, middle-class life. This cycle has a long history in Islam, discussed in the classical sources such as ibn Khaldun's Muqadimah. Such ways of thinking have almost been lost to us here in the West, and so we often have a hard time recognizing them for what they really are when we encounter them elsewhere.

These are among the many not-just-academic questions that arise from Ali's Infidel and The Caged Virgin, as well as the other recent additions to the bookshelf on Islam by Muslim women. Ali's autobiography blends the personal and political in a powerful way that illuminates both, leaving the chatterboxes of post-modern academia far behind in the dust.
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* Sometimes mislabeled "female circumcision." The actual male equivalent, were it practiced, would be something like cutting off a quarter or more of the male sexual organ - depending on size, of course :)

** The link between the two is the 19th-century Deobandi school of Islam on the Indian subcontinent. Both the Salafi and the Deobandi schools were early reactions to the incipient clash of Islam and modernity, one in the context of the Ottoman empire, the other in the context of a polyreligious India under the British Raj.

Meet the thinkers: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I just finished reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography, Infidel. You can read here about her opinions and thoughts on politics, the West, and Islam. But in this book, she wisely chose to tell her story personally. Abstractions often wash over and through our minds - easy come, easy go - but facts and events like those of Ali's life will not wash over and through anything - they will stick in readers' minds for a long time. Infidel is a powerful book and must reading for anyone in the West who wants to understand the unfolding confrontation of Islam and modernity, and avoid diversionary rationalizing. Women, particularly young women, should especially read it. Muslims should read it as well, for a whole set of different, if overlapping, reasons.

Ali's books (Infidel, as well as the earlier The Caged Virgin) and film Submission Part I (the later parts remain unmade after her partner Theo Van Gogh's murder) don't force her own answers on her viewers and readers. But they do push unavoidable questions to the fore and provoke everyone to consider their own answers. Her attitude is a refreshing and positive contrast to the proselytizers of the "new" atheism popular of late.

Her encounters with Christianity and its concept of a covenantal or "partnership" relation between man and the divine forced her to see something contrasting about Islam, a word that means "submission" in Arabic. (Muslim means "one who submits.") Lurking around here is an old argument about whether a "social contract" style of civil government is even possible in the Muslim world. The "social contract" of Western governments has its ultimate roots in the the biblical notion of covenant. It's different from autocratic government (rooted in conquest and overlordship) or the clan-aristocratic political culture of the ancient and medieval worlds. Theocentric in its original form, the humanized covenant becomes a contract among people, reflected in constitutions and consensual and representative forms of government.

What is a consistent approach to this war for the world, this contest between Islam and modernity?* This is not a conflict we can decide; Muslims have to. But we can consistently follow the rule that sticking to our rights is the best policy: defend ourselves and maintain the firm view that peaceful interaction between Muslims and the outside world is possible - if Muslims are willing to treat non-Muslims and "deviant," liberal, and secularized Muslims as equals. That's a big "if." The decision is theirs to accept or reject, not ours. But our response to the Muslim decision, either way, should be unapologetic.

Ali's larger and unmistakable point is that the West must abandon the claptrap of multiculturalism and its attendant subcults of victimhood and noble savagery. Ayaan, daughter of Hirsi, great-granddaughter of Ali, has been there and done that, and it's no fun. People are equal; cultures are not.

POSTSCRIPT: Read Ali's brief self-explanation here at Cato (PDF), and listen to a 2007 NPR interview with her here.
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* And, by the way, these days, the world's only real war on women. Read Anne Applebaum's review of Infidel at the Amazon page.

It didn't happen, and they're here to finish the job

UPDATE: And then there's stuff like this ....
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Wasn't it surreal, that Holocaust denial conference in Tehran? It had all the air of a malevolent witch-doctors' convention, and I don't mean to insult witch doctors :) What is it about this subject that brings out all the kooks? Anti-semitism is a kind of mental disorder; when it becomes widespread in a society, especially among its elites, it signals a societal or civilizational crisis. Anti-semitism is usually not about Jews, but typically about something else, and that "something else" is the real clue to the crisis.

The world's most important Holocaust-denier/minimizer is David Irving, the British historian who wrote a semi-respectable book in the 70s on World War II from the German point of view, but even then drifting over to the dark side; then in later decades showing up at neo-Nazi konklaves and the like. He claimed that Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt libeled him, sued her in the UK, and lost his case. Irving was just released from jail in Austria and served in absentia as the star of the Tehran conference.

Several countries in Europe have criminal or civil laws on the books banning Holocaust denial. These sorts of laws, from an American point of view, seem like an out-of-bounds infringement on free speech, even offensive or ridiculous speech. However, Americans aren't used to having large fascist/racist parties in their political culture. Anti-semitism in American society has declined dramatically since 1945 and is now a fringe phenomenon - plus America has never had a movement of political anti-semitism. Not so in Europe: certain European countries, like Austria, Germany, and France, do have such parties - and had them far worse in the recent past - and so Europeans might be excused for having such laws. Nevertheless, such laws are a misguided approach to the problem. Malevolent misinformation needs to be answered with more and better speech, not a ban.

The conference also marked the emergence of a new and frightening alliance: neo-Nazis and radical Islamists, along with a handful of anti-Zionist Jews and fringe radical left kooks (requires subscription). (I wonder if you can "present" a paper at such "conferences," then put it on your CV.) The burgeoning alliance of these groups has been unfolding for almost a decade. People are known by the company they keep, and we must avoid the false but common liberal assumption that better-educated people are immune to such thinking. In the Islamic world, the elites are especially saturated with it. (Ahmadinejad is an engineer.) They believe in it as an all-purpose pseudo-explanation of what their sorry excuse for a civilization suffers - here is today's relevant clue. The analogy with the German-speaking world, especially after 1918, is obvious: there too the core of the anti-semitic movements were made up of a large number of educated people, and Germany more generally was the best-educated society in the Western world. Evidently, it isn't just quantity that counts, but the quality and content of education. And of course, Germany was saturated at that time with its own kind of baneful "identity politics."

Unlike the European/Western world, where reminding people of the basic facts of the Holocaust and the immense evil it represented is largely preaching to the choir, the problem in the Muslim world is a combination of self-interested denial and simple ignorance. Ignorance is the natural state of humanity, while the denial stems from that mixture (again!) of the post-modern and the medieval: bogus claims of victimhood (unless we count collective self-victimization) and religious intolerance. Muslims, especially but not solely in Arab countries, live in, not so much a civilization, but the collapsed ruin of one; in those ruins, they are subject to a flood of official and semi-official anti-semitic propaganda that the Western world has not seen since the 1930s. There is no generally accepted background of historical knowledge to counter this flood, and its effect, especially on Muslims born since about 1970, has been profoundly pernicious.

That needs to change. The agencies best positioned to fight the flood (such as the Anti-Defamation League and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum) have been misguided and myopic in this area, obsessed with relatively marginal threats in the Western world, and only slowly turning their attention to the center of contemporary anti-semitism, the Muslim world. (A future posting will expand on these failures of Jewish institutions and leadership.) The Holocaust Museum did recently start an overdue program directed at the "new" anti-semitism, engaging the help of one of the most important Muslim critics of the Islamic world, the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She discusses anti-semitism in the Muslim world here (requires registration).

Another striking development is Robert Satloff's new book on the Holocaust in North Africa and Arabs and Muslims who helped to rescue Jews under German or Vichy French rule. Satloff is interviewed here; his book is reviewed here (requires subscription). One of the astonishing conclusions of Satloff's research is that the descendants of these Muslim rescuers in question do not want their ancestors recognized as righteous gentiles or listed at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial. Modern anti-semitism has a long history in the modern Middle East, stretching back to the 1920s or before, but its virulence and spread have jumped in recent decades. That makes developments like this (PDF) all the more understandable and necessary. There are Middle Eastern voices speaking out against these trends, but they are few in number, marginal, and under constant threat.

And while we're at it, we should also keep in mind the persecution and (sometimes) genocide of Christians and non-Arabs in the greater Middle East, from the late 19th century on, from the Kurdish mountains to the Sudan. The Armenian case of 1915-17 is merely the best known; the Darfur situation, just the latest.

The general thrust of these efforts has to include overcoming the deeply ingrained liberal prejudices of white guilt, cultural relativism, and "noble savagery" in connection with the Muslim world. More generally, we should ultimately expect the Muslim world to observe basic decencies that we take for granted in the civilized world. The Islamic world, especially in the Middle East, is a long way from that, but there's no better place to start than with Holocaust-denial, anti-semitism, and genocide-incitement.

The depressing decline of Europe

This is a topic perpetually "out there" these days, but we're frequently reminded of the underlying condition by some event or another. Two books and authors getting the most attention (deservedly) are Claire Berlinski's Menace in Europe and Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept. Berlinski's book is more journalistic and fragmented; Bawer's is the better thought out and better written. Read this interview with Berlinski for more.

Why should Americans care? Because Europe is the "other half" of the West and, along with Japan and the US, forms the "old core" of advanced countries. If Europe goes into a terminal tailspin, the US will need a Plan B for many things. Even as it is, the US is the only advanced country with an above-replacement birth rate and strong economic growth. This fact underlies many of the world's current dramatic imbalances (people and capital flows, military strength, etc.). But that topic deserves one or two postings all by itself.

As Jim Bennett likes to say: Democracy, Multiculturalism, Open Immigration -- pick any two. A simple yet profound related thought from Foreign Policy.

You can get a glimpse of what's wrong in Europe these days by considering the disgraceful case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian expelled from Holland. See here for her blog. Check this page out for Web interview videos of Ali. She spoke recently at Harvard. Her appearance was reported upon here, here, and here. (As always, truth-tellers on campus these days are faced with hostile Mulsim students and their pseudo-left PC-brainwashed allies. Remember that Harvard costs $50K a year -- as Ali herself asked, "What do they learn here?" If she only knew. Maybe she should have a chat with Larry Summers.)

Then there's the shameful case of Oriana Fallaci. This is how Europe treats one of its own; the Ali case, how Europe treats one of the Other you hear the post-modern Left chatter about so much. (But you'll hear few of them chatter about Ali.) Myopia and denial constitute the tragedy of the Fallaci case. Ali's tragedy is that an escapee from Islamic fanaticism believes in the Enlightenment values that Europe has either forgotten or repudiated.

A final thought: This topic is a beautiful example of why reading books and quality magazines, along with a few decent blogs, is infinitely better than a junk food diet of television news. When you read serious brain food, you'll actually know more than when you started, and little of the "news" will surprise you. When you consume television news, all you get is a stream of context-free and thus meaningless "news" events. Everything will surprise you. (Newspapers and radio are better, but not radically better.) The purpose of the news industry is not to enlighten, but to shock, propagandize, entertain, advertise, and generate a steady background of anxiety -- all to keep you coming back tomorrow.