Uh oh, scandal in Saudi Arabia – a cleric said it might not be so terrible for women to skip the niqab if they felt like it. The horror! Al Arabiya is on the scene:
A Saudi preacher has sparked controversy on social media after Tweeting that Muslim women are allowed to uncover their faces and not wear the face veil known as the niqab, but that if someone wants to wear it, she is free to do so.
Sheikh Suleiman al-Torifee’s, a member of Ministry of Islamic Affairs in Saudi Arabia, based his opinion on what he said were the teachings of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad.
Scary stuff, isn’t it. Tweeters certainly thought so.
“I dare you join your wife in an outing while she uncovers her face,” said one Twitter user (@Hamood20121111). “You are seeking fame and I wish you shave your beard because you are not a man,” the tweep continued.
“If you want to apply Western customs and traditions, this is impossible and if you do, please travel and live abroad,” said @Hamood2012111, another user.
“If you enjoy looking at other Muslim women then it means something is wrong with you! And you are the one who needs advice,” commented @k_almassad.
Another user, @m_MesOo, described the preacher’s Twitter comment as “Liberals’ heresies.”
Well…maybe next century, or the one after that.
“I dare you join your wife in an outing while she uncovers her face,” said one Twitter user (@Hamood20121111). “You are seeking fame and I wish you shave your beard because you are not a man,” the twerp continued.
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Oh, he is a man, and I dare say a greater one than Hamood20121111. Potentially an infinitely greater one. After all, Martin Luther kicked off the Reformation in Europe by disputing the scriptural foundations of Catholic practice. Sheikh Suleiman al-Torifee has done essentially the same within Islam, though it remains to be seen how it all plays out. But all the comments in the original Al Arabiya article are most interesting: a window into an alien world.
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.[NB: The copy/paste function on my laptop here is playing up, and may have made the odd error in the quote patch above.]
After all, Martin Luther kicked off the Reformation in Europe by disputing the scriptural foundations of Catholic practice
Mostly, he was challenging the power and authority of the church, and chose to attack its authority based on scripture. It was more of a political rebellion than a religious one, though since Luther chose a religious narrative, the “debate” appeared to be mostly religious though the discussion was usually in the form of rending flesh and breaking bone. The consequences were how many lives lost? I do not think that we’ll be happy if islam schisms like christianity did. In a sense, islam already has, with the succession of mohammed turning into the sunni/shi’a divide.
What islam could use (how to do it?) is less a Luther-style reformation than the sort of reformation that judaism has undergone. They managed it relatively peacefully, though there’s still a tremendous amount of deistic headbangery and nonsense, at least they didn’t spend hundreds of years slaughtering eachother like European christians did and muslims could well do.
You know, hiding women in bags isn’t Qur’anic anyway. That’s cultural baggage from some groups. I woder how liberal this preacher is in general. Regardless, Islam-at-large needs more “authorities” speaking up like this, and they need as much amplification as the ultraconservatives get.
AIUI, the Koran enjoins *both* sexes to dress modestly. Somehow for men this has always only meant loose (not form-fitting) clothing covering the chest/belly/loins plus arms and legs, with a head-covering for the crown of the head only. More enveloping robes a la Bedouin were for protection against the desert sun, and were not considered part of the modesty dress code.
Acceptably modest clothing for women used to be almost exactly the same as for the men in most Islamic cultures, with the addition of a hijab scarf draped around the hair and covering the bosom. The spread of the heavier chador/burqua/niquab covering throughout the Islamic world is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Marcus @#2: “What islam could use (how to do it?) is less a Luther-style reformation than the sort of reformation that judaism has undergone. They managed it relatively peacefully, though there’s still a tremendous amount of deistic headbangery and nonsense, at least they didn’t spend hundreds of years slaughtering each other like European christians did and muslims could well do.”
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They would be little more than history if they had. Their numerical weakness cf other religious populations was in a way their salvation from all that. The rest slaughtered one another because they could afford to. And it seems, much of the Islamic world believes it can still afford to.
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It plays out as it plays out. I see Judaism, Christianity and Islam as branches of the one Abrahamic tree. Whatever internal stresses and resolutions there are within modern Judaism, I think have to be looked at in the light of its brawl with the Islamic world over Israel, which IMHO will probably still be raging 500 years from now.
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Muslims are conflicted over modernity, finding it both attractive and repulsive. A lot of them seek its benefits via emigration to the West, but once there many attempt a ghettoised out-of-business-hours existence within it. But it seems to me that if Muslim women are to be kept repressed, veiled and shut away indoors they cannot bring much in the way of family income.
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I shop regularly at a very prosperous and efficient halal supermarket. The young Muslim women operating the checkout there are no different in friendliness and engagement from their Infidel counterparts anywhere. They are not like their heavily clad and veiled mothers, and even less like the occasional Muslim grandmother.
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The future will be another country.
Thing is, there is no muslim equivalent to the RCC before Reformation (and Reformation meant nothing for women anyway. To the contrary, witchhunts were mostly a protestant pasttime)
Only few muslim women I know around here wear any kind of headscarf, about none any face veils.
Ironically, most women I see with headscarves are in college. Few of them also wear loose floor length dresses that cover everything except their face and hands. Most do this neat religious trick of staying true to the word but not the spirit. They do wear a long sleeved shirts and pants, but those are very form fitting and then they wear the tank tops and minidresses on top. Very sexy, if you ask me. While less fabric would be definitely more comfortable on hot days, it would IMO not be more revealing
I wonder if Luther would have made any distinction. Either way, lives would have been lost, and over (as we know) several centuries. I doubt that any distinction is made in Saudi, too. But in any case, I think that this is a bit different: no “demands”, for one thing, but a religious teacher considering a particular custom in the light of scripture. It’s certainly a very brave thing to do (though he has God on his side, of course), but it may be a sign of the times. I am inclined towards Omar’s optimistic view. In the last twenty-five years I have taught Western music to two young Muslim women, in my own home, unchaperoned, unveiled, and not at the same time. That might not sound a lot, but I think differently.
If any violence results from this it will probably be caused more by extremist nutters than the establishment. I can see possibilities of being wrong about that, but given so much international pressure I think I can justifiably keep my fingers crossed.
Also, Marcus, I think that given their appalling history of persecution Jews would have had little choice but to sink their differences and come together in the face of the overwhelming hostility of the Christian world. Muslims may be opposed by many, but they are well established and no one is going to put them in gas chambers. Which brings us back to Luther, and Nazis, and Muslims, and (still) some Christians (they knocked on my door once, and explained how God was still punishing the Jews. They had had to climb seven or eight concrete steps to reach the doorbell; I was almost tempted, but they were young and stupid…)
Musleemaphilia?
Y’know reading these discussions are some really basic assumptions here that are wrong.
First, Islam is not a religion that is any more “primitive” than Christianity is. That is, Omar and Marcus Ranum are assuming that something like Martin Luther’s challenge is a part of a natural progression and that Islam hasn’t had an enlightenment yet. But Islamic fundamentalism as we know it today is a modern movement. In fact it couldn’t exist without modernity. If you got into a time machine and went back to Afghanistan in 1950 you would be very surprised I bet. (I had a great aunt who spent a lot of time there then, as her husband was building roads and dams there. The photos we have are educational to say the least, but full burquas, for instance, are uncommon). The Saudi version of Islamic orthodoxy dates from the late 19th century, if that far.
This isn’t unlike Christianity by the way. The Christian fundamentalists we deal with in the US are a thoroughly 20th century phenomenon, though they certainly have loose connections to previous Great Awakenings in the sense that Americans tend to have these “Awakenings” in the first place.
I bring this up because the March of Progress narrative is a dangerous one and it’s part of what got us into this mess in the first place. Recall that the Saudi Royal family is in power at all because of British and American intervention in the 1930s.
In any case, this idea that the Saudis are benighted primitives that haven’t experienced something we enlightened moderns have, as though they were frozen in time, is ahistorical I think. The Islamic fundamentalist movements appeared as renewal movements in response to being humiliated by colonial powers. Such renewal movements aren’t always a problem — anthropologist Wade Davis noted that Rastafarianism was a similar idea that’s relatively harmless. But just as often such movements are not a good thing. The Saudis and movements sch as Al Qaeda are looking to maintain a religious orthodoxy that historically never really existed in the first place. Outside the Islamic world the right wing Christian Identity movements are a similar phenomenon –there is a reason that militia groups are made up of largely disaffected working class white people. Historically the NSDAP was a German renewal movement, as was the Slavic one that ripped apart Yugoslavia in the 90s. Per Wade Davis, the Chinese Boxer Rebellion is another example. Again note that these are modern phenomena. But I don’t hear anyone saying that Oklahomans or Serbs are conflicted about modernity.
The issue with modernity in the Islamic world varies a lot. Indonesia is not Saudi Arabia, which is something of an outlier and I say again propped up by our US tax dollars. If anything I think as secularists we ought to be mounting a letter-writing campaign at the very least demanding an end to the military aid we give them, since it’s geared to controlling their own populations. (Am I the only one here who sees the supreme irony in the fact that Osama bin Laden was the guy calling for elections in Saudi Arabia?)
The issue of modernity is a complicated one, because it’s important to understand that the oil economies were superimposed — and imposed by force — on people whose societies were not geared to being resource extractors for people thousands of miles away. Nor were they asked about it.
I’m not romanticizing the cultures that exist there or existed there. But let’s not forget that they worked — living in a desert imposes some very strict constraints. The imposition of the oil industry (and the kings who were basically local emirs that the US, Britain or France could buy off) created some really huge distortions — some of which created fertile ground for Islamic radicals. (Imagine what Americans would do if someone came in and told us that our job was to provide resources for them, and they had our president killed, installed one of the Koch brothers or some Christian Dominionist as leader for life, and then sent troops to enforce that while arming the chosen leader). Any movement that appeared to oppose that would not necessarily be a democratic and secular one.
Anyhow my point is largely that we can’t pretend that the existence of a bunch of theocrats in Saudi Arabia — or in other places in the Arabian peninsula where we give them money and guns — has nothing to do with us, that it’s some special quality of Islam, that Islam has somehow missed out on history. It hasn’t. If anything it was us who ensured that the situation in Saudi Arabia is what it is now. It was us who made every effort to stymie democracy in North Africa and the Middle East, and only signed on to the Arab Spring when it was clear there wasn’t any other choice. (And I might add it was once again, us who engineered he brief ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood at the expense of the Egyptian labor movement, and us who continued to give the Egyptian military money which enabled them to mount a counter-revolution).
And before anyone says it, no, I am not justifying what the commenters said in response to a cleric saying women showing their faces is ok. But while it’s easy to mock the tweets, I feel like it’s important to maintain a certain historical awareness.
Well said, Jesse. The current anti-Westernisation/fundamentalist sentiment in the Middle East and the ex-colonial Islamic world generally is directly the product of corporatist decisions by the intersection of colonial and military-industrial complex powers in the last century. The corporations thought it would be easier to bribe oligarchs/despots/tyrants for resource deals than to negotiate honestly and fairly with democratic governments, so they funded and supplied anti-democratic authoritarians with the means of suppression (and their national governments let them get away with it). Hurrah for the free market, right?
The current anti-Westernisation/fundamentalist sentiment in the Middle East and the ex-colonial Islamic world generally is directly the product of corporatist decisions by the intersection of colonial and military-industrial complex powers in the last century.
Yes the current situation in the MENA region is all just a reaction resulting from what we did to them.
Just an uncontrollable reaction.
And you know, every time someone in Vienna gets a migraine, it’s merely a reaction to the colonialism of the Ottomans.
Bottom line; religion is nothing more than a fucked-up circle jerk.
Not uncontrollable at all, but a reaction nonetheless (i.e. it wouldn’t have happened without the stimulus)
The Ottoman empire is long gone. Western corporatism is alive and kicking. Seems to me that is a particularly salient datum which you are attempting to obscure.
Besides,the colonialism of the Ottomans is almost certainly the stimulus for the anti-Islamic sentiment existing throughout Europe before the 20th century. For much of the twentieth century Islamic autocrats were the West’s romanticised allies against fascism and communism, while forgetting the brutalities they exercised over their own subjects. It was only 9/11 which led to the current anti-Islamic sentiment becoming widespread – before that the corporatists were only too happy to overlook what fundamentalist Islamists were forcing upon their more moderate brethren and sistren.
My point was that there is nothing inherently anti-democratic about the individuals who make up the societies of the MENA. Sadly for them, every nascent democratic movement for the last 80-odd years was brutally quashed in its infancy by authoritarians/oligarchs funded by Western corporatist interests who valued despotic stability’s guarantee of oil and mineral supplies over representative democracy’s (trade-disruptive) hopes for self-determination for MENA citizens, so that now those citizens have no legacy of elder democratic leaders to help fight against militarised theocracy.
Important social movements make progress over generations. The disappearance of those elder generations of democratic activists in Islamic autocratic states was known, ignored, minimised and often directly connived at by representatives of the West. Our hands are not clean.
p.s. Just today the USA gave Egypt half a billion dollars worth of military aid that it could have withheld in solidarity with the democratic activists who were given mass death sentences and the Al Jazeera journalists who have just been sentenced to decades of imprisonment for doing their job of reporting on unrest within Egypt.
For some reason, the USA decided to make life easier for the regime that made those anti-democratic anti-accountability decisions rather than making life harder for that regime. Just as it and other Western states have done over and over and over again in the MENA region.
@ 10 tigtog
I’m sympathetic to your point of view, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from feminism it’s that sometimes it’s a good idea to “shut up and listen”, and I know that not everyone who actually lives in the Middle East agrees.
I see the point that there’s significant separation between the Islamic elites being cynically supported by the Western elites and the disenfranchised citizenry finding sympathetic social support/validation by Islamist clerics filling the safety net gap. The rebellious idealism that all too often is channelled into insurrection/terrorism thereby just appears to me to be the convergence point of two ends of a self-interested authoritarian wedge, and a feature rather than a bug of the system as it currently stands.
Nearly midnight here in Oz. I’ll be back in the morning.
The Ottoman empire is long gone. Western corporatism is alive and kicking. Seems to me that is a particularly salient datum which you are attempting to obscure.
Totally disagree.
Western colonialism, unlike its intellectually barren Ottoman counterpart, was a largely positive experience for the MENA region.
It broke Islam’s hold on the psyche and it was a great boon to women’s rights. In addition, that colonialism brought about an intellectual revival. It also brought modern science and technology to the region and it put an end to the discriminatory dhimmi laws and burdensome jizya taxes that had traditionally been applied to religious minorities.
It reawakened a culture that had been utterly stagnant for centuries.
FOUAD AJAMI:
Decker you are aware of who gave Saddam his supply of Mirage fighter jets, and surface-to-air missiles, and equipment for making chemical weapons? You are aware that Saddam was, per Reagan, “a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism?”
So if colonialism was so great, why weren’t the people of India ever so happy to be under British rule? I guess the Arabs and Africans should have been thrilled to be tutored by the obviously superior West. Savages gotta know their place.
Omar and Marcus Ranum are assuming that something like Martin Luther’s challenge is a part of a natural progression and that Islam hasn’t had an enlightenment yet
No, I am not; I don’t think there’s any particular natural progression, though there are some similarities that can make it look like there might be one. Over time, a successful religion is going to accrue power and wealth and will attract the kind of people who enjoy abusing power and wealth. This is more akin to the “iron law of oligarchy” than anything else, though I suppose it’s a natural progression of sorts in all successful enterprises in which authority and power are an objective. I was going to say “byproduct” but I do not believe authority and power happen by accident, and assume that is the ultimate purpose of religion, carefully concealed. I also believe it’s inevitable that too much power, too centralized, eventually results in separatist movements when you get too many people close to the seat of power who cannot bring themselves to share and prefer to try to grab all the pie.
With respect to whether Luther saw his actions as political rather than religious – tough call. I think Gordon@#7 is probably more right than I am, come to think of it – I was writing more from my own analysis of history and should have gone back to Luther’s words. Reviewing his arguments, Luther appears to be primarily concerned with the intersection between his theological interpretation and the RCC’s greed, and selling indulgences was a particular hot button. It was my leap to interpret Luther’s anger at the church’s avarice for a political position because the church was using its wealth (as usual) to buy power and tchotchkes.
But Islamic fundamentalism as we know it today is a modern movement
Yes, absolutely, a lot of it is permeated by Qtub’s political islam. Though, one must add that islam’s militant resurgence could be just as much related to the way islam was ruthlessly smacked down by the Mongols than anything recent. I’ve always found it odd that today’s islamists are triggered by the word “crusader” but not “khan”; it’s as if that was all so horrible that they prefer to forget it and focus on the more manageable disaster.
this idea that the Saudis are benighted primitives that haven’t experienced something we enlightened moderns have, as though they were frozen in time, is ahistorical I think.
Absolutely agreed!
Yet, there are some fundamental aspects of islam that are ripe fault-lines for a breakaway to form along. First and foremost, islam is deeply tied to arabic culture – yet there are a huge number of muslims that do not see that as their culture. I don’t think these fault-lines for reform represent an inevitable progression, though if the arabic part of islam were to accrue and begin wielding too much disproportionate power, it’s plausible that we could see a “reform islam” and those fault-lines could well be similar to those that emerged in christianity. For example, one would be if some imam started teaching that it was OK to read the koran in translation — with similar bloody back and forth fallout that happened over translating the bible to vulgate.
Again, this is not an assumption that there’s an inevitable progression, but more along the lines that history (in the very large scale) sometimes repeats itself, and we are wise to learn from those patterns while schooling ourselves to avoid getting bogged down in the details. After all, this is why we study history in the first place.
we can’t pretend that the existence of a bunch of theocrats in Saudi Arabia — or in other places in the Arabian peninsula where we give them money and guns — has nothing to do with us, that it’s some special quality of Islam, that Islam has somehow missed out on history
This. Yes. In other comment threads on this blog, I have railed against the tendency of some to assign a religious narrative to what’s going on in the islamic world, rather than a political one. (I know that using the term “islamic world” plays right into the religious narrative but it’s also a geography of power) It blinds us. What’s going on is not that muslims hate modernity – it’s that many societies that identify as muslim have been used as playthings and pieces in the “great game” and they are damaged and sick of it. Qtub’s politicalization of islam is a direct consequence of his perception of 1950s America’s wealth and power compared to the islamic world, which had been deliberately divided, packaged, and pawned by England and later the US. Narratives like “they hate us for our freedoms” play into that wrong view – they hate us because of the shit we’ve done to them!
A darkness, a long winter, has descended on the Arabs. Nothing grows in the middle between an authoritarian political order and populations given to perennial flings with dictators, abandoned to their most malignant hatreds
See? This is the kind of thing I’m talking about. It’s as if “darkness descended” as an inevitable fact of nature, not that the arab world had dictators imposed on it from above by Britain and the US – dictators that are propped up ruthlessly as long as they are convenient, and we call for “regime change” when they don’t keep the oil flowing on schedule or they say something naughty about Europe’s colony in the middle east, Israel.
It’s as if those poor silly arabs just kinda did all that stuff to themselves, or you know the world turned and inevitably dictators came…. It’s got nothing to do with “divide et impera” no, no, no, no. We return you now to the televised coverage of “the arab spring”…
@ jesse 9
Good points.
It makes me wonder though, the arguments about Islam needing “modernization” are based in the historical conflicts between the Catholics and Protestants leading to a distaste for violence on a more social level, combined with various social movements at the time. The idea has some logic to it, but I have been fine treating the idea as a discard-able hypothesis because history has tons of factors that we have trouble assigning good meaning to. But while you are correct in saying that both today’s Christianity and Islam are “modern” (arguments about the concept of being “evolved” not including values and focusing on fit to environment seem similar), this argument seems to be focused on Islam culturally changing if it had a particular group psychological experience.
Do you have any specific reasons for thinking that such a social experience would not have such effects? Maybe they have been having them with no change, or there are other missing cultural factors, or there are factors present that would prevent such changes? I’m mostly asking because with that sort of history I am not very well read.
It’s as if those poor silly arabs just kinda did all that stuff to themselves, or you know the world turned and inevitably dictators came…. It’s got nothing to do with “divide et impera” no, no, no, no. We return you now to the televised coverage of “the arab spring”…
Yes we imposed Hosni Mubarak on Egypt just so we could get our hands on the country’s vast oil reserves…
And with the deadly Sunni/Shia divide that has existed since the 7th century, divide et impera is a moot point.
Decker you are aware of who gave Saddam his supply of Mirage fighter jets, and surface-to-air missiles, and equipment for making chemical weapons?
France didn’t ‘give’ anything to Saddam. Saddam bought those jets with his oil revenues. He sold the french oil and they sold him the military hardware because that is what he wanted. They were a monument to his ego and something that allowed him to think he was playing in the big leagues.
Yep, that’s why the Algerians were heartbroken to see the French leave
@Decker– the French, and the US, could have refused to sel Saddam weapons. It’s really tht simple, we do it all the time.
And yes we imposed Hosni Mubarak on Egypt– by giving his military billions. And no, it wasn’t the oil reserves but you’re aware that the Suez Canal exists, I think, and there is such a thing as distrusting democracy because the people whole country you want to control might vote the wrong way. That’s happened BTW, and many nations know the price. (cue Tom Lehrer and “Send the Marines”). And did you look at where the cotton in your sheets came from?
@Marcus Ranum — point taken I was responding to a relatively small part of the post, is all. I should say also that Islam is hardly all that monolithic even within Sunni/ Shi’a groupings. I’ve seen the dervishes and the way people pray in Morocco, Turkey and Jordan, and I can tell you they are all rather different, let alone what’s practiced in Indonesia and Turkmenistan.
The reason the Arabian peninsula has the power it does is the money from the oil and overt military support we give them. The reform Islam you speak of has been attempted many times there. But we let our BFFs in the house of Saud execute or imprison them. What we have is a situation where one sect– a relatively tiny one — controls the emotional center of the Islamic world. It would be as though Louis Farrakhan took over Harlem or Christian fundamentalist Protestants were to occupy and rule the Vatican, backed by billions in revenues and military aid.
Plenty of people read the Qu’ran in translation, BTW. Nobody says it is not ok, just that you won’t get the right meaning of it. Jews have something similar with the Torah/ Talmud.
@Brony– I am not entirely sure what you are asking, but I can tell you that the conflicts between Protestant an Catholic did not lead to a distaste for violence. The problem was that the cost was too much. As Yugoslavia proved, Europeans were happy to engage in religious violence.
Remember the 100 years war lasted, well, 100 years. Much of Europe was shattered. Whole empires crumbled — in fact one could argue that the two worst things to happen to Spain were finding gold in the Americas and the 100 years war. At Westphalia the map of Europe was utterly changed and gave us the modern nation-state.
For the Arab world, the issue is the cultural experience of being dominated by the Western powers and suffering continued interference. The Ottomans were far from perfect, but one thing they did manage was leaving many cultures in the Arabian peninsula to their devices, for the most part. And they were rather good at co-opting local leaders and incorporating them into the Empire without trying to impose gigantic changes. The Hapsburgs tried a similar strategy, though not quite as successfully (they made some pretty dumb political decisions).
Anyway, the point is, here you have several groups of people that have been humiliated for a century. They aren’t going to react well to that. Those that move to the US or Europe are humiliated further, in a thousand small ways that any PoC is familiar with.
Let me throw something else out there: The cultures in the deserts grew as they did because it worked for them. There are a lot of things that you need to have to survive in such an environment. You need water, you need a mobile source of food and wealth (hence little farming because you can’t really do it) and you’re going to get a trend towards polygamy — this is true cross-culturally and cross-religiously. The Bedouins were only semi-settled and polygamous long before Islam appeared, and the Maasai, who live in a semi-arid region, exhibit similar traits. Same with the herding peoples in the dry steppe of Central Asia. This is all because it’s basically necessary to survive — there are whole social systems set up to ensure survival.
Now take that and smash it to bits, forcing people to settle. Tell them their culture isn’t “modern” and is worthless, take away their children and educate them in skills that have little relevance to the old world and then make them try to make it in the new with no support. Make them give up the herds and the rituals that marked their lives’ signposts of birth, marriage, death, happy occasions and sad ones. Impose Western methods that don’t make any sense in the sahara. Make little towns that are squalid camps centered on wells that run dry in a few years.
The outcome isn’t going to be good, and this same scenario plays out again and again and again.
Modern civilization has not been good to these people.
And again, I stress that the old societies were far from perfect. But they were good for what they needed to be. We’ve imposed for the sake of resource extraction and great-game politics systems of economics that were not at all fitted to people’s lives and we didn’t ask anyone their opinion. We’ve assumed that modern civilization as we know it is self-evidently better than anything else, even though it is utterly unsustainable.
And no, this doesn’t mean return Arabia to what it looked like in 1800. It does mean figuring out how to make modern technologies and systems work for the people there, in ways that enrich them rather than taking something vital away.
Jesse @#9:
“Y’know reading these discussions are some really basic assumptions here that are wrong.
“First, Islam is not a religion that is any more ‘primitive’ than Christianity is. That is, Omar and Marcus Ranum are assuming that something like Martin Luther’s challenge is a part of a natural progression and that Islam hasn’t had an enlightenment yet.”
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I do not presume to speak for Marcus, but the assumption I made, with good historical justification, IMHO, was that political, religious, ideological, economic or other authoritarianism is not sustainable in the medium to long term. Not only will a hundred flowers bloom if ‘allowed’ to by some Chairman Mao, but the ideological garden will naturally start to fill with ferals: ‘weeds’ if you will, that spontaneously appear. Islam did not continue for long before the Sunni/Shia schism, and a look around the Islamic scene today confirms that it is an all-in bun-fight, bomb-fight and bullet-fight, and it was so long before OBL and GWB got into their contest.
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To its eternal credit, the Islamic world kept learning alive for us all after its classical lights went out, and Western Europe descended in the first millennium AD into its Dark Age. But no; Islam has not had anything like Christianity’s Reformation, in part because the Koran is purportedly the creation of one author who gave a strict prohibition on any additions, while the Bible is openly many and often contradictory ‘books’. (Choose your text, nail it to a suitable
church door, then stand back and see what happens.) It seems to me that something more convincing than past colonialism has to be offered IMHO to explain the lack of scientific, technical and cultural innovation in the modern Islamic world, and its propensity for open brawling.
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You also said: “Anyhow my point is largely that we can’t pretend that the existence of a bunch of theocrats in Saudi Arabia — or in other places in the Arabian peninsula where we give them money and guns — has nothing to do with us, that it’s some special quality of Islam, that Islam has somehow missed out on history. It hasn’t. If anything it was us who ensured that the situation in Saudi Arabia is what it is now. It was us who made every effort to stymie democracy in North Africa and the Middle East, and only signed on to the Arab Spring when it was clear there wasn’t any other choice. (And I might add it was once again, us who engineered he brief ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood at the expense of the Egyptian labor movement, and us who continued to give the Egyptian military money which enabled them to mount a counter-revolution).”
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Speaking for myself, I beg leave to be not included in that ‘us’, and for good reason. Democracy is commonly assumed to be identical with representative government. The problem is that the people who stand for popular endorsement in elections are generally and often not themselves democrats. They do not want to see the ‘people’s will’ (however established or defined) prevail: they want their own will to prevail. Likewise the people who on any given day can be found at some stage of a climb up a corporate ladder. Democracy at best is an elected oligarchy, and ‘at best’ is not a mere figure of speech; it may be the genuine best we can ever hope for. (The experimental alternatives that have been tried to date have for a variety of reasons all been found wanting, though arguably Switzerland and Iceland are the countries which have the oldest and strongest continuing democracies in the world.)
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When Bush, Blair, Howard and the rest of the CoW buckled on their guns and went into Iraq, they probably sincerely believed they were fighting to see that Truth, Justice and the Western (eg Halliburton) Way prevailed over Saddam Hussein and his murderous henchmen. But what they got was something else again. As one old rhymer put it:
“… t was not our intention,
But that such mistakes occur,
Of course I needn’t mention.”
@Omar — The problem is that when you say
That’s like saying that since segregation ended in 1954 why can’t those black folks get more college degrees? Because the pernicious effects outlast he system that created those problems. Did you notice that every time a developing world leader showed up who tried to reform anything, the CIA had him killed? You think that might have an effect after a while? (Try this: name an anticolonial leader of the past half-century who wasn’t murdered by the former colonials. It’s a short list).
The British and the French absolutely destroyed many societies in the Middle East and Africa — they eliminated their material bases. It wasn’t unlike what was done to the Native Americans here, though nowhere near as thoroughly. For example, forcing settlements on people who moved around in the desert. The people there weren’t “nomadic” because they were stupid, they were nomadic because it bloody well works.
And you’re saying that “well, all that’s over now, why didn’t they innovate?” You think that maybe an imposed dictatorship might have had some effect on that?
I don’t see anyone decrying the lack of innovation in Greece or Spain or Portugal as some deep cultural problem related to Catholicism or Orthodoxy and all those countries were dictatorships within my living memory. The year I was born (1969) many gulf states were still protectorates. A big chunk of Africa was still under colonial rule.
Colonialism and exploitation is not the whole explanation, but it’s a gigantic part of it.
Now, as to being included in the “us” — well, whether or not you voted for Bush (I didn’t) I know a few cents of every tax dollar I pay goes to the house of Saud. A few more cents goes to Egypt’s military. A few more cents goes to Israel. So yes, I bear a pretty direct responsibility especially as I benefit from the cheap oil, as I expect you do (you own something made of plastic, I will bet, and a rather large bit of the cheap oil goes to make those things).
As to the intentions of Bush et al. I do not for one second think they had any intimations of democracy at all. No government in the West ever has, at least not when it comes to brown people. The policy has been, explicitly, to destroy any intimation of democracy wherever it might appear. Democracies are messy, and people won’t always vote in your interests, but in theirs. Dictatorships are much more pliable. If you don’t think this is the case I ask you when, in the last 100 years, or even before, the US has ever, ever, ever supported a democratic alternative when a dictatorship was available. I will tell you it has happened not once. Never. The Great Game was always more important.
Ever hear the saying “a man is judged by his friends?” Look at who our friends in the region were prior to the Arab Spring. Saddam Hussein was our friend, too. (Remember re-flagging the Kuwaiti / Iraqi oil tankers? But we have always been at war with Eastasia… Christ, I now know how Winston Smith felt).
Even in Afghanistan, by the way. The people the US gave money to were the precursors to the Taliban. The government that existed before wasn’t perfect, but it was a damned sight better than any since the civil war. But no, to poke the Russians in the eye First Carter, then Reagan and his ilk decided that destabilizing the country was a better idea. And then after 30 years of civil war that destroyed much of the social fabric, what do you expect?
Imagine if in the US we had an imposed government. Imagine someone worked really hard to take away all the jobs that existed before and render your skills irrelevant, destroying any ability you had to make a living. Then they said “learn this new set of skills, but you need to speak Arabic, you need to give up going to church, you need to quit reading Mellville and Milton and Shakespeare, they are all primitive savages.” You can’t live in a wood frame house anymore, someone tells you that it isn’t the way civilized people live. You’re forced to relocate. Your music is disparaged and discouraged, your art. Your whole culture and everything that makes you who you are. You exist to serve a foreign master. Christ, what do you think you would do in that case? Do you think the US would recover from something like that overnight? Would you?
No, the people who get voted in aren’t perfect. But nowhere in the Middle East have the Western powers ever allowed people who weren’t crazy authoritarians to get elected–assuming the elections were allowed to happen. See what I had above about the labor movement in Egypt, which is where the revolution started — not with western-educated English speakers tweeting in Tahrir square. When Hillary Clinton met with Egyptian leaders, the whole point was to make damned sure that the Egyptian left was sidelined.
(Al Jazeera English had that story by the way. A very, very good one. Western media ignored it, because few American correspondents — and some of these folks are acquaintances and colleagues of mine –speak even rudimentary Arabic. That automatically limits the people you will speak to. Talented reporters can work around this, but even so, what ends up happening is the sources are largely western-educated English speakers, which describes maybe <1% of the population. I don't doubt the sincerity of the people in Cairo. But in terms of how we view the Revolution it's important to remember that it's beginnings were not there, and that the thrust of the drive for reform came from the textile workers).
Jesse @#26:
“@Omar — The problem is that when you say
”’It seems to me that something more convincing than past colonialism has to be offered IMHO to explain the lack of scientific, technical and cultural innovation in the modern Islamic world, and its propensity for open brawling.’
“That’s like saying that since segregation ended in 1954 why can’t those black folks get more college degrees? Because the pernicious effects outlast he system that created those problems…”
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Do they? Does that explain (anywhere near sufficiently) the modern lingering ‘effects’?
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Vietnam: a war to prevent democracy rather than to establish it: no argument there. Chile: a democratically elected government overthrown with US assistance and a murderous tyranny installed. No argument there either. And etc, likewise. Mostly. But there are some important modern realities that the ‘lingering effects of past and pernicious imperialism’ thesis cannot even explain away, let alone explain.
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To begin with a non-Islamic example. Two countries share the island of Hispaniola, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Both are former European colonies, but with ethnically and thus culturally divergent populations. These two cultures manifest themselves quite starkly in satellite photography. (The link is a bit too long, to post here, and I was away from school the day we had HTML, but it comes from a google search of ‘Hispaniola, satellite imagery’.) Two divergent (however based and sourced) cultural attitudes to forestation are readily apparent from space on Hispaniola.
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India was 5,000 years old civilisation consisting of a collection of independent principalities before the British united it by conquest in the 18th C. In the 19th C, they, the French and a select few other European powers (plus Japan) walked all over the likewise 5,000 years old civilisation of China. This provoked a Chinese response which resulted in them all being expelled by 1949, and today, a mere 65 years later, China is the not only the workshop of the world but financier to a great part of it, while the former imperialist overlords sink steadily into the sunset. Meanwhile, India (independent by 1947) is much more slow to get its act together, while its ethnically identical but culturally different next door neighbour Pakistan languishes as a total basket case.
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The difference between India and Pakistan arises from the fact that they sit side by side on the Indian subcontinent as if set up in a controlled experiment designed to test the effect of Islam on a large sample of people of a more-or-less constant ethnicity. I would also like to see satellite imagery relating to this as well. Also Malaysia (Islam)/Thailand (Buddhist) and Bali (Hindu)/Java(Islam). I have not so far tried any of these.
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A while back here on B&W I suggested ranking the main religions in order of increasing obnoxiousness. I do not have a link to it, but from memory I definitely ranked Islam (choose your preferred sect) as the most obnoxious religion of them all. No argument from anyone, but some other commenter suggested the Jains (wouldn’t hurt a fly) to get the gong for the least obnoxious.
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Culture (read ‘religion’ if you wish) definitely and decisively counts.