This seems to me a fundamental problem:
Modernity has multiple meanings: industrialization, urbanization, adoption of liberal values, women’s rights, elected governments, etc. I want to emphasize here the concept of citizenship as a core component of modernity. The idea of citizenship is linked to the idea of individuals in society possessing unalienable rights. The evolution of this idea has meant that even though society is a collection of individuals, individual rights override collective rights and distinguish modern society from mob rule. On this idea rests the modern democratic society, wherein political leaders are elected by citizens to whom they are accountable. They hold office with citizen approval; they make laws, but none might be passed that override the unalienable rights of citizens written into the constitution. They govern with support of the citizens and are replaced when they fail to meet the goals that saw them elected.
Let us now consider the malady of Islam given the above description of the problem as I see it. Modernity, and its concept of individual rights, is Western in origin. It evolved through centuries of philosophical and political debates, and then equally long periods of war to defeat those who opposed the principle of individual liberty. Eventually modernity and its off-shoot, citizenship, prevailed over the opposition and were more or less firmly established in the West and places beyond by the end of the last century.
Arabs were in close proximity to these ideas and the struggle that accompanied them. What, it might be asked of the Arabs, was their response to modernity? Even with all the apologia and obfuscation, the answer that cannot be evaded is that the collective Arab response has shown a preference for totalitarian ideology. In the period following the end of the World War II and European colonialism, there were three ideological responses that marked out the Arabs into three groups: secular Muslims, and orthodox Muslims divided into the majority Sunni and minority Shi’i sects.
Secular Muslims were mobilized by Arab nationalism embodied in the Ba’ath party. Sunni Muslims chose Wahhabism/Salafism embodied in the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban. Shi’i Muslims followed Khomeinism embodied in the politics of the clerical regime in Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Sadrists in Iraq.
All three ideologies and movements they spawned are totalitarian. For all their professed belief in Islam’s sacred scripture, Arabs — given their blood-soaked history of suppressing dissent and despite their close proximity to the evolution of liberal movements in Europe — have been engaged in suppressing or eradicating any form of individual liberty while making no allowance for their opponents. Arabs have shown by their conduct that tyranny is their preferred response to modernity.
I wish that I had any sense whatsoever that the current administration understands this problem.
“I wish that I had any sense whatsoever that the current administration understands this problem.”
What makes you think the current administration thinks this is a problem, Rand?
small nit w/ the original author… our inalienable rights are not confined to those written in our Constitution. But, I understand that the author was speaking more broadly than the US.
With all due respect to Mr. Mansur, he misses both of the two essential characteristics of Arab/Islamic societies that underlie their ongoing dysfunction. First, none of the Arabian “nations” are really countries in the Western sense. Citizenship is a recent and weakly-rooted concept in that part of the world because it presupposes a Western-type nation-state as a prerequisite with which to identify. With few exceptions, Arabs define themselves primarily as members of tribes and clans rather than as citizens of nations.
Tribal barbarism is the default form of human social organization. Arabs have never really progressed beyond this except for a few atypical elites. Arab countries, then, are not ideologically totalitarian in the Western sense of that word, but simply ruled by scaled-up versions of despotic tribal chieftainship. The difference at street level between tribal despotism and totalitarian despotism is, admittedly, not very large, but their generative bases are quite different.
The fact is that tribalism, as a form of social organization does not really scale well beyond a few hundred individuals. This is papered over in most Arab countries by the quite artificial – and recent – use of scads of oil revenue to create unnaturally extended networks of lieutenancy and loot-sharing on the part of the tribal chieftain despots. The result bears certain superficial resemblances to Western welfare states but, again, has a very different origin.
The characteristic of tribalism that most dooms it as a basis for real nation-states that are large both in population and area is that tribal norms of male prestige are entirely antithetical to the construction of a large, diverse, division-of-labor economy. Tribal societies are almost exclusively warrior-centric. War with other tribes pretty much dominates external social interaction. Warrior prestige, in turn, is closely tied to success in battle and the acquisition of wealth through plunder.
Tribal peoples – especially nomadic tribal peoples such as Arabs have, until recently, mostly been – typically make very little in the way of goods by themselves. The preferred way of acquiring things is to take them by force from others. When everyone in a sizable territory sees things this way, it is unsurprising that not much gets added to the stock of goods in a typical generation. But it may also be the case that what goods there are change hands briskly as the result of ceaseless combats both large and small. The “ideology” of the typical tribalist, then, is, by the standards of Western civilized nation-states, that of a criminal. Thievery within tribes is usually punished severely. Thievery from those of other tribes, however, is celebrated and esteemed.
The especially poor treatment accorded women in Arabic/Islamic societies – much worse than in many other tribe-based cultures – is due to a second basic problem which I’m afraid requires more time than I currently have to write and more space to explain than the esteemed Mr. Simberg is likely to want to cede in his comment threads. Another time and place perhaps.
Yet interestingly, despite the value accorded to war and warriors, modern Islamic states are notable for their absence of war leaders. Party bosses like Saddam may strut around in gaudy uniforms, but actual victorious generals are few and tend to get purged. (One reason for the Arab states’ abysmal track record against Israel, I suspect.)
So one is confronted by the spectacle of a warrior-dominated society with nothing but faux warriors.
“The preferred way of acquiring things is to take them by force from others.”
P. J. O’Rourke, in one of his books, describes the tribal people of Afghanistan as “periodically descending upon the Plain of Punjab to commit recreational pillage.”
“I wish that I had any sense whatsoever that the current administration understands this problem.”
I think what Obama “knows” was summarized by his spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright: “God damn America.”
Obama thinks that all the troubles of the world are the fault of evil white men–especially evil Americans–and only disaster is likely to clue him in (although judging by the leftists I have known, it is overwhelmingly likely that even disaster would not open his eyes.)
As Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Trimegistus – what is needed to win wars is not warriors at all, but soldiers. And there is a difference.
To nitpick, Iran is not inhabited by Arabs and neither is Afghanistan. Neither are the various Far Eastern countries where the infection of Islam has taken hold.
However, it is quite easily arguable that Islam is essentially Dark Ages Arab barbarism made into a religion. The malady of Islam is that Islam is a malady. A highly infectious, unsightly and lethal one.
Some can learn from the mistakes of others, but most have to learn things hard lessons the hard way.
Others, unfortunately, cannot learn them at all. It’s scary to think one of these is our president.