This blog post by an Australian officer who just got back from Iraq (linked from a Washington Times article) has some great comments on the Sunni tribes’ revolt (which I discussed earlier). It supports my general view that the tribal leaders’ falling out with al-Qaeda is a result of a breakdown in their formerly-shared interest in stopping Shi’a power, but Kilcullen gives a lot more insight into the precise reasons. For one thing, he notes that tribal leaders have been thinking ahead to what will happen when the US leaves, and realizing that al Qaeda is as big a threat to their power as the government. This raises an interesting question: maybe Congressional Democrats’ constant talk of withdrawing from Iraq has actually helped the war effort?
Kilcullen also points out that the tribes’ “flip” is probably the best development in the last few years, but ironically it wasn’t an intended goal of the surge. Also, I would file all his comments about the greater effectiveness of local community organizations in securing order under the heading of “Edmund Burke was right all along.”
But on to my main point. The catalyst for the tribes’ flip, Kilcullen says, was jihadists trying to marry local women. Apparently al Qaeda commonly marries its people into powerful local families, but that goes against Iraq tribal tradition.In most parts of the Arab Middle East first cousins are regarded as ideal marriage partners–thus obviously keeping most marriages within tribes, and making marriage to al Qaeda outsiders less desirable. (I’m surprised that I can’t find a good discussion of this on either Google or Wikipedia, but Stanley Kurtz’s discussion of the topic last spring was thorough, even if his conclusions were questionable.) It’s interesting that all the places Kilcullen says al Qaeda has used intermarriage successfully–Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Indonesia–are non-Arab. Though Islam is almost universally interpreted to allow cousin marriage, this doesn’t mean that it’s a specifically Islamic practice. In fact it predates Islam in Arabia, which explains why it might be a blind spot for al Qaeda types who study only Islamic, not general Middle Eastern, history. (The big catch here is that most of the al Qaeda leadership is Arab, but I don’t know how much cousin marriage is still practiced by jetsetting Saudi construction tycoons.)
Which brings me to the most interesting line in Kilcullen’s post: “AQ, with their hyper-reductionist version of “Islam” stripped of cultural content, discounted the tribes’ view as ignorant, stupid and sinful.” I think this is fascinating because it points to the way in which al Qaeda is arguably a post-Enlightenment entity. Like the 19th century Western Orientalists Edward Said critiqued, al Qaeda subscribes to the idea that there is only one way to practice Islam in its essence–but whereas Orientalists would’ve said other traditions were just irrelevant furniture making it hard to see the fundamentally Islamic character of every Islamic culture, al Qaeda seems to view anything not explicitly contained within its interpretation of the Koran as being not just neutral, but actually ANTI-Islamic.
Why does this matter? Well, I think we inadvertently contribute, in some small way, to helping al Qaeda’s essentialist view of things when we talk about the “Islamic” period in Middle Eastern history, by which we mean only the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. For example, I visited Islamic Cairo when I was in Egypt, and a Google search reveals more examples of such usage like this, this, and this. So Western scholars are implying that it was only under the early caliphates that the Middle East was truly “Islamic,” which also implies that the Ottoman Empire was, and the modern Middle East is, somehow not Islamic. This plays right into the hands of an enemy which sees the Umayyads and Abbasids as homogeneous totalitarian theocracies, and which wants to bring them back.
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