Michael Cook on Muhammad
This discussion with Michael Cook has some good arguments. Among the most interesting quotes:
“I would see Constantine as a necessary precondition for Muhammad.”
“There is a significant difference between the obligations involved in aggressive and defensive jihad. In offensive jihad, provided somebody is doing it, nobody else has to bother. By contrast, with defensive jihad, anybody in the area that’s being attacked by the unbelievers — any adult male has a duty, prima facie, of participating in that jihad.”
[I think the implications of this or the War on Terror are pretty obvious.]
“Now, it’s not just that moderate, wishy-washy liberal Christians in this country don’t believe they ought to hate their parents; even the Christian fundamentalists don’t think they should hate their parents, and yet Jesus said it. I’m sure they have ways of getting off the hook in the same way Muslims can find all sorts of ways of getting off their hooks. The fact it’s there in scripture doesn’t have much predictive value — maybe none at all. So much comes down to the context in which people are doing things with scripture.”
“[Fundamentalism is] not just being pious or zealous, or for that matter fanatical; it’s specifically that you want to go back to the roots of your tradition. There are plenty of people who don’t want to go back to the roots of their tradition; they want the tradition as it came down to them. Hindus are typically like that. Fundamentalism is when you want to go back.”
[Among the more minor issues this raises: does this mean the KJV-Only movement isn’t fundamentalist…just conservative?]
The Israelis Make Mistakes Too
Hey, we told them not to sell fighter technology to China, and now it’s coming back to bite them. But then, they’re hardly the first country to regret selling weapons to Iran.
Why are the Turks so upset?
I don’t quite understand Turkey’s anger over the Armenian genocide resolution. I have my doubts over whether it was actually a genocide in the technical sense, but that’s not the point here. (There’s a good commentary on this on NRO, though I take great issue with Kavulla’s offhand and unjustified comment that Turkey may have merely a “delusion” of civilization.”)
But who was responsible for the Armenian massacres? They occurred entirely under the Ottoman Empire, before the founding of the Turkish Republic. And what about the people involved? To the best of my knowledge Ataturk had nothing to do with it, and in fact didn’t get along with the Young Turks who were running the government. As for those Young Turks (this is admittedly all based on Wikipedia/Vikipedi):
- Enver Pasha: court-martialled by the Ottoman Empire for crimes including the abuse of Armenians; sentenced to death; fled Anatolia; rejected as a political partner by Ataturk.
- Talaat Pasha: court-martialled by the Empire in absentia; sentenced to death; assassinated by an Armenian.
- Cemal Pasha: court-martialled by the Empire; sentenced to death; assassinated by an Armenian.
- Behaeddin Shakir: court-maritalled by the Empire but apparently acquitted; exchanged by the British to Ataturk’s government but never took up a major position.
- Sukru Kaya: If I’m reading Vikipedi correctly, which I’m probably not, he was fairly involved in Ataturk’s government, and he definitely became a Foreign Minister from Ataturk’s party.
But I think the upshot is that except for Kaya, none of the perpetrators of the massacres went on to become a major part of the Turkish Republic. In fact, even the Ottoman Empire tried the Young Turks for their crimes—which may have been just a tool to punish them for losing the war, but still, even Germany didn’t try its own war criminals in 1945. In WWII that was left up to the allies, who in the one case here where they had the chance (Shakir’s), didn’t try the perpetrators.
My point is I think the Turkish Republic has a very plausible case for admitting the massacres, or even admitting a genocide, but denying any responsibility by the current government. Everyone in the post-war German government which accepted responsibility for the Holocaust had lived through the war, and many had even been in the German Army, though probably not the SS. But a government of Turks born long after the last Armenian was murdered still stubbornly insists on denying the massacres, even hiring washed-up US congressional leaders to lobby for them. Why? All I can figure out is that it has to do with a continued sense of the Republic as the heir to a Great Turkish Past, and maybe a sense of the artificiality of Turkish nationalism. There were certainly plenty of Turks outside modern-day Turkey (as shown by Enver Pasha’s post-war activities), and plenty of non-Turks inside it. Maybe Turks realize, even if they don’t want to admit it, that without the Armenian massacres and the population exchanges, there could be no Turkey as we know it? (Sort-of the point made here.) Thus, even if remembering the massacres doesn’t hurt Ataturk’s reputation, maybe it does undermine the founding myth of Kemalism: a historical predestination that Anatolia would be the nation-state of the Turks?
Laws, Millets, and Privacy
This ongoing series on Slate.com discusses a number of things which frequently come up on BeardofWisdom, but I’m on an Ottoman kick today so I’m going to concentrate on Wu’s discussion of Mormons and the Amish. He’s certainly right that our treatment of these groups isn’t precisely consonant with a law code based on the individual (and the centralized state). We don’t do very well accommodating intermediary organizations, largely because we tend view these as putting unwarranted restrictions on their members’ rights. In some ways they have to, or else postmodernity, by breaking down geographically bounded communities (even as it creates purely voluntary un-geographic communities), will be the death of them–as Wayne has pointed out, this will probably happen to the Gnostics/Mandeans soon.
Ironically, it’s also postmodernity that allows the Amish and the FLDS to survive. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the (successful) government attacks on the Mormon Church, and the less successful moves against the FLDS and the Amish, all came between the late 19th century and the mid 20th century. This was the heyday, especially in the US and Europe, of the drive toward consolidated, monopolistic, uniformly sovereign nation states–which can’t tolerate smaller intermediary institutions. Since the ’60s, we seem to have become disillusioned with this effort, and hence the tolerance for the FLDS or the Amish. But really this is just returning to the pattern of states throughout human history–there has always been this tolerance of autonomous communities, sometimes even institutionalized (also in Russia), by empires which couldn’t impose their will uniformly on all their subjects. Now we have the means, but apparently not the will.
There’s also a lot of historical precedent for the situation Wu describes with pornography laws in the US. I know there’s some history of Catholic states tolerating prostitution better than Protestant ones, but I’m more familiar with the Ottoman case. In theory, it was illegal for Muslim subjects (though not for Christians) to consume alcohol, but usually no one was bothered for drinking in their own home–not just because there wasn’t a sufficient police force to monitor this, but because there was an assumption of the sanctity of the home. (Ah, those backward anti-modern Muslims!) Exactly the same combinations of reasons we don’t prosecute “normal” pornography on the internet.
So I don’t think any of this is really new, just a return to premodernity and the natural state of human societies. As long as I’m wandering all over the place, I’ll return to the Amish/FLDS situation: don’t the benefits of federalism also apply here? And isn’t federalism just a rationalistic, codified, modern recognition of this ancient tendency toward divided sovereignty?
What’s in a Name?
Brendan at Social Science++ took an amusing look at how free a country is likely to be based on what it calls itself. I think it’s interesting that “kingdoms” tend to be more free than “republics”. But the moral of the story: don’t take a job on the People’s Democratic Socialist Island of Islamic Arabs.
I Told You So (sort of)
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.
Iraq: Tribes vs. al-Qaeda
Belatedly following the advice of Capt. Travis Patriquin, the army is apparently trying hard to work with Sunni sheikhs, many of whom have become disillusioned with al Qaeda. Patriquin was killed while this strategy was just getting off the ground (pay link), but it seems to be having some success–for example, Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon claim that al-Anbar province is now one of the safest areas in Iraq. A Lexis Nexis search shows only 4 references to the Sunni Triangle in US newspapers in June and July of this year, down from 19 in the same period last year.
This makes a lot of sense for tribal leaders. They have always jealously guarded their power, against the Ottoman Empire, against the British, and even against Saddam. In 2003, the biggest threat became the US-backed provisional government, which as Patriquin’s slide show pointed out, sought to dismantle tribal leadership and centralize power with Shi’a government in Baghdad. So most of the Sunni sheikhs were willing to cooperate first with their old rivals the Ba’athists, and then with al Qaeda.
But in 2007 it seems pretty ridiculous to suggest that the Shi’a government in Baghdad is actually going to exert centralized control over Anbar. The problem for the sheikhs now is that the (often foreign) terrorists they invited in aren’t willing to leave, and are trying to become an independent power player in the Sunni Triangle, with their own ideological agenda. In much of Iraq, sectarian power struggles drive the violence, and provide an incentive to paper over intra-sectarian differences. But there are no Shi’a in al Anbar, and the Baghdad government is a paper tiger, so the sheikhs are free to turn against al Qaeda. When the US Army comes around at the same time offering money and support to do what you want to do anyway, why not cooperate?
In Baghdad’s confused tangle of sects, people are putting aside jihad against the Crusaders in order to kill each other for more mundane political advantages. In Anbar, the sheikhs line up with the US to hunt down terrorists. But in both cases, al Qaeda is being beaten only because it gets in the way of Iraqi interests hammering out their own future.
Optimistically, I hope the situation in al Anbar offers some small hope for a balance of power between the government and various factions in Iraq, perhaps leading to a sort of de facto federalism. On the other hand, an Iraq which is even partially stabilized by co-opting the tribal power structure won’t be an Iraq with real democracy, individual rights, freedom of religion, women’s rights, or even a government that doesn’t brutalize its own people.
Four Wars in Iraq?
I think there have really been four overlapping wars going on in Iraq in the past four years.
- The US Army vs the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard, March-April 2003. Obviously a clear US victory.
- The US vs Ba’athist hardliner guerillas, March 2003-sometime in 2004. It seems to me this war was quietly won–I doubt any Iraqi insurgents are loyal to Saddam anymore.
- The US and new Iraqi government vs al Qaeda in Iraq, late 2003-present. I think the US is actually winning this one, as indicated in this article, and by the killings of many al Qaeda leaders. There just aren’t many people in Iraq willing to fight for a new caliphate, or willing to endure the perpetual war al Qaeda demands. I also wonder if, as it looks more and more likely the US will leave soon, those Iraqis who just wanted the US gone are less motivated to help al Qaeda.
- Sunni and Shi’a groups vs each other, and vs. the US and Iraqi government, 2005-present. The start date on this one is obviously vague, and maybe you could push it up to 04 or back to early 06. Al Qaeda helped kick off the sectarian squabbles, but they clearly have a life of their own. Once another group has crystallized and is trying to squeeze out your interests, you have to fight back.
So the sad irony, I think, is that al Qaeda is being beaten in Iraq–partly because they’re getting in the way of Sunnis and Shi’a fighting with each other.