I wont even get into Old Testament characterizations and orders
something is radically wrong with these people
something genetic, perhaps neurotic, maybe just lazy
/ jim
No, not genetic, not neurotic, and certainly not lazy.
I posted on this a while back. They are 'married' to a Perfectly Stupid Idea - see post12187. The original go was an attack on socialism but it does have an analysis of dedication to ideological thinking whiich is applicable. Somewhere I wrote something better, I think, but the search engine on SI isn't great.
Here's a note I wrote a while back:
I suppose the deeper question is why does Arab nationalism reward the romantic loser? Utterly against all principles of self-preservation.
I saw an Israeli documentary on TV a couple of months ago in which were interviewed some unsuccessful suicide bombers - they got caught, or the bomb did not go off "successfully" and the bomber survived. Some of these youg men and boys were unrepentent. They believed, still, in the after death reward - 72 virgins, yada yada - and there was something in it for their families - money and that the rest of family would go to heaven, also.
I drew some conclusions.
The question you ask is too abstract, I think. Or perhaps at the wrong level of abstraction. Perhaps a more rewarding avenue is to ask two questions, 1) how does an individual get so attached to a set of ideas he will kill himself for them? And then, 2) what are the objective conditions which lead to the attachment?
Regarding 1): It's been said, correctly, I think, reason is servant of the emotions. What is meant here is that ideas have power when emotions are attached to them.
Many (not all) young men and boys in Palestine live in a violent environment, are often desperately poor, and are full of surging hormones and washed through and through with strong emotion: love, hate, lust, despair, etc. Get enough of these firmly attached to an idea or set of ideas, no matter how abjectly stupid, and these ideas have power - the thinker is committed to them; and an idea or set of ideas, no matter how admirable, which do not have these strong emotions attached have no power - the thinker has no 'room' for them, so to speak. These weak ideas do not 'illuminate' his life. This is analogous to falling very heavily in love. When we do that, how much 'room' do we have for other people? They do not light up our lives like the beloved.
2): The above is the 'internal', abstract description. These boys' and young mens' environment is deficient: it's authoritarian, and unjust; they are often (but not always) poor and uneducated, and when they get to and beyond puperty are often separated from female company which in itself is is an incitement to anger and violence. The only men who seem to be in control of things is the mullah or the Hamas or Hizbolla man. They are admirable, and often distribute comfort and largesse. The movie illustrated this also.
The documentary maker also interviewed a man who makes the bombs and straps them on the boys and young men. He said they look for suicide bomb candidates in the mosque. He said they look for the thoughtful ones who are devout, serious and although I don't remember him saying it, I expect they look for ones who don't have very many friends. But of course the quiet, thoughtful, devout boys and young men have all the emotional storms the louder ones do but they haven't committed to others and a wider realm of ideas in the way their more outgoing fellows have. These boys and men these recruiters bring along - they pay attention to them, take an interest, encourage and guide them in their devotional committment and eventually, in effect, seduce them and have them place all their emotional treasure - hate, love etc - in one set of ideas.
The above is the extreme example. More generally, people in groups tend to talk about, read, and listen to the same things, especially if they have a common culture. Totalitarian recruitment generally has a leader standing in front telling the story and recruiters trolling the gathering looking for those who appear receptive. If the movement, whatever it be, gets access to public media, or the schools, or both, and even gets to be the social service organization, it's on a roll and can expand recruitment rapidly.
The reason these movements fail eventually, lies in the poverty of their ideas, which really in the end boil down to two. The stronger one is that there is only one way to live - theirs. The weaker is that their misfortunes are caused by those folk who are not like them. Insofar as most of the leaders have attached their emotions to these ideas, other ideas lack power for them and, in effect, they become stupid: Declare war on the rest of the world, open a second front in in Russia, etc.
In the end, they meet a determined, slightly more flexible adversary, which does not want to be like them and which carries the fight until the totalitarians are no longer able to wage war.
An even more desirable outcome is that the totalitarian leadership is eliminated and the followers so exhausted they no longer can attach emotions to foolish ideas and can think of alternatives.
I don't think things run exactly the way Pipes and Ajami describe them. Ajami is right that intellectual classes in the near east world have a large part of their membership devoted to expressing inadequate ideas. But I also think that in many of these countries expressing adequate ideas will probably lead to unemployment, jail, or an early death.
I make no judgements about that because I'm not in their shoes and there is another factor: Most of them love their country and people and these haven't done very well in comparison with the West the last while and many of these intellectuals, like their compatriots value pride more than we do these days - the West will appropriate anything. Our Renaissance gained much of its start from contact with ideas from Arabia, German generals studied Sherman, every one took guff and good things as well, from the British in the 19th century and from the Americans in the 20th, etc A lot of the time we didn't like it but we tried to take the good stuff. Many middle east intellectuals write against appropriating western ideas and ways, I suspect, because they'd like their countries to achieve in their own ways. It's often pride and patriotism these intellectuals attach to the antiwestern idea collection.They can write in this fashion and survive in the very repressive regimes they live under because it isn't fundamentally subversive. But it's also mostly irrelevant.
Most of these intellectuals live in repressive kleptocracies where the only outlet is religion and religion in most of these places has been hijacked by extremists who have taken on many functions an uncorrupt government would run - good education and even justice, and because these are kleptocracies, feeding hungry people.
In Egypt, which is not actually a kleptocracy, these extremists often directly challenge the government, particularly with respect to education, publishing, and fredom of religion, and, of course, even murdered a president. The government is chary of them and gives in on what appear to be little things.
Criticizing the government or the extremist is a risky business compared to attacking the west. And the extremists in many places find it more secure to crticize the west than the local government - until they can replace it. Consequently, there is a lot of anti-western rhetoric coming from many Arab and middle eastern parts from people who who hate each other but are joined in this one activity.
[edited. I did post this here. I still think I got it about right. As far as I went. See below]
This guy is lots smarter than me (and just about everybody else, I suspect). Its a three part interview.
iran-bulletin.org
iran-bulletin.org
iran-bulletin.org
Snips:
Iran Bulletin: Let me begin with conceptual matters. In your book Islams and Modernities why did
you label contemporary Islamic movements "political Islamism" and not, for instance, "Islamic
fundamentalism?"
Aziz Al-Azmeh: I have no aversion whatsoever to using the term fundamentalism, except that
fundamentalism need not be political, and could be construed as a form of rigorous personal
self-discipline and renewed self-fashioning according to ritual and religio-moral requirements.
Fundamentalism is an attitude towards time, which it considers of no consequence, and therefore
finds no problem with the absurd proposition that the initial conditions, the golden age, can be
retrieved: either by going back to the texts without the mediation of traditions considered corrupt
(because they represent Time between the present and its putative beginning), as with Luther and
Sunni Salafism generally from Abduh through Rida and the Muslim Brothers until now, or by the
re-formation of society according to primitivist models seen to be copies of practices in the golden
age, as with what are recognised as fundamentalist movements. .......
AA: I am glad you asked this question. This will give me the opportunity not only to address the
affinities, some of them self-consciously elective, between Islamist ideology and fascism, and with
the wider expanse of modern anti-modernist ideologies which have informed the ideological
repertoire of nativism, right-wing populism, chauvinism, east and west......
Religion and social backwardness were therefore not often directly engaged by these states, which
pushed them into positions of retrenchment and marginality, and precluded serious modernist reform.
What modernism there is in modern Sunni Islam in the Arab world is ambiguous, hesitant,
apologetic, defensive, and manifestly very vulnerable to attack from both traditionalists and radicals
(the two currents presently converged, for instance, in the Azhar, which had hitherto been
traditionalist, paying lip-service, under Nasser - who invigorated the institution enormously - to
modernism.........
As for what you refer to as the "particularity of the Islamic world": I do not think, first of all, that the
Islamic world exists in the order of nature, but is something being constructed by both Islamists and
Westerners (Huntington is only representative, not an original mind) re-dividing the world
ideologically, along culturalist lines, at a time when developmentalism has gone into abeyance,
replaced by structural adjustment, cross-conditionalities, and the like......
If we replace the names of Muhammad and the Shari`a by Ram and the Dharma, we will arrive at the
same ideological tropes as characterise Hindu fundamentalism fascism, and if we substitute for them
Christ or Jeanne d'Arc, we will join up with evangelical fundamentalism and French racism...... |
