Empirical : Personal

As one looks over the Islamic Small Wars--that's what I'm going to call them--the note of intensely personal motivations for violence on the part of those who lead others to it seems hard to ignore. 

Two examples:

• The soldiers of a warlord rape two girls at a checkpoint in Afghanistan and the local Mullah raises a war party, takes revenge for the criminal instance, and then continues on out of necessity to raise the army (the story's relayed by Canadian photojournalist Paul Watson in his memoir, Where War Lives) [2] that becomes the Taliban;
• in Somalia, after a little digging, one learns, possibly, that legal issues between clans (absent of central government and law, one clan leader takes a house or estate by force and fate may give another a chance to take it back a little while later) and that inherent feudal organization within the society may have as much or more to do with the mayhem experienced daily in that bloody place than the Islamic Courts remnants, a possible foil for clan-based dirty work. [3]

With hints of that sort--like the television shows, real people, real stories, and really twisted circumstance--the violence in the Islamic conflict zones takes on dimension.

The democratic citizens of the world's open and not a few "swingin'" societies may not understand the strictures in contemporary tribal and feudal cultures, but they sure as hell know the nature of family, its impositions, obligations, and stories.

For dramatic effect (hey, it's my blog) I'll go so far as to say: "When it comes to family, the west relates!"

:-)

Our problem solvers, however, often take a different approach: scientific observation, military calculation.  The latest to cross my desk out of that realm: Frederic L. Pryor's "Are Muslim Countries Less Democratic?" published through the Middle East Quarterly under the auspices of the Middle East Forum, American Enterprise Institute.  Brushing aside the provocative and largely rhetorical title and its target--by easily accessed exampled, the conclusions are foregone: Saudi Arabia is a monarchy; Egypt is a one-party state; Iran is a theocracy; etc.--the approach wants to examine and perhaps fix a big picture using a target culture and demographic and economic variables to explain it.

Pryor acknowledges one sort of problem with the approach: "In his essay, Ross explores the characteristics of countries in which raw materials such as oil are an important source of state income. Regardless of their dominant religion, these states often have lower indices of political rights."

Much like Burma, I would bet.

I don't want to get into a critique of Pryor's study, which fairly tries to isolate confused variables on its way to concluding, ". . . in all but very poor countries, Islam has a significantly negative impact on political rights," but rather question the relationship between the overarching clinical approach to developing political wisdom versus the study of specific personalities and key embedded cultural myths and values that well up through populations and essentially compose and recapitulate their arrangements across generations.

I hope I'm growing a little bit as a writer as I blog along . . . .

This comes from an early post here on Fatah al-Islam at Nahr al-Bared, Lebanon [4]:

Lebanon

Here's the lead from Nazih Siddiq's article in Reuters [3]: "Al Qaeda-inspired militants in north Lebanon threatened on Wednesday to take their fight to other parts of Lebanon and beyond if the Lebanese army did not stop attacking a Palestinian refugee camp."

Let's reflect a moment here: you rob a bank; the police chase you back to your sanctuary, guns blazing as you go; the army arrives to control the situation, which is your situation, of course, and you set up sniper positions to sap military personnel as the civilian evacuating begins and tedious negotiations and politics get under way to save lives; the army, applying heavier metal than you have, then grinds away at your positions until your sandbox turns into one square kilometer of wreckage, and the Palestinians who have elected to stay, a former and now middle-aged PLO terrorist, who has done his time, among them, revile you for endangering their lives and bringing this disaster down on their heads; at which point, you turn around and assert that you're defending them.

How?

Toward the end of the siege, as Lebanese forces took the last of Fatah al-Islam's positions, and as the militants handed over their women and children on the government's promise of safe passage, prefering that they themselves die fighting, the Quixotic and romantic nature of the folly could not be escaped.  That did not come from poverty, oil- or other resource-based economies, or growing up in a densely populated urban African enclave, and so on, although all those elements may have framed the lives of those who came ashore to fight the Zionists and destroy the infidels; the fighters that comprised Fatah al-Islam arose from a corner of the language of a much incubated culture.

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1. Pryor, Frederic L.  "Are Muslim Countries Less Democratic?"  The Middle East Quarterly, 14:4, Fall 2007.

2. Watson, Paul. Where War Lives. Toronto, Ontario: McClelland & Stewart, Ltd., 2007.

3. Mahdi.  "The Crocodile Tears of Somalia’s Insurgency-owned FM Radios in Mogadishu."  Comment at Oppenheim Arts & Letters, September 28, 2007.

4. Oppenheim, James.  "070606-0900: Odds 'N' Ends."  Oppenheim Arts & Letters, June 6, 2007.

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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