The Middle East's Tribal Affliction
- From: jose <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 08:15:31 -0800 (PST)
The Middle East's Tribal Affliction
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Why is the Middle East so at odds with modern life, laggard in
everything from literacy to standard of living, from military prowess
to political development?
A profound new book by Philip Carl Salzman, professor at McGill
University, with the deceptively plain title Culture and Conflict in
the Middle East (Prometheus), offers a bold and original
interpretation of Middle Eastern problems.
An anthropologist, Salzman begins by sketching out the two patterns of
rule that historically have dominated the Middle East: tribal autonomy
and tyrannical centralism. The former pattern, he argues, is
distinctive to the region and key to understanding it. Tribal self-
rule is based on what Salzman calls balanced opposition, a mechanism
whereby those Middle Easterners living in deserts, mountains, and
steppes protect life and limb by relying on their extended families.
This immensely intricate and subtle system boils down to (1) each
person counting on paternal relatives (called agnates) for protection
and (2) equal-sized units of agnates confronting each other. Thus, a
nuclear family faces off against another nuclear family, a clan faces
a clan, and so on, up to the meta-tribal level. As the well-known
Middle Eastern adage sums up these confrontations, "I against my
brother, I and my brothers against my cousins, I and my brothers and
my cousins against the world."
On the positive side, affiliation solidarity allows for a dignified
independence from repressive states. Negatively, it implies unending
conflict; each group has multiple sworn enemies and feuds often carry
on for generations.
Tribal autonomy has driven Middle Eastern history, as the great
historian Ibn Khaldun observed over six centuries ago. When a
government faltered, large tribal confederations would form, leave
their arid badlands and seize control of the cities and agricultural
lands. Having seized the state, tribes exploited their power
unabashedly to forward their own interests, cruelly exploiting their
subject population, until they in turn faltered and the cycle started
anew.
Salzman's tour de force lies in updating Ibn Khaldun, demonstrating
how the dual pattern of tribal self-rule and tyrannical centralism
continues to define life in the Middle East, and using it to explain
the region's most characteristic features, such as autocracy,
political mercilessness, and economic stagnancy. It accounts,
likewise, for the war of annihilation against Israel and, more
generally, Islam's "bloody borders" - the widespread hostility toward
non-Muslims.
The dual pattern even explains key aspects of Middle Eastern family
life. The imperative to aggregate more agnates than one's neighbors,
Salzman argues, means developing tactics to outnumber their male
progeny. This has several implications:
Marrying one's daughters to cousins, as a way for the family to
benefit from their fertility.
Practicing polygyny, so as to benefit from the fertility of multiple
women.
Scrutinizing other families' females, hoping to catch them in an
immoral act, thereby compelling their men-folk to kill them and
forfeit their fertility.
This last point suggests that balanced opposition largely accounts for
the well-known Middle Eastern custom of "honor killing," whereby
brothers murder sisters, cousins murder cousins, fathers murder
daughters, and sons murder mothers. Significantly, the woman's
indiscretions are tolerated within the family and lead to murders
almost only when they become known outside the family.
More broadly, balanced opposition means the Middle East lacks abstract
principles by which to measure actions "against general criteria,
irrespective of the affiliation of particular actors." Instead,
intense particularism requires a family member to support a closer
relative against a farther one, regardless of who may be at fault.
Tribesmen and subjects, not citizens, populate the region. That most
Middle Easterners retain this us-versus-them mentality dooms
universalism, the rule of law, and constitutionalism. Trapped by these
ancient patterns, Salzman writes, Middle Eastern societies "perform
poorly by most social, cultural, economic, and political criteria." As
the region fails to modernize, it falls steadily further behind.
It can advance only by breaking the archaic system of affiliation
solidarity. "This is possible not through the replacement of
traditional groups by newly conceived groups [such as political
parties], but by the replacement of groups by individuals."
Individualism will make headway among Middle Easterners, however, only
when "what they are for is more important than whom they are against."
That fundamental change may take decades or even centuries to
accomplish. But Salzman's deep analysis makes it possible to
understand the region's strange affliction and to identify its
solution.
.
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