The Cellar - View Single Post - Anti-Semites? Who, Us?

Skunks · 01-18-2005, 12:46 PM

I have a paper on The Awakening that I need to crap out in the next hour and a half, but I was reading an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0198810784/qid=1106073268/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-1987600-2352128?v=glance&s=books&n=507846">interesting book</a> about the life of Muhammad last night, and there was an offhand comment about the troubles of the middle east.

Essentially, before Islam came around, the desert was populated by nomadic tribes. They didn't have a code of ethics, or any sense of morality; they had honor, and a firm grasp of "what goes around, comes around." Murder was prevented within the tribe by the absolute rule of the chief/mob justice against anybody who can't settle a scuffle properly. Murder between tribes was kept in relative check by limited proximity and blood debts--the whole Hammurabi "eye for an eye" thing. If you killed a member of another tribe, you could count on that tribe killing parts of your tribe.

So the guy's saying something or other about how this works into the intricate politics of Muhammad's career, particularly about the idea of paying tribute for protection (wherein a more powerful group is honorbound to perform the retribution-killings for you, allowing an ethnic or religious or just smaller tribe to pay a modest sum for relatively violence-free living), and he offhandedly notes that part of the troubles in the middle east today is that this system has been removed and not been replaced. We have these countries, which were sort of arbitrarily grouped without much regard for ethnic groups or history (etc) by the colonists, and they're somehow supposed to be kept in check by the western higher authority of a punitive law enforcement agency. Except because that's antithetical to their traditional approach to life, they can't make it work well for them. And in the mean time there's no effective system.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, but it struck me as an interesting take on the problem. That maybe the "progress" we're bringing (e.g. western ideas of justice) is actually a step backwards, because it's removed a perhaps less "sanitized" if functional system without putting in place any effective alternative. Which is of course a very broad statement that anybody could have come up with ("oh, yeah, the middle east is fucked up"), so I'm not sure why I'm posting it.

But it's a very interesting, and remarkably secular, book about the early history of Islam.

(it should be noted that my geographic sense of the middle east is very, very vague, and I'm sort of lumping it all together as one big mess. And that I really didn't read anything in this thread aside from the first half of the first post, and a few nuggets of vitriol in the middle.)

01-18-2005, 12:46 PM	#7
Skunks I thought I changed this. Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: western nowhere, ny Posts: 412	I have a paper on The Awakening that I need to crap out in the next hour and a half, but I was reading an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0198810784/qid=1106073268/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-1987600-2352128?v=glance&s=books&n=507846">interesting book</a> about the life of Muhammad last night, and there was an offhand comment about the troubles of the middle east. Essentially, before Islam came around, the desert was populated by nomadic tribes. They didn't have a code of ethics, or any sense of morality; they had honor, and a firm grasp of "what goes around, comes around." Murder was prevented within the tribe by the absolute rule of the chief/mob justice against anybody who can't settle a scuffle properly. Murder between tribes was kept in relative check by limited proximity and blood debts--the whole Hammurabi "eye for an eye" thing. If you killed a member of another tribe, you could count on that tribe killing parts of your tribe. So the guy's saying something or other about how this works into the intricate politics of Muhammad's career, particularly about the idea of paying tribute for protection (wherein a more powerful group is honorbound to perform the retribution-killings for you, allowing an ethnic or religious or just smaller tribe to pay a modest sum for relatively violence-free living), and he offhandedly notes that part of the troubles in the middle east today is that this system has been removed and not been replaced. We have these countries, which were sort of arbitrarily grouped without much regard for ethnic groups or history (etc) by the colonists, and they're somehow supposed to be kept in check by the western higher authority of a punitive law enforcement agency. Except because that's antithetical to their traditional approach to life, they can't make it work well for them. And in the mean time there's no effective system. I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, but it struck me as an interesting take on the problem. That maybe the "progress" we're bringing (e.g. western ideas of justice) is actually a step backwards, because it's removed a perhaps less "sanitized" if functional system without putting in place any effective alternative. Which is of course a very broad statement that anybody could have come up with ("oh, yeah, the middle east is fucked up"), so I'm not sure why I'm posting it. But it's a very interesting, and remarkably secular, book about the early history of Islam. (it should be noted that my geographic sense of the middle east is very, very vague, and I'm sort of lumping it all together as one big mess. And that I really didn't read anything in this thread aside from the first half of the first post, and a few nuggets of vitriol in the middle.)