Is monarchy the best model for the Middle East?
- Thread starter Mouthwash
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James Stuart
King
Hot midriff-exposing princesses couldn't hurt either.
Start making an actual argument which relates to anything I have said. If you like, go back and read the original quote again.
I don't think that Protestantism makes people automatically support liberty. I just think it reflects the society and ideas of the times, just as how Islam reflected the society of the seventh century Arabs.
There's an excellent study on cousin marriage which Goldman gives, which I can't seem to find on the internet. Jordanians marry cousins at about a 40% rate, Israeli Arabs at 35% (despite being having the highest literacy rate of any Arab nationality) and Syria and Iraq I believe were even higher. The only Middle Eastern countries with a rate below 30% were Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey.
I do recall that one Jordanian diplomat was excommunicated from his tribe because he served as an ambassador to Israel, so I think it's fair to say that they have a large role in Jordan. I also hear a lot about how the US is arming certain Iraqi tribes to fight ISIS, or how internal Gaza politics play out among its tribes. Really, it's one of those things that you don't even know how to argue for, because it seems just self-evident.
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
Your first mistake is referring to "Protestantism" as though it's some kind of singular coherent ideology. Zwingli, Melancthon, Luther, Müntzer, and the many, many different local movements that were collectively referred to as "anabaptism" disagreed with each other at least as much as they did with the Catholic Church
Protip: Calling Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Baptism one "thing" is as ridiculous as calling Greek Orthodoxy, Catholicism and the Coptic Church one thing. Sure in broad strokes they all acknowledge the importance of baptism and the Eucharist and follow the teachings of Christ as recorded in the Bible. But that would rather be like calling Judaism and Christianity the same thing because the Old Testament and the Torah share a lot of stories or that Islam and Christianity are the same thing because they both espouse salvation through holy war.
The other ridiculous part of this post is the implication that Islam is a reflection of 7th Century values and is not allowed to intellectually or philosophically progress, and that it doesn't have a rich and diverse tradition of academic theology, while (apparently) claiming that Christianity is not a reflection of 1st or 2nd Century values and is instead a constantly updating and modernizing religion.
If that's not some Eurocentrist bull[feces] I don't know what is.
Louis XXIV
Le Roi Soleil
You said "start off as a universalist religion." Why did you say that? My response, which was directly to that thing you said, is that Judaism is simply not a universalist religion. A segment of Judaism that has taken on elements of Christianity has moved towards universalism, but that ignores the branches of Judaism that have simply not been influenced at all by Christianity.
Then your quote said "makes it like Islam." I attempted to respond to that by emphasizing the things that make Judaism like Islam.
Maybe after you finished being snarky, you would have figured that out for yourself, but I hope that helped clear things up
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I think that Owen addressed the inanity of this claim pretty neatly, but I'd ask you to consider: what does this reasoning say about Judaism?
It's not clear to me why this is evidence for the claim that a clan-system is fundamental to Arab society. All you're saying here is that a minority of Arabs marry within their extended family, and while that implies a greater degree of association by kinship, it doesn't imply a "clan-system" of the sort you're arguing for. That isn't terribly uncommon even in the West; you'll find something similar in much of the rural United States until the twentieth century. It offers no suggestion that the "clan" is a fundamental social unit or even a defined social unit within Arab society.
Well, it isn't. If the centrality of this "clan system" to Arab society was self-evident you'd be able to explain or even simply describe it, but all you're doing is asserting that centrality over and over again. There's no argument, here, not even Kaiserguard's appeal to antiquity, just reiteration.
I don't think they are one "thing" by any stretch of the imagination. I think that they are broadly similar phenomena in a sociological sense. And I've said the same thing up and down this thread.
Well, Islam had a harder time with progress because of the rigidity of the doctrine- the Quran being the literal word of God- but Goldman traces Islamic stagnation back to Al-Ghazali and his contemporaries. And yes, the Quran certainly is a reflection of seventh century values.
If I could offer my own theory, I would say that Islam was entirely too apolitical for its own good. It rode on the backs of empires and never had to form its own institutions like Christianity did. So a memetic selection process did not place, or at least not with the vigor of the church.
You said "start off as a universalist religion." Why did you say that? My response, which was directly to that thing you said, is that Judaism is simply not a universalist religion. A segment of Judaism that has taken on elements of Christianity has moved towards universalism, but that ignores the branches of Judaism that have simply not been influenced at all by Christianity.
Then your quote said "makes it like Islam." I attempted to respond to that by emphasizing the things that make Judaism like Islam.
Maybe after you finished being snarky, you would have figured that out for yourself, but I hope that helped clear things up
I think you're right (although you seem to underestimate, at certain periods, just how universal Judaism became). But I honestly don't see why having this in common with Islam refutes the other vast philosophical differences the two have. This what I mean by you not acknowledging my arguments.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
That isn't actually true. In Islam, thhe Qur'an is literally the word of God but not the literal word of God; difference being, it is held to be the authentic word of God himself, but not every one of those words has a single, immediate or self-evident meaning. Some sections of the Qur'an are actually impossible to read literally: there are several references to the "hands" of God, for example, even though the Qur'an explicitly states that God has no corporeal form. The closest you can really get to literalism is the concept of "bi-la kaifa", "without asking how", which takes an essentially neutral position on the literal truth of the text, asking readers to accept the apparent meaning of the text without affirming or attempting to justify its literal truth.
It's true that, in some respects, the Qur'an is a more rigid text that the Christian and Jewish holy books, because it lays out a much more explicit theology. But this really isn't one of them.
Judaism is a reflection of the exilic era. It has narratives and texts from before, but they were selected and interpreted by the post-Temple generations.
The fact that the Arab countries have smartphones and still half of the people marry cousins doesn't make any sort of point? I really don't think that they are culturally disposed to find mild incest attractive.
I don't know anything about the Arab clan system, but I am confident that it exists and that there are certain cultural dispositions it imparts. I know this from my own experience and from political knowledge of the Middle East. I can offer evidence to help you infer the same thing, but that's all I can do.
It's just insanely cool that you can regurgitate this on demand.
It prevents any sort of serious biblical criticism. Isn't one of what? I think you skipped over a sentence there.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
And you don't think that's awfully limiting? To imagine that two and a half thousand years of Jewish thought and tradition is simply the anxieties of some iron-age wanderers, played out ad nauseam? That the most strident rationalists and the most enthusiastic mystics are both, ultimately, prisoners of the mentalité of people who lived and died before the Achaemenids or the Han?
It doesn't make the point you want it to make. As I said, it only tells us that there are high levels of association-by-kinship, not that there exists any defined units of extend kinship, i.e clans, or that these units are fundamental to Arab society. (And it actually contradicts the claim of a clan-system in the strict anthropological sense, which defines clans as units of common descent, rendering all intra-clan marriage incestuous by definition.)
"I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm right"?
I mean, I agree that kinship is very important to Arabs. I think it's important to most people outside of the West; kinship is pretty much the fundamental human institution, and it usually takes a good couple of centuries of capitalism to grind people up into Smithian individuals. But you're making a claim for something much more specific, a defined and concious system of kinship-groups, and that this system is both fundamental to Arab society and lays the foundation for strong monarchical government. Those are claims which require at least explanation, especially given how counter-intuitive they seem in regards to the more usual conflict between clan and crown that Park observed a few pages back.
Not really; as I've said it allows for a lot more flexibility than Islam. The modern Talmud isn't the product of the exact same mentality that produced the Torah, Kabbalah, etc.
So if you redefine clan to mean something other than what I mean, you can come to a different conclusion? I am refuted!
"I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm right"?
Not what I said. I can make a convincing argument that the system works, and what attributes make it work, even if I don't understand its mechanics. That's how any historian or scholar operates, at some level.
I found this, which gives a pretty good summary although it doesn't deal with monarchy.
Louis XXIV
Le Roi Soleil
My point is this:
There are vast philosophical differences between Judaism and Islam. There are vast philosophical differences between Islam and Christianity. There are also vast philosophical differences between Judaism and Christianity. They are all also Abrahamic religions, so they share many philosophical similarities (I would argue that Christianity and Islam share as many as Christianity and Judaism. Likewise, I would argue Judaism and Islam share as many as Christianity and Judaism). Given all this, it makes no sense to group Judaism and Christianity together while separating Islam except for Western bias - a sort of "othering" of Islam brought about by the Middle Ages and the Crusades while Judaism remained integrated (at least physically) into western society.
But indeed I've made arguments, which you've made every effort to ignore, as to why they should be separated; the fact that they have the same mythical figures doesn't negate it somehow. Even if I were to go that route, Judaism and Christianity are both products of the same religious tradition- the Talmud and the Gospel are their different answers to it. Islam claims lineage from Ishmael and believes that even the OT was corrupted.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
But fifteen hundred years of Islamic scholarship, from Timbuktu to Jakarta, are simply irrelevant?
It's not a redefinition. As I said, it's the strict anthropological definition. If you are using the term "clan" in a different sense, then define it, as I have repeatedly invited you to do.
But your claim is a claim about mechanics, about why and how things work the way they do.
But monarchy is the issue. You are claiming that a defined clan-system is the basis and guarantee of monarchical authority; the text you link only talks about the role of kinship in local faction-building. Those aren't the same thing at all (and if anything, the text seems to describe a distinctly republican sort of government, dominated by local "big men" rather than grand monarchical institutions).
jackelgull
An aberration of nature
To answer your question about mechanics TF, I know nothing about current Middle Eastern politics, but i do know something about pre-Islamic tribal politics, and I think that might help. The biggest difference between the European tribe and the Middle Eastern one, was that Middle Eastern tribes were used to sharing territory. In Mecca there were a whole bunch of tribes living there who submitted to the authority of the Quraish tribe, and the Quraish tribe had their own tribal leader who was essentially a king, though no one ever called him such. He didn't have as much centralized power as many European monarchs did at the time, and within the tribe he wasn't the only leader, but he was the most powerful leader.
Now, I don't know the full history of how this arrangement came to be, but I assume it is because in the Middle East resources were scarcer, so good city spots were shared by several tribes who were forced in together out of necessity, and so those tribes needed to work out some sort of workable system.
So monarchy and tribalism did coexist within the Middle East. Of course it isn't that simple, but I don't feel like getting in deeper into the subject lest i get out of my depth.
Now, I don't know the full history of how this arrangement came to be, but I assume it is because in the Middle East resources were scarcer, so good city spots were shared by several tribes who were forced in together out of necessity, and so those tribes needed to work out some sort of workable system.
So monarchy and tribalism did coexist within the Middle East. Of course it isn't that simple, but I don't feel like getting in deeper into the subject lest i get out of my depth.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Well, "tribe" and "clan" are difference concepts. A tribe is a political community, a clan is a kinship-group. They're often tied up with each other, but they aren't identical. A clan isn't even necessarily a sub-group of a tribe; among the Iroquois, for example, most clans were spread across multiple "tribal" groupings. There's also the question of how we define "monarchy", and you seem to be saying that in pre-modern Arabia, there existed a number of tribes, distinct sectional communities, each with their own leadership structures, and that the leaders of a dominant tribe might achieved a position of overall authority, but that seems like a paramount chieftainship rather than a monarchy, and while I'll admit the distinction isn't always particularly clear, monarchy implies a degree of independent sovereignty which paramount chieftains don't usually claim.
So you're making a claim about the role of tribes in pre-modern Arabic society and their relationship to paramount chieftainships. But Mouthwash is making a claim about the role of clans in modern Arabic society and their relationship to monarchical states, which isn't the same thing at all.
So you're making a claim about the role of tribes in pre-modern Arabic society and their relationship to paramount chieftainships. But Mouthwash is making a claim about the role of clans in modern Arabic society and their relationship to monarchical states, which isn't the same thing at all.
Mostly, yes. I gave my reasons for why Islamic theology stagnated.
I agree with your definition. Everybody in a 'clan' of marrying age are naturally going to be cousins. So the point you were making is based on a overly strict definition of a word.
No. I made the thread to ask.
That's how democracy generally works in Arab countries, and why republican governments universally fail. I am arguing is that lineage, patriarchy, and family are more important to people in these countries than education or competence, and that kings are viewed as legitimate through those terms. What I don't know, specifically, is how an individual or a clan might view the monarchy. One can know that the ancient Sumerians originally had military dictators, who became dynastic kings, without knowing how exactly they justified it.
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
Isn't that more or less true of US politics?
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Not really. You just said "It did", and made some vague gestures towards the Qur'an.
You may consider it "overly strict", but it is as I said the strict anthropological definition. It's also the original definition, "clan" entering English as a description of the Gaelic clan system of Ireland and Scotland, which was structured around defined groups of common descent. The term "clan" can be used more broadly as a shorthand for "extended family", but a "clan system" implies a degree of definition self-conciousness that implies true clans.
Maybe you only meant "extended family", but if that's the case, you should just make it explicit, instead of digging this whole deeper by trying to defend a usage of "clan system" that doesn't exist anywhere outside of this thread.
You've already claimed, repeatedly, that you "know" how Arab society works. You make the same claim again immediately below! If you're asking, you only seem to asking for people to justify what you've already satisfied yourself is true.
Yes, but "how they justify it" is the claim you are making. Claiming that kings are legitimised through a system of clans ("clans") is a claim about how and why Arab society works, both an explicit claim about the relationship between kinship and kingship and a host of implicit claims about the nature of each. You can't make a claim about the mechanics of a society, deny any knowledge of the mechanics of the society, and then expect the claim to stand.
Yeah, the domination of politics by "big men" isn't unusual. Western democracies mask it behind political clubs and the like, but it's still there. Arab society seems to be distinguished only by the prevalence of kinship, and it's not really clear how this translates into any innate tendency towards monarchism.
There's only one thing that explains American politics, and that's apathy. So you might see 'dynasties' but they aren't mandated, they are just the product of opportunism.
When I was talking to Owen: "If I could offer my own theory, I would say that Islam was entirely too apolitical for its own good. It rode on the backs of empires and never had to form its own institutions like Christianity did. So a memetic selection process did not place, or at least not with the vigor of the church."
Clans and extended family usually overlap. For everybody that did not marry one of their cousins, how many would marry someone from their clan? And even in a clan of thousands, intermarriage can create a very tight gene pool. I don't have any data on this, unfortunately, but maybe I can find some literature.
I was hoping for some discussion of how Arab countries do their politics; maybe with some level of detail.
To be honest, in the OP, I simply drew a correlation between monarchical regimes and stability. Afterwards I argued that Islam sociologically disposed towards tribalism, without really referring to monarchy. So it may be that I'm falling out of my purview, but I don't see where I really ever had the burden of proof.
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