Desirable to all? or some? a simple majority? 60/40?
Those are the countries that would never understand American Blues⊠âWhat do you mean, your woman leave you? Why didnât you stone her and rape her sister?â
I donât remember studying any culture that is âoutcomeâ based. Culture is a framework of rules, traditions and accepted behaviors of a given people, not a process to create something other than itself.
And many cultures manage to limp along despite their faults not because of themâŠ
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I would only see that as a problem if thatâs where the book ended.
Hey, if a country âsupportsâ Palestinians with weapons, I would consider them de facto friends and hence, your borders are open to them. If you donât like them, donât support them.
Would you consider culture to be top down or bottom up in terms of how itâs developed? i.e. do you think itâs, generally, as far as a âsuccessfulâ culture goes (ambiguous I know), something akin to emergent order/ordered chaos or something more like a (more or less) top down dispersement? (open question)
Would this apply to âInsert generic time USA gives group that eventually becomes terrorist organization against us weapons?â
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For example, Haqqani was the mastermind behind the latest ambulance attack in Kabul
Hell noâŠ
I think the forces that create a culture are of many, many facets. There isnât one way, but a factor of lots of shit.
Rules that are in place to create a desired outcome.
Those who are in a position (have the power) to influence the culture. That of course is not necessarily monolithic in all cases. Personally, I think that a culture which does not allow all of those who are subjected to its norms to share in having an influence in how the culture develops is faulty but that is only my opinion. Of course there would be exceptions as not EVERYONE should have an equal say, or any say. A tourist for example, should not expect to have a say in how things are done in a country he is visiting for a few days even though while he is there he has to accept that countryâs cultural norms. Children shouldnât expect to write the rules either.
I might not agree with everything John Dolan writes, but he has a point.
Arabs were getting very âmodernâ at that time (1960s). Itâs important to remember that. You know why they stopped getting modern, and started getting interested in reactionary, Islamist repression?
Because the modernizing Arabs were all killed by the West.
That was what happened in the North Yemen Civil War, from 1962-1967. After a coup, Nasser backed modernist Yemeni officers against the new Shia ruler. The Saudis might not have liked Shia, but they hated secularist, modernizing nationalists much more. At least the Northern Shia kings ruled by divine right and invoked Allah after their heretical fashion. That was much better, to the Saudi view, than a secular Yemen.
And the west agreed. To the Americans of that time, âsecularâ sounded a little bit commie. To the British, it sounded anti-colonial and unprofitable. To the Israelis, it raised the horrible specter of an Arab world ruled by effective 20th-century executives. States like that might become dangerous enemies, while an Arab world stuck in religious wars, dynastic feuds, and poverty sounded wonderful.
That scenario was repeated all over the Middle East during the Cold War, and it has a lot to do with how messed up the place is now. âFor Allah and the Emirâ; when Time ran that headline in 1963, that slogan sounded quaint and kind of touching. . . . It sounded like a nice alternative to Nasser, nationalism (and its much more dangerous corollary, nationalization) or, worse yet, Communism.
So the West put its weapons and its money in on the side of âAllah and the Emirâ over and over again, against every single faction trying to make a modern, secular Arab world, whether on the Nasserite, Baâathist, Socialist, Communist, or other model.
It worked very well . . . or badly, if you prefer. It left Yemen festering, like most of the Arab world, with a weak royalist regime in the north and an even weaker socialist state in Aden. In 1990, after the collapse of the USSR, that southern Yemen state dissolved, taking the last of its fading âsocialistâ posters and slogans with it. Yemen was reunited, in theory; a poor, sectarian, anti-modern nightmare state.
By that time, âFor Allah and the Emirâ was pretty much the only slogan anywhere in the Arab countries. It had gone from quaint and quirky to universal. The only option left was to choose which version of Allah, and which corresponding emir, you were going to back.
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so if a âcountryâ supports the bad guys with weapons theyâre friends, and if America does it weâre not?
Or did you specifically mean supporting Palestinians with weapons?
And usually, in my experience the desired outcome is not what happens but more likely, unintended consequences.
For example, Somalia has rules, but no one cares about the rules. So no matter the desired result something else happens.
In my travels I noticed one commonality amoung everyone else but the U.S., people donât much give a shit about rules.
Iâm only talking about the Palestinians and Israel.
Itâs unique and not a situation you can generalize.
Yeah, everyone here drives the speed limit and no one cheats on their taxes.
I think he has a point. You canât lay blame on the West (or Soviets) too much, though. There was (and is) a lot of other things going on.
You can also go back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which was also fighting against Islamisation â and had street credibility to do so, as the de facto heir to Mohammedâs kingdom. Itâs enemies. When it fell, the competing factions were free to rise.
And there was also the English vs. the Germans spheres of influence. The Baathist parties and the PLO were directly founded (or inspired) by the Nazis as a counterweight against the British (which was a continuation of their policies before, during, and after WWI).
And, probably most importantly, Islamism was always there, under the surface. Itâs expressly in the writings of Mohamed. Whether to take them literally or not is the question.
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Yes, thatâs why some modern scholars argue that Ottoman Sunni Islam should be considered a separate third strain of Islam.
If you look at the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, they always fared comparatively better when direct rule of the Porte was introduced, at least until the 19th century.
Benny Morris convincingly argues that when the Arabs were introduced to the European concept of nationalism in the first half of the 19th century it basically produced the first major strains of Arab antisemitism that manifested itself through first (sporadic) pogroms in Antioch and elsewhere.
Yes, the Baath was explicitly modeled after NSDAP and Nasser had a thing for former(?) Nazis, but itâs also a fact that the British during their colonial rule always preferred dealing with Muslim âlocal leadersâ over local Christians and/or Jews, whether in Yemen, Nigeria or Palestine. Just look at Glubb-pasha and his Arab legion, not to mention famous British islamophiles such as St. John Philby and TE Lawrence.
Thatâs true. For those clueless Westerners calling for an âIslamic Reformationâ the historian Tom Holland succinctly replied - âthe Islamic Reformation is already here and itâs driving white Toyotas brandishing black flags in the Iraqi desertâ.
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I have heard of Tom Holland, but when I went to google, I got Spiderman. How else would I know his name? What is he famous for?