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[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 01:02:24PM -0500, David R.Matusiak wrote:
> On Feb 18, 2004, at 12:55 PM, Steven Champeon wrote:
> 
> >on Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 12:43:20PM -0500, David R.Matusiak wrote:
> >>http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/
> >>0,5744,8724530%255E2703,00.html
> >>
> >>Why one Saddam-hating Iraqi is resisting the US
> >
> >Because he's an idiot?
> 
> hey, i'm not defending and/or supporting this dufus, but i've still got 
> to keep abreast of all the peoples and countries that completely 
> f*cking hate us - rational or not.  its my job.

Keep up the good work, David - I, for one, appreciate it.

Incidentally, I just finished a really interesting book: "The Closed
Circle - an Interpretation of the Arabs", by David Pryce-Jones. Written
in the late eighties, IIRC, but updated somewhat and reprinted in 2002,
by a long-time reporter and resident of the Middle East and North
Africa, it's fascinating because it makes otherwise ridiculous events
and currents in Arab history intelligible. Well, er, somewhat, anyway.

He uses several cultural trends or interpersonal relationship types
to explain how the Arab world works:

 - the shame/honor response; namely, that anyone shamed will attempt to
   restore honor to himself and his family - the causes of shame range
   all over from being rebuffed by a woman to unfavorable comparisons
   of Arab society with the West. More importantly than the way it works
   in the shamed, it seems to be accepted by others - so that few, if
   any, responses to shaming in an attempt to restore one's honor are
   judged excessive by onlookers. And history starts over once one is
   avenged, so an honor killing that shames another gives that other a
   sufficient reason to avenge, etc. Hammurabi, via Matthew 5:38.

 - the power-challenge; basically, a bare-bones "crawl your way to the
   top" attitude towards power. It is not to be shared, only won or
   lost, at the cost of lives and careers. And once won, the
   conspiracies that helped win it are now suspect and prosecuted in the
   defensive response of one who knows the power that can be won/lost
   thereby. cf. every modern Arab leader and many aspiring ones (e.g.,
   Al-Sistani, Arafat, Mubarak, Assad, Ataturk, the Saudis, bin Laden)

 - the money/favor nexus; basically, a shorthand for bribery and
   corruption, but also a reflection of the hierarchies of patronage
   colored by the two others (e.g., I can shame you into giving me
   your money, which you have because you've won power at the expense
   of your competitors) - cf. everywhere from nationalized Western 
   companies to the pathetic unemployment of the Saudi "workforce",
   who hire out demeaning jobs to indentured servants from elsewhere

It was even more fascinating to see him describe events in history in
terms of these three things plus Islam and great power/cold war
politics. I was also intrigued by, and curious to see if anyone had
compared his "local" approach to describing the Arabs, with whom he was
more familiar, to other societies, such as our own. He's a bit of a
Western chauvinist, though perhaps rightly so, but it'd be interesting
to compare the West today with that of three hundred years ago. I know
I've read that the pre-Revolutionary American elite essentially
substituted the money/favor nexus as described above for the hierarchies
of title and land of the Old World; and we're certainly not immune to
perhaps more moderate forms of the other two - witness our own domestic
terrorists and their honor/ shame issues, or politics in general and the
power-challenge we're currently watching in the runup to the elections.

Anyway, I thought it was a very illuminating book, and I've read dozens
of them about the Mideast and Islam and Central Asia and the Israeli/
Palestine conflict in the past few years. 

Steve

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