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One word: Thundercougarfalconbird
Sep. 21st, 2005 10:43 pmWe went to a lecture on Islam and government by Nimrod Hurvitz tonight, because, one, the guy's name is Nimrod, and, two, my mental gears have been spinning over a personal issue since yesterday, and I, rather desperately, wanted to find something intellectual that might engage their teeth. I think it worked.
Dr. Hurvitz's central point was that fundamentalist extremist Muslims actually tend to reflect the mood of the general populace quite well, but two deeply ingrained Islamic beliefs prevent them from gaining enough popular support to achieve more than minor victories:
1) Tyranny is preferable to chaos. Whatever the crimes of a ruler, it is better to have the ruler in place than to surrender your nation to a succession of criminals—in the first case, taxation might be brutal, but it happens once a year, and that's better than wave after wave of arbitrary collections. (This has obvious application to our regime-building in the region, though he didn't spell it out.) I'm not sure how much weight this argument carried for me; it's my sense that most common folk all over the world prefer crappy stability to an uncertain future, and I suspect the potential for revolution has more to do with resource distribution. But I do not have a PhD.
2) Islam is like the Sith. (That's my summary, not his.) In the early days, there were splinter groups of Islam that went after each other like knives—literally, in some cases—and things sucked a great deal. As a reaction, today there's a strongly held aversion amongst most Muslims against accusations of apostasy—as long as you follow the Koran and don't fuck with Mohammed, your individual beliefs and acts can't make you a non-Muslim. (This is in sharp contrast to Christianity, which has been rooted in accusations of heresy since its founding: "You claim you're a Christian, but your blue hat clearly proves you're not!" See the current split in the Episcopal church over homosexuality.) Thus it's hard to get up much support for killing a leader, who is, whatever he does or says, still part of your community. Militant groups have revived the old idea of "You're not a Muslim because you do X," which makes it easy to justify their actions to themselves, but difficult to achieve popular support. It's a remarkably dangerous concept to introduce, because every group gets to define their own behavioral cutoff, and what was happy coexistence among splinters can turn quickly into chaos as people stop believing their neighbors are "really" Muslims; the Islamic world, Hurvitz said, gets this on a deep level.
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adfamiliares's ears, of course, perked up with the discussion of heresy, since that's What She Does. I found it interesting for my own self, and, by way of a bonus, during the cookie reception afterward we ran into one of adfamiliares's colleagues, who seems keen to make us Get A Life. Her first suggestion went something like, "Hey, we're all so isolated here, I'm trying to get some fun happening! Woo! So, like, we're all going to meet at this bar every Friday..." This was very sweet, but teetotaller me was not so excited. However, she went on to tell us that she's one of the people who runs the SF club here, and as she burbled cheerfully on about getting together to game and watch zombie movies I started feeling some stirrings of enthusiasm. So, yes—movement on the social front.
Dr. Hurvitz's central point was that fundamentalist extremist Muslims actually tend to reflect the mood of the general populace quite well, but two deeply ingrained Islamic beliefs prevent them from gaining enough popular support to achieve more than minor victories:
1) Tyranny is preferable to chaos. Whatever the crimes of a ruler, it is better to have the ruler in place than to surrender your nation to a succession of criminals—in the first case, taxation might be brutal, but it happens once a year, and that's better than wave after wave of arbitrary collections. (This has obvious application to our regime-building in the region, though he didn't spell it out.) I'm not sure how much weight this argument carried for me; it's my sense that most common folk all over the world prefer crappy stability to an uncertain future, and I suspect the potential for revolution has more to do with resource distribution. But I do not have a PhD.
2) Islam is like the Sith. (That's my summary, not his.) In the early days, there were splinter groups of Islam that went after each other like knives—literally, in some cases—and things sucked a great deal. As a reaction, today there's a strongly held aversion amongst most Muslims against accusations of apostasy—as long as you follow the Koran and don't fuck with Mohammed, your individual beliefs and acts can't make you a non-Muslim. (This is in sharp contrast to Christianity, which has been rooted in accusations of heresy since its founding: "You claim you're a Christian, but your blue hat clearly proves you're not!" See the current split in the Episcopal church over homosexuality.) Thus it's hard to get up much support for killing a leader, who is, whatever he does or says, still part of your community. Militant groups have revived the old idea of "You're not a Muslim because you do X," which makes it easy to justify their actions to themselves, but difficult to achieve popular support. It's a remarkably dangerous concept to introduce, because every group gets to define their own behavioral cutoff, and what was happy coexistence among splinters can turn quickly into chaos as people stop believing their neighbors are "really" Muslims; the Islamic world, Hurvitz said, gets this on a deep level.
adfamiliares's ears, of course, perked up with the discussion of heresy, since that's What She Does. I found it interesting for my own self, and, by way of a bonus, during the cookie reception afterward we ran into one of adfamiliares's colleagues, who seems keen to make us Get A Life. Her first suggestion went something like, "Hey, we're all so isolated here, I'm trying to get some fun happening! Woo! So, like, we're all going to meet at this bar every Friday..." This was very sweet, but teetotaller me was not so excited. However, she went on to tell us that she's one of the people who runs the SF club here, and as she burbled cheerfully on about getting together to game and watch zombie movies I started feeling some stirrings of enthusiasm. So, yes—movement on the social front.
