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The Depth of Conservatism in the Middle East
01/19/2003
Earlier, I considered commenting on an article that the Providence Journal picked up from the Chicago Tribune today (not available for free online). It is about rising unemployment and economic hopelessness among the ever-increasing youth of "Saudi" Arabia. Although I hadn't yet formed more than a vague objection, I was going to point out staff-writer Evan Osnos's basic assessment of "why they hate us":
With 65 percent of the Saudi population younger than 25, these growing legions form a potent social and political force that the nation's leaders are scrambling to harness. Coming of age after the oil boom, they face soaring unemployment and are torn between traditional and modern demands in this deeply conservative Islamic kingdom. They are part of a generation that can watch Britney Spears on satellite television but can't approach an unfamiliar girl on the street.
Toward the end of the piece, Osnos informs the reader that "many young people say they are fond of Western music, movies and fashion, but strongly oppose U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East." So, the proffered plot line is that the youngsters, who just want what any kid from Connecticut might want (of course), enjoy Western popular culture but are suppressed locally by the "conservatism" of their nation and, more broadly, by the oppressive foreign policy of the prime disseminator of that Western popular culture: the United States of America.
After some thought and further reading, I can verbalize my disagreement: I finding it counterintuitive — absurd, even — to suggest that the one point of interaction in this global culture war that does not foster enmity involves the liberal bastions of entertainment and fashion. It seems to me that two things are going on for the youths — an age group renowned for neither its understanding of the subtleties of the world nor its demand for consistency — of the Middle East.
First, they are attracted to the freedom of the West, perhaps in part because it is inextricable from economic health; however, their national elders perpetuate a socioeconomic system that restricts both their desire to behave humanly and their need to find sources of income. Second, these same social leaders, whom, it may be presumed, are not so fond of Britney Spears, use their influence, particularly in the "deeply conservative" religious schools, to foster a hatred of the Great Satan by pointing to its evil activity, but only where it does not draw attention to oppression originating with the local elite.
What solidified my analysis (and spurred me to blog it) was a post by Andrew Stuttaford in the Corner about an AP report concerning media burnings in Pakistan. From the AP:
Officials in a deeply conservative Pakistani province destroyed audio and video tapes and compact discs today as part of a campaign to wipe out material the authorities deem obscene.
In front of a crowd of more than 1,000 people, officials doused gasoline on the materials piled up in a bazaar in Peshawar. The police chief, Tanveer ul-Haq Sipra, then set the pile on fire.
"We are determined to fulfill our promises about Islamization and cleaning up society," said Maulana Haji Ihsan ul-Haq, general-secretary of the Muthida Majlis-e-Amal, or United Action Forum.
What initially caught my attention was the opening information that the province is "deeply conservative." The Chicago Tribune column, I'd noted, had referred to "Saudi" Arabia as both "deeply conservative" and "deeply religious." Mr. Stuttaford directs attention to the somewhat suspect use of the noun "conservative" (as opposed to Islamic), which raises further questions about why conservatism may, apparently, only be embellished as "deep" — not "extreme" or "radical" or "heavily." Could it be a (likely subconscious) linking of radical Muslims with the "deep South"?
The AP report connects with Evan Osnos's essay in much more significant and intriguing ways. First, there is the obvious conflict between Sharia and activities in which people wish to indulge, restricting ideas that might prove subversive:
But Aslam Khan, an employee at a local movie theater, said attendance had fallen by half in the past month since the theater stopped showing films considered obscene by the government.
Then, there are the attacks on the local economy more broadly than just affecting those who previously provided banned goods, thus inhibiting social and economic mobility (only those with money will have money to invest):
Provincial legislators passed a resolution several weeks ago urging Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali's government to eliminate interest-based banking nationwide.
And last, there is the borderline dementia of the Western Left:
The American vice consul in Peshawar, Sara L. Groen, met today with Balqueef Hussain, the leader of the women's wing of the United Action Forum to discuss women's issues.
Ms. Hussain told Ms. Groen that the government was planning to improve education for girls, including making education free for girls up to middle school level.
The government also plans to ensure that there is a doctor in every village who is a woman, and that women have opportunities to work, she said.
"The government is trying to create an awareness about the dignified situation of women in society," she said.
Thrown in at the end of the piece, as it is, this information gives the impression that the author intended it to be a "silver lining." Beyond the questionable nature of the "education" that girls will receive and the implications of one female doctor in each village when considered in the context of Islamic dictates, one can't help but marvel at the blindness of those for whom paper dignity is more important than tangible freedom.
The contortions through which adherents to a leftward ideology attempt to reconcile the "deep conservatism" of a culture with its "freedom-fighting struggle" against Western conservatives (as represented by their foreign policy) are truly a thing to behold.
Posted by Justin Katz @ 05:27 PM EST
7 comments
A lot of valuable observations here. But your central thesis escapes me.
Kevin Connors @ 01/19/2003 06:34 PM EST
Mr. Connors,
Well, that's not good! Perhaps the slippery nature of the subject matter contributed to that, but it's largely attributable to the fact that most of the ideas for the entry came while I wrote it.
I've made some minor changes in an attempt to make the post clearer, but let me see if I can sum up my twofold "thesis":
1) The youth of the Middle East live in a society that is both socially and economically oppressive, and they are understandably attracted to the freedom and prosperity conveyed in Western popular culture. The more "conservative" leaders and elders, on the other hand, can't help but object to those very same qualities based on their religion and/or desire to maintain their elevated positions, so they redirect the youths' frustration toward American foreign policy. In this way, Middle Eastern leaders scapegoat the culture that they despise without drawing attention to their own culpability for their people's destitute circumstances.
2) Western liberals seek to lend a "conservative" tint to the frightening religious radicalism of the Middle East, yet they support, by default, those who battle U.S./Western influence on the rest of the world. Therefore, they are in the untenable position of supporting the region's attack on the West while simultaneously despising the underlying cultural traits that motivate the attack.
Justin Katz @ 01/19/2003 07:21 PM EST
Face it. The Islamic world is a failed culture, if it considers one woman physician in a village to be some sort of cultural breakthrough. There is no hope for any advancement by these people until they grow out of the medieval strictures that their traditional culture puts on them. It doesn't matter if they hate us or not. Ignorant retrograde barbarians cannot compete in the modern world.
Bruce Easily @ 01/19/2003 10:02 PM EST
A quote from a recent Wall Street Journal editorial by Roger Scruton exposes, if I am not mistaken, a fallacy in your position (and here is the URL)
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110002746
"It is a tautology to say that a conservative is a person who wants to conserve things; the question is what things? To this I think we can give a simple one-word answer, namely: us. At the heart of every conservative endeavor is the effort to conserve a historically given community. In any conflict the conservative is the one who sides with "us" against "them"--not knowing, but trusting. He is the one who looks for the good in the institutions, customs and habits that he has inherited. He is the one who seeks to defend and perpetuate an instinctive sense of loyalty, and who is therefore suspicious of experiments and innovations that put loyalty at risk.
So defined, conservatism is less a philosophy than a temperament; but it is, I believe, a temperament that emerges naturally from the experience of society, and which is indeed necessary if societies are to endure. The conservative strives to diminish social entropy. The second law of thermodynamics implies that, in the long run, all conservatism must fail. But the same is true of life itself, and conservatism might equally be defined as the social organism's will to live."
Maybe the point I am now about to make is obvious. But pixels are cheap; here goes. In any war of 'us' versus 'them', there are - what with the perspectival nature of the business - two 'us's and two 'them's.
Ergo, there is nothing even mildly eyebrow-raising about the prospect of conservatives being at philosophical odds or at war. One perennial conservative strategy, in the face of pressure to change, is to export the sources of pressure. Unrest at home? Make it someone else's problem by directing disaffection outwards. The fact that conservative Islamic societies are seriously disrupting Western societies with their exports of unrest – thereby enraging Western conservatives (and those segments of the left that prefer life to death) – is no reason to deny that the conservative Islamic societies are conservative.
Even if one wishes to articulate a sense of 'conservative' on which it designates, give or take, the electoral base of the Republican party, it ought to be apparent Scruton's sense of the term is serviceable, intuitive, indeed nose-bleedingly natural; ergo - this is really the point - no sort of below-the-belt blow to Dubya and co.
As per your posting in response to a previous comment, I think you are mostly irked by what you perceive as a not-so-subtle attempt to draw an illegitimate moral equivalence between the forces of Dubya and the forces of Islamic fundamentalism. And maybe the authors of the pieces you quote actually intend for that cheeky equals-sign to be drawn between the lines. (If so, let contumely rain down on their idiotarian heads.) But surely the fallacy does not come with the step at which the Saudi's are labeled 'conservative'. The fallacy derives from supposing the conservative temperament is, per se, an infallible ethical compass: pointing ever and only to good or else to evil.
Final comment: upon rereading, it would appear you wish the accent to fall on the adverb, 'deeply'. It is wrong to describe the Saudi's, Pakistanis, et. al., as deeply conservative. But. . . well, I guess I don't get it. If it is perfectly in order to call them 'conservative', which it is; and if they are deeply so, which they are. . . well, whatever.
I guess it seems to me that policing liberal bias in the media goes too far when conservatives are inclined to deprive liberals of terminological usage that accords with that of those as far to the right as Mr. Scruton (no apologist for recent excesses of fundamentalist Islam, he.)
John Holbo @ 01/19/2003 10:44 PM EST
What Holbo said. (I swear I was going to say the same thing, although I doubt I would have done it quite as well. I was even going to use Scruton's recent piece, since it fit the argument so well.)
Worth Colliton @ 01/19/2003 11:25 PM EST
Mr. Holbo,
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I think we do and don't agree. Similarly with Mr. Scruton; in a semantic sense, he is quite right to say:
It is a tautology to say that a conservative is a person who wants to conserve things; the question is what things? To this I think we can give a simple one-word answer, namely: us.
However, taking this line detracts immensely from the usefulness of the term and extrapolates it to a point beyond general usage. In the U.S., an argument could be made that the "liberals" are more conservative on many issues. It removes all context to insist on "liberal/conservative" being equivalent to "push/pull." It would also be a waste of time for me, for example, to insist on defining myself to new acquaintances as a "classic liberal" or "nineteenth century progressive" only to explain that it is equivalent to today's "conservatism."
Moreover, it simply isn't the way it's intended. In Middle East coverage, "conservative" is meant to be equivalent to right wing, with "fascist" as the extreme measure. Consider its use, rather than any other serviceable terms (even "conservative Muslim"), when the topic is "book burning." Consider also this from an AP report today: "Despite opposition from right-wing clerics, Musharraf has persisted with a policy of supporting the United States in its war against terrorism." Or the title of this AP story: "Religious right, pro-military party big winners in by-elections." The reporter and editor who don't spot the significance of that language are poor users of the language with which they build their careers (I wouldn't be surprised if they sniggered to themselves something about the November U.S. elections).
As with Democratic candidates for the presidency all mouthing variants of "the regular people," when a specific, but hardly technical, term ("deeply conservative") becomes so commonly used as to suggest a complete lack of linguistic imagination, it is at least interesting to poke around for reasons. However, were this the only point of interest, I wouldn't have written this post (indeed, I say that I sat on it most of the day). As a conservative of the American variety, I'm not unsympathetic to dislike of Britney Spears. Indeed, it is this similarity (albeit of wide degree) that makes both Middle Eastern and Western "conservatives" unpalatable to the Left.
The contortions of which I wrote derive from the "proffered plot line" that I paraphrase above (of course, you are free to dispute that on its own merits). The idea is that because, to the "liberal" mindset, the Muslim extremists must be wrong in their cultural conservatism and the Republicans wrong in their foreign-policy "conservatism," the media misses the step in which the former deflect blame onto the latter. If deflected blame is admitted, then it becomes less cut and dry that American Middle Eastern policy is as wrong and harmful as presented. The result of this skipped step ranges from merely leaving out any analysis connecting affinity for Western popular culture with hatred of U.S. policy to the insinuation that it is the same liberating impulse that drives both.
In the end, I wouldn't dream of "depriving" anybody of language (indeed, reporters should, I feel, be much more free and creative with the words that they use). Furthermore, I find liberal bias, generally speaking, little more than amusing... except where it obscures issues that desperately require clarity.
Justin Katz @ 01/20/2003 12:09 AM EST
Political correctness is at work here. Ever since the 1960's, American?s have been hectored to use non-offensive terms for people: Chairperson instead of chairman, Gay instead of queer, Hispanic instead of spic and Black (Negro, afro-American whatever) instead of nigger, etc. If you used these words, you were accused of insensitivity.
All this time the Left has played fast and loose with the word conservative. A segregationist was called conservative even when he was a member of the Democratic Party, so were the Communists in Russia against Gorbachov's and Yeltsin's reforms, and now, we have the Islamist's who want to destroy the west. The presumption is that no Leftist can be accused of insensitivity, because conservatives have no feelings. There is a name for such activity. It is the original reason for the sensitivity movement. This activity is known as propaganda.
Lou Wheeler @ 01/20/2003 11:43 AM EST