DANIEL GREENFIELD
April 9, 2014
Saudi Arabia and Qatar aren't talking to each other. Syria and
Turkey are shooting at each other. Not only are the Shiites and Sunnis
killing each other in Syria, but the Sunni groups have been killing
each other for some time now. There are even two or three Al Qaedas
fighting each other over which of them is the real Al Qaeda while,
occasionally, denying that they are the real Al Qaeda.
There's
something about Syria that splits down everything and everyone. Even
Hamas had to split between its political and military wings when
choosing between Iran's weapons and Qatar's money. Doing the logical
thing, the military wing took the weapons and the political wing took
the money so that the military wing of Hamas supported Assad and its
political wing supported the Sunni opposition.
It's not however
money and weapons that splits Muslims over Syria. Money and weapons
are only the symbols. What they represent is Islam. And what Islam
represents is the intersection between identity and power.
A
modern state derives its power from its identity. That is nationalism.
The Japanese and the Russians were willing to die in large numbers for
their homeland during WW2. Both countries had undergone rapid
de-feudalization turning peasants into citizens with varying degrees of
success. Japan and Russia however had historic identities to draw on.
The rapid de-feudalization in the Arab world had much messier results
because countries such as Jordan and Syria were Frankenstein's monsters
made out of bits and pieces of assembled parts of history stuck
together with crazy glue.
The Middle East is full of flags,
but most are minor variations on the same red, green, black and white
theme. The difference between the Palestinian flag and the Jordanian
flag is a tiny asterisk on the chevron representing the unity of the
Arab peoples.
The Iraqi, Syria and Egyptian flags differ in
that the Egyptian flag has an eagle sitting on its white strip and the
Iraqi flag had three green stars (now it only has Allahu Akbar) while
the Syrian flag has two green stars. The Iraqi flag was originally the
same as the Jordanian and Palestinian flags. So are most of the flags
in the region which are based on the Arab Revolt flag which was in turn
based on the colors of the Caliphates.
Every time you see the
Al Qaeda "black flag" of Jihad, it's already represented in the black
stripes on the flags of every Arab nation. What Al Qaeda has done is
strip out the other colors representing the various succeeding
caliphates and gone back all the way to the black of Mohammed's war
flag.
(Mohammed hadn't originated the black flag. Like the rest of Islam,
it was a tribal adaptation. Black had been the color of the headdresses
worn into battle. It symbolized revenge. As a warlord, Mohammed often
wore black. Black came to symbolize Islam, the color which does not
change, for the religion that does not change. Impermeable, offering no
illumination or light.)
Syria is split, roughly speaking,
between the Kurds, who want their own country, Greater Kurdistan, to be
assembled out of pieces of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, the Sunnis,
many of whom want to form it into a Greater Syria, to be made out of
pieces of Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, and the Neo-Shiite
Alawites.
Greater Syria was the original agenda of the
Palestine Liberation Organization. It's still the agenda of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Syria. And Al Qaeda in Iraq has become the Islamic State
of Iraq and the Levant and is fighting for its own version of a
Greater Syria tying together Iraq and Syria.
What is Syria? The civil war answered that question. Like the USSR,
it's a prison of nations. It exists only by virtue of men pointing guns
at other men. As long as all the men with the guns agreed on what
Syria was, the country existed. Once they no longer did, there was no
longer a Syria. The same is true of much of the Middle East.
There are questions that you can resolve with democracy within a
functioning country, but when your country has less of an existence than
the conflicting religious and ethnic identities of its people,
democracy only makes the problem worse. Democracy in Iraq means Shiites
voting to be Shiite, Sunnis voting to be Sunni and Kurds voting to be
Kurds. Democracy in Syria would mean the same thing. And that way lies a
federation and then secession and civil war all over again.
The problem in the Middle East isn't a lack of democracy. It's the lack of anything to be democratic about.
Everyone in the Middle East (who isn't a Jew, Christian, Kurd, Bahai,
Zoroastrian, Armenian, Circassian, Druze, etc.. ) agrees on the
importance of Arab and Islamic unity and that their specific flavor of
it, their clan, their tribe and their Islamic interpretation should be
supreme.
It's not surprising that the Middle East is constantly at war. It's only a wonder that the fighting ever stops.
Arab nationalism is the ideology that Arab elites used to complete the
de-feudalization of their population from peasants into citizens. But
what worked in Japan and Russia fell flat in the Middle East where tribe
and religion are still supreme. The peasants didn't become Egyptians
or Syrians. They remained Ougaidat or Tarabin. After that, they were
Muslim. Their national identity came a distant third.
What the
Arab Spring truly showed is how little national identity mattered as
democracy and the fall of governments demonstrated that there was no
national consensus, only the narrower one of class, tribe and
institution. It's not something that Americans should be too smug
about. The left's efforts are reducing the United States to the same
balkanized state in which there is a black vote and a white vote, a rich
vote and a poor vote, but no national identity that transcends them.
We too are becoming ‘Sunnis' and 'Shiites'. It's no wonder that Islam
finds the post-American United States and the disintegrating territories
of the European Union fertile ground for its work.
It's the
same reason why Islam is rising in the Middle East. The rise of Islam
is a striving for an era before nations and before whatever remnants of
civilization accreted to the Mohammedan conquerors over the years.
It's a desire for pre-civilization, for the raid, the noble savage and
the twilight of morality. It's a heroic myth dressed up as a religion
cloaking the naked savagery of it all.
Islam rose out of the
death of the Roman Empire. It's rising now out of the death of the
West, but it would be a mistake to call that a clash of civilizations
when it's civilization succumbing to barbarism. Western civilization
has grown degenerate and the only things resembling civilization that
the other side has, it has borrowed from the same civilization that it
is preying on.
Hasan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood's
founder, wrote, "Our task is to stand against the flood of modernist
civilization." Syria is the desert that remains when the flood of
civilization has passed. The atrocities there show us life in
Mohammedan times when banditry was the only civilization that there
was.
Islam can't unite Syria. It can't even unite Sunni Islamists. It can't even unite those Salafis who identify with Al Qaeda.
It can't unite, because Islam is a disruptive force that achieves its
unity through violence. It's a supremacist ideology whose final solution
is always the sword. Mohammed won his debates by killing his enemies. A
rising Islam is forcing Christians out of the Middle East while
obsessively hurling its force against the Jewish State. But it doesn't
end there. A religion that can't co-exist with other religions... also
can't co-exist with itself.
How do Muslims settle religious
arguments with each other? The same way they settle them with Jews and
Christians. That is what we are seeing in Syria.
This
isn't civilization. It's the complete collapse of civilization. At its
barest minimum, civilization is co-existence. Islam is the opposite of
co-existence and of civilization. Its sheer age only means that there
is even more in its past to fight over.
Arab nationalism failed to provide the modern identities that its
people needed. Instead they are reverting to Islam which provides an
identity of war, an endless splintering of cities into armed camps,
brigades into bands and nations into quarreling ethnic and religious
groups at each other's throats.
Islam is the conscious
abandonment of civilization and co-existence for the nomadic life of
the Jihadi who drifts from place to place, his weapons on his back,
destroying cities and farms, taking anything and anyone he likes, and
moving on to the next fight and the next burning city.
The
Jihadist is at war with civilization, with the city, the family and the
settled way of existence. He is a nomadic raider rolling back time to
pre-history. He is the savage warrior of the savage past.
Daniel Greenfield is a blogger, columnist and freelance photographer born in Israel, who maintains his own blog,
Sultan Knish.
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