Thoughts about ideology and economy

Veteran jouralist Masood Farivar has an interesting opinion piece in the New York Times, reflecting on foreign fighters in  Syria. Farivar explains that the motives of foreign fights kept them apart from the Afghans fighting agains the Soviets.

Their foreign tongues, their strange garb and mien and, above all, their reasons for fighting kept them apart. Their novice’s clumsiness drew giggles; their religious dogmatism baffled us. And their suicidal embrace of martyrdom caused revulsion.

He then examines the motivations some fighters have, but while acknowledging they may be complex, he does not find them to pose a threat to the US. 

This is interesting to hear. There's been a lot of talk about the threat posed by returning fighters, while has struck me as overblown. Or, that it's the wrong way to look at the issue.

Farivar dismisses the idea of typing foreign fighters, yet it does have some utility.

In an attempt to understand the foreign fighters, some Western experts have crafted caricatures — the revenge-seeker, the status-seeker, the identity-seeker and so on — but the legion of fighters with varied and often overlapping motives defy easy stereotypes.

Certainly, real people will not fit nicely into one of these profiles, but understanding the issue through this lens offers some insight. In Anthropology, it is important to differentiate between individual change, often linked to the life cycle,  and larger, cultural change. So, we can observe that the phenomenon of men (and women) going abroad to fight for a cause is nothing new. A good example is the Spanish Civil War, which attracted soldiers worldwide. A similar comparison can also be made with the wave of leftist guerrilla violence throughout Europe in the 1970s and 80s (Baader-Meinhof, Brigate Rosse, Action Directe). Jihadist groups can be viewed as the current manifestation, not necessarily a unique or different threat.

My argument is that the problem is not young people in search of meaning, but conditions that allow the general population  to sympathize with them. Thus focusing on returning fighters, or even on the threat of lone wolves, is not a particularly useful endeavor. Instead, if states are genuinely interested in cutting down on violence, their best course of action is to right the wrongs that most concern their populations.

Looking at the above examples, one may notice that both coincide with periods of economic turmoil (the Great Depression, Oil Crisis/stagflation). I don't wish to reduce a complex situation to a numbers game, but as Bill Clinton famously said "It's the economy, stupid." Thus, when people suffer economically and concerned about inequality, this kind of movement seems more attractive. 

And here's why Farivar's article is relevant to this blog's theme. Many commentators have speculated on the mayhem that returning fighters could cause in the Maghreb countries. In Tunisia especially, where the population is less used to this kind of violence, tensions run high. But I maintain that the most serious problems in Tunisia are not religious or political, but economic. Similar arguments could be made relative to the inequalities in Morocco. I'm not sure if the same can be said for Algeria, and would welcome feedback.

Who gets to interpret religion?

Hannah Armstrong, who is a Institute of Current World Affairs fellow in the Sahel and someone your blogger follow enthusiastically on Twitter (@HannahHaniya), wrote another interesting piece on Mali in the New York Times.

She contrasts the violent, authoritarian attitude of the various jihadi groups in Northern Mali with the gentler tactics of the High Council of Islam:

who uniformly decry violence and defend the importance of working alongside the Malian state — unlike the jihadis up north. And unlike the Gulf-inspired radicalism of those jihadis, the H.C.I. groups together Muslims of wide-ranging ideologies. Some represent the local brand of Sufism, for which music, fetishes and gender mixing are quite ordinary; others subscribe to the conservative Wahhabi strain of Islam, an import from Saudi Arabia.

While some of the comments on her piece took issue with the statements of one of the cheikhs she interviewed, the role that religion takes in public life is an important and complicated issue, throughout the MENA region (and related territories, like Mali). The controversy in Mali over celebrating the Prophet Muhammad's birthday mirrors similar tensions elsewhere, much as religious firebrands destroy saints' mausoleums from Timbuktu to Tunis.

While recent turmoil in Egypt has tarnished Western views of the Muslim Brotherhood, this doesn't mean that religious leaders can't play a useful and constructive role in the civil society of Muslim countries. However, these leaders are a varied group and there is no single version of what Islam is, or how religion and politics should co-exist. Hannah's points are interesting, and the questions her piece raises about the Arab-centric nature of Muslim discourse and its racist undercurrents warrant further investigation:

One Malian recently tweeted ... : “These Arab Islamists are racists for they only conceive of Islam as being by Arabs, blacks are just second class.” He, like most black southern Malians, who overwhelmingly support the intervention, do not grant Arab countries a monopoly on the interpretation of Islam. They favor their own version, leavened by pluralism and compromise-seeking.

Previous Revolutions

To go out with a bang from her current job, your blogger wrote an article about an item here in Philadelphia that resonates with current debates about rights and the will of the people.

One thing that gets complicated in the spread of ideas is who owns the idea and how the ideas are transmitted. For instance, many revolutionary ideals, most obviously liberty, equality and fraternity, are closely identified with the French Revolution. The narrative of class struggle often uses the Russian Revolution as a jumping off point. Both of these ideas perceive and present themselves as universal, even if they are often interpreted differently according to location.

And yet, there is a good deal of push-back. For instance, in the Maghreb, political parties need to tread carefully when they espouse "European" ideals, or risk being identified as the "hizba faransa" and labeled as traitors. And there is plenty of talk of "cultural imperialism." However, there is a difference between forcing a system onto an unstable state, and benefiting from a free exchange of ideas. Colonialism understandably makes some people wary of ideas, but it would be unwise to dismiss them out of hand.

Of course, not everyone goes around in their daily life comparing political systems. It might, in fact, be helpful to focus on what themes systems have in common, instead of pitting them against one another. Unfortunately, as the Poetic Politico points out, sometimes people in power view this as a threat, instead of considering that it might provide a useful lens for people experiencing a painful transition.