Below I suggested that a modest base of knowledge is simply a necessary precondition for smelling crap thrown at your door in some fields. The natural sciences are pretty contingent, the interlocking set of facts have necessary relations so that you can often intuitively "fill in the gaps" and recognize people trying to pass one over on you. There are of course limits to this, most people don't understand Quantum Mechanics, and intuitive physics and folk psychology can be hard to get past. But in something like history or international affairs the necessary relations between the facts are more difficult to establish, and isolated and seemingly unrelated pieces of data float before you in an amorphous mass. It is easy to make mistakes even if you are a specialist, I just read a 1,000 page history of the Crusades and I was a bit irritated when the author confused Nestorian Christians with Jacobites & Copts multiple times. But this author's focus was on medieval Europe, the details of Middle Eastern religious history were outside his domain.

And yet just because theoretical constructs are wobbly and flimsy in history or international affairs does not imply that the full sample space of possibilities is at our beck & call. Below jaim klein offered: "religious differences mask ethnic cleavages not only in Europe but also in the Middle East, so learning the fine points of Islamic theology is sterile & pointless, for intelligence chiefs and for everybody else. " A fine and testable assertion. Which is why I mocked it. The reason is simple, jaim offers that religious differences are masks for ethnic differences. For example, in the Northeastern United States in the early 20th century tension between Protestants and Roman Catholics were also pretty closely correlated to the cleavage between WASPs and white 'ethnic' communities, especially the Irish. Is this the case in Iraq? You have Arab and Sunni & Shia communities, is the religious difference somehow rooted in an ethnic difference? My mockery was simply a repetition of a basic fact which is important in understanding the depth of this religious difference: in the 19th century a process of conversion of Arab Sunni nomads to Shiism occurred as they settled around newly expanded canals around the Shia holy cities. These new farmers assimilated to their new lifestyle by changing their religion to the one of the local settled populations, who were often derived from descendents of pilgrims in the Shia holy cities. In other words, the enormous schism between Sunnis and Shia Arabs in Iraq is to a large extent a recent phenomenon as agriculture expanded in Ottoman Iraq in the 19th century thanks to European technology. This is not to say that Shiism was not a force in Iraq, but it was strongest in the holy cities which were cosmopolitan, with a strong Persian tinge. In short, there is no ethnic difference between the Shia and Sunni Arab to a good approximation insofar as the former are relatively recent derivations from the latter. This, being a blog about genetics, I would like to add I actually spent some time looking at the patterns of allele frequencies in the Middle East. I was especially curious if Muslims and Christians in places like Lebanon and Egypt were genetically different, that is, the religious difference was simply a reflection of a deeper ethnic difference between indigenous Christian substrate and Arab Muslim invaders. No. In general the main pan-regional trend one might see is that Arabs have a larger admixture of black African ancestry via their matriline than their non-Arab neighbors (e.g., Kurds & Turks). In all other respects the alleles seem to follow the geography pretty closely, Muslim and Christian Lebanese are pretty similar, Muslim and Christian Egyptians are pretty similar, etc. (Christian populations in other regions are rather small so I couldn't find studies).

Now, jaim has a follow up reply: "Yes, Razib, exactly. An interesting fact that you seem to ignore is that Shiite Arabs that live in the Iranian-Iraqi border (the swamp Arabs), during the 1980s, fought on the side of the Iranians, not the Iraqi Arabs. I think you should read what Prof. Juan Cole says about the history of the Shia Shiite issue. BTW, Prof Cole is not a Jew and he is an antisemite, which may render his writings more credible to you." This is of course correct. In fact some Shia Arabs settled in Iran, and some of these have returned to man the heights of the new government in Iraq. I suppose the Shia Swamp Arab sympathy with the Iranians perhaps goes to jaim's original point about difference. Of course, the difference could be religious, not ethnic, but however it is, I was not impressed. You see, some Shia Arabs did fight for Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. In fact, the Iranian province of Khuzistan is Arab. Nevertheless, there is an important point to raise: the majority of the soldiers in the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq War were Shia Arab. Certainly I accept that some Shia Arab fought for Iran, but that does not refute the reality that the preponderance did not (inexplicably to the Iranians) simply roll over and let the Iranian army through the heart of Iraq. In fact, in The Shia Revival Vali Nasr recounts how irritated the Iranian leadership was that the Shia city of Basra would not surrender and so open the road to the north. The Iranian army never did break through southern Iraq and so the war (which the Iraqis started) ended in a stand still.

So, in regards to jaim klein's hypothesis there are two points:

a) the historical record makes assertions of religion tracking ethnicity within a locality tricky. In some cases this is true, clearly in Israel Jews and Muslims are different ethnicites and religions. To some extent one may say the same of parts of the Levant and Iraq, where local Christian populations until recently spoke dialects of Aramaic, not Arabic. Nevertheless, overall the religious differences emerged out of the same ethnic substratum. The Arabs of the Levant and Iraq are descendents of the indigenous people, who were once Christian, Jewish and pagan. The Shia and the Sunni Arab are both Arabs (one common misconception is that Shiism is a Persian religion, recall that Persians were mostly Sunni until the 16th century, and in Central Asia the Tajiks are the Persianate population which remains Sunni).

b) it seems rather peculiar to end a round of sharp exchanges with the implicit accusation that the other individual is an anti-Semite.

Before on this blog I talked about the Patrick Boyle problem, the tendency to let emotionalism take control and run around ranting like a beast. It happens to us all, and many GNXP readers have indulged in it (though do note that I do save the threads where people lose control on a local hard-drive and keep tabs on who has been naughty and nice and judge accordingly-I still peruse the evidence of bestialism on the infamous Matt McIntosh post so I don't forget how some people behaved). And yet then there is the jaim klein problem: to assert the patently false and simply refuse to own up to this. This isn't the first time this has happened. Recall the time jaim decided that it was ludicrous to term Iranians "Aryan," since of course they weren't Nordic beasts, despite the fact that I made clear in the thread that I was using it in a ethno-linguistic sense which was accurate because Aryan is an Indo-Iranian word which was co-opted by European. One might infer this from the term Iran, which derives from the root!

To have some decent discussions on these topics it is important to acknowledge that you can be wrong, that models and theories don't just emerge from a vacuum, and that the sample space of data is not coterminus with what you know at any given moment. We're not perfect, we make mistakes, but together as a collective GNXP writers and readers can brutally push our way through bullshit and see some light at the end of the tunnel. Knowledge building is a collective enterprise as we correct each other, and watch each other's backs. But good faith is necessary, and no free riding or poisoning the well from which we all drink is acceptable. If you don't want to put into the kitty, you don't need to comment, simply watch silently as we climb up the hill with what powers of cognition that the gods have granted us.

If formal mathematical knowledge is like the construction of a edifice in space from stark linear bricks, contingent piece by contingent piece, discerning the form beneath the mass of historical facts is like hammering away at rock to bring out the scultpure within. To hammer we must eliminate hypothesis after hypothesis. This means we throw out ideas, and dismiss them when the facts refute them. We then move on to the next hypothesis. And so it goes. But to do this well we need to move fast, and always keep up with the facts, and never be complacent. Like rising waters the facts always attempt to drown us, envelope and supersede our powers of conceptualization. All we can do is try to narrow down the sample space ever more until we see a semblance of the structure within.