Comments on: The games people play

By: razib

razib — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 01:41:37 +0000

p.s. if i didn't make it clear in the post itself: i do think it is critical consider how important the small deviations from expectation that ideological parameters might induce.

By: razib

razib — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 01:35:45 +0000

Realpolitik usually trumps religion. There are plenty of European examples. Protestant Elizabethan England allied with France against Habsburg Spain, and Christians were willing to ally with the Turks when they had a common enemy.

the limits the key. what are they? we know they're there; the french were criticized whenever the hapsburgs seemed about to be overrun by the ottomans. i recall that the sun king actually didn't hit the austrians as hard on some occasions as he should have in following through with back channel agreements with istanbul because he didn't want to seem a traitor to christendom. but this might be an exception which points us to a counter-trend: idealism is the indulgence of the powerful. louis had power to squander (and he did!). in contrast, small states and peoples can't be idealistic and will take allies where they can get it in the interests of survival. and sometimes the near enemy is a greater danger than the far enemy, protestantism (reform) survived in hungary in regions where the ottomans were dominant because they obviously weren't going to give the counter-reformation the backing which the austrian monarchy did. so for hungarian protestants the turk was their savior! (the distribution of reform still reflects the partition of hungary between the hapsburgs and the ottomans in the 16th and 17th centuries).

But Realpolitik has its limits in the modern world, where power and influence are often exercised by fanatical movements rather than coldly calculating diplomats.

i'm a little skeptical about the 'cold calculation' of diplomats ;-) one of the issues here is that we're acting like economists and assuming that these people/states are rational actors, but there's probably all sorts of implicit processes going on. robert pape's work shows the statistical relationships between macroscale geopolitical events and acts and microscale sociological response. i doubt though that most young men involved in terrorism explicitly connect the two dynamics; rather we're talking about sufficient background conditions which foster the emergence of social networks which channel psychological animus which might normally be inchoate.

By: David B

David B — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 01:19:45 +0000

Realpolitik usually trumps religion. There are plenty of European examples. Protestant Elizabethan England allied with France against Habsburg Spain, and Christians were willing to ally with the Turks when they had a common enemy.

But Realpolitik has its limits in the modern world, where power and influence are often exercised by fanatical movements rather than coldly calculating diplomats.

By: razib

razib — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 01:08:26 +0000

1) yes, i have read crone.

2) let me be clear and offer that i think that the revisionists probably go a bit too far. absence of evidence is not always evidence. i think the herodotus' etruscan 'myth' should make us more cautious about disregarding what the people of past thought about their own origins.

3) that being said, from what i know i think it's pretty clear that islam evolved in the centuries up to the final suppression of mutazili 'heresy' and the construction of a sunni orthodoxy as we understand it. if we understand cultures as functional units via an organismic analogy the nature of islam, as such, needs to be assessed before we can claim that religious zeal was the underlying factor behind the arab conquests, as some claim. the circumstantial evidence that muslim religiosity might have been more a feature of the period after 750 (the ummayads were famously impious, one could chalk this up to later annalists trying to curry favor with the abbasids, but i've read art history works which suggest that the ummayad hellenism verged toward support of art which would have pleased a renaissance patron in its sumptuous paganism!), as well as the big picture reality that many barbarians driven by obviously corporeal impulses conquered all before them, suggests we should be careful about attributing the early conquests to ideology as opposed to contingency, opportunity and a particular technological or cultural superiority.

By: razib

razib — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 01:05:38 +0000

zora, that sure sounds plausible. the arab strikes around the 'fertile crescent' during the 7th century kind of remind me of the mongol sweeps across central asia. they simply showed up where they weren't supposed to because they took straight line paths through difficult territory. that being said, in infidels andrew wheatcroft claims that the original arab armies that defeated the byzantines were predominantly foot. this doesn't negate a big role for the camel. after all, we just discovered a new lactase persistence allele which seems to have emerged among the arabs and the causal cultural factor is the camel.

of course, none of that "explains" the rise of islam. there were plenty of nomadic & barbarian conquerers in the history of the world. very few of them left as strong an imprint as the arabs through their religion (and they managed to arabcize linguistic very different populations, such as egyptians). if you read ferdowsi you note how aghast civilized peoples like the persians were that the arabs could conquer them so easily and turn them in a servile nation. christian apologists make all sorts of claims that the absurdity that an obscure sect could conquer rome is a testament to its veracity as a witness to the hand divine providence. muslims of course make the same claims, and just as plausibly.

By: Zora

Zora — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 00:53:04 +0000

What gave the Arabs of Muhammad's time a military advantage? Reza Aslan's book pointed me to Richard Bulliet's The Camel and the Wheel. Bulliet argues that improvements in the camel saddle had vastly increased the usefulness of the camel both as a military mount and a trader's beast of burden. Camels didn't require roads; they were cheaper than the wheeled transport. Arabs were the camel breeders; Arabs had an advantage.

I can tell that Razib has been reading Patricia Crone :)

By: razib

razib — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 19:21:58 +0000

Very good razib, I knew you could do better than a simple "no."

most regular readers know that a simple "no" carries a lot of weight from me. i don't express opinions without knowing something about a topic, you understand? your attitude though is noted.

By: Forrest

Forrest — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 19:13:02 +0000

Very good razib, I knew you could do better than a simple “no.”

By: razib

razib — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 18:16:12 +0000

The Arabs seemed to have been a disorganized and unimportant bunch for a long time before Muhammad and I am not sure what materially changed around his time. He definitely seems to have had a big effect, but whether that could have occurred without him I am nnot sure.

they were a minor people, but they were a presence on the fringes of the persian and byzantine world for centuries. as i noted above, two north arab confederacies were long allies of the two empires. prominent arabs even assimilated to roman culture, ergo, 'phillip the arabian' as an emperor in the 3rd century. also, see the palmyrene empire, which seems to have had an 'arab' ethnic core.

By: razib

razib — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 18:13:30 +0000

I find the scholarly research into the social pathologies of Bedouin society leading up to the Islamic revolution to be more than sufficient to explain the success of Mohammad, just as I find the socio-political condition of Roman society to explain Julius Caesar, and the anarchy of revolutionary France to explain Napolean Bonaparte.

what scholarly research? citations?

1) there were multiple arab eruptions prior to muhammad. the ghassanids and lakhmids were both christianized. the 'muslim' eruption is an anomaly in generating a alternative religion.

2) we know there are monotheists around the arabian peninsula. jews, christians and "hanifs." these last usually converted to judaism and christianity after an exploratory phase, though there was usually an extant number in arabia during muhammad's life. so the typical response of arabs to monotheism wasn't to make up their own religion, it was to convert to the ones that were extant.

3) there is a lot of revisionist work which throws a lot of doubt around how islam arose. there is a spectrum, from what the muslims say (that is, islam arose in arabia in the time of muhammad) to those who would argue that islam as such didn't really exist until the early abbasids. see crone et. al. i suspect the revisionists are pushing things too far, but there's a lot of confusion about the early period, and much of the current mainstream model relies purely on muslim legend (legends are worth taking seriously, but not alone without other lines of evidence).

4) even muslim scholars cast a pall over the muslim bonafides of the ummayyad period (650-750). here are two facts of note: 1) there is attested de facto and de jure discrimination against non-arab muslims 2) there were north arabian christian tribes which were allowed into the arab muslim armies without the requirement to convert to islam but given all the privileges of arabs as the ruling race (sinecures, taxation exemptions, et.). the codification of the koran is also likely a feature of the 8th century, not the period of the early 'muslim' conquests.

5) so, there is debate about exactly when and how islam arose. it is plausibly a causal agent if islam actually did arise and manifest in the form that muslims tell us by 630 in arabia, but islam is more likely to be a byproduct of the arab encounter with civilization after their conquest if the revisionists are correct. that is, there is a lot of circumstantial data that the arab conquerers constructed islam as a special revelation to the arabs to boost their prestige as the ruling caste after the encounter with christians, jews and zoroastrians. but as i note above, there were other arab eruptions (remember that one roman emperor, phillip, had arab ancestry) which didn't produce a new religion, so this isn't inevitable. it was perhaps a peculiar response to extraordinary conquests.

6) i'm a little confused as to why you focus on the bedouins. even islamic tradition seems to indicate that the original muslims were not bedouins, they were the city-dwellers (merchants and oasis farmers) of mecca and medina (as i note above, there is reason to be a bit skeptical of this narrative, and reza aslan himself has presented the revisionist argument in his works that suggest that mecca as a entrepot is a fiction). additionally, it seems quantitatively most arabs were probably not obligately bedouin in their lifestyle, since there were tributary states of some heft to the north until the recent roman-persian wars (the ghassanids and lakhmids who i refer to). from what i have read the bedouins were actually relative latecomers who arrived for the plunder (there was some resistance to the muslim demand that they cut out the intertribal warfare, but made up for the fact that they had new lands to seek rents from).

7) there are other major eruptions of nomads historically in this period. e.g., the avars and the turkish empire antedated the muslims by a century or so (the avars lingered on for centuries, though were in sharp decline contemporaneously with the rise of islam). later there were the mongols. the arabs are exceptional in constructing a 'world religion' which their civilized subjects assimilated to. rather, the typical pattern is for barbarians to acclimate to the religion of their subjects, or, adopt a rival religion (e.g., the turko-mongols in russia).

8) so, the arab muslim event is to some extent sui generis. i didn't say that muhammad was responsible for it, there might not have been a muhammad just as there might not have been a jesus. because it is sui generis to a great extent i think it is critical to look to the contingent historical events which serve as the context for that eruption.

9) e.g., the eruption of the 7th century can not be considered by only the noting dynamics in situ within arabian society. "unrest" is not atypical for marginalized barbarians, and arabs were a part of middle eastern politics since at least the time of the roman republic. what was exceptional about the 7th century? as everyone knows, there were tensions within roman society (the monophysite/chalcedonian controversy) and perisan society (the suppression of the mazdakites) and a recent 'world war' between the two states which had pushed both to exhaustion (which the east romans won nominally). i think it is a bit much to attribute all arab success to these exogenous events, but they can't be denied, and were probably necessary preconditions for the fact that they spread so far and overran ancient societies so quickly.

10) there were many religious factions before and after the arabs and their islam. many of these are attested during the first few centuries of the rule of the caliphs (often they came out of a shia-zoroastrian milieu in iran). none of them succeeded. since i'm an atheist i don't attribute their failure to divine providence, rather, almost all new religions fail. that being said, paganism, or non-institutionalized reliigon, tend to cede ground before 'higher religion' over time (see the mongols, whose shamanism ceded to islam in the west and lamaism in the east). so if islam had not arisen, i doubt that the arabs would have been pagan to this day. even during the period of muhammad's life before islam allah was the high god in mecca (though there were other gods). it seems likely that arabs without islam would have been christianized or judaized, just as ethiopians, nubians and mesopatamians were (zoroastrianism tended to have strong ethnic connotations, with very little outreach to non-persians except for the armenians).

so my main point is that saying that some sort of new arab religion predicated on jewish or christian antecedents seems unlikely. rather, the precedent before the muslims was for arabs to become christians (the allies of the persians, the lakhimids, became 'heretical' christians aligned with the persian church). it seems likely that arabs were in a position to expand and acquire byzantine and persian territory in the 7th century (both the ghassinids and lakhimids as buffer states were destroyed by the early 7th century war so tribes to their south now had room to move and grow). but an eruption from the atlantic to sindh to transoxiana was obviously a deviation from expectation. that being said, the turkish empire of the 6th century encompassed the region from the borders of china to the ukraine. one could say that this was due to the special psychology of islam...but as i stated, there is some doubt as to whether islam as such existed in the mid-7th century.

all that is to say i don't know why islam arose. but, i bet it is more likely if we rewound history that the arabs would be christian. how confident am i? not very. but more confident than your hypothesis that the arabs were bound to invent a monotheistic religion which they would adhere to as opposed to a world religion already extant.

since i took some time out to explain myself i await your illuminating response.

By: The Real Richard Sharpe

The Real Richard Sharpe — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 14:43:39 +0000

sufficiency is not necessity. be careful about the power of post facto abduction.

Well, that is true, however, I think we can be certain that there were many would-be leaders who aspired to become great.

Also, the situation today seems contingent on many past missteps and lucky breaks on the part of many players, but there seems to be no lack of aspirants willing to step into the void and try to make things work to their advantage.

And, of course, with plenty of data points, some of them are bound to be more than just ordinary.

Oh, wait ...

By: Forrest

Forrest — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 13:23:15 +0000

"Another person assuming you're a muslim, razib."

Not really. I'm just trying to narrow down the possible reasons for his implied "great man" theory of history.

By: TGGP

TGGP — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 12:53:55 +0000

Another person assuming you’re a muslim, razib. Maybe you should go back to calling yourself “razib_the_atheist”.

The Arabs seemed to have been a disorganized and unimportant bunch for a long time before Muhammad and I am not sure what materially changed around his time. He definitely seems to have had a big effect, but whether that could have occurred without him I am nnot sure.

By: Forrest

Forrest — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 12:10:45 +0000

By: razib

razib — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:41:47 +0000

The underlying disorders in social and economic relations among Arabs that resulted in Islam sweeping the Arabian peninsula would still have existed. Muhammad was the catalyst for change not the ultimate cause of it.

sufficiency is not necessity. be careful about the power of post facto abduction.

By: Mencius

Mencius — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:30:24 +0000

Danny,

Try Chaudhuri’s sequel, Thy Hand, Great Anarch, which is even better – it takes on Indian politics much more squarely, and it has far more actual biographical content.

Chaudhuri was the personal secretary to Sarat Bose – brother but not supporter of the infamous Subhas Chandra Bose – and his reminiscences of the period preceding Indian “independence” are worth more than the entire so-called discipline of “postcolonial studies.” Naturally, most Indians, Pakistanis and Bengalis today have never even heard of Chaudhuri, the Jeremiah of the late Raj. It’s neat to see him mentioned here.

By: Forrest

Forrest — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:28:18 +0000

"no."

The underlying disorders in social and economic relations among Arabs that resulted in Islam sweeping the Arabian peninsula would still have existed. Muhammad was the catalyst for change not the ultimate cause of it.

By: razib

razib — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:17:48 +0000

Without Muhammad I daresay the Arab world would have produced some other unifying ideology and probably just another one based on the Old Testament.

no.

By: razib

razib — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 10:57:24 +0000

I recently read Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad Chaudhuri (very interesting despite or because it is quite idiosyncratic, old-fashioned & unfashionable). Speaking about relations between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal, he says that despite the talk of secular Congress politicians, the existence of 2 religion-based nations (which was what Jinnah argued) was a fact of life growing up there.

right, but it was mostly elite discourse. on the village level these fissures did exist, but it was often relatively fluid. also, in a place like bengal there wasn't much of a bengali speaking middle class before the 19th century, bengalis muslims who went up the social ladder became urdu speakers since that was the muslim language. the peculiarities of bengali muslim nationalism have to do with the emergence of a new identity relatively recently which challenged both the urdu-speaking muslims and bengali-speaking hindus.

I wonder if most Bengali Muslims, say in the UK where they are there in large numbers, make common cause with Pakistani Muslims under a common Muslim identity, or whether they prefer to emphasis the Bengali aspect of their identity.

one problem is that pakistanis are mostly 2nd generation while bangladeshis are mostly 1st gen. and common coss between 1st gen & FOBs isn't easy. amartya sen is concerned that the british gov. is enabling 'communities activists' in shifting bangladeshis to a mostly muslim-identification as opposed to a more synthetic one. i would bet on a muslim identity because it is more portable; being bengali outside of bengal gets progressively more attenuated as elements of language, food and dress disappear due to assimilation.

To answer my own question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Str...nded_Pakistanis

i have people from urdu speaking backgrounds in my own family; up the line of descent (my paternal grandfather's family) as well as horizontally (aunt-in-laws), so i wonder if it isn't exaggerated to the extent that many traditional urdu speaking families have simply become bengali.

By: Forrest

Forrest — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 10:19:47 +0000

Without Muhammad I daresay the Arab world would have produced some other unifying ideology and probably just another one based on the Old Testament.