Saudi Arabia and Iran: The Cold War of Islam
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
Also Saudi doesn't just follow plain old Sunni Islam. They practice Wahhabism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism) which has a more literal reading of the Quran (which explains the higher percentage of extremism). The royal family leveraged Wahhabism to gain and keep power of the region.
As long as the countries remain governed by religious politics and inflict God's so called will on others, there cannot be an end to the conflict.
Far more interesting is the way in which they, eg, handle selection of clergy, or marriage patterns.
Shia clergy for instance is far more hierarchical than Sunni, which arguably is better for social stability since it avoids as many random yahoos deciding they have a hotline to god, who incidentally wants them to go on jihad.
Have you seen the video of an Iraqi Shia cleric claiming that eating rabbit meat is forbidden because rabbits are insects?
Hierarchy can only take you so far. There will always be uneducated idiots. The best way for quality control is to educate clerics at the national level and allow only those certified to actually preach or lead in prayer.
Islam is not just a religion. It is a very deliberately structured guide for the entirety of society. "Full-stack" social control as we on HN might call it. The Quran is a complete manual that details everything expected and required of a good Muslim, from the food that can be eaten to the appearance of your body.
Trying to make a wedge between Islam and government in these places simply will not work. Many European historians contend that Western state secularism was a direct result of there being no lasting European empire following Rome to enforce religious doctrines (whereas most of the ME has been in the hands of one empire or another since the founding of Islam), and the Protestant Reformation only cemented the expectation among various nobles that they get to rule the world while the church sticks with ruling the soul.
In short, the greater Middle East will always remain governed by religious politics. Something has to fix the mess out there, but excluding religion simply won't work.
Christianity is not any different.
"You shall not cut your hair round or trim your beard". 3rd book Mose, 19:27
Read the Bible, and you’ll find definitions for when to eat what, how long to preserve what, how to punish crimes, etc.
As for the Old Testament: how many Christians keep kosher?
Islam's founding story is much more straightforward: Angel tells Muhammed to transcribe a book that exists word-for-word in heaven. No ambiguity there.
Edit: the Hadiths are continually debated for accuracy and adherence as they have varying levels of perceived legitimacy, somewhat like interpretations of passages in the Christian New Testament.
Moreover, the elevation of faith over adherence to law as the path to salvation also has the effect of deemphasizing the latter.
Ideology doesn't do anything. People do things. Ideology is completely instrumental. Material forces dictate the way ideology manifests because, having no power of its own ideology must be propagated by something physical.
The enlightenment, first of all a 20th century reinterpretation of history was not ideology overcoming ideology, but material forces of social change outmoding old ideology and fertilizing new.
So the question is, what are the material, physical forces driving the political situation in the Middle East?
Would it be ridiculous to say that the petrodollar, coups and bombs drive it?
That's your claim. I say that the catholic church ruled because it had a stranglehold on material power. It behaved as a cartel for monarchic control. The ideology of the catholic church never prevented challenges to its power that were heterodox, like the multiple antipopes that arose through the years. The ideology of a celibate clergy never stopped popes from siring children and placing them in power.
The catholic church declined because technology and economic activity developed into a system that could not be controlled by an entity like the church. Monarchies and the church became obsolete for material reasons, not the appearance of competing ideologies. The ideologies that came about were filling in the vacuum left by the church. A new social order had to be explained. Ideology is post-hoc.
That's my claim.
Ideology and social order go hand in hand, and even more so in Political situations and you have to be very oblivious to say that Islam is not an political religious ideology for most of the Middle East.
It is an important characteristic of ideology that it is symbolic: it means that multiple people can interpret it in different ways. Which interpretations are "correct"? The ones that conform to the underlying power structure. The power structure punishes "misinterpretations" and rewards "correct" interpretations.
Just as different start-ups have different ideologies because they have different power structures and economic relations, Islam in the Middle East is not a coherent political ideology. The Islam of Iran reflects the organization of its government, not the other way around. The Islam of Saudi Arabia reflects the organization of its government, not the other way around.
The Islam of Da'esh, which is considered heterodox by literally every other sect of Islam, is a reflection of its power structures.
The same signs and ideas reflect different physical realities. What drives the development of signs and ideas? The physical reality. Only the material can propagate ideology, and only the material that propagates itself succeeds in the long-run.
What use is it to say that "Islam is a political religious ideology for most of the Middle East"? What analytic and predictive power does this statement have?
Ok, sure. I can agree with that, but in my opinion it's a low-power assertion. Liberalism as an ideology allows imperialism and coups, too. Like the one that ousted the democratically elected prime minister of Iran and replaced him with the autocratic Shah.
There is nothing especially poisonous about Islam. The politics of the Middle East are largely driven by global capitalism, imperialism, and war. What has more political force? A cruise missile or a copy of the Quran?
It also took hundreds of years, and numerous very bloody wars.
> Ideology doesn't do anything. People do things.
What people believe definitely affects what people do. I don't see how you can seriously argue otherwise.
People go through contortions to square the dissonance between their ideology and their actions. Ideology serves people, not the other way around. At best ideology is a hint at what people are like. There are always gross contradictions between what people believe and how people act.
Ideology does not arise from pure reason, it does not spring from the void. Ideology does not exist on its own, only in conjunction with power structures; ideology is completely subordinate to physical power. Ideology does not create power, it rationalizes it.
Lebanon has been a highly secular state with a varied population when it comes to religion (Christians, Sunnis, Shiites, Druze). Unfortunately Hezbollah now has far more influence than it should have, which is what is ruining Lebanon in my opinion.
My country Tunisia is slowly shifting towards a pseudo-secular republic. The constitution currently lists Islam as the country's religion, but freedom of religion is guaranteed. The majority are Sunnis, but there are some Shiites, Abadis, and a small historically Jewish population based on the island of Djerba.
Sure, I'd be the first to agree that trying to introduce the wedge from the outside is incredibly dangerous and liable to backfire (even though in the long run it worked pretty much everywhere in the Soviet sphere of influence bar Afghanistan). But a large degree of separation of church and state is entirely possible with most of the population remaining Muslim.
And frankly, the degree of separation of religion and politics is often overstated in the West. I mean, I live in a country with govt-funded parochial schools and an actual established church with formal political power... and I'd still consider it to be a society where religion has less influence on politics than the US.
https://hmstur.wordpress.com/2014/11/23/afghan-women-and-a-m...
Too many Westerners (my apologies if you are not, I am, and I see this contention that you have brought forth from many of them) read things about 'Afghanistan' that are really about Kabul. It's similar to equating New York City to all of America.
Time will tell if it will have a positive impact on developing nations that currently lack strong community/political structure.
Turkey is none-the-less a curious case given their economic status and political history.
You are sort of right that Islam was more full stack than Christianity is in western civ now, but this is an over simplification. There were points in Western civilization were the Catholic Church had strong control over western laws.
And while Islam started off with a pretty much unified religious and state body, that hasn't always been the case. The Ottoman Empire didn't use real Islamic law. In the far flung corners of the Ottoman Empire (like what is now Saudi Arabia) they pretty much practiced a more pure Islamic law, but the Ottoman Empire didn't. And it's successor states really didn't either.
Most of the middle east is on a legal system that quite different from Islamic law. Only really the Saudis are following anything that closely, and even they don't do it 100%. The rest of the Islamic world really just uses it as a family court.
The push to bring back Islamic law into full legal force is somewhat new. It's a fundamentalist movement that pushing that idea.
Plus the idea that Islamic law is the only law isn't just a bad idea it's essentially unislamic too. Tazir crimes are laws that rulers make for their people and that has been part of Islam since the start.
Could you expand on that?
This couldn't be further from the truth. For example, Salat (Praying) which is the 2nd most important pillar of Islam right after the oral declaration (statement of faith - Shahada), you can't find anything whether How-To guide or tutorials in your so-called manual, and the same holds true for thee rest of the pillarsm and this very reason is the chief problem mainstream Sunnis have with Koranists[0] who only endorse the teachings of the Koran while rejecting completely Mohammad's sayings (Sunna).
So, no the Koran is not a complete manual for the Sunni Muslim fundamentalists, far from it. It just complements Sunna and both constitute the canonical reference for those people.
As with your deterministic overview of the inability to separate Islam and State in Muslim-majority countries, you just have to read about the experiments of Tunisia, Turkey and Albania and see for yourself how secularism developed in those countries despite all the challenges and concerns you cited in your comment.
Literal Islam whether Sunni or Shiite version pose indeed a challenge for secularism to flourish in Muslim-majority countries but to write off in absolute terms, secularism taking root in those countries not now not ever is shortsighted and unfair. However, it's still refreshing to hear orientalists views every once in a while on those topics.
The Quran orders Muslims to obey the Prophet Peace be upon him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB4cARWalY4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_seizure#Policies
The Royal family essentially entered into a Faustian pact with the religious fundamentalists who've held massive sway over the country ever since. (Not unlike The Sparrows in GOT).
This is very important. The people from the Islamic countries should rise above their God's so called will in a similar way as how the European Christians rose above their God's so called will. We need a Islamic Arab renaissance and a corresponding Islamic Separation of church (mosque/sharia) and state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safavid_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safaviyya
It was basically just something invented, or adopted, ad-hoc by a Sufi Saint who practiced Sunnism and his followers who did not want to be under the yoke of the Ottomans any more, actually in those days this concept did not even exist and it was the 15th century already, and then the whole Shia Sunni myth was invented after the empire took power in the 15th century, like 700 years after Muhammad died.
The Fatimids existed before this in 900, around 200 years after Muhammad's death. But this empire was completely different from the Fatimids, and it came into being hundreds of years after their fall.
It depends on your definition of "plain old". If you are referring to that some people choose not to follow the violent part of sunni Islam, then you are correct. However, under the normal definition of "plain old", Wahhabism is the plain old sunni Islam as Islam was 1400 years ago.
Saudi on the other hand is very "new" to the world in terms of culture and influence, only coming into prominence since the 1940s oil boom. The harsh environment isn't hospitable to living there without extreme energy use.
Both obviously have major regional economic power, but the Saudi society is built on sand (literally and metaphorically). In the very long term Iran's importance will come back so if anything the US and the broader world should be seeking to engage more with Iran and less with Saudi IMO.
That's not getting into a lot of the political stuff obviously, more just an analysis of the "fundamentals."
Long term one of the largest questions is how cheap desalination can get. At ~100 gallons per cent both areas can effectively stop being deserts, but current prices of 3 gallons per cent act as a significant economic drain.
PS: In the US the average person directly uses ~90 gallons per day @ 3 gallons per cent that's only ~100$ per year for desalination. However, people use vastly more water indirectly, one pound of beef takes ~1,847 gallons.
Their GDP is based on oil. In the long term that's going to dry up, and unless they institute major reforms starting right now they'll be in serious trouble.
Another option is manufacturing, cheap power means cheap aluminum. And there is significant research into synthetic fuels, even if significantly more expensive than Oil right now they are likely in demand for aircraft in the long term.
In fact, I'm not sure they can do anything besides eat, pray, and watch soccer. It's a really, really strange place.
Going there on business was a very weird experience for me - the country somehow functions, but none of the locals actually do anything, as far as I could tell.
As if that's not happened in Western societies?
The Kurds are an amazing and resilient group that have been an incredible ally to the west.
I don't know any group it's size who has been more historically oppressed, marginalized and killed with almost nobody paying any attention to it.
I'm under the impression that the US is mostly following rather than mostly leading in engagement with the Saudi rather than Iran: one country is lead by plutocrats whose relationship with the US is driven by desire to dominate the world oil trade, and the other controlled by powerful revolutionaries and theocrats whose control over an increasingly diverse society depends on invoking the spectre of "Great Satan" as recent history's most dangerous enemy.
1. Climate change is accelerating and changing geopolitics of the region faster. Iran’s power and influence has been continuously decreasing in past 2500 years as the Iranian Plateau has got drier. As an example, Iran’s population centers have been moving north as time goes on. 2. Do not ignore role of management and human resources in power and development. In past 40 years Iranians have been making big management and strategic mistakes. Mistakes that engaged them in an eight year war with their neighbor — Iraq, put their interests at adds with world’s largest economic and military power — the United States, and now fighting a cold war with the majority Sunni in the middle east. What do all these have in common?
That is mightily misleading. It is more important what part of the shiites make out of Middle East muslims. Because large parts of the muslim populations live in places like Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, China, Bangladesh - and from bird's eye - they don't seem to care much about sectarian struggles.
Not so much anymore. With the Salafists/Wahabis spreading their hateful agenda against the Shias in these parts of the world in a very big way, there are numerous incidents of mainly Sunnis attacking Shias and a little bit of the other way round too.