Re: Islamic Militancy: It is their problem

I never intended to throw in my lot with the "Bill Gates/George Bush" axis,
nor am I in the game of locating blame.  The point I'm making has been very
well understood and explained by Steve, but let me add a couple of
analogies of my own while we're at it.

One of the central arguments in World Systems analysis as presented by
Wallerstein was how historical capitalism could work with many different
labor regimes.  Others have found this direction useful to explain how the
induction of bonded labor, child labor and women's labor across the third
world can employ cultural modes of power and authority for the purposes of
forging labor discipline.  This helps to lower the costs of labor and
increases the flexibility of the labor market, both to the advantage of
capitalists.  The capacity of historical capitalism to employ diverse
regimes of power in the consolidation of a world embracing division of
labor has meant that non-modern, pre-existing, whatever you want to call
it, forms of power retain their importance, and perhaps experience a
re-awakening in periods of structural transformation such as the one we are
living through.

Take another example.  We are by now familiar with the argument of how East
Asia's historical legacy of regional integration lived on after the arrival
of historical capitalism.  Gunder Frank in  ReOrient and the
Arrighi/Selden/Hamashita combine both agree that the rise of East Asia is
best understood in terms of how it has built on, rather than superceded or
obliterated, a tradition of regional integration that long pre-dates the
arrival of historical capitalism.  Here too, a phenomenon of world
historical significance is being explained as an intersection of an
internal historical trajectory with a capitalist one.

A world embracing division of labor can create news modes of labor
organization as much as work through existing ones.  The rise of a region
to challenge the prevailing hegemonic power of a capitalist state can be
explained as the consolidation of a regional division of labor and resource
flows that long predates the rise of historical capitalism within which it
operates.  Why is it so controverial to suggest (on a WSN list at that!)
that the same model of explanation might hold when it comes to patterns of
anti-systemic mobilization in the post Communist world?

None of this is intended to suggest that bonded labor or child labor is
entirely indigenous to the societies that are incorporated.  Neither does
it suggest that regional integration is the only history that East Asia has
known.  Likewise, it does not suggest that the inspired militancy of the
Salafiyah cadres is the only history in Islam.  Far from it.  The
incorporation into the networks of historical capitalism produces a
wrenching transformation of already existent patterns of mobilization.  The
process is best described by Geertz' term "involution," which refers to an
overarticulation of detail, an accentuation of repressive tendencies which
had worked to legitimize a very different order from the one that they are
now being called upon to legitimize.  If I were to present this argument in
conversational form, I could say that historical capitalism has brought out
the worst in Islam.  

And I don't know what to tell your Wal Mart employee as to why he makes
minimum wage.


Khurram Husain




At 12:28 PM 10/29/01 EST, KSamman@aol.com wrote:
>Mr. Hussain writes: 
><There is an internal history to the matter too.>
>
>This comment is a typical text book renunciation of world systems
analysis.  I see it over and over again.  It sounds reasonable.  We need to
take into account the interactions (intersections?) of the local and the
global, and, as the critique goes, world systems fails to do that in so far
as it places primary emphasis on the "external". Hence, such people argue
that those who use a world systems methodology blame everything on the
larger system.  Totality gone too far, we need more island than ocean
(Sherry Ortner), so to say.
>
>Some questions I'd like to ask of the above comments:
>
>I meet a poor, working class male who works at Wal Mart and earns a
minimum wage.  Does he earn low wages because a) he is enveloped by a
culture of poverty and can't seem to acquire the proper cultural traits
needed to become a Bill Gates? or b) he is enveloped by a system of
exploitation that ultimately requires a minimum wage class to reproduce the
wealth of a Bill Gates? 
>
>Most of us on this Listserv, I have a feeling, would probably say that the
first response is "blaming the victim" and would prefer to look at the
larger system to explain the circumstances of this Wal Mart employee.  Some
of my students, however, would respond by saying such a perspective "blames
society" for all the ills of what they view are the shortcomings of this
particular working class male.  "He should have worked harder, received an
education, saved money and started a business, and . . ."  
>The criticism that we need to consider what's happening "within" a given
region, culture, gender, class, ... is not unlike the response giving by
some of my students. Hussain's comment that "it is entirely facile to try
to locate the roots of contemporary Islamic inspired militancy exclusively
in terms of capitalism, modernity, peripheralization, etc" is very similar
to the response I would get, lets say, from a social scientist like Oscar
Lewis who would say that "you leftist blame the larger society for
everything when obviously the problem stems from the fact that this Wal
Mart worker has learned from his family negative traits that led him to his
poor, miserable life."  The two are not unlike each other.  For Hussain,
some Muslims have learned that Islam means holy war from past historical
cultures of their own making and now have carried this cultural baggage
into the modern era.  For Lewis, the Wal Mart employee has learned negative
qualities like "immediate gratificatio!
>n" in his childhood and is now i
>n his adult life reproducing his parents bad qualities.
>
>While we see the problem with the culture of poverty thesis ("blaming the
victim"), many of us have no problem accepting it on a world systems level.
 Instead, we get caught up in this internal versus external dichotomy and
fail to see that these concepts also perform the legitimization of people
like Bill Gates or, even worse, that those Muslims have a problem unrelated
to our own doing.  "They are a militant culture who send their children to
be martyrs."  "They have their culture and we have ours." I guess we should
all say God Bless America and Bill Gates. Lets support Bush in the War
against Terrorism.
>
>Khaldoun Samman  
>
>