Re: Islamic Militancy: It is their problem

I sent this on 11-1-1 to Khaldoun, but meant to send to WSN.  So here it is.

Khaldoun makes an excellent reply.  I particularly like this point:

"Does a Chiapas (sp?) peasant decide to join the Zapitasta resistance due to
the fact that he read Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto"?  Maybe some have
read it, but I would think that most joined the class struggle because they
knew quite well that they were getting screwed by the system.  ...class
struggle is the product of being faced with issues of land, work, a family
wage, respect, human rights, democracy"

And then he addresses Sherman's point:

> So why Islam as the unifying theme of resistance?

He proposes some possible answers.

However, I think what is relevant here is not just why a particular culture
is a "theme" or a mediating part of the circumstances and of agency, but
that just the fact that it is.  That is, when we talk about actions against
unfairness -- as tied to for example, "land, work, a family wage, respect,
human rights, democracy" -- we may observe that the very process of
perception and action (of the ideas of what is a family way, or respect, or
rights, or democracy) is a culturally mediated one.  One cannot posit as a
separate logic the inequalities against which people act from the cultural
process by which they perceive and act with/against the circumstances.  I'm
therefore skeptical of distinguishing spheres as Khaldoun has.

And I think that Khaldoun's following remarks are off:

"Sherman is calling useful was conflating religious revival movements of
centuries past to claim that Islam has always had a militant streak.  Thus,
history has been told.  No, that is not history I am afraid, but a Bernard
Lewis like argument: "Islam has always been militant, and the west has
nothing to do with the chaos of the region"."

I don't think Sherman makes this argument at all.  So I'd like to look again
at a point Sherman made:

"Marxism is (in the dominant version) a political philosophy that encourages
its adherents to see the world in terms of class warfare, and for the most
part, the 'marxist' perspective in this century emphasizes the utility of
armed struggle as opposed to 'reformist' advocacy of electoral tactics."

I think Sherman's point here is *not* to say that the immediate
circumstances within which groups take action is irrelevant to their action,
or that their action is determined solely by a disembodied ideology.  The
adoption and interpretation of a system of ideas and meanings did affect the
agents -- their actions, their perceptions of their circumstances, their
sense of morality, their justification for taking certain actions, etc.

In my view, the key point is this: if it is valid to claim that one cannot
explain the current circumstances without looking at the global mechanisms
and conditions of inequality and their local manifestations in the Middle
East (as Khaldoun states), it is also true that one cannot explain the
agencies or circumstances without examining their shared and mutually
communicated beliefs, ideas, etc. as aspects of their motivations,
inspiration, interpretation of their actions and of the circumstances.  In
this case, one thus cannot avoid discussing their Islamic beliefs.  Sherman,
as I read him, was not suggesting that we do only that, but that we need to
do that too.

But then part of the problem is understanding the system of ideas which are
mediating the circumstances and agents.  This relates to my critique of
world-systems analysis.  When it is perceived that culture an aspect of the
dynamic, then we are likely to look at the complex history of the
transformation of that system of ideas -- the long run continuities.  And
this gets us into the a great deal of complexity because the histories of
those meaning systems are not really just the long run continuities of those
meaning systems -- no more than the meaning system as part of the current
situation is merely a meaning system.  It is a cultural dimension of certain
social relationships and agencies.  Thus, if we seek to describe the history
of that meaning system, we must examine the history of social relationships
and agencies (of social systems? of social networks?) with an eye to how the
meaning/agency system and relationships have changed or "evolved," been
revivified, reconstructed, etc.  In other words, one can't just pluck
ideas/agencies from their historical context and examine them as discrete
entities, as disembodied phenomena without reifying them.

That task is further complicated by the postmodern condition -- issues of
interpretation qua agency.  A 21st century American scholar, with her/his
own meaning systems is interpreting and those meaning/systems and social
relationships.

Elson Boles
Dept. of Sociology
Saginaw Valley State University