Re: Defining the Islamic State

This is the kind of discussion that seems to happen a lot on this list and, every time I hear people start banging away about this or that group, I can’t help wondering just how much their opinions are based on any kind of real life experience.  A lot of armchair theorizing goes on in academia and I wonder how often people go to the trouble of testing their assumptions against reality.  I had a professor who was purportedly an expert on the Middle East.  It turns out most of his expertise on the Middle East came from books and very little from actually spending time in the Middle East or hanging out with middle Eastern people.  That could explain why his lectures were singularly lacking in insight and why he was just as annoying as people who've been to a McDonald's in Bangkok and think they've got a handle on American culture.
 
I realize that anecdotal evidence has no epistemological stature but it’s terribly easy to find a level of analysis you’re comfortable with and go on endlessly proving yourself right within that paradigm.  Reality is more like peeling back layers of an onion – your perceptions always change. Reading a book about Country X written by an eminent scholar is a totally different experience than traveling to Country X as a tourist, which is different still from having people from Country X in your family, squabbling with them, learning how to eat their food and watching their popular movies until you want to scream – and then watching them some more.  Firsthand experience, up close and personal, will give you insights into a culture like you would not believe.
 
I’m reading a very interesting book on Third World development by an American economist, who tells about his experiences traveling to an impoverished village in Pakistan. They invite him to stay for lunch, having arranged for two cooks to prepare the meal, but he politely declines because he knows how scarce food is for them.  This is the way right-minded socially aware Americans are supposed to think – we have way too much, they have way too little.  Still, he should have eaten the food -- and licked his fingers and licked the plate.  It would have honored them.  Economics professors never teach you things like that, because most of them don’t actually know it themselves.
 
I live in what is probably one of the most multicultural regions on earth, a veritable patchwork of ethnicities, orientations and Lifestyles with a capital “L.”  People from tiny little countries find enough of their fellow expatriates here to form their own little cliques.  This is a great place to rub shoulders with people from an incredible diversity of backgrounds, but the fact is – people tend to stick to their own groups.  They make very little effort to reach out to people from different backgrounds.  Go to any cultural festival and 99% of the people there will be from that culture. Maybe it’s human nature for people to be socially lazy.  It’s much easier to hang out with people who appreciate your style of cooking, laugh at your jokes and know the words to the same songs.  Television reinforces this by making people in exotic locations seem as familiar to us as our neighbors, creating the illusion that we can understand people from diverse backgrounds without having to leave our living rooms.