Glen Beck was fired from Fox News two years ago when he spoke out against the Arab Spring movement, saying it wasn’t a new Islamic Renaissance but a looming Caliphate destined to encompass the entire Middle East in the doom and gloom of Sharia Law. He was right!
Libya was fundamentalist to begin with. Now they are, with the help of NATO and the U.S., a solidly Sharia state.
Egypt was secular. Now they are a solidly fundamentalist state; if not Sharia, then pretty damn close. Only Tunisia has a reasonably democratic government.
Tunisia is at the western edge of what is shaping up to be a homogenous Arab civilization. It took 300 years, from the 7th to the 10th century, for the original Arab Caliphate to spread beyond the Arabian Peninsula. This time it took 3 years, thanks to social media and the drive-by media. Hurray!
University of Cincinnati historian Robert Haug presented his research at a conference last week about how medieval cultures adapted to resist the spread of Islam. The Caliphate met with a great deal of resistance, as posed in a summary at Science Digest; so much so that even after 300 years of occupation the population was still only 50% Muslim.
There was a power struggle throughout this era between the Arab elite of the Caliphate and the local farmers and landed gentry. There were political, economic and cultural tensions. Westerners are accustomed to thinking of the Middle East as naturally, historically – inevitably! – Muslim. That was not at all the case, not at all…
Professor Haug speaks repeatedly of the “Caliphate elite” whose only objective was to collect taxes and raise armies to expand their domain. The locals were inconsequential, tangential to their grand design.
These folks had been at the fringes of civilization for a thousand years. They were fiercely independent, and they knew very well how to defend themselves. They had fortified grain silos everywhere, defensive siege works to fend off any invaders.
The new Arab elite saw these fortified structures; well, for what they were – a means by which the locals could resist. The Arab elite tried to ban these structures. Cleverly, the local elders started to call these structures “ribats,” an Arab term referring to a defensive jihad. This sounded good to the Arab elite, transforming them into a protectorate of the Caliphate.
Well, the natives kept their fortified grain silos and their independence too, most of it.
Fast forward a thousand years. Iraq was won by forging a coalition between – guess who? – the local tribal elders. Afghanistan has fought against American control as defiantly as the fought the Russians – because? – the local tribal elders prize their independence. Their freedom!
Libya has now “degenerated” into a nation of a thousand little fiefdoms run by – hello! – their traditional, ancestral tribal leaders. Do we see a pattern here?
Even after 1300 years of Arab rule; well, these people are still not Muslim. Not in the Caliphate sense.
Egyptians fought tooth and nail to retain what little secularism they had achieved in the modern era. Ditto for the Libyans and the Syrians.
We need to stop thinking of the Middle East as a lost cause. We need to stop thinking of Muslims as primitive heathens. We need to respect their struggle for independence.
We need to give them breathing room to escape the domination of the Caliphate.
