Autumn 1997
TRAVELLERS – BEWARE !
THE URGENT NEED TO FOR QUESTION MARKS
“Convictions are more dangerous enemies
of truth than outright lies.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
When thoughtful people raised in the West travel to the Orient – anywhere between the Mediterranean and the Pacific - or concern themselves with the Orient intellectually - they do well to leave most of their political convictions and their political vocabulary at home and reserve space in their mind for a generous supply of question marks.
Why? The existential experience of the Oriental person is so very different from that of the Westerns in basic matters, private and public, that without understanding him in his own existential experience, perspectives, historic background and terminology they cannot help misjudging him. By measuring him against Western standards they are doing him an injustice, themselves a disservice, invite surprises, and often serious damage. In politics, business or in personal relations the damage can be (and has sometimes been) disastrous.
Examples from real life illustrating the vast cultural, emotional and verbal gap between East and West, are scattered throughout our Web site. Here we will cite some also from the Middle East because of their compelling relevance to the issues of this mainly Muslim-Arab territory in our time. The Middle East, picturesque, varied, history-laden, has been a region with a character all its own since prehistoric times. It was the cradle of our alphabet, of legal codes and religions, pagan and monotheistic, of astronomy, and city life long before “the West” became literate. The main monotheistic religions, in historic order, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Bahai faith (about 150 years old) have believers around the globe and are certain to endure, thanks to inspiring books that originated in the Orient and have left their mark on the history of Western civilization.
In the Middle East and beyond, religions have produced dogmatic and divisive certainties and few doubts. Islam, the dominant faith in the region, has produced no reformers like Martin Luther or Jean Calvin, no critics like Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Marx, Kierkegaard, to mention only a few. Islam conditions the mind for fatalism, submission, unconditional acceptance of whatever befalls the true believer, a perfect fit for the Eastern political tradition, as if made to measure. Hence its great and ongoing success among Third World populations.
A characteristic example of difference between East and West today are suicide statistics: figures in Oriental countries are negligible compared with those of Europe. All the more incongruous the current phenomenon of Muslim suicide terrorists. It can be understood as motivated, wholly or partly, only by strongly religious indoctrination, with nationalism and a sense of frustration as contributory ingredients.
Another basic difference is the Muslim’s experience of time. He may wear the same Swiss watch on his wrist as Westerns do, but in his mind it ticks slower. In the West “time is money”, a modern whip to restlessness and achievement quite alien to the Middle East. There an equivalent saying would be “Time is God-willed Fate“. The Arabic word “boukra” in literal translation is “tomorrow”. It can mean the next day, but more often “soon, at some undetermined time”. The Muslim’s contemplative, fatalistic turn of mind renders him rather indifferent to the economic link between productive effort and the input of time and its cost. All countries, without exception, in which Islam is the dominant religion – about sixty - belong to the Third World group, among them even those with a very high per caput income, most of it comfortably achieved by their petroleum wealth, without the native initiative and industrial enterprise that have made Southeast Asian states grow prosperous.
Another important, but hardly noted difference between East and West is observance of agreements between states, communities, tribes, clans or any other groups constituting legal, national, ethnic, social and even economic units. The rule of ancient Roman law that ‘pacta sunt observanda’ has become accepted as part of the international legal code by the community of nations. If it is violated (as it was by Germany and other European states in this century), it is judged a reprehensible deviation from the norm.
Not in the East. The first fully recorded instances of such violations were recurrent breaches of peace treaties between ancient Rome and the city-state of Carthage, by ethnic origin a colony of the Middle Eastern Phoenicians (in Latin “Poeni” or “Puni”). They were successful maritime and commercial rivals
of Rome. Their violations of signed agreements with Rome led to three wars between them. After Carthage broke the second peace treaty (and its leader Hannibal came near victory on Italian soil), the Romans decided on a third Punic war. Scipio Africanus won it in 146 B.C. and that time razed the city. (Cato the Elder won fame by ending his Roman Senate speeches with the words “ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam”). The motive for all three wars was what the Romans came to call, on a note of contempt, “fides Poenica”, the Phoenician disdain for honouring treaties they had freely negotiated and signed.
HOUBAYDIYEH
Another example of traditional Oriental non-observance of agreements is of interest today for its relevance to contemporary Middle East disputes. In 622 A.D. the Prophet Muhammad, then aged 52, preaching for more than a decade a new faith he called “Islam” to his pagan fellow citizens of Mecca, had made himself such a nuisance to them that they lost patience and planned to silence him. Warned in time by relatives he first sent away his small group of faithful and soon followed them in 622 A.D. with a devoted companian, Abu Bakr (his first successor). For secrecy both left their families behind (which the Meccans later allowed to leave). They sought refuge in Yathrib (later renamed Medinah (the City of the Prophet) where the townspeople, rivals of Mecca, welcomed them. He continued his missionary effort there with such success that he could soon muster a small military force. Six years after his arrival he thought he had enough men to return and try taking revenge on his defiantly pagan home town for the humiliation of his flight from it.
Encouraged by success and a surfeit of booty in several previous engagements with Qurayshi caravans Muhammed decided in March 628 on an expedition against Mecca at the head of some 700 men (some sources put their number much higher). The Meccans were prepared and met their enemies at Houdaibiyeh, a hamlet some ten miles northwest of their town. Muhammad pleaded he and his followers wanted merely to perform the traditional rites at the town’s holy (but still pagan) shrines as unarmed pilgrims, something the Meccans could not well refuse. After lengthy and detailed negotiations a peace agreement was signed, valid for ten years allowing the Muslims entry into Mecca only twelve months later - reluctant concessions for both sides. By signing the treaty of Houdaibiyeh the Meccans implicitly recognized Muhammad’s standing and power as the leader of a rival community growing in military strength and self-confidence. For Muhammad it meant a diplomatic success, though not the triumphant return to his home town he had hoped for. In the circumstances this satisfied him, despite vocal dissent in his own camp.
He lost however little time making preparations for another expedition against Mecca, pretending to aim at a target north of Yathrib, in the opposite direction. Within two years he could muster about 10,000 men, an enormous force in Arabia in those days. The Meccans had little hope of resisting and the majority of its divided leaders agreed to surrender. In January 630 Muhammad entered Mecca at the head of his army. Only a small group of fanatics resisted and was cut down.
That he had broken a ten years non-aggression treaty was not held against him because neither signatory expected to honour it, if circumstances changed in his favour. The term ‘Houdaibiyeh’ as a time-honoured precedent justifying breaches of political and military pacts has since entered the political dictionary of the Arab East, just as the term ‘Canossa’ has become a synonym of humble submission in the West since 1077 A.D. when the German emperor Heinrich IV asked Pope Gregorius VII’s pardon outside a mountain monastery in South Italy after a fierce political-theological dispute over a legal issue.
In our time examples of Middle East treaty violations abound. In the civil war in Lebanon 1975 and 1976 the various factions engaged in the fighting signed well over a hundred cease-fire agreements and broke them, many of them hours later the same day. (Some 40,000 Lebanese citizens were killed and 100,000 wounded in twenty months of bloodshed. It ended in November 1976 by the intervention of Syrian troops).
Iraq (a charter member of the Arab League since its beginning in 1945) and Iran were engaged in a long dispute over their rights in the Shatt el Arab waterway between the two states until it was settled by an agreement between the two governments. As long as Shah Pahlevi was head of Iran, Iraq’s ruling Baath Party honoured the treaty. When the ambitious and aggressive Saddam Hussein succededed Ahmed Hassan el Bakr in mid-1979 as Iraq’s dictator, he not only tore up the agreement, but prepared for war. Just over a year later he took advantage of the turmoil that disrupted Iran between the flight of the Shah and the return from exile of Ayatollah Khomeini, and sent his troops across the border. The war he thought would be won in a short time lasted eight years and ended in exhaustion of both countries after appalling loss of lives and vast damage.
Another essential difference between East and West is the regard for the rights of man, individual and collective, equality before the law for all citizens, men and women, regardless of their religious belief, fair trial by independent judges, freedom of speech, assembly and access to the Internet. All Middle Eastern states, except Turkey and Israel, are governed by dictatorships, some dressed in democratic costumes, referring to themselves republics and holding what they call elections. These states have no tradition of citizens’ rights, deny women the vote even in their local and national sham elections. (The states that have adopted Islamic law do not even allow women to drive cars in public). When judging such conditions in the Middle East Western observers should remember that the rights they take for granted in their own country nowadays are of relatively recent date, some just over 200 years old, some even less (Switzerland, for instance, granted its women the suffrage only this century).
The wide differences of all kinds between East and West, whether ethnic, religious, political, economic or ideological, would not matter so much were it not for resentment, envy, hated and outright hostility they are breeding in the East. Islam is seething with such emotions against the West. They have surfaced in our century in Asia and Africa, and are likely to flare up again in the future, especially in the Middle East where resentment against “the wicked West” is heating up fast.
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