Open Integral

Had an interesting morning in the glorious surrounds of the State Library of Victoria, one of the great libraries. A new book by Irving Zeitlin called ‘The Historical Muhammad’. It’s more or less a review of the literature and he discusses the contributions of specialists in the area, adding new findings. I only managed to skim the book, but here’s what I found interesting.

- There was a Jewish prescence in Arabia, probably from Roman times. These Jews settled in towns and developed agriculture and industry and therefore, became quite wealthy – in contrast to the nomadic lifestyle of the Bedouins.
- Some Arabs converted to Judaism and an Arabised Judaism developed.
- Before Mohammed there had been conflict between some Arab and Jewish tribes. This was not specifically religious. Tribal conflict was common enough.
- Before Mohammed’s time Jewish power was in decline.
- The Arabs had been exposed to monotheistic ideas from various sources.
- There was a form of Arab/Jewish mysticism, the followers were called Hanif. Two of Mohammed’s relatives, through his first wife Khadija, were Hanif.
- There are stories of Mohammed discussing religious issues before his revelations. It seems his ideas developed over some time (his first revelation came when he was forty).
- Mohammed was not the only person to claim to be a prophet. There was a Jewish man who made a similar claim and who said he had had visions. His name was Ibn Sayyad.

The existence of Ibn Sayyad raises some interesting questions. He was a contemporary of Mohammed’s and there are two stories about them meeting. One has Mohammed spying on Ibn Sayyad whilst he was meditating at an oasis. The other has Mohammed meeting Ibn Sayyad and asking, ‘do you recognise me as the prophet?’ To which Ibn Sayyad replies, ‘do you recognise ME as the prophet?’ It seems early accounts depict Ibn Sayyad as an equal and as a competitor. Later accounts start to portray him as a lesser prophet and as a fake. This reminds me of the Christian propaganda concerning Simon Magus.

The picture that emerges from this is a younger Mohammed attracted to the Hanif and learning about monotheism from mostly Arab Jewish sources, although there were Christians in Arabia, mostly Nestorians. It seems that Mohammed fancied himself as a master Hanif and a Jewish prophet. At first he was welcomed in Medina by the Jews as an Arab Jew, but once the rabbis began to understand that he had diverged from Judaism they declared him a false prophet and to protect themselves from his growing power they sought and alliance with Mecca. This incensed Mohammed and the rest is history.

The book also paints an uncompromising picture of the massacre of the Jewish Bani Qurayzah. For those unfamiliar with the story, one of Mohammed’s generals ordered all the males of fighting age to be lined up in front of trenches and systematically beheaded. The generally accepted figure is 700 beheaded, but there is evidence to suggest it was as high as 900. This event is usually excused by saying that such things were normal at the time. The book however, argues that this was not at all normal. The normal Arab response was to disarm their rivals and maybe scatter them. By massacring all the men Mohammed was in fact departing from tradition in a quite brutal manner. Can you imagine the scene. A long trench and the calculated and systematic beheading of men and adolescent boys. It would have taken a day. What does it remind you of? Perhaps Nazis digging trenches and shooting hundreds of Jews. And what happened to the women and children? Sold into slavery.

After Mohammed had gained control of Arabia he is reported to have said on his death bed that Islam should be the only religion. As a result all the Jews of Arabia were expelled. If it walks like genocide, quacks like genocide, its genocide.

The debate has been raging on. The government has sent in its task force and all eyes are focused on this problem. The reports that come out are disturbing. An infant with its skull smashed in – her father was drunk and threw a bottle at his teenage wife, missed, and hit the baby. In WA six men (some teens) were arrested for systematic sexual abuse of girls. Too many cases to cite.

I said in a previous post (I’ll summarise) that the reasons are both simple and complex. 1. Aboriginal society is collapsing and all social norms are being ignored. 2. Traditional Aboriginal society was sexually liberal to begin with.

As academics and journalists investigate this issue more information comes out. The media has been coy in detailing just what pre-contact Aboriginal sexuality was like, but now I can share more detail.

1. Aboriginal children were allowed to play and faced little censure and discipline (one of the issues is the lack of discipline and poor school attendance).
2. Childhood ended around 10, after that they took on more adult roles.
3. Children were regularly exposed to adult sexuality.
4. Children were not censured for explicit sexual play.
5. Older boys would seduce pre-pubescent girls.
6. Girls got married and took on adult sexual responsibilities as young as 8-10.
7. Everyone was completely naked, so nudity was never an issue (and you can’t hide male arousal).

As I said, some of these remote communities lived a traditional lifestyle within living memory. The last family to be contacted was in the 1960’s, colour footage shows a group of around five naked children running into the bush, one teen girl with an infant on her back. She is still alive, in her sixties and fondly remembers her childhood.

Marguerite Duras is a celebrated French author. At the moment in Melbourne there is a one woman play about her life. It explores some of the controversy around her life, namely that at the age of fourteen she had an affair with an older man. She wrote about this in her book ‘The Lover’. I was reading a review of the play when I came across this quote from an academic who specialises in Duras.

“Because he was in his late 20’s, he admits the affair is illegal under French law, but it was not so horrendous in those times.” Those times being French Indochina during the 20’s.

Sexual mores change and I’m fascinated by that change. What was not so horrendous back then? Were 14 year old girls more mature than they are now and therefore better able to cope? I think not. I would suggest that 14 year olds are more mature today, certainly more worldly wise. If it was not so horrendous then why is it more horrendoius now? What has changed? Our attitudes of course. The 80’s saw an increase in concern over psychological trauma and a growing fear about child abuse. It is horrendous now because we believe girls must be traumatized by sex. Never mind that people like the famous singer Loretta Lynne was happily married at just 13 (legal back then).

14 year olds haven’t changed much. The difference is the increase in moral panic over these issues. Duras never regretted her affair.

The recent attacks in England and Scotland has connections in Australia through a network of doctors and medical workers. People seemed shocked that they could be doctors. Why? The chief ideologue behind al Qaeda, the Egyptian al Zawahiri, was a highly trained doctor. Recent studies have shown that many Islamists are highly educated. It puts an end to the idea that this all about oppressed and impoverished people fighting back. It isn’t. Islamism is an ideology like fascism or communism and both ideologies attracted highly intelligent professionals who imagined themselves as a vanguard acting on behalf of an imagined oppressed group. Islamism is a form of utopian idealism that is attractive to certain personality types.

I was irritated to read this silly statement in a major article on the attacks. The journalist Nick McKenzie writes in today’s ‘Age’: “The threat comes from a very small number of individuals who twist Islam to justify extrtemism.” This comment is simply incompetent. The threat has come from a significant group of militants who number in the tens of thousands (across several battle fields). This is hardly a ’small’ number of individuals. Furthermore, this number of active militants has significant support amongst Muslims, many still regard bin Laden as a hero.

Furthermore, Islam does not have to be twisted too far to justify violence. There seems to be a willing blind spot to what Mohammed preached and actually did. After he felt he had been betrayed he declared war on his enemies. This war included the massacre of 700 hundred Jews of the Bani Quarayzeh by beheading ‘after’ they had surrendered. Mohammed’s jihad then involved the destruction of the traditional religion of Arabia and the forced conversion of the ‘infidels’, followed by the expulsion of all Jews and Christians from the area he controlled. This history is not disputed, just glossed over and excused with rather lame arguments that he was justified.

Apologists will argue that Islam only fights in defence of Islam. The notion of defence hinges on the definition of attack. What constitutes an attack on Islam? As it turns out, not much. We must remember that Islam has not done much to change Arab notions of honour and revenge. The existance of tribal blood feuds tells us that violence is a recognized method with which to restore honour. If a female member of the family causes dishonour, you kill her. This is what an honour killing is.

The inconvenient truth is that violence is seen as a solution. Another inconvenient truth is that it is a central doctrine of Islam that the life of an infidel is not worth much and can be taken in the cause of protecting Islam.

The doctors behind the attacks in Great Britain did not twist Islam, rather they followed a long standing, mainstream interpretation of Islam as demonstrated by Mohammed himself.

So why did McKenzie basically lie about the situation? Because many find it difficult to comprehend such casual violence and are simply in denial.

I don’t like the term Western civilization. It presupposes a false dichotomy between West and East. In essence there is simply civilization. As I have said before I make reference to the field of political anthropology (Johnson and Earle) and the rather clear evidence that there is a spectrum of development from primate bands, to various tribal configurations, to early states and finally to the creation of a global civilization. It is an historical arc that has its ups and downs but that also has an historical inevitability about it.

Civilization does not belong to any one ethnic or cultural configuration, instead it is the accumulation of discovery and novelty from every corner of the planet. The analogy is the national dish of Italy, pasta. Noodles were invented in China and brought to Italy by Marco Polo and tomatoes are indigenous to South America. The English enjoy tea from China and the French enjoy coffee, indigenous to North Africa and introduced to Europe via Arabia (and thence exported to South America). These are trivial examples but they reveal the reality of ‘Western’ civilization, which is that it is not necessarily Western at all.

The word Western is based on a false geographical line. It dates from the time of the Holy Roman empire, when Catholicism was based in Rome. The old Eastern Roman empire had become predominantly Eastern Orthodox and the line is an abstract separation between Rome and Constantinople, despite the fact that under this system Christianity becomes an ‘Middle Eastern’ religion.

Tribal cultures develop into states whenever and wherever the conditions are right. I don’t need to explain the history in detail, it’s relatively non-controversial. The oldest civilizations are reckoned to be Egypt and Sumeria (and possibly Mohenjo-Daro and China). ‘Western’ civilzation still uses the Sumerian duodecimal system to reckon time and measure geographical distance (360 degrees divided into 60 minutes and 60 seconds). Western astrology is really Sumerian astrology.

Of course Ancient Greece has had a big impact on ‘Western’ civilization, but the Greeks were primarily focused on Persia and India to the East. When Alexander initiated his conquests he went East, not West. Indeed, scratch the surface deeper and you find linguistic links between Sanskrit and many European languages, hence the term Indo-European.

The indigenous culture of the West, the culture of the Vikings, Celts, Gauls and Druids has been largely lost, replaced by the Eastern Greco-Roman and Christian cultures.

Much is made of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as defining moments in the creation of ‘Western’ civilization, but as we all know these periods simply marked the rediscovery of Classical Eastern culture. Nor was it the Europeans that kept the flame of Eastern civilization alive. It was Islam. When the Christians had gained control of the Western Roman empire they attempted to extinguish the flame of Eastern civilzation. Emperor Justinian closed the philosophical schools and the Christians went on an orgy of book burning and violence to suppress all heretical and ‘pagan’ beliefs. The Classical tradition reappeared in the Christian world after European travellers encountered Arabic translations of Greek works, particularly in Islamic Spain.

There really is no ‘Western’ civilization, so why use the term? As far as I’m concerned it’s used by the intellectually lazy and those with a political agenda, particularly a leftist, anti-imperialist agenda. One of the false impressions the post-colonial critique gives, particularly in the hands of those who see themselves as victims of ‘Western’ colonialism, is that imperialism and colonialism is the fault of ‘white’ Europeans. It isn’t. Imperialism and colonialism occurs as a result of state expansion. The history of China is the history of such expansion with several emperors attempting to gain control of regional competitors, first within China and then in neighbouring cultures. If you travel throughout Asia, through Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc, to Korea and Japan you easily see the influence of Chinese culture on the region, in architecture, in astrology, in clothing. Japan essentially borrowed Chinese culture almost in total.

Indian culture expanded into Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and down to Indonesia. The island of Bali is the last remaining Hindu culture in the region, the invading Muslim culture almost wiped out the Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms of SE Asia.

The reasons why cultures rise and fall are complex, sometimes they collapse due to internal pressures, at other times they are defeated by superior military strength. South America may very well have been conquered by Muslims. Colombus ‘discovered’ the Americas in 1492, the same year his Queen, Isabella finally expelled the Muslims from their last stronghold, Granada. Columbus would not have been able to travel to the Americas without the advances made in navigation by Muslims. Would the Muslims have been less violent ‘Conquistadors’ than the Christians? Maybe, but they would still have brought the same European diseases and insisted on conversion to Islam. Why didn’t Muslims travel further west? We don’t know. Perhaps they thought there was nothing to be found. They had the capacity, they had been going on trade and slave capturing missions as far north as Ireland and Iceland (and entire Irish town was captured as slaves) and Islam had expanded east into India.

There are many accidents in history, Australia was a month away from becoming a French colony (or maybe not, La Perouse, who landed in Botany Bay just after Captain Cook, wasn’t very impressed).

There is another resaon for the success of civilizations and that is adaptability and openess. Closed cultures tend to decline. There was a point in history when Islam decided to close its doors to innovation. Rather than be ‘conquered’ by Europeans they actually surrendered through neglect. The clerics became fearful of change and instead of continuing the process of scientific innovation they handed the ball to Christian Europe (Islamic Spain was around two hundred years ahead of Northern Europe in medicine). The Ottoman Empire turned its back on many European innovations (except weaponry).

The point is that there was historical momentum to global expansion. It was never a question of ‘if’ America, Africa and Australia would be colonized but ‘when’ and by whom. The critics of the European slave trade ignore the fact that Arabs had colonized North Africa well before the Europeans and one of their main exports was slaves to serve the Muslim elites. The history of the Muslim slave trade is a neglected area of study, after all, the Europeans learnt the trade from the Arabs (and slavery still exists in parts of Islamic North Africa and the Janjaweed are simply doing what they have been doing for centuries, harvesting the black and infidel tribes of Sudan). If the Muslims had conquered South America they would have enslaved the indigenous tribes and imported African slaves – the entire Islamic economy was based on slavery and conquest.

It really was an accident of history that the Northern Europeans became the great global colonizers and there is no evidence to suggest they were worse or better than any other expansionist power.

The downside of any imperialist expansion is that the elites of the conquering power benefit and become wealthy at the expense of the conquered. In South America the elites of Meso-American empires benefitted from the enslavement of local tribes. The Spanish elites simply replaced the Aztec elites, at least the Spanish didn’t require human sacrifice.

The problem isn’t that ‘Western’ elites benefit, but that elites in general benefit. It’s simply racist to claim that there is a ‘Western’ imperialism and that ‘European’ culture has been more oppressive than any other culture in an expansionist phase.

There is also a considerable deal of hypocrisy on the part of non-European cultures who say they are trying to defend their ‘traditions’. The major ‘Western’ cities are actually the most culturally diverse places in the world. My own city of Melbourne has every culture represented in the faces on the street (the latest are Sudanese and Somalian, and Indian immigration has increased rapidly – according to the latest census Hinduism is the fastest growing religion). There are around 200 languages spoken in Australia. So whilst the West is opening itself to considerable change through immigration some other cultures are shouting to be able to keep their cultural purity, whilst accusing the ‘West’ of racism. Here’s the deal – cultures accorded special victim status can resist change and keep the ‘other’ out, but the West has to accept open immigration and the change it brings. Apparently European cultural preservationists are racist but non-European preservationists are only demanding their rights.

And this is the final point, not only is ‘Western’ civilization not really ‘Western’, it is constantly changing and as it receives more immigrants it becomes more global in outlook. Australia used to be a mainly English culture. That is fast receeding and Australia is becoming a cultural melting pot that is looking increasingly to Asia.

I should add that the next twenty years may very well see a shift in power and wealth from the traditional ‘Western’ powers to Asia. Is there any evidence that Asian capitalism and imperialism is any better than European and American capitalism and imperialism? Are Asian corporations any better than American? What if Japan had actually won the war in the Pacific? It may not seem relevant to the non-Australians out there but Australia faced the very real possibility of being invaded and conquered by Japan, and we all know how vicious Japanese imperialism was (just ask the Chinese and Koreans).