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Originally Posted by roachboy
that's because you haven't done any reasearch, ustwo, and so havent the faintest idea what you are talking about. unless you think that all arabs are basically the same, that all muslims are arabs, and that knowing factoids about **some** aspects of the situation in saudi arabia means that you know everything you need to in order to write authoritative sounding sentences. (it's hard to write while listening to morton subotnik's music, btw--in case you were wondering what it would be like)
researchers working in france and north africa have shown that the vast majority of "fundamentalist" variants of islam--the small, socially marginal groups that you refer to when you think you are talking about islam in general---the folk who identify share certain features:
they tend to be poor to very poor
they come from socially and culturally marginal areas
they are the main are quite young (under 30).
now you *could* make the argument that, in this case, judging from much of the work on these areas, that poverty in itself is not enough to explain these groups--you have to factor in the other two.
well those....and you need to add:
the complex politics of the major organizations that run the various muslim communities within each nation-state;
the characteristics of state power;
the history of relations between these states and the major administrative entities that comprise the muslim community
for example
....and matters of geography--physical, economic, social, cultural, religious....
to the factors of poverty and sense of marginalization (which may or may not be directly linked to poverty) and the sense of foreclosure of possibilities experienced by younger generations within the more marginalized areas.
then you might be able to model these groups
but if you wanted to extend the modelling, you'd have to gather parallel types of information for each new area you tried to include. that is because local histories matter, ustwo--and muslims have them--and they are every bit as complex and meaningful to the folk who live within them, who make them, as yours is to you.
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imagine we would meet over here...and amidst someone smelling like a marxist to boot!
but I digress, the thing I want to comment on is this notion of dispute you (and abaya) are having with ustwo. I have to preface with the statement that I filter from the same general schools of thought you two often pull from. According to the most current literature from my wing (Crim & socio-legal scholars), ustwo comes close to being accurate. But I don't know how he conceptualizes his points. That is to say, the evidence seems to support the contention that terrorists are coming from the "solid middle class". But that doesn't really tap into the full realm of anxiety and decentering and a full range of other complex issues many of our population are dealing with: oh say, lots of previously working people in Detroit or in a mill town
in anyVille, USA. Or even lotsa people running around over "there" shooting "them" if you wanted a more parallel analogy.
That said, the numbers of the 'kinds' of people ramming large aircraft into symbolic skyscrapers (actually if you had outlined what the symbolism meant to the respective populations you might have not fallen into what I think is a semantic argument with ustwo) is very, very, very small in relation to the people you and abaya seem to be referencing lately--the impoverished, downtrodden, marginalized, & etc. And infintismal (?) in relation to the general muslim population. but you seem to have done what you carefully tried to avoid and alert others from doing--collapsing various groups along distinct class lines into a homogenous group.
Shit, it's getting late (early, wth) and I'm supposed to be doing something entirely different so this is coming out rapid shot and not at all the tone I wanted to add to your and abayas insightful comments (among a couple other people I found myself nodding along with, but can't quite remember how to spell their names)
But I mean to say that the people we are reading about, the fire, gun, and sign slingers are a different group than the bomb slingers. you and I and abaya, I am almost positive, would agree that the bomb slingers are not filling the mosques. No, their members are of the sign, rock, fire, gun toting variety. Many of the people depicted in some pictures in this very thread would have trouble skinning a live rabbit much less hacking a human head off its stalk. And it's not too difficult to start to draw some lines between the youthful, angry, distraught faces in the mosques and their parents--those men (and it's almost always men, isn't it so far?) who very infrequently blow themselves up as their last act of powerless(ness).
I guess I just wanted to remind you that ustwo sees all of these characters as a one large mass. The youthful protesters, as they move into terrorists, and all coming from this large cauldron of muslimicity. So I think he tries to make these vertical connections between the muslimness of it all, the civil unrest, and the tangible things he feels might actually kill him or his way of life if left unaddressed. Meanwhile his politics don't allow him from analyzing the horizontal connections between structures in our society as impediments to theirs and its consequence on what he sees as a 'solid' middle class. You know, maybe in another time and place, you might have even questioned that particular premise of his: that there is anything approaching a "solid" middle class. For it seems likely that if one were to talk about the evisceration of such a strata then one might go a long way towards addressing terrorism. And by addressing I mean thinking and discoursing about it in a copmlex manner. and then maybe the who's we are discussing wouldn't congeal while the what's they are doing wouldn't collapse into some anti-american, anti-freedom, anti-US kind of understandings that become so difficult to disabuse in an internet forum medium.
but hot damn it was a pleasure to read your comments out here in general and I'm glad I decided to tighten my seatbelt and delve on into this thread after all because I had no idea what I was going to slap into and especially after I read the first page or two of responses.