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Ok, so I’ve had some more time to digest this and come to a conclusion that there is some fascinating truth buried under all the bullshit.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great book titled Outliers. In it’s chapter ‘Rice Paddies and Math Tests’ he discussed the outcome geography on a personal attitude and cultural values. One particular point of interest was his look the feuding families living in Appalachian region of the US in the nineteenth century. He proposed that their cultural background and settlement location influenced their violent behavior.
The theory is that farming cultures force people to co-operate and theft of personal livelihood is unlikely - they would need to harvest the crops. This leads to a culture where anger must be suppressed and conflict has time to be defused. Herding cultures on the other hand force the shepherds to develop aggressive mindset due to their livelihood being on the line with the loss of every animal. Farmers have strength in numbers; herders must be tough individually.
This leads me back to Sennels’ observation on young Muslim development in aggression, self-confidence, individual responsibility and identity. To me his Dutch vs Muslim observations are strongly parallel of Gladwell’s farmer vs herder comparisons.
The issue of course is that not all Muslim’s come from herding cultures. Many herding societies adopt other religions the Irish, the American Appalachians, the central European countries to name of a few. Further many Muslim societies develop in farming regions and Islam is widely responsible for the development and retention of farming knowledge in the Middle Ages. I’ve always believed the religion bends to social norms.
So perhaps the greatest lesson from this article is that if governments wish to rehabilitate immigrants from aggressive societies they should use religion to their advantage and encourage the mingling of Muslims from herding and farming cultures to help integration into western society.
- Mantus
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