Western and Muslim concepts of honor create an unbridgeable cultural divide

By Aussiegirl

If we are to prevail in this war with fanatical and terrorist Islam, it is extremely important that we understand our enemy thoroughly, from his perspective, not from ours. It is futile to attempt to understand "root causes", a concept that even President Bush has subscribed to in the past, if we see those "root causes" through the prism of our own culture and understanding of human nature and values. In this sense, the oh-so-tolerant West, with its notion of cultural relativity and tolerance, completely misses the mark when it comes to comprehending what we are up against. In order to fully understand what we are dealing with we need to take the world view of the Muslim, and see the conflict from his point of view, not from our own. Unfortunately, this level of cultural relativity has not penetrated the prevailing mindset, which holds that not only are all men created equal, they all think the same, feel the same and see the world the same. Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to East meeting West.

The last time the liberal West encountered this form of shame and honor culture was in WWII, when Americans faced the Japanese, to whom the concept of "face" was more important than life itself. It is why there were such huge casualties when we invaded the Pacific Islands and places like Iwo Jima, when wave after suicidal wave of Japanese kept coming, long after it made any strategic or tactical sense. It was better to die an honorable death, than to live a dishonorable life.

Similarly, Islamic culture is based on honor and shame, particularly when it concerns their women. Western societies in previous centuries lived by this honor code as witnessed by the numbers of duels fought over a lady's reputation or a perceived slight to her honor. Pushkin famously lost his life in a duel when he felt compelled to defend the honor of his flirtatious and foolish wife. Eventually, duels were outlawed in Western nations, although secret duels continued to be fought on many occasions.

Our own societies have moved beyond the culture of honor and shame and become societies based on the rule of law. Our disputes are settled in courts, not in blood feuds or acts of personal revenge -- unlike the Muslim culture, which approves of and even requires the avenging of a slight to honor or an insult to family or tribe. The West has been fighting this concept since as early as the days of Shakespeare -- indeed that is a great part of what Hamlet is about. Will he take the route of "honor", and avenge the murder of his father, or, will he take the more reasonable and intellectual route that his conscience dictates? His entire conflict can be summed up in the fact that Hamlet appears to be a more modern man than the age in which he finds himself, a man who has seen beyond the reflexive notions of honor and avenging death in a personal act of murder and retribution. He instead wrestles with his conscience and tries to arrive at a logical conclusion, while everyone around him acts without a second thought to carry out the sentence required by the code of honor -- as evidenced by Laertes, who without hesitation, undertook to avenge the deaths of Ophelia and Polonius. Falstaff himself (and here we can perhaps hear Shakespeare's opinion on the matter) derides honor as a mere "word" -- a concept which can as easily be ignored as being irrelevant to a full stomach . In another Shakespeare play, "Romeo and Juliet", Shakespeare again seems to be arguing against the ancient concepts of blood feuds, as the two families gather over the dead bodies of their respective children, and lament the catastrophe that misplaced defense of honor has wrought. Indeed, where would operas be without the concepts of an honor syste? The plot lines are replete with tenors filled with vengeance at the perceived infidelity of their beloveds, and the fighting of duels, etc. But obviously Western culture has moved beyond this kind of society, to one based on the rule of law.

In addition to honor and shame, and concomitant with it, comes the Muslim sense of manhood or manliness, which involves being capable of great violence and mayhem in defense of the family name or his religion. Our own concepts of tolerance seem hopelessly weak and pathetic to a culture such as this, and in no way makes us palatable to the Muslim male, who sees only weakness -- probably the weakness of a woman in our attempts to be compassionate and tolerant. So much for winning hearts and minds!

By extension, even the concepts of victory and defeat are turned on their heads. And what our generals portray as great victories, are seen by the Muslim as defeats. And what we see as defeats of the enemy, the Muslim sees as victory. Thus, Saddam Hussein was able to portray himself as a victor in the first Gulf War, merely because he survived. He took what the greatest military power on earth could mete out, and he emerged not only still standing, but still in power. Similarly, the Taliban did not feel defeated in Afghanistan, they merely staged a tatical retreat, knowing that when the time was right they could gain their victory by repeated sneak attacks and terrrorist raids and bombings. They do not see victory in terms of body counts, or territory gained or held, but merely in the fact that they know they will never give up and will keep harrassing and attacking and inflicting shame and casualties on the Great Satan.

In Iraq, Zarqawi and by extension Bin Laden feel that they have been victorious. They have succeeded in bogging down the American military, harrassing them, inflicting casualties and showing that they can take a licking and keep on ticking.

Our entire concepts of victory, defeat, honor and shame must be understood in this proper context, or we will never be able to conquer this mentality.

In addition, it would be prudent to note that gangs operate on this level as well, which is perhaps why Islam and gang and prison culture are finding themselves to be quite at home with one another. This is a disturbing trend as Islamic preachers find ready converts in the gang-ridden, criminal underclasses that populate our prisons. These criminal and gang subcultures, with their heavy emphasis on machismo and masculine concepts of honor and vengeance, find a comfortable fit with the tenets of Islam, in a way that perhaps the more peaceful and tolerant expressions of Christianity do not. Indeed, perhaps one reason we find to our consternation that Islam is making big inroads in converting large numbers of Hispanics is the Latino culture of machismo, which also finds much in common with the Islamic sense of maleness and virile domination and defense of family and clan.

We would be wise to take into account these cultural characteristics, and not make the mistake that the compassionate liberal makes -- which is that given enough understanding and tolerance, the other fellow will see your point of view, and come in the end, to be as tolerant as you. In a sense, this is the illogic of tolerance, it assumes that tolerance is the logical endpoint of all understanding and culture. It is not. And this hubris of liberal tolerance -- that in the end the ultimate expression of human understanding and development is to be tolerant of all points of view -- will be its ultimate downfall.

MORE THAN MERELY A WORDMore than merely a word

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com We're learning the hard way that the secular liberalizing forces that shape values in the West give us no protection from Islamist terror. The pride we take in our tolerance, our determination to fight fair, to look for the "root causes" of poverty, ignorance and oppression to explain the anger of the likes of Zacarious Moussaoui and the evil of Sept. 11 put us at peril. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists grew up in middle-class comfort and knew neither poverty nor oppression.

Moussaoui, nurtured in the Islamic culture, became virulently and violently anti-American, contemptuous of the "soft" psychological and sociological interpretations Americans make of the Islamist enemy. He was even contemptuous of the two jurors who took into account his unhappy childhood, his father's hot temper and his hostile relationship with his mother as mitigating causes of his viciousness, and spared his life.

So what could honor have to do with it? For the Islamic terrorist, a lot. In a remarkable book tracing the significance of the concept of honor, James Bowman warns that to understand the jihadists it's essential to understand their definition of "honor" and "manhood." Honor, as they define it, is even more important than the dogma of their dogmatic religion. "It is natural enough in a culture like ours, informed by the psychotherapeutic revolution, to think even of geopolitics in terms of psychology and emotions," he writes in "Honor: A History." "But these are irrelevant in an honor culture." He cites Osama bin Laden to make his point.

"We believe that we are men, Muslim men who have the honor of defending Mecca," bin Laden told an al-Jazeera TV interviewer in 1998, sneering at "the weakness, feebleness and cowardliness of the U.S. soldier" when the Clinton administration withdrew from Somalia. Bin Laden has particular contempt for the "toughness" of the Americans who send women to war against men: "By G-d, Muslim women refuse to be defended by these American and Jewish prostitutes."

The tactics of the American interrogators who forced prisoners to wear women's panties as a humiliation tactic to break down their resistance offends Western sensibilities, but as an interrogation tactic the American interrogators understood the Islamist codes of honor. Offensive or not, it often worked.

President Bush was harshly criticized at home for offending "the Arab street" with the use of the word "crusade" to describe the mission in Iraq, but it did not occur to his critics that the use of female soldiers was far more offensive to the Arab culture and code of honor. Israeli women who fought against Arab armies in the war for Israeli independence in 1948, for example, suffered extraordinary casualties because the Arabs were determined not to lose to women.

Nothing feeds the rage of Islamic men more; they regard fighting women as a direct violation of their honor culture. Saddam Hussein understood that well and made specific allusions to honor in his speeches to the Iraqis before the invasion by the West, reminding them to "remember all the meaning of what makes a man at times like these, in which they preserve for their children and progeny a record of honor."

The "honor killings" by Muslim men of adulterous wives and liberated daughters in Europe, who replace the chador with blue jeans, is regarded in the West as evil divorced from any semblance of honor. But such killings nevertheless testify to the brutal rigidity of the Islamic code of honor, which is fundamentally an appeal to the natural modesty of women. Such ideas are not found in the Koran, where the killing of innocents is forbidden, but are rooted in a pre-Islamic culture that demanded the killing of women who "shamed" their men. Only later were these ideas codified in dogmatic Islam.

In the Arab world, David Pryce-Jones writes in National Review, such ideas of honor are the "social glue" that holds the society together. A high-profile public shame, like the Asian obsession with "saving face," must be maintained at any price. "Shame sears the soul and has to be wiped out and avenged in a public way that all can witness and appreciate ... That is the wellspring of the fanaticism we are witnessing."

Shakespeare's Falstaff famously said that honor was merely a "word." Perhaps, but it's a word with many meanings. If we want to succeed in our mission to the Middle East, we had better get on with understanding all those meanings.