Tribal Middle East

Stanley Kurtz of the EPPC has a lengthy essay review of Philip Carl Salzman’s Culture and Conflict in the Middle East (Humanity Press) in the April 14 issue of The Weekly Standard . The book comes with the endorsement of Daniel Pipes, who calls it “one of the handful of most important books I’ve read during nearly four decades of studying the Middle East” – which is high praise indeed. Kurtz calls the book “a major event: the most penetrating, reliable, systematic, and theoretically sophisticated effort yet made to understand the Islamic challenge the United States is facing in cultural terms.”

I won’t even try to sum up Kurtz’s review; tolle lege , as they say. Only a few brief notes: Kurtz traces the conflicts in the middle east to the persistence of a stateless, semi-anarchic tribal system; he says that the West has overlooked this partly because “tribe” has become a cuss word in the academy (especially since Said’s politically-interested Orientalism ); he summarizes Salzman’s field work among the “nomads of Iranian Baluchistan,” and notes that tribal loyalties, values, and conflicts persist even in cities and towns; he elicits a cheer, perhaps even 1.25, for the modern nation state.

Kurtz’s piece should be read alongside Jody Bottum’s superb Girardian analysis of militant Islam in First Things a couple of years ago.