Hello Robin,
Saturday, June 28, 2003, 7:54:35 AM, you wrote:
RT> A lot of them are very well-educated (and I'm not talking about RT> all that training they got in Pakistan thanks to the CIA). The RT> word "taliban" derives from "talep", meaning "student".
Very interesting. We probably get a rather distorted view in the US, as you can see from the comments. Being much closer, you probably know a lot more than we do. What is the 'glue' that holds this group together - why do they exist?
It's largely to do with the fact that in Islamic countries, protest is inherently conservative, in that it appeals to a nostalgic utopianism based on what an Islamic society is supposed to be like. Western societies associate protest with the adoption of new ideas (allusions to Greek democracy notwithstanding), but in the Islamic world, protest is a matter of eliminating degenerate rulers and returning to the source (remember that Osama bin Laden's original grudge was against the Saudi monarchy, not America). The original Islamic order was a kind of social democracy presided over by a divinely-inspired leader - first Mohammed, then his successors ("Caliph" means "successor, and the famous Sunni-Shia schism was over who was the true successor of Mohammed - probably pointless, since Mohammed never named a successor and probably didn't intend for there to be one). As the Koran says: "First obey God, then the Prophet, then the Shura", a shura being a sort of quasi-democratic tribal council. Of course the fantasy of "pure Islam" touted by current fundamentalists rarely bears any relation to what the first Muslims actually practised at Medina, especially with regard to sexual politics - by the standards of his time (or indeed any time up to the twentieth century) Mohammed was a feminist.
The second strand is the Islamic veneration of learning. Mohammed is reported as saying "Seek knowledge, even if you have to go as far as China", and the Koran is full of exhortations to observe the natural world. Even the notorious Muslim aversion to alcohol is based in part on the idea that it destroys the capacity for rational thought. The Arabic (and Turkish) word "hoja" means both "teacher" and "cleric". When I moved to Turkey, my social status rose astronomically, partly because I'm a European (Turks are incredibly Europhile) but mainly because even in secular Turkey, the old respect for teachers is very strong. Look at almost any nutty fundamentalist group and you'll see some intellectual or cleric pulling the strings, usually a sweet-looking old man with glasses and a long white beard.
I was being whimsical, but really, it's a different world. Even if they had the necessary fluency in English (and a lot of them do), Linux is another language! I once recommended a colleague with email problems to see the computer centre's sysadmin. He asked me if she spoke English, and I replied "I don't know - she speaks Unix." It's not just the technical language - there are whole new rules of discourse here.
RT> They're probably not up to following this list, though.
That's odd, if they're educated. Why is that?
Best wishes,
Robin
-- "Some guy breaking into a government computer system and wreaking havoc makes for a more interesting movie plot than some guy writing device drivers. It's hard to work in a good 10-minutes car chase scene with some guy who writes device drivers..." - tjc, post to LWN
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Univeritesi Ankara 06533 Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
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