Another cool old post still getting comments. Most people don’t know this about the Arab and Islamic World, and that’s why idiots keep screwing up. Remember how the (((neoconservatives))) under Paul Bremer dismantled Ba’ath socialism and tried to install US-style neoliberalism or laissez-faire capitalism? Remember how it didn’t work?
These neocon morons didn’t understand one damned thing about Arab and Muslim culture. Odd because they had spent so much time studying it. Instead they were so enamored of getting rid of Saddam Hussein to eliminate an enemy of Israel that they simply brainwashed themselves into believing that a lot of things that they wanted to be true were in fact true.
This is a terrible flaw of human beings. Just because you want it to be true doesn’t mean it is true, dammit! This mindset of people causes untold damage and even deaths all over the world every single year. If you can get rid of this idea in your personal politics, your politics will make a lot more sense. And I think in a lot of other areas of your life, thinking this way can cause quite a few problems. Can you imagine running a business on the basis of “If I want it to be true, it is true”? I can’t think of a worse way to run a business than via delusion.
Semi-feudalism was eliminated in the (Arab) Muslim world at least 60-70 years ago; granted, it existed prior.
It was fairly easy to take out semi-feudalism in the Arab World because it is very hard to justify such a system under Islam. The semi-feudalists had used distorted readings of the Koran to justify their oppression. For instance, the fact that Mohammad said that some are rich and some are poor and that this is a normal thing was given as an excuse for semi-feudalism.
Most Muslims knew intuitively that this excuse didn’t fly well in an Islamic sense, so the new Arab nationalist (mostly socialist) regimes found it easy to dismantle semi-feudalism.
I know that Palestine was semi-feudal in the 1930’s, and Iraq and Egypt were in the 1940’s. Massive land reforms in 1950’s Egypt and Iraq took out semi-feudalism. But it lingered elsewhere. In the early 60’s, your average peasant in Yemen had a picture of Nasser on his wall. Nasser was seen as a great hero of the Arab working and peasant classes.
When the Arab nationalist and socialist Ba’ath Party came into power in Syria and Iraq, one of the first things they did was a land reform. It was easy to do as the semi-feudal system was hard to justify Islamically, and a more equitable or socialist economics was very easy to sell in an Islamic sense.
This is because if you read the Koran, you can see the Mohammad, for all his flaws, was basically a socialist. This is why even hardline Islamist organizations like Hamas are virtually socialist. When the PLO ran Gaza, Hamas ran the social services that should have been but were not run by the state. Now that Hamas is in power, they have a huge social safety net.
Semi-feudalism will be seen as very un-Islamic nowadays, except in the case of Pakistan, where a huge substrate of Indian and Hindu culture virtually neuters whatever socialist advantages Islam may bring.
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