#scruton

Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge; and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.

Sir Roger Scruton, I Drink Therefore I Am

“The Turkish term millet (which now has the meaning of "nation") derives from Arabic millah, meaning a creed community or sect. The Ottoman Empire included Christians and Muslims of almost every obedience, together with Jews, Druze, and Alawites (the latter two being sects that grew out of Islam but ought now to be regarded as indigenous forms of post-Islamic religion). Each subject of the Ottoman Empire belonged to, or was allocated to, a millet, defined primarily by religious custom and confession. The millets (milletler in Turkish) were represented separately before the Sultan's throne, and rivalry between them was settled by adjudication from the Sublime Porte—in that sense there was an overarching territorial jurisdiction. However, the authority of this jurisdiction depended upon the dominant millet of Sunni Muslims and on the shari’ a as interpreted by the Mufti. When, during the nineteenth century, the Ottoman authorities attempted to modernize the law, as an instrument for administering the entire territory of the Empire, the resulting code—the Majalla, as it is known—was explicitly derived from the shari’ a: the first attempt, indeed, to codify Islamic law. The Majalla was preserved under the British protectorate of Palestine, and incorporated after independence by the State of Israel: a tribute to Islam that is not often remarked upon.

The Ottoman Empire was a territorial jurisdiction only in the sense that the dominant creed community asserted its overarching control over all local administration. In all matters relating to religious custom, marriage, family, and inheritance the millets were sovereign, and they dealt with conflicts by a system of appeals to the office of their respective religious leader—the Greek Catholic Patriarch in Antioch, for example, or the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Constantinople. The ones who suffered most from the Sunni ascendancy were not the Christian minorities (although the Armenians were to pay a bitter price when the Empire finally began to disintegrate), but the Muslim sects judged to be heretical and therefore deprived of a religious leader and communal identity of their own—the Shi'ites being the principal example.

As the Empire declined, the rights and privileges of the millets were continually set aside by a central power that welcomed sectarian conflict as the best guarantee of its own survival. Increasingly, therefore, sectarian loyalties came to prevail over obedience to the Porte, and when, in the wake of the First World War, obedience was cancelled, the subjects of the Empire found themselves with no other lord than that which religious custom or tribal affiliation had bestowed on them. At the same time the Western powers— France and Britain in particular—were staking out their rival imperial claims in the region and dividing up the Ottoman territory into countries that had little or no identity beyond that required by administrative convenience and geopolitical strategy. Even where regions had achieved a kind of autonomy under Ottoman sovereignty—notably Lebanon and Egypt—the claims of history and local loyalty were largely set aside in the interests of imperial gain.

It is easy to blame the subsequent instability of the Middle East on the ambitions of the Western powers. However, it is important to bear in mind that, in a region of creed communities, none of which enjoyed a territory of its own, there was no alternative to empire. Without some kind of territorial jurisdiction imposed from outside, the communities themselves would have been bereft of all methods, other than war, of resolving the disputes between them. The Sykes-Picot accords, agreed between two adventurous diplomats charged with securing a postwar settlement for the region, therefore divided the Ottoman territories into geographical states, and endeavored to attach to each of them a sovereign who would command the common loyalty of the communities who resided there, and a legal system that would underpin the institutions required by political "progress."

These legal systems, derived as a rule by importing ready-made codes from the West, were intended to further the development of the territories as "nation-states," governed according to constitutional principles familiar from the European rule of law. Although they frequently paid lip service to the shari’ a, these codes harmonized badly with the indigenous legal traditions, and required knowledge and expertise that were not locally available. Hence the temporary imperial administrations under puppet sovereigns (some of whom had no previous territorial connection with the countries over which they nominally ruled) did not make way for genuine political government, still less for democracy in the Western mold, even in those countries— such as Egypt—where there was considerable indigenous support for Constitutionalism, and established interests wedded to the idea of a secular state. For the most part the regimes installed by the European powers crumbled before feudal despotism, hereditary monarchy, or the peculiar combination of gangster terrorism and Leninist one-party rule imposed through the Ba'th party by Hafiz el-Asad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And in place of Western ideas of secular government came the kind of raging ideological politics, influenced equally by Marxism and Islamic millenarianism, that finally gained absolute power with the Islamic Revolution of Khomeini in Iran.

The most telling exception was Lebanon, which had retained a kind of independence since classical times. Thanks to its mountainous hinterlands, Lebanon had been able to protect itself from enemies (including the Sultan), and to survive as a semi-autonomous emirate, offering refuge to the more adventurous tribes of Asia Minor and the Fertile Crescent. And thanks to its Mediterranean harbors, Lebanon had enjoyed a freedom and respect for law that are the natural concomitants of maritime trade. Its Christian (largely Maronite) community (probably a majority at the time when Lebanon became a French protectorate) had evolved a territorial claim, a European sense of secular jurisdiction, and a commitment to freedom of conscience made necessary by its many sects.

Bordered by a despotic Syria, occupied by armed refugees from Palestine, invaded by the Israeli and Syrian armies, and beset by a rebellious and growing Shi'ite underclass and an Iranian-backed Shi'ite militia intent on bringing chaos to the countryside, Lebanon was doomed to destruction. Nevertheless, its model constitution and laws, its "national pact" (which distributed the offices of state according to the confessions), and its democratic procedures under a French-style presidency so distinguished it, during its years of relative peace, from every other Arab state as to bear witness to the real and deep difference between a Christian and a Muslim political culture. Territorial jurisdiction takes natural root in the first, but not in the second, and the one remaining example of a Muslim country in which secular jurisdiction and democratic procedures survive—Turkey itself—is notable for the fact that religion is expressly banished from the law, from the offices of state, and from the public life of the country, and that the edict of banishment must be constantly remade by a vigilant and secularized army.

With hindsight it is difficult to see the destruction of the Ottoman Empire as anything other than a disaster—a disaster whose consequences threaten to match those of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Hitler. So it is described by David Fromkin, for example. The tragic history of the post-World War I settlement, however, is less relevant to today's world than the enduring failure of the Middle Eastern states to acquire territorial legitimacy. In this they contrast starkly with the successor states of the Austrian Empire, where nationalist aspirations had preceded the breakup of the Empire by a century or more, and where loyalties were already shaping themselves in the nineteenth century according to territorial rather than religious or tribal ideals.

(…)

It is true that there has been a concerted attempt, beginning with the Ottoman reforms of the nineteenth century, to introduce ideas of national rather than religious unity into the Middle East. The philosophy of "Arab nationalism" was designed to facilitate modern forms of government, with the territorially defined nation (qawm) replacing the Islamic umma as the focus of loyalty. The Arab nation was invented in order to provide a pre-political order suitable to the emerging sovereign states, and "arabism" (‘uruba) became a nationalist ideology designed to repair the religious and sectarian divisions among the Arabic-speaking peoples. It is perhaps significant that Michel Aflaq, the most influential modern proponent of Arab nationalism and co-founder of the Ba'th Party, was not originally a Muslim but a Paris-educated Syrian of Greek Orthodox extraction, who used nationalist rhetoric in order to uphold the claims of a "Greater Syria" against Lebanon and Israel." When Aflaq, in later life, converted to Islam, it was because he saw this as the logical consequence of his Arabist ideology, rather than the other way around.

In fact the whole idea of Arab nationalism verges on contradiction, being an attempt to shape a local, territorial loyalty from a language that had been spread around the Mediterranean on the wings of a militant religion, and to conscript the religious loyalty that echoes in that most enchanted of languages to a secular cause with which it is profoundly incompatible. The Egyptian case is instructive. The quasi-autonomous Egyptian khedivate under Mehmet Ali and his successors began the Europeanizing process that severed the country from the rest of the Ottoman Empire. British occupation excited local resistance, the most effective and committed of which was that of the Muslim Brotherhood. This was founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, initially as a religious charity offering support and comfort to the migrants who were crowding into the cities, but soon developing into a terrorist movement aimed at ridding Egypt of alien powers. Resistance to the foreigner, in other words, came into being as a jihad on behalf of Islam. When Nasser came to power in 1952 by a coup d'état staged by fellow army officers, so ousting the British client King Faruq, he wished to gain legitimacy for a secular government, and therefore preached the Arab nationalist cause. But he found himself in immediate conflict with the real pre-political loyalty of the Muslim majority. The Copts of Egypt, like the Maronites and Melkites of Lebanon, saw the benefits of a secular state and Western systems of law: such is the normal Christian response. Many of the Muslims did not.

Nasser moved quickly to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, by means almost as brutal as those which President Hafiz el-Asad was later to use in Syria. Having taken a step in this Arab nationalist direction, Nasser found himself compelled by the logic of the case to declare a short-lived "United Arab Republic" of Egypt and Syria. If the Arabs really are a unified people, then they deserve and require a unified state. The immediate collapse of the UAR, however, made it clear that there was little more to Arab political unity than a shared antipathy to Israel. The real unity remains today what it was in the time of Muhammad: the unity of a creed community with a common language sanctified by a holy text. And the centuries of fragmentation into rival sects and tribes have ensured that this unity—the only unity that the people really believe in—is also an unrealizable fiction whose political enactment entails bloodshed, tyranny, and war.

csak mert olvastam, mi is akar lenni ez a legújabb jobboldali placc (gondolom azoknak, akiknek az R56 söröző nem elég sikk, bár közpénzből az is legalább ugyanannyit felemésztett)

de szóval a “fejlődés helye” a szimbólumok nyelvén: - eleve a félig üres könyvespolcok, azok is mivel töltve; - lexikonok (ki használ még ilyet, hacsak nem kifejezetten dekorálásra, de azt hiszem, ez a kirakatérték is magáért beszél) - használt, tankönyvforma olvasmányok, amelyek egy szegényes iskolakönyvtár benyomását keltik - a patinásnak szánt, valójában ócskának és koszosnak tűnő szőnyeg az egészen gusztustalan (mű?)márvány borításon - és minderre az ikeabútorok teljes eklektikája, a rosszabbik fajtából - lezseren elegáns, gyűrött ingű, sportcipős, MAGYARÁZÓ férfi - egyházi személy - csinos, filigrán nő, nyakát meresztve figyel, mit mond a hím - sok pohár víz (a bort már nyilván megitták)