The New Old West And The Muslim "Frontier"
Thanks to Saskia Sassen for her canny comments.
Her idea of a fluid and world-spanning frontier where the US encounters the Muslim world has a great deal to recommend it. I was struck when I first read about the US colonization of the Philippines how much it was an extension of the Old West. Many of the same army units involved in the Indian wars, many of the political figures concerned with the situation at the Western frontier, ended up in Manila. The first major US military encounter with Muslim fighters in modern history was there. Psy-ops against Muslim opponents using humiliation and pork products were pioneered then and later forgotten. When George W. Bush spoke of how he envied the US troops in Afghanistan the "romance" of their endeavor, you wonder if he was also thinking of the Old West and the games of his childhood (as Tom Engelhardt suggested)..
But Sassen takes the discussion in a different direction, a contemporary one, a post-colonial one. Just as Spock played three-dimensional chess in Star Trek, Sassen sees a multi-level encounter between the US and various forms of Muslim challenge to its hegemony, playing out in great cities such as Baghdad and Qandahar, but also London and Paris.
Forget the Old West, the Muslim challenge to our hegemony, blah, blah and blah...mans' testosterone levels sky-rocket in the heat of battle (also the primary reason why soldiers rape, by the way.) Chalk the whole thing up to that 'old happy feeling.'
March 20, 2009 11:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
This simply is not true and there is not one study you can recommend that would prove it so. Human beings are reflexive, not instinctive and there would be no evolutionary payoff for testosterone levels to rise in the "heat of battle",in fact, it would be counter-evolutionary. If this were in fact true, that testosterone levels rise in the heat of battle, there would be no need to coerce and induce men to fight.
March 20, 2009 1:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
You may be confusing coercion and inducement with actual fighting. As far as evolution goes, the survivor of conflict lives on to procreate which is the bottom-line measure of fitness - according to Darwin.
Unfortunately, I'm unable to retrieve the scientific study that came up with this interesting, and provocative info. It shouldn't be, however, discarded willy-nilly if for no other reason than the possibility that acknowledging it could be beneficial as a means of putting an end to mankind's history of slaughter in the name of some religion or patriotism or...
March 20, 2009 4:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't believe that I am confusing actual battle with coercion and inducement. War is anti-evolutionary, it is contrary to our survival as a species. There is no possible way to measure the levels of testosterone of human beings in the heat of battle because the battle would have to be stopped to take blood samples. Evidence of humans' reactions in battle are anecdotal and almost to a man they claim that the motivation is fear and guilt and that they are emotionally and physically depleted after engaging in warfare for any time length. Their bodies and emotions tend to shut down. There are certainly sociopaths who do feel exhilarated after fighting, but the army tries to weed them out - they're not team players. If war was an evolutionary tool to further procreation, we would all be at war all the time. War is an abberration, not a norm, it is a product of culture.
March 20, 2009 4:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
past personal experience causes me to believe that any male in the midst of a potentially deadly battle, whose testicles have not valiantly attempted an ascension deep up into their host's body cavity, are death-wish motivated sociopaths. i cannot speak authoritatively for females, but believe there is an analogous involuntary physical response when in an active battlefield environment.
March 20, 2009 9:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
I wish I had put it so elegantly.
March 21, 2009 10:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
thanks, after posting it last night, i actually wondered if if might be an unintended cause for you to take offense.
March 21, 2009 1:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Given how large the Muslim population is likely to be in the near future, I don't know how long they can maintain their "frontier" placement as identity or as a geography, although I appreciate Ms. Sassen's fascinating comments. Will it be the rise of the city-state then, where new understandings are born because states as actors will have to contend with the full and varied histories of the Muslim Other right in their own metropolises? Likely.
As to the Old West in Manila, I love the analogy. I recall reading in the Guardian that in the first forays by US troops into Baghdad -- an ancient capital in an ancient land which has undergone many transformations and seen the rise and fall of many empires and wars -- and some of the troops could only comment that it was a no-mans land a very "backwards" place, because it had no McDonalds. At the very least, the news from Iraq has been packed with distortions of its people and their histories.
March 20, 2009 12:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't mean to be rude at all, I just want to try to clarify: I think Ms. Sassen was not really calling the Muslim World a "frontier;" I think she actually was calling modern cities a new frontier. You should check me on that interpretation, but I don't think she was perpetuating the Muslim World as lawless frontier meme.
March 20, 2009 12:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
I know that. I read it that way too. The modern city as the new frontier because of the ways people who live there contend with each others histories. eg -- Kandahar and Manila -- and the ways in which the US encounters Muslims in these places. That's why I put frontier in quotes. If the population of Muslims increase, which it will, it's a very young population right now, then the idea of "frontier" - ness, decreases. My point is that Muslim as a category recedes as a "frontier" or an "other." I was seeing both as a conflation and a result.
March 20, 2009 1:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think Ms. Sassen was not really calling the Muslim World a "frontier;" I think she actually was calling modern cities a new frontier.
It was both. She said the frontier space "also" exists in cities and neighborhoods in the US and in several European countries.
But she explicitly said that the emergent frontier zone between the US and the Muslim world is a frontier that "spans the globe, involving yes, Iraq and Afghanistan and other critical countries in the US "War against Terror", and all kinds of other countries who have participated in one way or another in the fighting of the last several years."
Now a frontier is the land that forms the furthest extent of a country's settled territory. A country's frontier is found at the boundary between that country and other lands. So Sassen thinks that the boundary between the US and what is not the US can now be found in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Muslim lands throughout the world. It can even be found in our own cities. While Sassen might want to claim defensively that the US and Muslim world are not "clashing" at the frontier, but are just "mixing" and "encountering" each other there, she has just declared a whole bunch of American citizens to be foreign others, whose neighborhoods are in the American "frontier zone". She also apparently believes American territory has now expanded so far that our new frontier is in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We have seen this kind of talk before, from right-wing hawks like Robert Kaplan, who in the book Imperial Grunts specifically compared the War on Terror to the 19th-century fighting along the American Frontier in "injun country."
March 20, 2009 2:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think Ms. Sassen is contradicting the "clash of civ" thing that got such a head of steam in 2001.
Also, what she says was anticipated in that some of the biggest antiwar demonstrations, preceding the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, happened in Rome, London, Madrid and NYC, DC etc. So they are in effect post-colonial frontiers. Because, certainly, the govts of said countries went to war regardless of the large numbers who came out to protest in their biggest cities.
March 20, 2009 4:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
How are these cities "post colonial"? That is a conceit that has no basis in the history of great cities and makes no sense in the reality of immigration and migration of global cities.
March 20, 2009 5:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't get it. Because people in these cities protested the war in Iraq, they inhabit a "frontier zone?" Aren't these people equally citizens of their countries?
I opposed the Iraq War. Is my house also a frontier zone, where there are unclear "rules of engagement? I'm a US citizen, and engaged in the political process in a perfectly legitimate way. I am not about to allow myself to be seen as some as some sort of foreign "other" on the opposite side of a frontier boundary. And Muslim Americans, Muslim French and Muslim Spaniards shouldn't accept it either.
This post-colonial cities business is interesting. What Sassen seems to have in mind is that in the post-colonial period, cities in Europe and the United States have seen immigration from Muslim countries. But rather than see that as a process by which people from Muslim countries have become American or Frenchmen, for example, she prefers to see it as a process by which Muslims have moved the border between the "Muslim world" and the non-Muslim world into the western cities, and turned them into frontier zones. That's disturbing.
March 20, 2009 7:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
My question is when have great cities not been post colonial? This is what comes from thinking that history happened yesterday.
March 21, 2009 9:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Okay, Dan, you had your chances.
You're simply misreading "frontier" in the purely geological/geographical sense of "land". The frontiers of science for instance rebuke you immediately. This is a cultural, spiritual, ethical, and social frontier, as I read the story.
"While Sassen might want to claim defensively that the US and Muslim world are not "clashing" at the frontier, but are just "mixing" and "encountering" each other there"
And you're being sophistic there. Your bad guess of what Sassen wants or might want is just your bad guess. Read what was written, as written. Sassen points out that the focus is encounter rather than clash. There may be clashes too.
March 20, 2009 4:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
eds, I considered the fact that Sassen might be using "frontier" in a purely figurative sense. But I am not the one introduced the geographical language here. As I noted, Sassen specifically said these frontier spaces have physical locations:
"today's global cities are a post-colonial frontier space."
"this frontier space also consists of thick localizations in cities and neighborhoods in the US, and in several European countries, and beyond."
"And so is this emergent frontier zone between the US and the Muslim world, a frontier that spans the globe, involving yes, Iraq and Afghanistan and other critical countries in the US "War against Terror", and all kinds of other countries who have participated in one way or another in the fighting of the last several years."
And her denial that she views this frontier space as a place where civilizations are clashing rings hollow, given that she specifically identifies it as involving the critical countries where the "War against Terror", and "the fighting" have been taking place.
March 20, 2009 6:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
What Ms. Sassen said -- about the US and our relations with the larger Muslim world.
The two zones have different rules of engagement.
One is where Democracy reigns as the deserving actor, sets the rules and thus proclaims its right to dominate the global stage. This has been so voiced and specifically since the Cold War because it was also the rhetoric of the Cold War era confrontations. In fact the whole thing was engaged on that trope.
The other, as Ms. Sassen lays it out and as I understand it, is that in our cities ----- where now we find Mosques and significant Muslim populations whose histories have been distorted in the larger discourse by Democratic Therefore Deserving actor ----- are the loci where this will be resolved and it is not a "clash of civ" but a mixing, a conversation, a merging and emerging (of different histories) and yet a separateness, an imbrication (noun: covering with a design in which one element covers a part of another --as with tiles or shingles) will happen, indeed is happening.
Therefore cities - major metropoles - Manila, London, Paris, NYC, Amman, Baghdad --- are where the rules of engagement between US-Muslim world is being set/will be established. Different histories will be the center/focus/emphasis for negotiations and that will be the focus, instead of Denigrations Delivered for Democracy. I don't understand why this is of any particular contention to you and BevD. Seems so straightforward to me.
March 21, 2009 2:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
The two zones have different rules of engagement.
One is where Democracy reigns...
The other, as Ms. Sassen lays it out and as I understand it, is that in our cities ----- where now we find Mosques and significant Muslim populations..."
So you and Sassen are in agreement that Muslim communities in US and European cities occupy a zone that is different from the zone "where democracy reigns"? And that the rules of engagement are different there? And that the boundaries between these zones represent a frontier of encounter between the US and the Muslim world?
That will perhaps be news to the many Muslim-American citizens who thought they lived in America, that they were US citizens, that they were participants in US democracy.
March 21, 2009 3:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Aaargh!!! Jeeez! Please tell me you are not being willfully obtuse. Like, really.
Let me try again. :)
You use the term "Muslim-American," Why? Why not simply an American? What's contained in that hyphenation? What kind of identity has been negotiated to generate that hypen?
March 21, 2009 4:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
You say you want to "try again". But you really don't even attempt to address the issues the were raised by Sassen's obnoxious piece. Willfully obtuse? It seems to me you are willfully ignoring all of the parts of Sassen's post that don't fit your sloppy, carelessly expressed, pollyanna reading of it.
Muslim-Americans are Muslims who who are American citizens. Isn't that fairly obvious? Would you prefer "American Muslims"? In any case, my view is Muslim citizens of the United States who live in America do not occupy a "no-man's land". They do not inhabit a "frontier". They do not live on the boundary between "the US" and "the Muslim world" with unclear "rules of engagement."
Again, these are all Sassen's terms, not mine. I can't believe you don't see what is objectionable in this kind of language.
You see very full of admiration for Sassen. Why don't you write her and ask her to come back and defend her own claims instead of leaving it to you?
March 21, 2009 6:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
I almost always agree with Juan Cole and I admire his writing very much, but in this case I think he is being seduced by imagery, not fact.
The first major encounter with Muslim fighters was on the shores of Tripoli, not the Phillipines, and Jefferson made it very clear that the response was not to their religion or way of life, but the interference of lawfully conducted commerce between nations. Secondly, while some of the same actors that conducted our U.S. western policy were complicit in our invasion of the Phillipines, the reason for the invasion was very much the same that caused us to land on the shores of Tripoli - the protection of our sea lanes from piracy and the domination of Germany and England in international commerce. While there are aprophical stories that such operations of using pork products to intimidate Muslim fighters in the Phillipines, that was never a policy of the U.S. army and in fact there are no instances of that ever being used in any operation in the Phillipines. While we did indeed conduct an illicit invasion of the Phillipines, I see no reason to make it worse than it was, nor add to the list of grievances held by Muslims today.
Secondly, to believe that George Bush "envied" soldiers fighting in Afghanistan for any reason is to first, believe that he actually did envy them and secondly to believe that envy stemmed from any kind of childhood game played by George Bush. The most reasonable explanation for why he would say such a thing is that he simply trying to establish some sort of weird comraderie with those men sent on an errand of futility that could get them killed and the need for statesmen to romanticize war in order to induce others to fight it.
What we are seeing here is not a "new frontier" but the same clash of paradigms, that of a technological society clashing with a tribal society and with any clash of paradigms only one can prevail.
Paris, London, New York are not "post colonial cities" in which the colonial insurrections of the past will be carried out, they are cities that for the most part absorb and colloquialize the immigrants that settle in those cities. That other cultures can be assimilated so quickly and yet maintain some traditions and cultural memes of other countries tells us not that these are frontiers of future conflict and confrontation but equalizers for the most part in absortion of other cultures.
March 20, 2009 2:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
absorption...
March 20, 2009 3:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
In fairness to Juan, he did say in "modern history" rather than US history when he talked about the Philippines rather than Tripoli.
March 20, 2009 6:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're right, but what is "modern history"? To many people the invasion of the Phillipines is considered ancient history. To me, anything that has happened in the last 500 years is modern history - it certainly seems to be the case with Muslims.
I think that this "western frontier" imagery is bad, just as the "new frontier" and "post colonial global cities" is bad.
March 21, 2009 10:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
The West has been encountering Islam for a long long time and not just at the 'marches'. Thomas Aquinas was reacting to Averroes and the Deism of Voltaire and the General Will of Rousseau bear a closer resemlance to Allah than the to the Christian Trinity. Islamic colored ideas have long been a part of the history of Europe and the West.
March 20, 2009 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
True. I live near the Mexican border and I can hear the crowd shouting "Allah, Allah" at the bullfights in Mexicali. In our local high school they shout "Algebra, Algebra!"
March 20, 2009 3:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
The problem has been the decline of Muslim Civilization from one of great learning and respect for others to something else. While it's not fair to generalize, there is far too much acceptance of religious mania and brutishness in the Muslim World in my view.
March 20, 2009 4:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
This happens in societies undergoing great paradigm shifts - those in power are desparate to hold onto the traditions because they see that their power is slipping away from them. The more vulnerable the catholic church became, the more likely they were to invoke violence to control societies. I don't think this is particular to Muslims - look at the conservative christian movement and their battles against science, more and more they resort to brutishness and mania. Religion has become the barrier to evolution.
March 20, 2009 4:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with your general statement on religion. I was lamenting the passage of that era when Europe came in contact with Muslim Civilization and learned a thing or two. There was a good book on the subject some years ago: The Muslim Discovery of Europe. Studied as history one can make allowances for civilizations before the Age of Reason. At some point beyond however it's more difficult for me to accept an intellect that has encountered reason and not had reason win out. That is something that troubles me deeply about President Obama. His single greatest weakness of intellect in my opinion.
March 20, 2009 6:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think inherently Islam is about jihad and when all was well with jihad Islam was tolerant. I think when Islam was at the top of it's game and expanding Islam could afford to be benificent. Also having a second class Christian population, basically an aparteid system, was a real benefit to individuals who were Moslem. It paid to be tolerant. Islam was fairly munificent given the standards of the day given victory but when Islam was pressed to the wall, jihad undermined, Islam became repressive.
March 20, 2009 8:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
I haven't thought of it in that way. I guess now I will. Can you suggest some readings?
March 21, 2009 11:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
How about the late Edward Said's "Orientalism"? The metaphor of the "frontier" is operational here: at least in hermeneutics (ethnocriticism) the frontier metaphor maps out that place where mutually unintelligible meet and exchange information that is always distorted by translation.
But that isn't the case at all with Islamic, Christian and Jewish culture. All three came out of the same crucible, so to speak, and their respective histories are both intimate and intertwined. In that sense Islamic fundamentalist intolerance and hostility has little difference with Christian or Jewish intolerance and hostility. I really do believe that we should cease and desist pretending that Islamic culture something exotic and inscrutable.
I read "al Ahram" online often - a great opinion sheet written by really smart people who happen to be Islamic. I would recommend it to anyone.
March 21, 2009 9:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
I would recommend reading the Koran. The context of the Koran is an ongoing jihad throughout Arabia. The revelations of Muhammed supported the jihad. Of course, like any other religion Islam can mutate and Islam perhaps can acclimatize to democracy but the history of Islam is otherwise. Things do change, though. The Vatican is, of course, no longer a secular power. I don't think a past necessitates a future but for Islam to drop the jihad mindset is going to be difficult.
March 22, 2009 1:33 AM | Reply | Permalink