Quote:
Originally Posted by Haak
I was just reading On the Road to Kandahar by Jason Burke, right now and it had a chapter that provided an interesting insight on why violence is so a part of daily life in Pakistan:
"At the beginning of my time in Pakistan, I could not distinguish between the various forms of violence I encountered and I was astonished and appalled by much that I read, saw and reported. Then, after a year or so, I found myself becoming more habituated to the brutality that was so much a part of life of the country and began to see it's variety...However it was not violence that dominated lives but insecurity. Everyone in the country was worried about threats, potential and actual...One of the reasons this took a while for me to grasp might have been that, having been raised on the post-Enlightenment optimism of the West with it's faith in reason and progress, such endemic existential fear was alien to me. People in the West trust their technology and...more or less their leaders to protect them. For the average citizen of Pakistan, as in any country where authority depends not on consent but on force and custom, there is no such safety net." (Burke had already previously gievn examples of cases where the police were corrupt and next to useless in maintaining order and how religion provided a conveient subsitute for all the things that were still lacking in a developing society or were simply not affordabale to the average citizen. e.g. a free spiritual healer that acted as "a GP, consumer helpline, counsellor and psychotherapist all in one)
Then he goes into more detail about the Pashtuns: "But Parachar was most troubled, he told me repeatedly, not by the Shias and the supposed heresy and the divisons within Islam but the 'moral corruption' that threatened his community...it appeared to include, more or less any change that might alter the traditional customs of the Pashtun society. These customs, Parachar had decided were also 'Islamic' customs. So for him modernisation, Wsternisation, globalisation..were all fused into one great assault into what was right and certain and Muslim...And it was clear that if violence was neccessary to maintain social order, then Parachar supported violence."
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You've hit it right on the head. You deserve a gold star.
People characterise Islam as a violent religion, but it's not religion that's the problem, it's the nature of those societies, which
happen to be insecure. This lack of secuirty means that their inhabitants are willing to great lengths (including use of violence) to protect themselves, their tradition and their way of life.
They see the west as personifying the forces assaulting their traditions. In olden times they would just have to smolder and take it. Now they can hijack planes.
In reality they're a lot more like the Luddites of the 19th centure, futilely lashing out at the face of what is destroying the fabric of life as they know it.
It's like if a casino opened up in a conservative community in the US, while a host of other forces destroyed people's livelihoods. People might first lash out at the Casino, which has brought so much degeneracy and vice to their community. Or they might bomb Las Vegas (the "root" of gambling in the US). In reality though, there's very little they can really do.