So,I guess you won't see a thong on the street in Tehran anytime soon.

[CAnnoneer]

Whenever someone gets too popular, he is destroyed either by a direct strike on the part of a foreign power, or by arms and funds provided to an unpopular gang which will then attempt to seat itself in power.

Excellent. So you do agree they do it to themselves.

Well, that's tough to do when a well armed foreign power will supply and train and arm any enemy who might have a chance at killing you.

With what army? Recruited from which cultures? American mercs? Nope. Locals flocking to the banners. So much for "unity". Like I said, many of them pay lip service to unity, just like elitist dems cannot stop talking about Jesus and poverty, but when the time comes for action, they look out for number one.

Yeah, but "sufficient" doesn't mean anything near "majority."  Especially not when foreign powers are willing to give you all the money and arms you need to stay in power.  That helps dictators along quite a bit.  Having an army that kills anyone who gets out of line and a secret police force that effectively catches anyone trying to organize a resistance helps too.

Your assumption is that we are the ones that prop these regimes. If that is the case, why aren't they doing what we want? Syria for example is deeply and increasingly involved in training and supplying jihadists that kill Iraqis and our troops. Syria is the major corridor for entry into Iraq for them. If we are propping the Syrian gov, why are they fighting against us??

You're inventing an "Arab created" history that simply never happened.  The Arabs did not get together and choose to go in that direction-it was heaved upon them by intervention.

Right, the evil white man did it all to the poor little local innocent victims. Pink glasses.

  On one hand, you're saying that no government can exist without support.  Yet clearly a non-Arab, non-tribal government did exist in these lands for a lot longer than the current governments have.  And on the other hand, you say that Arabs are tribal barbarians who would never support any other kind of government. How do you plan to resolve that contradiction?

There is no contradiction. The stance was that they are tribal, i.e. they obey their tribal chiefs. If the chiefs make a deal with an outside power, the tribals will be kept in line through their chiefs. Thus the ottoman imperial superstructure could be imposed onto the shaky legs of tribalism by local contracts. But I already explained that. Notice that the superstructure government was foreign and maintained by local chiefs. When the Ottomans fell, the tribalism logically re-emerged. Moreover, as jfruser pointed out explicitly, once the current weak govs fall after they run out of oil revenue, again the tribal culture will re-emerge.

Which history, btw, shows a "lack of effective control" on the part of the Ottomans?

Explained above. Also, you cannot count the Ottoman empire as an arabic one. Turks are not arabs. They don't even like one another very much.

If you can't imagine how a dictator could hold on to power while being extremely unpopular, there's no amount of evidence that will convince you because your assumptions are completely irrational.

That pretty much sums up your naivety. Whenever dictators fall, suddenly everybody hated them and opposed them. But before they do, how many actually do anything vs how many aid, support, and comprise the regime? This bullshit has been going on since despots appeared in the dawn of history. More recently, after Hitler died, suddenly everybody was anti-nazi. Same with Stalin, Berya, Khruschev, Brejnev, Andropov, Gorby, and the clique of East European dictators. The reality is that a sufficient number of people in all cases were more than happy to be active participants or silent aiders to the regime. THAT is internal support.

But of course, you can never recognize that, because it is incompatible with your glorified idea of how humans and their societies work.

Yes, the English, Germans, Italians, and French were germanic peoples.  They lived under germanic legal codes and were not too far descended from the germanic hordes that turned Europe from the heights of the Roman empire into a bloody, undeveloped, barbarian killing field. Germanic hordes were the source of nearly every state that participated in the crusade, except for the mostly forgotten by western triumphalists Byzantine elements.

That will be news to the French and Italians. They don't even speak Germanic languages. The French are descendents of Gauls, partly intermixed with Franks (Charlemagne) and Vikings (Normans/Burgundians). The Italians are descendents of Italic tribes that formed early Rome, and later intermixed with freed slave foreigners and eventually "barbarian" tribes. If the "invaders" were indeed that dominant in the gene pool, you'd expect the eventual peoples to speak germanic languages. Instead, they speak romanic languages, and their cultures are distinctly non-germanic or non-scandinavian. A quick look at French and Italian art vs Norseman art would convince you so.

Germanic hordes?? In the crusades? I give up. It is pointless. You are talking fiction here, not history. Everybody can convince themselves in that by a cursory read of european history and the sources I mentioned.

Well, there was also the problem that their idea of government consisted of "so and so promises to the other so and so that he will do whatever he says, and will respect no other law besides that."  They were notoriously corrupt and had no real organization...they were still a lot like the nomadic barbarian hordes from which their languages and cultures descended.

That does not sound like corruption to me. It is called "feudalism". It is a contract between a lord and a vassal. Completely normal for the time. Taxation and military service have very similar underpinnings. Moreover, such agreements form the basis of law and modern contracts. Our own advanced technological civilization would be unworkable without adherence to contracts and legal ways to enforce it. Contracts mean order.

I am afraid you have a lot to learn/relearn about European history. If indeed you are of Irish, and thus European descent, you owe it to yourself to know where you come from. Don't take the brainwasher version as the default.

Except that this claim is totally ridiculous because the centers of power of the Muslim world were the settled, agrarian regions.  To ignore all of that influence and to go back to Muhammad's (peace be upon him) time, where he was not a nomad but lived in a settled, trading establishment, is really naive.  He didn't live in the open desert-he lived in a large trading outpost that was permanent and developed.

So now we have finally established you are a muslim convert. Makes sense.

I never said he lived in the open desert either. He was a trader and worked with caravans. That was a typical lifestyle at the time. That is not a sedentary agrarian lifestyle. He did not work the land and neither did most of his early followers. Also, again, if you look through his life, islam did not develop easily and spread out quickly in the beginning. If anything, it was bloody, difficult, full of reversals, and generally a really messy business involving violent suppression of nay-sayers. He himself admitted that he triumphed through terror. Again, just because a group of zealots enters an agrarian city and converts its citizens at the edge of a scimitar does not give you the right to claim that the particular city was a "center" for islam.

Yes, but you are missing the point: These places developed into economic powerhouses that exceeded anything the Hellenic, Persian, and Roman cultures had created.  They did so under Arab and later Turkish Muslim rule.

Ah, so you finally admit the precursors that built flourishing successful communities in those places much earlier than the arabs. We are getting somewhere.

Ok, so explain to us what it is that made those places "even more successful" than before? Technology, political organization, superior code of laws? And compared to what? The Old World overrun with plagues, huns, vandals, visigoths etc.? I think taking into account what the Old World went through, they've done amazingly well and still far better than anybody else.

I strongly suspect that you have no specifics because you don't actually know anything about Afghanistan, but are instead using the "brown skin and roughly similar clothing" test to determine that it's even remotely similar to the Arab world. 

Thanks for playing the racism card again. How many more in your deck?

It is not necessary for my stance to write a 5-tome history of the regions to distill and point out obvious organizational and political similarities. Call me crazy if I were the only one saying that, but I am not. I am tired of having to prove the obvious, in the face of subjectively-motivated denial. If you want to further argue the point, read a recent article on an interview with Gen. Petraeus in Human Events. Part of it talks about exactly these issues with tribalism, Syria, the source of support and recruits for the jihadists. I will not resume this argument until you prove to us that Gen. Petraeus is an idiot who knows less about the region than you do.

[De Selby]

CAnnoneer,

Let's review this latest post.

Excellent. So you do agree they do it to themselves

How is "direct strike by foreign power" and "arms and funds provided from outside" the same thing as "they do it to themselves?"  Not seeing that at all, so I'm not sure how you were able to so badly misunderstand my point.

With what army? Recruited from which cultures? American mercs? Nope. Locals flocking to the banners. So much for "unity". Like I said, many of them pay lip service to unity, just like elitist dems cannot stop talking about Jesus and poverty, but when the time comes for action, they look out for number one.

Well, by your analysis the US is "tribal" just like the Arabs.  If that's the case, you need a new explanation for poverty and underdevelopment.  In many cases, foreign mercenaries (or allies) are in fact the source of the attack-witness the 1967 war against Nasser.  The Arabs weren't the ones who defeated him.

Your assumption is that we are the ones that prop these regimes. If that is the case, why aren't they doing what we want? Syria for example is deeply and increasingly involved in training and supplying jihadists that kill Iraqis and our troops. Syria is the major corridor for entry into Iraq for them. If we are propping the Syrian gov, why are they fighting against us??

They are, and that's why Syria is allied with Iran.  Notice that of the spectrum of relative strengths, Iran is the strongest of the states in that region (compared to any Arab state) with Syria in next place.  If Syria were not supported by Iran, it would likely not last long....but it is, and Iran isn't a dictatorship.  Doesn't matter how you want to carve up its government, the country does not operate under a dictatorship that kills everyone who dissents.  In that respect, it has a whole lot more stability and representative capacity than any of the neighborhing countries.

Right, the evil white man did it all to the poor little local innocent victims. Pink glasses.

Okay, try this: Name an Arab border that was not drawn by western powers, and an arab government that was not put into place by western powers in the WWII era and beyond.  Maybe you think facts are inconvenient, but they are certainly there...look it up sometime.  Occupying someone else's country, declaring what the border is, and installing a Monarch into power counts as outside interference, don't you think?

. The stance was that they are tribal, i.e. they obey their tribal chiefs. If the chiefs make a deal with an outside power, the tribals will be kept in line through their chiefs. Thus the ottoman imperial superstructure could be imposed onto the shaky legs of tribalism by local contracts. But I already explained that. Notice that the superstructure government was foreign and maintained by local chiefs. When the Ottomans fell, the tribalism logically re-emerged. Moreover, as jfruser pointed out explicitly, once the current weak govs fall after they run out of oil revenue, again the tribal culture will re-emerge.

What? That's your picture of Ottoman administration?  Uh....well, back to the textbook for you.  The Ottomans used a slave-like class of professional administrators (Janissary) for much of that time.  The Ruler of Egypt that carried it through independence from Ottoman rule was BOSNIAN, for example.  The problem with this argument is that you're totally wrong on the facts of Ottoman rule-it did not rule by "the shakey legs of tribalism", it ruled by professional administration. 

"Tribalism" re-emerged with the instigation and financial support of the British, at that time interested in fomenting revolt against the Ottomans.  So yeah...get the facts straight first, then your argument can develop.

Explained above. Also, you cannot count the Ottoman empire as an arabic one. Turks are not arabs. They don't even like one another very much.

Ah ha....and that's why the Arabs rallied around Ottoman rulers in many cases who were not Arabs?  You're making the mistake of confusing post-nationalist Turkey with Ottoman Turkey.  Ataturk's transformation of Turkey into a race-based state (following the European model) is what made the Turkish-Arab divide today.  Before that, Arabic was a language of Court for the Ottomans and the Turks generally did not think in terms of "Turk versus Arab". 

Turkey today is a post WWI development of the Turks' plan to shape their country on a European secular model, and that's where your example starts to make sense.  So if it's an example of "tribalism", then again, you've got the problem of the European system and the American system being "tribal" to the same extent.

But before they do, how many actually do anything vs how many aid, support, and comprise the regime? This bullshit has been going on since despots appeared in the dawn of history. More recently, after Hitler died, suddenly everybody was anti-nazi. Same with Stalin, Berya, Khruschev, Brejnev, Andropov, Gorby, and the clique of East European dictators. The reality is that a sufficient number of people in all cases were more than happy to be active participants or silent aiders to the regime. THAT is internal support.

Okay, so which is it?  Did the Arabs get along fine with non-Arab rulers, or did they support them despite this "tribalism" that you keep forcing upon the historical account?  Your claim here really doesn't amount to much, anyway, because you fail to define what is a "sufficient number of people."  A sufficient number of people can be the army-not anywhere near a significant percentage of the population, but enough to control the rest.  As long as they get money and weapons, they can kill whoever argues with them. 

If that's not what you're saying, what is the impact of your point on this discussion? 

That will be news to the French and Italians. They don't even speak Germanic languages. The French are descendents of Gauls, partly intermixed with Franks (Charlemagne) and Vikings (Normans/Burgundians). The Italians are descendents of Italic tribes that formed early Rome, and later intermixed with freed slave foreigners and eventually "barbarian" tribes. If the "invaders" were indeed that dominant in the gene pool, you'd expect the eventual peoples to speak germanic languages.

This is quite amusing.  Not only will this not be news to the French and Italians, it would be news indeed for them to find out that it's not the case.  The Franks were a Germanic horde-the Normans never were a majority of the country.  The celtic Gauls were gone for centuries before the Franks showed up-there was almost nothing left of pre-Roman celtic society by the time the Romans finished with Europe and the Germanic hordes did clean up.

"Their cultures" are distinctly related-and they are so because they are Germanic.  Some centuries after the germanic invasions, they got ahold of Roman legal codes and tried to reinstitute Roman rule, but the basic system of oath, fealty to a Lord, trial, and feud remained for a long, long time.  Many of the names remain Germanic:  Louis is a particularly prominent example (it comes from Clovis.)

French and Italian art is not Roman art.  It's true that germanic-Norse art is not the same, but then again, they were never primarily Norse countries.  They were, however, primarily Germanic countries.  There was no resurgence of Romans after the hordes destroyed Rome-the hordes learned something from the documents they still had (and those they received again via Spain), but yeah....they remained genetically and culturally germanic peoples. 

Your history on this, in sum, is not even close. 

It is a contract between a lord and a vassal. Completely normal for the time.

This was normal for a Germanic barbarian society.  It was most definitely not the norm for the Romans, the Arabs, the Persians, or any of the other societies that were highly developed and economically productive.  The Lordship-Vassal model existed mostly in the backwards, uneducated, and brutal European states of the time.  It was the opposite of what Romans and post-Renaissance societies used.

That was a typical lifestyle at the time. That is not a sedentary agrarian lifestyle. He did not work the land and neither did most of his early followers.

Okay, so what happened to this "desert nomad" claim?  Clearly, he and his tribe were not nomads.  They lived in settled cities and in permanent structures. 

Again, just because a group of zealots enters an agrarian city and converts its citizens at the edge of a scimitar does not give you the right to claim that the particular city was a "center" for islam.

That wasn't what happened either.  They actually ended up by consensus in charge of Medina, and then by contract in charge of Mecca.  The charter is still available, you can read it here: http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/sources/documentview.cfm?ID=12

Either way, we're certainly through with your false claim that it was a Nomadic society.  It clearly was not.

Ok, so explain to us what it is that made those places "even more successful" than before? Technology, political organization, superior code of laws? And compared to what? The Old World overrun with plagues, huns, vandals, visigoths etc.? I think taking into account what the Old World went through, they've done amazingly well and still far better than anybody else

You mean what they went through on their own account and because of their own culture in the "Old World"?  It's not like the Romans were attacked and then rebuilt.  They were destroyed and overtaken by Barbarian hordes.  That Germanic culture reversed a thousand years of development virtually overnight...and as it revived, it relied on technology transfers from you guessed it: the economic colossus of the middle ages, the Islamic empire.  That's where the recovery of Roman techniques and the beginnings of European technological development started. 

What made the the Roman and Persian territories more developed than before was the Arabs relatively hands off approach to rule: they let the populations in place keep their religion, defined their rights and duties as a matter of contract, and thereby laid the framework for relatively stable economic conditions.  They also reduced taxes across the board, something modern conservatives would be interested to note. 

On top of the administrative system, the Arab states invested heavily in academic progress.  The first universities and proto-research institutes were founded by the Islamic empires, and they served their purpose: to promote technological and social development.  Medicine in particular was a big achievement in this arena.

I am tired of having to prove the obvious, in the face of subjectively-motivated denial. If you want to further argue the point, read a recent article on an interview with Gen. Petraeus in Human Events.

Again, you've cited precisely zero knowledge of Afghanistan.  How exactly do you intend to compare information about the Arabs to another society if you don't actually know anything about that society? 

Comparing Afghanistan to Arabia requires knowing something about both.  So where's at least an attempt at spelling out the Afghan side of this equation?

[Barbara]

So now we have finally established you are a muslim convert. Makes sense.

He's not the only one.

[Gewehr98]

Here I was just winging it when I considered SS to be a Sharia sympathizer...

[Matthew Carberry]

SS,

Don't ignore the fact that Ottomon science was not in any way an Islamic or Eastern creation out of whole cloth.  They were the heirs of the Roman Byzantine Empire and neatly acquired by conquest all the benefits of Greek and Roman science that had already been pervasive in the Eastern Empire.

When that knowledge, held in trust in the remote fastnesses of the West and maintained with a telling lack of improvement by the Ottomons, came back to the West as it recovered from plagues and the collapse of the Western Empire, once again the Western way of science and economics rapidly outstripped the stagnant societies of the Ottomons.  They did well for a while, but their culture failed to really exploit the advances handed them on a platter by the taking of the East from Rome, even though they had the "advantages" of recieved knowledge and a stable society.  Once again the more authoritarian, centralized society, the Ottomons, couldn't compete long-term with the looser, freer, and dynamic warring petty kingdoms of the West.  Heck, one city, Venice alone, had the GNP to fund the fleet that crushed the Ottomon navy with superior technology and tactics at Lepanto.

It is worth noting that, far from the West going from Roman society to absolute tribal barbarism, it was more the case that the invaders recognized the advantages of the society they had displaced.  Rome's policies and science were in fact adopted widely and avidly by the "barbarian" invaders within generations of exposure.  That was true for the barbarians directly conquered by Rome, once they realized all the advantages civilized science and economics had over their tribal structures and then for later waves of barbarians, even though those Roman patterns were being passed 2nd hand from the "civilized" tribes lft behind when Rome fell to the more recent invaders.  The barbarians did their best to become as Romanized as they could.

Modern historians and archeologists are painting a far more accurate picture of the "Dark Ages" recently than when Gibbon was pointing his accusing little fingers.

[De Selby]

Carebear,

I'm certainly not ignoring the contributions of Byzantine sciences to the Islamic empires, but there's no question that they improved on it.  Medicinal and infrastructure building-technologies in particular where things the Islamic empires did very well, and that's true for the Persian, Arab, and Turkish leadership of that empire more or less.  I don't agree that they failed to exploit the advances of the Greco-Roman learning that they inherited-they did so very well, and it showed in the relative economic growth and military prowess compared to what the Germanic societies did in Europe.

No, the Germanic peoples didn't just ignore the Romans...but they were incapable of instituting anything like that level of organization.  Education was bad, authority mostly did not exist beyond the walls of one's home, and inter-principality politics were better described as a giant blood feud than diplomacy. 

I think one thing that might be setting us both on a different track here is the time frame involved.  I would say that much of what you are saying is definitely true by the time of the Battle of Lepanto, but that's a good  1000 years from the Germanic takeover, and a solid 900 years from the creation of the Islamic empire.

It wasn't at all clear that the Germanic tribal societies were on the path to overtake the Islamic empire until at least the time of the Mongol invasions.  And during that time, if it weren't for pure luck, we would all now be struggling to find an explanation for how a society of nomads wiped out Europe and did to Rome what they did to Baghdad.  The first real military defeat handed to the Mongols (the one that initiated their decline) wasn't doled out by a Western army, either-it was doled out by a slave-like class of Muslims.

The lack of innovation of the later Ottoman empire was certainly something you can compare to the innovative growth of Europe, but that's a far cry from the earliest days of the rivalry, and it was definitely not a foregone conclusion from the time of the first Caliphs and Germanic kings.  On top of it, I think you can make a very good case that it was Europe's lack of political stability that drove military innovation to get them, eventually, beyond the Turks.  The Turks lived in an empire that was more or less stable and characterized by bureaucracy-it had been a long time since they needed to invent new weapons to fight tribe-to-tribe, whereas European history up to that point (and for some time after) was characterized by regular warfare between independent principalities.  They had the incentive to build new weapons, and the lack of a good pan-European political system meant that Europe was a giant "free market" of warfare in which to test and develop new tactics. 

[Matthew Carberry]

Okay, I see what you're talking about in terms of timelines.

I guess my larger point is that the stagnation in science and culture that leads to women in Tehran being made to dress according to and having rights similar to (in some case worse than) the regulations and rights they would have had 1500 years before in the glory days of empire; and Iran (and the rest of the ME states) still being net importers of science and technology (in fact everything except oil) 500 years after the collapse of Ottomon rule (though that net importer status was apparent centuries earlier) is indicative of a larger failing that can't be blamed on Western interference.

The West dealt with plague and invasion and, as you point out, used those trials to reinvent themselves and regain superiority in the same arts and sciences while the Ottomon's and their predecessors and descendents, had similar issues of invasion and plague, apparently survived them with less negative effect on their societies, but only had a brief flower of invention and development and then stagnated.

Which is as much due to authoritarianism as any religious influence, as demonstrated by the Persians and other Eastern Empires being at similar systematic disadvantages against the much more comparatively free and dynamic Greco/Roman West pre-Christianity/Islam.

[De Selby]

carebear,

It's certainly true that you can't blame all of the problems on western interference, but you can't ignore it either.  Most of that territory was a British or French colony in the early 20th century.  The collapse of Ottoman rule didn't mean independence and free decision making-it meant new colonizer, and only in relatively recent times have there been movements to replace installed authorities with homegrown ones. 

I think the real blame is in the apathy of those populations to outside influence.  Generally, the "Arab street" and the rest of the middle east have been asleep at the wheel, and have not demonstrated a particularly high level of caring who runs the country.  You can mobilize them to protest danish cartoons, but not to protest rip-off oil concession packages.  That's where authoritarianism comes in...it seems they've adapted to being able to vent in approved ways, and to be silent on matters where the authority is against speaking out. 

[Matthew Carberry]

Actually, you can ignore the "outside involvement".  If the Ottomon's had had a decent structure, they would have been able to continue to develop and defend their society.  Their collapse was primarily internal, through rot.  Just like Rome, but what arose less than a thousand years after Rome, after and through continual "outside interference" was a continuation of that empire's  vibrancy and growth and success by the successor states.  With greater freedom and greater achievement for the individual than what had come before. 

Contrast that to the authoritarian Ottomon Empire (or any of the ME Empires pre-Islam) which collapsed from within, in the face of pressure from much less (at the time) developed and smaller Western states.

Greece, a collection of bickering minor cities, stopped all of Persia and then marched through the length of it while fighting constant civil wars.

Rome did the same, while fighting on two or three fronts (Gaul, Spain, Germany, Carthage as well as internecine) simultaneously.

Western than Eastern Rome fell and the East resurged, only to be beaten back several times.

First, temporarily, by Crusaders the East rightfully dismissed for their lack of science and culture and then only a few centuries later by a group of bickering and infighting small states (Venice, the Papal states, some Italian Kingdoms) that individually had it matched and surpassed in economies, science and the technology of war.

But unlike Rome destroyed and trampled by "barbarians", the Ottomon's heirs, not reduced in science and tech but indeed having constant access to the most modern examples of both, haven't resurged or shown any signs thereof.  They remain resource-rich irrelevencies, culturally and scientifically.

And their problem is their culture, which hasn't, at root, changed since time immemorial.
 
The willingness to subsume the individual to authority.  It's common to humanity, "go along to get along" but when a people consistently sets up (or allows to be set up) governmental systems that encourage or force that subsumation, that's a culture with a problem and it's been a problem of the peoples of the ME since recorded history.
 
They threw off Western rule decades ago and instead of developing anything new culturally with that freedom, they remain mired in the same constructs of hundreds and thousands of years before.  Autocracies with religious justification pasted over the same tribal affiliations.  Part of being considered a "civilization" is defending yourself.  Blaming the West for propping up homegrown dictators doesn't cut it.  They are a collection of proud peoples with a lot of history to be proud of and yet they sit in squalor and allow others to control them directly or indirectly. 

[De Selby]

carebear,

I think the argument about their culture is problematic because it has, since time immemorial, certainly been changed.  The Islamist currents of today are pretty clearly a departure from the past.  The Arab culture and the Roman culture that it encountered tended to mix-it wasn't a clean replacement and there wasn't a parallel to Arab culture at the time of the first conquests, which was democratic in nature and stronger on personal freedoms than anything we know of in Europe. (Have you read "From Time Immemorial", by the way? A review of it seems to have gotten a DePaul professor in some hot water.)

It's generally, I would say, not possible to make sweeping claims about cultures that drive thousands of years of development.  But I'm still waiting to given VDH's book a read too, so maybe I'll be convinced.

Actually, you can ignore the "outside involvement".

My point was that you can't ignore it in the political systems that exist today, not that it was the sole cause of Ottoman demise.  Sorry if I was unclear on that.

There is no vibrant European state, for example, that lives under a dictatorship imposed from without and that continues to receive most of its armaments from outside.  The closest examples to this were in Soviet east europe-and look at how they fared compared to Western Europe.

With greater freedom and greater achievement for the individual than what had come before. 

Is this the case? I don't think it was until the post enlightenment period.  It's hard to argue that the industrial revolution initially led to "greater individual freedoms"-what seems to have done that was not "western culture" itself but rather a series of peasant rebellions that in some cases nearly erased (French revolution) the culture that preceeded. 

I don't think there's any good way to argue that before the 1700's, Europe had anything remotely approaching a "culture of individual freedom."  The fact is, in many places, individuals were far, far less free than they were in most parts of the Ottoman empire.  The Ottomans generally practiced lower taxation, were better at the concept of personal jurisdiction in the legal system, and did not have a culture of intruding on personal beliefs and creed like Europe's.

Contrast that to the authoritarian Ottomon Empire (or any of the ME Empires pre-Islam) which collapsed from within, in the face of pressure from much less (at the time) developed and smaller Western states.

Well, I would say that they didn't actually collapse in the face of less developed Western states.  They did collapse in the face of more developed western states later on, though.  Post 1600, it was downhill in terms of relative development, and the map to day reflects that-the Ottomans and Arabs lost.

The Crusades were largely an abberation-the Europeans achieved what they did in a very short amount of time, and they lost it very shortly as well.  I don't think that's a good example of relative strength.  The crusader project hit at a moment of crisis in Islamic government, and it was crushed inside of a hundred years. 

I think where our narratives here are most departing is in modern times.  The fact is, while you most certainly can blame the fall of the Ottoman empire on internal rot, you most definitely cannot ignore external meddling in the state of middle east governments today.  The borders and states are a creation of foreign powers, literally.  The majority of Middle East governments continue to rely on foreign support for armaments and financing.  There's really no way you can make sense of those conditions without factoring in the reality that the Jordanian regime, the Saudi Regime, the Emirati regime, the Lebanese regime, and the Egyptian regime are either complete inventions of Western colonial powers, or at a minimum continue to operate only with a constant inflow of arms and support from western powers.

There is one strong counter example, and that is Iran.  The fact is, as bad as Iran is in terms of personal freedom...it is miles ahead of the Western creations and allies in the region.  They are developing democratic institutions, and individulas are finding ways to participate in relevant and powerful political movements that challenge the ruling party. 

They are also, unsurprisingly, probably in the best position to defend their country of any middle east state at present.  So I think your analysis of personal freedoms and the ability to develop and defend a state holds true on that level, but the fact is, it's actually happening in Iran.  Where it's not happening is in the countries with the closest bonds to Western powers, which runs completely contrary to the view that this is a western cultural product.

[onions!]

So how'd this go from discussing cute Persian girls tuckusses to discussing the politics of a bunch of dead guys?

[Matthew Carberry]

Right, because no "vibrant European state" would tolerate it, their culture doesn't allow it.

You really need to reexamine the history of the West, no Western monarch ever had the control over their population that the Eastern autocracies had.  Feudalism is not slavery and trade and private property were always allowed to one degree or another.  And degree is what is important.  The fact that the "rights of man" didn't reach their full flower until the Enlightenment does not deny that all were more greatly available to a greater degree to a wider portion of the population of Europe from Rome forward than in the East on balance.  Private property and the ability to hold land within a family without decree by the bureaucracy being the largest example.  Land could be stolen from free peasants, but it was their land to be stolen, not land owned by and assigned to them at will by the Imperial state.  the reason those peasants revolted and ME peasants didn't is due to it being part of the Western tradition.  Tyranny never rested well in scieties descended from the only ancient culture (Greece) with a word for "freedom" in the first place.

I said the Crusades were temporary.  What I was pointing out was that even at the height of Ottomon power a bunch of unwashed, less advanced, outnumbered European savages retook part of the empire, on the very doorstep of Istanbul, and held it for several centuries.  That shouldn't happen to a viable Empire, distracted or not.

China was invaded and run by the West for a large part of its history but eventually threw off the yoke of Western oppression at about the same time as the ME and created a "third way" in the face of continuing efforts to re-dominate it.  As have India and other Asian nations.

They have cultures that for whatever reason refuse to tolerate outside interference.  It appears to be a unique weakness of the ME to accept such treatment.  If they had something worth defending, they'd find a way, like every other country born in revolution.

The "it's the West's fault" is getting old since their contemporaries elsewhere in the ex-colonial world seem to have moved on with varying degrees of success and they have not.  And the reason "it's the West's fault" keeps changing as the old excuses start being invalidated by time.  How many more decades do they get to play the victim to excuse their cultural failures before they finally accept that their problems are their responsibilities and they need to step up.  Heck, even comparatively poor Cuba and Chavez's Venezuela show more internal gumption.  

[De Selby]

carebear,

The thing is, not every eastern state was ancient Persia.  The right to private property in the Arab empires and their successors was on some levels more secure than in Europe, especially feudal Europe, where private property was limited to a very few.  The concept of rent and robot dates from the Europe of that time.  So I don't see how it's possible to characterize it in contrast to the Islamic east as a bastion of personal freedoms.

With the medieval system, there were very few free peasants and landowning individuals until after the rise of cities.  That was largely a post-medieval development, and it was certainly not a feature of the feudal system to encourage independent townsmen. 

The legal system of the Germanic times recognized title only by oath or warfare-there was no such thing as a general law of "you own what you have."  If you didn't secure a promise from a warlord to respect your property rights, you didn't have any.

Contrast that to the Islamic law system: property is yours as long as you don't declare war on the state.  There's really not a good case to be made here that medieval European culture respected property or individuality in a way that Eastern empires of the time didn't, because I think it's more clearly the case that the opposite was true.  Property in the Islamic systems was, like the Roman system, a function of the law.  You owned what you owned and the state protected and recognized that right based on a defined and settled body of laws.  The Feudal system did not do this-you only had a more powerful neighbor's promise to rely on, and if he didn't give it, you would have no claim (and no authority to enforce the claim) to any property seized from you.

It's true that the crusaders made great progress at first, but in fairness, does your evaluation of their performance lead you to conclude that Europe was really weak due to the fact that the Ottomans managed to hold a large chunk of the continent for hundred and hundreds of years?  I don't think that's a necessarily accurate way to compare the two societies.

I agree with your examples of China and India and Asian nations.  They are very good examples of places that managed to displace colonial administration, and that are now on their way to building pretty stable economies.  Hopefully that trend holds.

In comparison to the middle east, it's not like resistence to outside interference is small or waning.  The difference is that the staying power of the installed monarchies is much higher, I think in no small part due to the strategic importance that the middle east holds for the rest of the planet.  It's a bit unfair to compare the willingness of Europe and the US to commit resources to holding Asia, to their willingness to commit to interference in the location of some of the world's largest oil reserves.

I'm not arguing here that all the ills of the middle east are the west's fault, but similarly, I don't think you can write it off as insignificant.  Now that they are starting to violently resist Western influence in their countries, they're branded terrorists (rightly so in many cases) and generally held in contempt, but it's not like there isn't any effort to change things there.  There is a corresponding strong effort to keep things the same-so just as it's not fair to say the "West" generally is totally to blame for the way Arabs live, it's equally unfair to say that the Arabs have no legitimate reason to point to western interference in their countries as a source of the problem.