Where religion intersects with tribalism

Someone left a copy of Matthew Parris's autobiography at the cottage in St Ives we were staying in last week.  I only read the first few chapters, about his childhood in South Africa, Rhodesia, Swaziland, Cyprus and Jamaica (another Third Culture Kid and presumably why he calls himself an outsider in his autobiography subtitle).  He, like me, is not a religious believer, but he makes the point that monotheistic religions like Christianity provided a constructive escape from tribalism for many of the Africans he knew. 

I've become more and more concerned by the intersection between tribalism and religious fundamentalism, since I started (but haven't finished) reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel and hearing the horror stories around "honour killing" where women are killed for wanting to marry someone in a different tribe.

Shiv Malik's article in Prospect about how Mohammad Siddique Khan became a suicide bomber describes convincingly how Islamic fundamentalism provided a way of rebelling against tribalism (the Mullah Boys of Beeston marrying anyone, so long as they were good Muslims), but in a way that is hard for 'proper' Muslim parents to contest.

So the critical moment is not just when isolated young people try to find a group to belong to, but when they are also looking for a credo that gives them a cast iron, supposedly morally superior way to rebel against the traditions of their parents. 

Comments

[Iman]

I just read a new book on "honor" killings entitled "Reclaiming Honor in Jordan," available on the American version of Amazon.com.

There are many excuses for "honor" killings, above and beyond simply wishing to marry outside one's tribe (though that is certainly one of them).

In Jordan, the World Bank conducted a study of all the "honor" killings that occurred in 1997. Post mortem examinations of the victims' bodies showed that a full 95% were virgins. So they were killed on the basis of mere unsubstantiated rumor. These girls/women are also sometimes killed for reasons of inheritance (i.e., more assets will then go to the boys/men, even though by law they already get double what the females do), of poverty (i.e., the family simply can't afford the upkeep), of other things not related to family honor. Three laws on the books actually offer leniency to the killers such that the average sentence is only six months. So any time a man wants to kill a woman, he'll make it look like an "honor" killing so he can get away with murder.

This is truly a tragedy, an emergency. What will it take to get the leaders of the countries where these crimes occur to act? In most cases, they are autocratic rulers, so they could simply criminalize these acts. Do they not mind at all that their own subjects are being killed this way on their watches? Is the life of a woman still of so little value in this world?

To be honest, I think that the leaders of many of these countries are themselves very tribal, no matter how much they try to act Westernized when they travel outside the region. And that is part of the problem. To their way of thinking, tribe trumps basic human rights any day. Or so it seems to me is their instinct.

[Irfan]

I interviewed Hirsi Ali when she was in Australia for the Sydney Writers' Festival. The article that came out of that interview can be found here ...

http://madhabirfy.blogspot.com/2007/08/unreliable-narrator.html

The interview podcast can be found at the NewMatilda.com website.