Is the US becoming more tribalist?

The shoe must go on
By SALIM MANSUR
Last Updated: 20th December 2008, 4:06amEmail Story Print Size A A A Report Typo Share with: Facebook Digg Del.icio.us Google Stumble Upon Newsvine Reddit Technorati Feed Me Yahoo Ma.gnolia Simpy Squidoo Spurl Blogmarks Netvouz Scuttle Co.mments Sitejot + What are these? The television pictures of an Iraqi journalist hurling shoes at President George W. Bush standing alongside the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in a Baghdad press conference have ricocheted across the world to the hysterical applause of many members of the Arab-Muslim audience and their usual supporters.

Hurling shoes at someone, we are told, is the worst insult in Arab culture.
A few years ago the world witnessed when Baghdad was liberated by American soldiers and Saddam Hussein's statue in the centre of the city was pulled down. A cheering crowd of Iraqis gathered to kick and slap the broken image of the fallen tyrant repeatedly with their footwear, displaying contempt for a man whose shadow only weeks earlier would have frozen them in fear.
What are non Arabs to make of the shoes hurled at an American president in an Arab capital to the cheers of an Arab audience?

It is not a surprise that more Arabs loathe President Bush than approve of him. This being the case, the incident is more revealing of Arabs and their culture than of President Bush arriving as a guest in an Arab capital.

Much of Arab culture is tribal culture, and Arab nationalism is tribalism dressed in the political garments borrowed from Europe. Arab modernity is often a charade, and Arab states are typically, in the memorable words of Tahseen Bashir, an Egyptian diplomat, so many "tribes with flags."
Tribal mentality
The collectivist tribal mentality frowns upon the idea of individuals asserting their rights as free people. Freedom is subversive to a culture that insists on tribal identity and this is why many Arabs, as tribes, remain fearful of modernity and democracy.
Fatima Mernissi from Morocco is an incredibly brave analyst of the Arab world. As an Arab woman she has felt the full weight of patriarchy and gender discrimination of her culture, and as a Moroccan she has watched how tribalism has retarded the progress of Arabs in the modern world.

Mernissi discusses in Islam and Democracy the tribal fear that possesses Arabs of all things that seem strange. She writes about the Arab fear of the West, of the past as anarchy and the present as change, and of the Imam as the authoritarian leader.
The fear that does Arabs most harm, however, is fear of the freedom of thought, of individualism, and of the idea of freedom perceived as promiscuity, hence most loathed in tribal cultures.

In the Arab world the unforgiving crime of President Bush has been his promotion of freedom not merely as rhetorical device, but his role in actually overthrowing tyranny and opening a new page of history for Iraqi Arabs.

This deliverance of liberty has no precedence in Arab-Muslim culture and its cost, however calculated, remains a fraction of the tyrant's wage paid in blood and treasure by Iraqis over the decades.

But for Arabs to recognize President Bush as an agent of change and freedom would be an admission of their dysfunctional tribalism.
This is why if hurling shoes as insult was an individual act, it would have been dismissed as an unfortunate incident.

Instead, in cheerfully embracing this misguided individual as some sort of hero defending his tribe's honour, the Arab world provided another pathetic display of its collective failings.