They Don't Think Like Us
 

From Maggie's Farm.
These are the first two of twelve points he makes. Here is the last.
Worth reading them all, as it is a well reasoned view, even if you disagree.

That mindset isn't as foreign as I would like; it's just taken to the [il]logical extreme.

As far as I know they only teach Theological subjects that way. There are plenty of Middle and Near Eastern students over in the Uk doing postgrads and stuff. They have their equivalent technical and medical experts. The Mullahs might not be much for the technical revolution and some regions and countries are less well developed...but let's not start homogenizing them. Look how different America and England is, and yet we share a language, a basic religious philosphy, a large amount of our political philosophy (democratic institutions etc) capitalist intentions and mechanisms, historical orgins and both cultures are underpinned with Anglo-Saxon, individualist sensibilities and similar lawsets.

If we can share all that and yet be so different, why not the same for Eastern cultures?

Who's to say all Americans have the same values? Bah- that's just wierd racist stuff- 'nuff said.

Good point Cicero. We can't even say with any confidence that all people in a single country share the same beliefs and value systems. Hell we can't even say that people always share beliefs and value systems with their nearest and dearest.

I have a very different cultural outlook than many people born south of the Watford Gap. I certainly have a different cultural perspective to the Scottish. If the length of Britain can contain difference how can we expect homogenised societies elsewhere.

... I can't help myself. This is one of those articles that defines what a lot of people think. Now, most of my experience with arab culture is Iraqi, my knowledge of other arab cultures is more based on a few people I have met here and there. BUT!

They do think vastly differently, no one can argue that. My favorite example is the rationale behind the attempt to bomb JFK airport, which was that because we americans loved Kennedy so much, we would become incensed with rage at seeing his namesake destroyed. While this would be true at bombing a mosque of your enemy's hero, we in the US don't really care that much.

"We should hammer them to stop them from messing with our civilization." Sounds kind of like some other people's beliefs...

This of course, is identical across cultures. Was this guy mad that his friend chose his immediate and extended family over him? We do the same things...

To say that their system of morals is phony because it's not yours... Here's the deal, Arabs don't assign much value to their work, it's a means to living. I think that's fucking fantastic. Arabs DO enjoy a romantic love, especially the Lebanese and Syrians... They can be as crazy about it as any Italian. Not all marriages are arranged, and this might come as a shock to you, but the arranged couples almost always fall in love with a bond just as strong as any westerner. They just go about it a different way.

Ok, they have a hard time adapting to an infrastructure, just like any other 3rd world country. No shit, they can't figure out how to effectively maintain brand new and pretty much unintelligible equipment!? Crazy.

Oh, and it was at this point that I lost respect for the author entirely. Inshahallah does NOT fucking mean that. The palestinian was JOKING, and it's a very COMMON joke. Inshahallah is almost exclusively a way to signify future tense. I admit, it does take an ear for the language to discern when a person saying "I will meet you tomorrow Inshahallah" is simply saying he will meet you tomorrow, or if he's actually showing some amount of uncertainty. Of course, an Iraqi will always say "maybe" if it's uncertain.

This assclown started his article saying that all americans are linguistic idiots, and he makes the most common and idiotic mistake himself.

I call bullshit. Like I said, I have less knowledge of the Saudis, but I know the Iraqis and Levant Arabs have the philosophy of "If you think he's going to fight you, throw the first punch for the advantage."

This is the first thing in the article that's completely true. The language and culture has so much more extremeism. This was evident when American forces started rounding up clerics by the dozens for speaking about violence against the US. What they didn't understand is that no one in the mosque, including the Mullah, had any expectations of anyone doing anything.

...like "there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

But He loves you."

Absurd is in the eye of the beholder.

Hallelujah! Someone finally gets it. Maybe the fact that their culture is under constant attack (whether intentional or not) from western media and Ideals... maybe THAT'S what's frustrating those using violence, and they're using Islam as a justification.

So closing liquor stores on sundays, trying to get prayer in schools, etc. What he's not realizing here is that most Arabs DON'T want to control others. Most of the population of Saudi Arabia hates the religious police, and wants it gone. The only difference is that a) there is a larger number of religious nut jobs in the Arab world than in the western. If we had an increase of, say, 10% of the evangelicals in the US they would be so close to the majority our rights would start sliding out the window.

I'll use Happy Monkey's views to summarize that section!

I realize this was super long, so if you read the whole thing... wow.
I would have avoided making such a long post, but these views are held by a very large number of people. Those people will go on thinking the same things, and say that I'm not a source to be trusted, but just maybe if they only needed one more drop of water to burst their dam....

He didn't say all, he said most. I thought this was a pretty common opinion, especially in Europe? At least I've heard it repeated often.

I didn't get the impression he was talking about their religious beliefs when he said they would "routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity".

I'm not disagreeing with the idea that most Americans are linguistically challenged, barely knowing a language, but I was pointing out that after disparaging others for their lack of knowledge, he made a huge mistake. It's like saying "You have the worstest grammer and speling evr."

The example he uses for his 'absurd ideas' that Arabs believe is the Djinn, and that's part of the Islamic myth. They play a part in many stories in the Quran. Besides, it doesn't matter, I could use examples that many many Americans believe in angels, or that global warming doesn't exist, or that people with different skin colors have different genetic dispositions. The key line is that absurd is in the eye of the beholder.

The sorry fact that many people in this world, Western or European, display the competence and aptitude of a pile of sod is not really relevant here. The whole list boiled down to a pretty simple conclusion, that our existence is being perceived as an attack, and there are people in power who refuse to be convinced otherwise. Their culture is being consumed and amalgamated in the same process that all civilizations undergo once they have long past their zenith.

If they choose to cast their eyes to the ground in bitterness when modern culture and technology crack open the dry husk of nearly 1500 years of habitude, then so be it. Survival means the inclusion of new ideas and realities. I refuse to rationalize the damage done by the final malignant thrashings of a minority so unwilling to compromise, that they would rather doom their own then allow them to mingle with outsiders.

What the opposition does not get is that leaving the Gap and becoming increasingly integrated into the economic Core does not equal an abolition of identity. America and Europe are in the Old Core. Are Americans indistinguishable from Europeans? So it shall be with the integration of Araby.

...sounds kind of like the communists. And the terrorists. By that I mean, we say THEY are attacking OUR way of life. In truth, I'm much more inclined to believe that the emotions and conceptions of the majority of the world's people have been, since the dawn of humanity, hijacked by those in power with the foresight and lack of morals to manipulate them.

It is true that most Arab people truly believe that their society is under attack by the west. All but the smallest percentages think this, and then continue on with their lives without doing any violence.
Let's do some simple word replacement.
It is true that most Americans truly believe that their society is under attack by Terrorism. All but the smallest percentages think this, and then continue on with their lives without doing any violence.

In every society we've ever seen, there have been a few educated folks that knew what was up, a few folks that took up a sword for whatever cause consumed their world, and the vast majority of folks who just ate, drank, and were merry with their families.

The cycles of history are so rigid, and seemingly unchangeable, that it makes me tired. We are better than Them. These are the reasons. They are trying to destroy Us. This is because of Their nature. We must, with great regret, kill Them.

Queeq I thought your response made a lot of sense.

Anecdote: my friend N was born in Pakistan (he's now in his early fifties) and at the age of 16 was married to a girl from a neighbouring village by an arrengent which was actually made when he was 14 and she was 12. They had a few difficulties at first as they got used to being a couple. Their families helped mediate when they fell out (he tells a story of an argument they had when she walked out and went back to her family's house. They split up for five days. Then he went to the house and waited outside for her to come back from collecting water and they made up.

She died this New Year past, a few minutes to midnight, after a long and debilitating illness (massive stroke, after massive stroke) she was 50 years old. N had spent nearly ten years taking care of her, with the help of a couple of nieces and their two sons. They were totally devoted to each other.

After she died, a couple of months later, N, myself and another friend L, whose husband had died a month after N's wife, were sat talking and the subject of remarriage came up. N was saying it was too soon, but friends and relatives were encouraging him to find another wife as he isn't the kind of person who suits being alone. He listed some criteria as to the circumstances and kind of woman he'd consider (including that she not be young enough to have more children) when the time came. He didn't mention love.

L pointed that out to him in gentle humour and he said.

"Oh no. R was my love."

That's a single anecdote about a single couple. I have many friends and contacts amongst the Asian parts of our community and have known some arrangements which have led to love and some which have been disatrous...at roughly the same percentages as my white friends' love-match marriages. I have also known people who fell in love after the arrangement then fell out of love. It happens.

N's eldest son was married at 18 by arrengement (like most arrangements both parties had right to say no and once each party had agreed that this was the suitor they were most interested in arrangements were made. It didn't work out. They stayed together for four and a half years had a daughter and then got divorced (bear in mind this is a fairly traditional community in terms of faith, respect for parental authority, dress codes and many assumptions and gender roles.) now she lives across the road from N, with her daughter, N's son lives with him and his second wife and little girl. They all are in and out of each others houses and seem to get along quite well. She chose not to remarry, despite the fact that a divorcee from another family was interested.

Just because we can't understand the way others do things, means that we automatically superimpose our own value system onto their decisions and this can lead to a gross misreading of the situation.

We tend to think of the forced marriage when we are really talking just of arrangement. We tend to think of force and coercion where often it is merely cultural pressure, something which we are also subject to in different ways. When they look at our way of doing things, I wonder if they have in mind the aggressive violent male and the passive and disrespected female that characterises a view of an abusive marriage. The numbers are there. An outsider could easily make a case for the danger of love matches just by looking at the massive problem of spousal abuse in our culture.

That characterizes one view of an abusive marriage. There are different types of abusive marriages.

... I don't follow. What are you saying, bruce?

Not all abusive marriages are comprised of an "aggressive violent male and the passive and disrespected female". That's only one of the possible combinations/circumstances.

I guess more what I was asking is how it relates to the topic. I'm all for changing the topic (as is evident with Ending God's Tax Exempt status ;)) but I'm just making sure I'm not overlooking a point of contention.

I quoted, and was responding to, Dana's post.

Yes, but my post wasn't saying all abusive marriages are that way. I was suggesting that to look at arranged marriages as a system and conclude that they are abusive in nature, is as unreasonable as looking at the love match system of marriage and concluding the same. Much of what we see about arranged marriages in the media is actually stuff about forced marriage, but the two have become almost interchangeable in the western mind.

If someone from a culture who doesn't pracrtice love match marriages looks at our culture and how marriage appears to work, they could easily look at very real and very large problem of abusive marriages and arrive at a similar misunderstanding/stereotype of our way of doing things, as we have of theirs. The image I portrayed was that misconception/stereotype.

Of course not all abusive marriages follow that patern. But enough do that such a conclusion could be reached by someone taking an outsider's look at us.

When we think of arranged marriages, our western mindset sees something of a trap. It seems almost unnatural to have someone pick out your 'love' for you. Yet, even though we have had the concept of romantic love firmly embedded in our culture hundreds of years, in reality marriages were mostly 'arranged' by parents up until fairly recently, say the last hundred years. For most of my own culture's history marriage was something that involved parents of both parties even in the early part of the last century. The whole idea of 'asking for her hand in marriage' was a survival of that earlier approach.

In the upper classes marriages were routinely arranged by the elders ofthe community ( the 'right people' would be brought together in a dance or ball (think about the purpose of the 'coming out ball' where the debutantes were launched onto the scene in front of all the respectable young men). Aunts and mothers and fathers all conspired to bring about the 'right match' usually between two families who wished to link.

In the lower classes the parents had just as much sway over things. At festivals and so forth, elders may conspire to get the right young people together and even the many who simply met someone and fell in love would not have been able to wed unless parental approval was given.

To a culture that has arranged marriages as the norm, this will seem eminently sensible. How can someone so young meet someone and know that they will always be in love? How can they be sure this person is good for them? Big decisions to be taken by a callow youth. Far better maybe, to marry someone who has been properly vetted and chosen by people who know both parties well enough and are experienced in life enough, to make a proper judgement of suitability.

Not the way I would have it...but I can see the logic. When they look at our society and see the levels of divorce and, yes, the well publicised problem with domesic violence they probably see a system which to them looks very very flawed.

i didn't even read this thread and I'm still freakin'; sure that somebody is throwing "linguistic" around in an unsafe manner.

I think they have a legitimate point with respect to the divorce rate. However, domestic violence exists within arranged marriages as well, and there is far more cultural pressure to remain in the marriage. The positive aspects of family and cultural support can become just as negative if/when it means pressure to accept an abusive situation.

Aggh! I can't get the multi-quote function to work!:redface:

I think the main point is that we have a skewed view of their system and value our own system more highly....and they have a skewed view of our system and value their own system more highly.

Dana, I hadn't realized there was a substantial difference between "arranged" marriages and "forced" marriages. You said that in an arranged marriage, both parties have the option to say no. Have they usually met each other before, and had a chance to get to know the suitor, or would they be saying yes/no based only on a profile, including social status, family, etc? The only arranged marriage I have personal knowledge of was an Indian girl I went to high school with, who told me that her parents had already chosen her husband back in India and he would be coming to America for the wedding--she had never met him. I didn't ask her whether she could have officially said no or not, though I don't see how that choice is really useful if you can't meet what you're saying no to.

In my own experience of friends from that kind of culture, they tend to have more choice than people think. For example, a friend of mine (Imran) who's from Pakistan wanted to get married. He thought it was about time and he asked his parents to see what they could sort out. He ended up with a bunch of photos and letters from Girls and their families from the part of Pakistan his family are from. He chose a couple that seemed interesting and arrangements were made for some contact. Now, in normal circumstances where all live in the same area, this would be done via chaperoned visits, but because he's in England they ended up talking via webcam, telephone and email. He got along well with one girl and arrangements were well under way for the engagement. She came over to England for a visit, they ended up not getting on so well in person and she decided she didn't want to go ahead. The engagement was cancelled and there was a lot of upset, but nobody was forced and I believe she has now selected another potential suitor. Imran meanwhile is in contact with a third cousin from Lahore who may well end up as his wife.


That said, we have a serious problem in some parts of the Asian community with forced marriages. Young women who get taken on holiday to the old country only to find they've been set up with a husband. There are also other factors such as family pressure, where although the girl could say no, she is made to feel as if she really shouldnt and goes along with it. But really there are as many ways of conducting an arranged marriage as there are ways of meeting a love match. Sometimes the system is oppressive and forces people into a marriage they don't want. But sometimes the system is better than ours. For example: the horrible feeling of having been left on the shelf, or just not being able to find/attract a partner which many people o through in Western cultures is often mitigated by arranged marriages. Instead of choosing a partner based on the chance meeting of a likeminded soul, or the instant attraction of physical beauty which can leave a lot of people out in the cold, under many arranged marriage systems, the 'match making' is done by a third party and those people who may get left out of the marriage game in our society are more likely to find a partner and be able to have a family.

There are pros and cons to both systems, but it rests on how you view marriage: it's purpose and its role in the community. It also hinges on how you view your elders.

I know older Japanese/Americans that believe it's still ok for their husbands to take their hands off. They believe it's ok whether they've ever actually been abused by their husbands or not.

I don't think it's o.k. at all. So much for having the same ideals and values in the same country. "They" are pretty different from "me". And there are ways in which we are alike. I'm just not going to waste my days counting differences, and preaching who's a threat and who's not.

By those terms I could say that all Jap/American women are threatening my way of life and my liberty to not be dismembered by my husband. Now how stupid does that sound?


Do you know what? Nevermind. I still don't get who "us" is and who "they" is so I just need to avoid answering to the thread.

??? I haven't heard of this before :shock:. ... Can you fill us in on the cultural context/rationale??

I was involved with a Japanese Buddhist sect and a friend explained some of the social differences. She had married into a Japanese family and was noteably different from her mother-in-law for those reasons amongst others. The community of women had very strong voices and had earned the right to push people around (like me) physically. It's actually kind of funny when they push you out of their way at the "temple" with a cane or something. But those very same women are still traditionalists who still believe that women are not human and not only that....do not have a chance of being enlightened because of that. Therefore, second class, and some have submitted to this idea entirely throughout their long years. They have learned that there is great honor in taking their punishment from their husband- whatever it may be. I don't see things that way. Which is probably why I don't study buddhism with other buddhists. It's actually right inside the books that they teach and learn from. The duties of women have been taught to generations of them and they are not changing anytime soon. And I'm not going to ask them to.

I don't think I can explain it in terms of "rationale" sorry. I think it's anything but.

I was having a great time chanting and meditating when stupid me, I started to read the literature that told me I had no chance at obtaining enlightenment because of an innate evil nature that I possess as a woman. Started to sound just like christianity....but the traditions and culture had changed even less. Too severe for me.

Well- I guess it's just another thing where people trusted me to follow their traditions and be respectful of all of it and they were trying to honor me by inviting me in. It just didn't take. Still being defined as a woman by your amount of servitude, submission, and a graceful sub-sub human I just can't do. I suppose they are hoping that they can come back as a man next time. Might have a chance at enlightenment. Seeing being born a woman as Karmic retribution (like being born a goat with 3 hooves) and chanting your ass off is not the way I think I want to conduct myself.

Sometimes other cultures think that being born a woman is a divine punishment when they are sure that women are less than human. But those traditionalists are getting older and for the most part, from what I've seen just inside that group, the younger ones are not adopting those ideas. Now the younger ones will have to figure out how they are even a service there without complete submission.

Is that a cultural phenomenon or was it just in the temple? I'm thinking of an experience one of my sons had (as an adult-sized teen). He was in a museum and was physically pushed aside by the leader of a Japanese group that came into the room. There was plenty of space in the room; the leader just wanted to be where he was. He didn't know what to make of it. Is it a hierarchical thing? I suspect non-Japanese would be at the bottom of that hierarchy.

Sorry. Bad choice of words. I can't imagine a rationale either, I just wondered how it was viewed or explained.

I'm sorry you've encountered that in Christianity. I'm aware of RC writers who have advanced those ideas, but that isn't universal.

Maybe for the cosmopolitans, but not the girl that never has, and probably never will, travel outside her parents village. When she can be stoned to death for talking to a non-relative male, the "no" option probably doesn't exist.

Bruce are you Jewish?

True enough, those scenarios exist. But...they are not necessairly characteristic of the system as a whole. The Moslem world is a pretty big one. There are as many variations of culture within that frame as within ours.

Agreed, it runs the gamut from very poor to very rich.

No, not a Jew.

It doesn't just run the gamut from poor to rich...it is also subject to great cultural variance. The culture pof Pakistan is not the same as the culture of Indonesia, despite the fact both are Moslem cultures. The culture of African moslems is different to the culture of arabic moslems. The culture of western moslems is different to their cultures of origin.

Good point. Influenced, but not defined, by their religion. But that doesn't change the authors position, "they don't think like us"?

Well, the article is specifically about Arabs, not Muslims in general.

I don't think it's completely off base to suggest that a culture with very different assumptions and cultural norms might think differently to another ('theirs' being different from 'ours') But it is off-base to suggest that there is no commanality at all. There are areas of life where our cultures have commonlity and areas where they don't.

There is a commonality with all humans but is it enough to invalidate his point #12?They look like pretty big differences to coexist without remaining separated.

Not all Islamic culture subjugates women. Not all Islamic culture's seek to be governed by Islamic (sharia) law. A theocracy is entirely inconsistent with what we consider western values, but not all Moslems favour theocracy any more than all Cristians deem the Pope infallible.

In terms of the financial and borrowing sector: there are many banks and institutions in my country who offer so-called 'halal' loans, which do not contradict the Islamic teachings on usury.

Their young men are only taught by rote in religious education. If a young man does a degree at an Iranian univeristy on Persian literature and history, they don't learn it by rote., they study in the same way we do.

The concept of "Gos wills it" it is misleading: it's a saying dropped into speech at regular points. A little like a Christian saying Godwilling, or even an atheist like myself saying "God knows" or "My God".

I do not belieive 'our civilisation' is destroying their world: I believe that currently our political masters are endangering their world. Yes, they realise it, and yes, we should realise it. But the answer isn't to become even more aggressive, it's to pull back and realise the damage we are doing.

When did Middle Eastern countries really start with Islamic Law? I know Iran did in 1979 and I'm pretty sure a lot of other countries had more secular governments in 60's and 70's before the whole Cold War thing tore them apart in favor of the religious extremists.

Isn't everyone armed in the Muggle-East?
If they wanted things to change would they not just kick their government's ass?

Many are armed, but not everyone. Most arms are small arms not rocket launchers. Ever tried kicking a government's (army, police, tanks, teargas, guns) ass with handguns?

S-how most governments are overthrown. Happens all the time.

I wonder how Gandhi would have fared against Iran, instead of Britain?

That'd probably depend on whether or not Gandhi had been previously educated in the best Iranian universities and moved within the circles of the powerful and elite of Iran.

They would have killed him and all of his followers.

I'd be more interested in knowing how Britain might have dealt with Gandhi if he'd been agitating 50-100 years earlier. By the time Gandhi was agitating, the world had changed and the Empire was fragmenting.

Actually, one of the best representations of how arrangements often work within some immigrant communities is the film Bend it Like Beckham. The kind of pressure that parents often put on their children is often the result of a culture clash between the parents' tradition and their child's national culture.

If you grow up in a culture that assumes marriages will be arranged by parents and professional match makers, then you will more than likely just assume that's how people progress forwards in life from unmarried child to married adult. That same culture will most likely have stories which glamourise through tragedy and romance those who try a different route, but then we are all comfortable with the idea that much of what happens in stories doesn't apply to real life. In reality within that culture being found a husband or wife is something you have a right to expect of your parents. It is their parental duty and one which is often felt very, very keenly. I think the closest many western cultures come to that is the responsibility that most parents feel to ensuring their child's education (how many people open a college fund account as soon as their first kid is born?).

Though the system is open to abuse, (and since we live in a world where women represent the weaker and less valued sex in much of the world still, this usually means that women suffer...but the men too at times), if you were to actually ask most young people in countries where arrangements are the norm, what they thought about it, they'd consider it perfectly acceptable.

When the first generation immigrant gets to the new country though, their children are raised within two cultures and those assumptions are often weakened, or at the very least put under stress. They've been educated and raised in a society that places individualism at the core of its value system and in which an assumption that individuals are best able to judge their own emotional commitments is dominant.

Bend it Like Beckham is specific to the Sikh faith, but there a lot of similarities to other Asian communities.

Arabs.

Yes I know Bruce, but that was directed at the question that had been asked about arranged marriages in more general terms.