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4 - Manichean Tribalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2009

Laurent Murawiec
Affiliation:
Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C
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Summary

Wa la yaslamu as sharafu al-rafiu min al-adha Hatta yuraqu ala jawanibihi al-damu.

High honor is not safe from injury, Until blood is spilled over its flanks.

Al-Mutanabbi, 915—965

Honor and the Honor-Based Society

Honor — no word so insistently recurs in Arab and Arab Muslim political oratory and literature. All commune in unison under the sonorous word of honor. The concepts of honor, pride, dignity and their cognates, and their polar opposites of shame and humiliation, occupy a central position in the Muslim political discourse. Al-sharaf al-arabi (“Arab honor”) and al-sharaf al-Muslimi (“Muslim honor”) are terms so self-evident as to require no definition for the Arab and Muslim audience: They go directly to the heart and the mind because they express the soul of a society and a culture. They resonate because they are attuned to the inherent “frequency” of their culture.

On October 26, 1954, as Nasser was addressing a crowd in Alexandria, a Muslim Brotherhood sniper shot at him eight times. Nasser was unscathed — his security service had arranged the “plot.” Unsurprisingly unfazed, Nasser intoned:

O ye people … o ye free men … I, Gamal Abdal Nasser, am of your blood and my blood is for you. I will live for your sake and I will die serving you. I will live to struggle for the sake of your freedom and your dignity. O ye free men, o ye men, even if they kill me now, for I have planted in this nation freedom, self-respect and dignity. […]

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The Mind of Jihad , pp. 132 - 168
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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