Tribalism

Less than two hundred years ago, an adorable concept called romantic nationalism emerged. It was based on having a feeling of shared brotherhood with people in your close proximity. People got all worked up, started making national flags, collecting national songs, folk stories, dishes. It’s amazing how powerful something that started as a hippie fad got when it got the right forces to back it.

The concept of nation is…. fluffy (I’m not saying that’s bad, I mean I’m a cosmopolitanist, I’m the king of fluff). It also resulted in a truckload of complicated problems, whether in the Balkans, the Caucasus, or even in our own backyard. It does have a lot of unappreciated positives: it makes some shared basics familiar to any confused outsider, it gives you one authority you can then comfortably tweak, it’s also very good for personal freedom. In a nation, as long as you’re not hurting citizens or jeopardizing national security, you’re free to live life as you see fit, theoretically speaking.

That happens because in the pure romantic definition of nation, you are a brother whatever you do. You are part of this beautiful ecology all freedom fighters love, and just by being there, you are special. This mentality is an escape from a much more powerful and primal sense of identity… Tribalism

“Oh you mean the 3asha2er… yeah they’re bad”. Bullshit! We’re all tribes in denial and we know it.

Let’s observe for a minute how tribes function:

- A common set of morals, guidelines and traditions passed on from generation to generation. You accept all this baggage since birth.

- Just belonging to a tribe gives you numerous advantages correlated with your tribe’s power and ranking, as long as you stick to the morals

-Practicing one of the tribe’s taboos will strip you of all advantages and result in your disowning and banishment

Yup, I just described any of the over dozen sects we have .

It’s cute to watch, especially in a multi-sectarian background. People you know are militant atheists go berserk when a family member dares to think about crossing a line. We might think we’re progressive, free thinkers, our own masters. Truth is, we’re all slaves to the perks of belonging to our tribes.

Break one of the golden rules, and it’s banishment! To you and your family till the fiftieth generation! Nobody will give you their women anymore, you can’t attend the tribal ceremonies. You are officially uprooted.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my tribe. I think we’re steadfast people who have been through so many hardships, and survived with our heads high. I’m connected with them. But when you start thinking about how to make your tribe more powerful, how to get them into higher positions, to support tribe restaurants and stores… I mean seriously?

This is why the region has no hope. From the ignorant to the most educated, we understand tribes and tribes only. Just look around you, examples are abundant. Any war or tension in the region, it’s not about ideologies, people lost interest in that long ago, tribalism is the only driving factor.

It’s like everyone is still waiting for the other to snap out of this. Judge yourself, how much of your lifestyle is dictated by your affiliation? And the boogie man they wave over us, is it really that scary? If there are more out than in, the punishments will get less severe, and you’ll have a community whatever you do. We just need enough people to have the guts.

Things like this, we should have gotten over them in the late sixties you know…

Amman: Impressions

Jordan has always fascinated me as an outsider. Every soundbite you get seems like a radical contradiction to the one before: A bilingual, globalized, tech savvy, highly educated, business oriented crowd responsible for some of the most successful Arab companies contrasts with a traditionalist, tribal culture notorious for one of the most archaic honor killing laws in the region. I decided to go see for myself, in hopes of understanding who our southern neighbors really are, the image of Jordan.

Amman is a wonderful, vibrant place. You get the feeling that it has been going full speed ahead ever since conception, and shows no signs of stopping soon. At least four neighborhoods were described to me as the “it” place, usually with the sentence structure ” Well it used to be that other neighborhood five years ago, but it’s here now”. It feels fresh, polished. I fell in love with the youth culture: aware, opinionated, politically correct, creative, connected, aspirational, with direction. You feel it first online, with the sheer number of successful blogs, the tweeting public figures. But when you go there, you see it on the ground as well, the kids of West Amman may be the first in the region to have a significant voice.

To put it another way, if youth culture Damascus is the slacker kid who can’t care less about grades and barely passes all his tests because he’s an expert of microscopic handwriting…

F the system bro

and youth culture Beirut is the high school sweetheart who had amazing potential but got a serious crack addiction at some point and now everybody is wondering if she’ll ever go clean again

Two more shots please

Then this is what youth culture Amman looks like:

I'm gonna grow up and be a doctor!

Jordan has invested so much in this group. It has provided them with a world class education, an amazing economic environment, and a foreign policy that works to their benefit. It now expects this group to start getting jobs locally and globally, and to form the core that Jordanian society thrives on.

Yet therein lies the problem. West Amman is not the core of Jordan. It’s a fringe, a segment at best. Too much resources are being spent on this one group, too much focus is only on them. Too many other groups are excluded. Ask yourself, during the last fifty years in which Jordan enjoyed steady financial and cultural growth, how much did the tribes socially change? How many refugee families got into a better financial state? Even East Amman, or the non-touristic cities, towns… are they in touch with the rainbow street culture?

"I'm in Jebel Amman therefore I am a snob"- Jordanian Descartes

Victims

Last week a wonderful woman was murdered in her sleep by her husband in Jordan, shot in the head several times at point blank range. The perpetrator upon arrest claimed that a local “magician” told him that his wife had been enchanted, and he had to kill her before she killed him.

The death of Reema, mother of three, would have gone unnoticed like many other crimes happening in the region. If not for the emotional and gut wrenching tribute of her blogger nephew. The blogosphere went crazy, retweets abound, polls, petitions… the whole thing. Reema turned into a poster child for women whose husbands treat them like possessions, of the dangers of primitive witchcraft, and of plain old stupidity.

Amateur psychology geeks, did you catch it? How about if I told you the family said the husband has a history of mental illness? This story is fishy from the start, I mean we all know classic sorcerer tricks, hjabs, put stuff in food, jump over the entrance and such. Which psychotic sorcerer would ask someone to murder his wife! For no motive!  I mean the guy will point back to him. Speaking of which, why is he not under arrest yet!

The husband’s statement of “I killed her because she was going to kill me” makes the case too powerful to dismiss. Ladies and gentlemen, we have very possibly a tragic case of neglected Paranoid Schizophrenia. A relatively complicated disease, it is characterized by two major symptoms: the delusion that people are out to kill him (it may be random like spies or aliens, or close people like brothers, friends, or in this case, his wife. The stories can get very elaborate), and auditory hallucinations, voices talking with him, telling him what to do. The mysterious sheikh may have been in his mind all along.

I’m not saying psychosis is the only explanation. It may also sound ridiculous to people who know the man. But for a kid behind a laptop  hundreds of kilometres away, it sounds pretty viable. I guess we’ll know once the psych results are back.

Regardless, the situation doesn’t change the woman was abused all the time, and died in a violent manner. This is still the tragic story of the Arab female. The only angle changed is the perps, us. We denied a mentally ill person treatment, acted as he is perfectly normal, wed him to an innocent girl, putting her and potential children in grave danger (you have no idea how easily those three angels could have been killed as well), when the situation got obviously much worse, we opted the abused woman stay at home with a madman, rather than “break the family”.

Our family based society is supposed to be built in a way that we have a good base, people who will have our backs when we are in danger, take us out of harm’s way. We sacrifice so much of our personal freedom for that. It’s when those mechanisms malfunction, work to hurt us instead of help, that we should look deeper into who we are.

Now who’s going to cut that diamond?

“As the taxi was cruising down the main boulevard I craned my neck as far as I can, looked up at the towering skyscrapers. I knew I was somewhere exciting, somewhere vibrant, somewhere where things happen and every day is an adventure”

Classic small town girl goes to the big city. The only change is instead of Smallville to Manhattan, it’s Aleppo to Dubai. That excerpt is my friend describing her first visit.

It’s amazing how many of us are in denial on the effect the Gulf has on our daily lives, an effect that will surely grow exponentially in the near future. Let’s forget all the Foreign Direct Investment funneling our way, or the job opportunities and remittances that keep all our economies afloat. I want to focus on two things that get less media attention, but are much more important.

1- Global Image

Burj Khalifah, Masdar, Sex and the City 2, an apocalyptic Dubai video game… The gulf is one Qatari world cup away from being the first thing the world thinks of when “Arab” is mentioned (An Israeli think-tank recently advised officials to call Palestinians Arabs, since “Palestinian” makes you think refugees, bitterness, poverty, whereas “Arab” make you think oil, SUVs and money).

I know most of us have problems with the irresponsibility, immaturity, the hubris. But if you ask me, I prefer the image they’re drawing for us over the current image we have. They’re also growing, with Qatar visibly leading the way: Al-Jazeera English which gave the Arabs a global voice, Sheikha Mozah’s “College Complex”, even the statement that the enormous football stadiums being designed will have removable benches that will be given as charity to poorer countries once the cup is over suggests a different mindset. The Gulf is steadily becoming more mature, and I like it.

2- The melting pot:

20% of the population of the Emirates only are Emirati citizens. Every community in the Middle East has a significant presence. Add to that Westerners and South Asians, and you have by far the most multi-cultural nation in a region known for its heterogeneous societies.

All the cooking ingredients are there, but no melting is going on. There’s no heat, no stirring. All the “creativity” I’ve heard till now is finding a new slur word for Levantine Arabs (Zalamehs they call us, turns out only we use that word).

But can you deny the potential? With 80% of them connected, how long is it going to take till some Jordanian blogger from Dubai decides to mix Egyptian and Iraqi cuisine, with a dash of Pakistani? How long till an alternative band in Bahrain decides to mix electric guitars with ethnic melodies? Won’t an age come where what the girls in Abu Dhabi wear define fashion in the region as a whole?

Let’s wait and see…

Public health’s “elephant in the room”

Public health in the Middle East… we have so much to work on.

Let’s start with what it means. Public health is all about awareness (fatty foods cause diabetes and atherosclerosis,  having children after 40 raises the chance of birth defects…)  and prevention (screening, early diagnosis, limiting bad habits). Public health advocates respect your freedom in general, unless your actions can hurt someone else, then it’s downright war, as all the poor smokers can tell you.

But there is an “activity”, very common in the ME among all classes of society,  which has potentially tragic consequences on the most vulnerable among us, and which many of us are oblivious to… Consanguinity “Marriage between cousins”.

Let’s start with the science:

The danger of marriage between relatives is that pesky “Recessive Gene”, which can cause many serious and usually fatal diseases. Luckily, those disorders are extremely rare, with the whole bundle affecting 3-4% of the population. That figure rises up to 6-7% in first cousin marriages, and to 12% if the offspring are the result of a double first marriage (as in the married couple are also offspring of first cousin marriages). This is no joke people…

10% of marriages worldwide are consanguineous, with skyrocketing percentages in our region. As we all know, the practice is encouraged in our culture. I have never seen its implications discussed before me, except for a casual racist remark I heard once in my life. Neither have I heard any attempt to raise awareness, except for my college pediatrician who shouts at villagers bringing children with heartbreaking conditions.

It’s understandable why the practice is attractive, the social benefits are vast. I also get why no government is attempting to tackle this behemoth. But wouldn’t you agree that this is a public health cause of utter importance? When the decisions of people can harm nobody except those who are closest to their heart, don’t they at least deserve to be aware about it? Is a long term goal of outright banning the practice ridiculous?

Please keep the comments lengthy, diversifying and personal

I am an Arab

Identity has been a huge issue for me growing up. With many “cultural camps” surrounding me, each trying to pull me to its path, I came to my own personal solution.

What makes you an Arab (or any other culture)?

I have what I call the “Opinion Theory”. You are an Arab if you have opinions -negative or positive – about everything Arab. Hummus, kibbeh, Myriam Fares, dabkehs, argeelehs, Palestine… If those words invoke a reaction inside you, then by my theory you are pretty much one of us. You might hate shawerma, or you might not stand two minutes of Fairouz, but just by having experienced this world enough, with its tastes, sounds and soul, part of you has become one with us.

To me, that sounds more logical than the descendants theory: being the son of  an Arab doesn’t make you one any more than having a religious  father gets you the blessings. Plus over 90% of us aren’t descended from the ancient Arabian tribes anyways.

Here’s the catch in my theory, I’m also a full-blooded Armenian. I have all the cultural experiences of being one checked, and I’d take great offense if someone implied that I’m not one. But can I have two identities at the same time?

To anyone who tries to pigeonhole me I answer, why the hell not! To speak conservatively I’m 99% Arab and 99% Armenian. Come to think of it, I’m also 15% British 2% Turkish 0.8% Japanese and 0.6% French (I like pattiserie).

You see, culture is something dynamic. You pick up what you can, hope to pass on some of it to your kids, what you find most important. It’s those little “idea genes”, the ones Dawkins coined memes, passing back and forth, evolving, getting extinct, going viral.

Your “heritage” is to collect and cherish those memes you love, build on them, so that your culture may prosper…