Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
On the eve of the outbreak of World War I, the Arab world had not been ruled over by Arabs for over 600 years. The tremendous power of the Arab dominated caliphate ended with the Mongol sacking of Baghdad and the end of last Abbasid Caliph. For over half a millennia the Arab world was ruled over by a succession of foreign rulers: Mongols, Mamluks, Persians and eventually Turks under the Ottoman Empire. Their liberation came in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman state in 1918, with the preeminent powers of Britain and France stepping in to carve out new Arab-ruled states. Under the auspices of Britain in particular, the region was reorganised into a form still recognisable today, often with an explicitly pro-Arab agenda (more for fear of the other regional powers than for love of Arabs, although many British officers did find their rugged and proud martialism respectable). However, this exercise in state-building was attempting to emulate the Westphalian nation-state of Europe in a world governed by altogether different forces; and ever since their independence the region has been wracked with massive instability. The fundamental difference between European and Middle-Eastern civilisation is of course religion. Islam remains the ultimate driving force in the affairs of the Middle East, the loyalty to which overshadows nationality, ethnicity or any other philosophy.
In order to truly worship the Muslim God, it is necessary to establish the universal "Islamic Caliphate": one state that all true Muslims belong to. As the one true state, reason asserts that all other states must therefore be illegitimate; and while the infidel states of non-Muslim people can be tolerated as outside of Sharia, it is unacceptable that there be multiple Muslim states simultaneously. In fact it should be impossible. Such a philosophy is analogous to the Mediaeval Christian concept of "Dominium Mundi": that there can only one true Emperor. After the fall of Rome and several centuries of turmoil, the two successor states of the German "Holy Roman Empire" and the Greek "Byzantine Empire" claimed to be the one true Roman Empire. However eventually this ideal (mostly) dissipated due to the obvious political independence of both empires and their lack of reliance of each other to survive: both could simply ignore the other. Islam, in contrast, has been unable to dismiss the theory of the universal Caliphate: a concept both Christianity and Islam take from their common scripture. The Old Testament reads: "And the kingdom shall be given to the people of the saints of the most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him." (Daniel 7:27). Similarly, and even more clearly, the Quran says: "Remember when your Lord said to the angels, 'I am going to place a successive human authority on earth.'" (Al-Baqarah 2:30). It also says that those who do not follow this righteous kingdom shall be punished: "O David! We have made you an authority in the land, so judge between people with truth. And do not follow your desires or they will lead you astray from Allah's Way. Surely those who go astray from Allah's Way will suffer a severe punishment for neglecting the Day of Reckoning." Over the several centuries of foreign rule, the Arab could simply claim that an interregnum was in place, and that one day the yoke of foreign oppression would be cast aside and the Islamic State would be reinstated. This may well be the primary reason behind instability in the modern Middle Eastern states: none are content with the status-quo and all desire a unified Arab, and eventually Muslim, state. The problems obviously arises in deciding who will unite them.
The two great opposing forces within Islam are Sunnism and Shiism. Sunnis make up most of the Arab population and are relatively decentralised compared to the Shiites, who have a strong priestly class and organised structure. Again we can see echoes of these two schools of religion in Christianity. The Shiite proclivity to a centralised church is quite Roman Catholic, as is many of their practises such as extravagant religious festivals and public acts of devotion. Sunnis are however analogous to Protestants, with each mosque being separate and unbeholden to a central authority. They follow a "sola scriptura" theology and focus on personal and intimate study of the Quran. The modern Iranian State holds itself together using its theological Shiite inclination toward authoritarianism: being one of the few relatively stable states since the Revolution in 1979, despite the collapse of many of her neighbours and Western economic embargo, all while claiming to be the one true Muslim state. Without the strong priests and central guiding authority that Shia Islam offers, Sunni majority states have often been far more prone to collapse and radicalism, with most international Islamic terrorists being Sunni. Tension between the two options for building the Caliphate, as well as the inherent weakness of Sunni statebuilding, are both contributing factors to instability, particularly in the Sunni dominated Arab world.
But one matter that both sides can agree on is the State of Israel. While any people group would protest the imposition of a new settler state within their land, Israel's overt Jewishness is a point of great contention. While historical relations between Muslims and Jews were relatively civil in the time when the Jews were weak, it cannot be denied that every Muslim state and their inhabitants today are at least anti-Zionist, if not outright antisemitic. This makes the removal of Israel an imperative (but also an impossibility with their current division and military impotence. It is difficult to see a stable Middle East with Israel a part of it, cutting the Arab world in two as it does.
To conclude, Islam is the great predominant force of instability in the Middle East, owing to its integrity to society that we as secular Westerners struggle to understand. While other factors such as foreign intervention, disagreements over resources, and demographic shift play their parts, they are always seen within a religious framework in the Middle East: Islam is at the very centre of Middle-Eastern culture and shapes everything that happens there. Any lasting peace within the Middle East, therefore, will have to reconcile itself with the conditions of Islam, or come with a marked secularisation of the region, which seems unlikely.
