You might want to take a look at this article by Turki al-Hamad, a Saudi journalist, political analyst, and writer about the history of vengeance in Arab culture. Here’s a snippet:
What is going on in Iraq and even in Lebanon, the Sudan, Algeria, Somalia and other parts of the Arab world is the result of an antiquated, unchanging and unchangeable culture that is self-producing in an odd way and is protected by strong guards to the extent that even a religion such as Islam could only subdue it for a brief period until it contained Islam. We have become sects, schools of thought, ethnic groups, tribes, clans, customs and traditions; everybody has killed everybody in defense of Islam, while it was power, wealth, fanaticism and ignorance that stood behind all of that.
Hat tip: James Joyner
This echoes a point I’ve been making for some time: that the real enemy we confront is not Islam but pre-Islamic cultural forces that are being conflated with Islam.
John Burgess of Crossroads Arabia characterizes it as “sad, but useful readingâ€. Useful, indeed! To combat unIslamic practices by nominal Muslims perhaps a proper resort is real Islam.
Well, I think as a Saudi he’s mistaking the Gulf Arab culture for pan Arab culture. And a commonality among much traditional rural culture (voir Sicily, rural Greece, etc) with Arab culture.
That being said, the problems or challanges of the cycle of revence and the logic of clan based politics is strong in much of the region.
He gets it wrong, however, in seeing Algeria as being like Gulf or Machreq. In general the Maghreb -as part of the mixed ‘blessing’ / curse of French dirigiste rule- has relatively little of Machreq style tribalism or clan-based identity.
As for your closing, there is a strong argument, in my opinion, to be made for American policy to be less Islam phobic, and to differentiate between reasonable (if not particularly lovely) Islamism and unreasonable bloody-minded millenarianism (al Qaeda and its less violent fellow-travellers).
Rather like it was a mistake in the Cold War for the Americans to see Left – Communist (and even not be able to differentiate among Communists of more national versus millenarian flavours).