Based on extensive fieldwork, this ethnographic account of life in Pukhtun village outlines char... more Based on extensive fieldwork, this ethnographic account of life in Pukhtun village outlines characteristic patterns of exchange, marriage, politics, family life, socialization, as well as exploring notions of honor, hospitality, feud, warfare, It argues that there is direct correlation between the cultural elaboration of masculine rivalry and the ideal of generosity, and friendship
Beyond Swat: History, Society, and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Border. Eds. Magnus Marsden & Benjamin Hopkins. London: Hurst. , 2013
The paper is a description of the village in Swat, Pakistan, where the author did his fieldwork i... more The paper is a description of the village in Swat, Pakistan, where the author did his fieldwork in 1977, and a comparison with the present situation, where social ties have been eroded and taliban-like religious parties have gained authority, both through moral appeals and through force. Sources of this transformation are outlined, including the influx of impoverished migrants from Afghanistan, matched by increased encroachment by the Pakistani. The complexities of this situation are illustrated in a narrative about the relationship between a suicide bomber and a Pukhtun doctor.
The International News. Saturday Opinion Section., Jul 31, 2010
An interview conducted with me by Dr. Sher M. Khan about recent upheavals in the Pukhtun areas of... more An interview conducted with me by Dr. Sher M. Khan about recent upheavals in the Pukhtun areas of Pakistan
.” In Ethnicity, Authority, and Power in Central Asia. Eds. Robert Canfield & Gabriele Rasuly-Paleczek. London: Routledge., 2010
The Pukhtun of Swat Valley assume that persons are essentially independent actors, each sepa... more The Pukhtun of Swat Valley assume that persons are essentially independent actors, each separately responsible for his or her own fate and endowed with a God-given potential for free choice and agency. Each separate individual is believed to be motivated by a natural desire for self-aggrandizement and the accumulation of desired goods. Furthermore, all men (though not women) are regarded as equal before God and the law, and have an absolute right to assert their value as human beings deserving of respect. Given this ideology, a major problem is how authority is legitimized.
One route to power is to rule by 'natural' force. Strong men have the right to dominate. But they can rightfully be displaced by a stronger figure at any time. A second road to power is by the acquisition of spiritual gifts (baraka) through submission to a teacher.
Authority that is secular and deemed 'natural' must be fleeting and weakly legitimized, while power that is potentially permanent is held by ambivalent characters whose very essence is a refutation of Pukhtunness. We see efforts by the Pukhtun to overcome this quandary through myths of spiritual blessing and by devaluation of the saints as lecherous, mendacious, and avaricious. Yet the impasse of secular authority remains unresolved, meaning that holy leadership lies just below the surface, ready to redeem the tribesmen from their eternal battles and rescue them from external invasion by a revelation of mystical authority.
This model implies that religious figures, whether Sufis or scholars, will continue to call for purification of the faith and the ascendance of the righteous – that is, themselves; in times of stress their efforts may succeed in the short run, but will eventually be met by accusations of hypocrisy from Pukhtuns who find their deepest values threatened by content of saintly claims for secular authority. This paradigm can be profitably be extended to apply to societies in the Middle East and elsewhere which have similar beliefs in egalitarian individualism, and which share a similarly disenchanted view of the secular state.
The article concludes by illustrating this pattern in the rise of Taliban (TNSM) in Swat.
The Pukhtun of Swat in Northern Pakistan refer to Islam to justify their practice of polygamy and... more The Pukhtun of Swat in Northern Pakistan refer to Islam to justify their practice of polygamy and female subordination. However, Islamic law is far more egalitarian than Pukhtun practice. Using case studies and statistical evidence, this article argues that husbands in Swat take second wives mainly in a spirit of revenge, reflecting the endemic hostility between spouses that exists within this strongly patriarchal segmentary lineage organization in which romantic love is ideally reserved for chaste extramarital relationships. An ideology of the primacy of paternal blood underlies the misogynistic attitudes characteristic of Swat, and prevalent elsewhere in the Middle East and the
Circum-Mediterranean region.
Unpublished manuscript prepared for AAA panel , 2008
Fasting in Islam during Ramadan and at other times is not imagined as atonement for sins, nor as ... more Fasting in Islam during Ramadan and at other times is not imagined as atonement for sins, nor as suffering. Rather, as befits the Islamic ethos, the fast is pragmatic, egalitarian, and oriented toward the unity of the community as well as the salvation of the individual. The personal restraint and virtue of the faithful during the day is rewarded both by a communal celebration at night, and by redemption in the afterlife. High and low are leveled through the giving of alms, while sharing in hunger gives the wealthy a sense of the contingency of their plenty and their brotherhood with the impoverished, who, like all other Muslims, share in both the fast and the feast. Muslim identity and the fast are thus deeply intertwined, and can only be disentangled at the price of apostasy.
What are the reasons behind the inferior status of women in Middle Eastern society? Why are th... more What are the reasons behind the inferior status of women in Middle Eastern society? Why are they veiled, secluded, mistreated and degraded? For many Western commentators the answer is obvious and singular: Islam. In this paper I will demonstrate that this easy answer is mistaken, and that the cultural denigration of women is best understood as the result of what Deniz Kandiyoti has called the "patriarchal bargain." I will then trace the historical and cultural roots of this invidious bargain, which has been generally understood as an inevitable consequence of the evolution of patrilineality in situations of cultural complexity. However, the case of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, which was patrilineal, culturally complex, but yet very friendly to women’s rights, shows that this common understanding is insufficient. Alongside complexity and patrilineality, a belief in female inferiority requires a fateful linkage between blood and belonging. This linkage, I suggest, is correlated with an unstable environment and a competitive social formation where power is ephemeral and hard to maintain.
Jang (Pakistan) International Sunday Edition. Section 3. Political Economy, Oct 26, 2003
Dr. Sher M. Khan conducts an interview with me covering various aspects pertaining to Pakistan an... more Dr. Sher M. Khan conducts an interview with me covering various aspects pertaining to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11.
IInterpreting Islam. Ed. H. Donnan. London: Sage. , 2001
This paper briefly discusses the history of and prospects for an anthropology of Islam. The essa... more This paper briefly discusses the history of and prospects for an anthropology of Islam. The essay is focused on the Middle East, the Islamic heartland, and only cites works that I believe are especially groundbreaking or representative of a type. My intent is simply to inform the reader about the trajectory, contradictions, and vicissitudes of a particular scholarly tradition.
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Religious Studies. Eds. N. Smelser and P. Baltes. Section ed. D. Martin. Amsterdam: Elsevier., 2001
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Third Series, 9: 375-88, 1999
What is the connection between civil society, Islamic law, and the state? To provide some provisi... more What is the connection between civil society, Islamic law, and the state? To provide some provisional answers to these questions, I supply a capsule historical background of the complex relations between these three elements, which are analytically separable but empirically entangled, and will conclude with a short case study of their intersection in a political uprising in Northern Pakistan.
unpublished paper prepared for 1998 AAA meetings panel on fictive kinship, 1998
in the Middle East adoption from outside the immediate patriline is extremely unusual. In Islami... more in the Middle East adoption from outside the immediate patriline is extremely unusual. In Islamic law, such children, if they are taken in, have no automatic rights of inheritance, in contrast to the children of slave women, who have a full legal share in the patrimony. This paper argues that the antipathy toward adopted children is a consequence of the powerful patrilineal blood ideology of Middle Eastern peoples, which was challenged but never superseded by the communal message of Islam. This ideology insists that those descended from a common forefather have a shared substance, an equivalence made explicit in feuds, wherein the blood of any member can serve as payment for injuries done by any other. The ideology of shared paternal blood also has great impact in terms of personal and familial relationships. When purity of paternal blood is a central cultural value, then veiling, female seclusion, and enforced chastity follow. The data lead to the hypothesis of a causal correlation between status instability, a cultural ethic of competitive egalitarianism, a cultural idiom of natural difference located in blood inheritance, rejection of adoption, and the evolution of patrilineality and patriarchy.
Embodying Charisma. Eds. P. Werbner and H. Basu. London: Berghahn., 1998
Using historical data, I argue that tensions implicit in the Muhammad's charismatic enunciation o... more Using historical data, I argue that tensions implicit in the Muhammad's charismatic enunciation of an emissary religion of unparalleled purity inevitably led to the rise of charismatic saints who could serve as embodied moral exemplars for ordinary people. In the Middle East, these figures had their heyday as alternative power sources in periods of cultural and political disruption, but were gradually pressed to make greater and greater claims for their own powers and more extreme demands on the devotion and self-sacrifice of their disciples. This tendency was in contradiction to the general cultural ethos of equality and autonomy, and eventually led to the delegitimization of the Sufi movement.
However, this same trajectory did not occur in South Asia, where Sufism has maintained its hold on the public. This is partly because Sufi saints retained more autonomy and wealth in South Asia, which allowed them to offer disciples concrete rewards and also to present themselves plausibly as moral alternatives to corrupt politicians. Furthermore, the oppositional character of South Asian Islam inevitably heightened the anxiety of the faithful, and pressed them to seek personalized charismatic leaders. Finally, the hierarchical and devotional traditions of South Asian culture favor saint worship, despite the egalitarian messages of orthodox Islam. Hence, while Sufism has almost died in the Middle East, it has retained and even improved its position in South Asia.
The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner. Eds. J. Hall & I. Jarvie. Poznan: Rodopi., 1997
I argue that the prevalence of despotism in the premodern Middle East was not, as is often assert... more I argue that the prevalence of despotism in the premodern Middle East was not, as is often asserted, a consequence of the lack of a notion of legitimate government, or the absence of an independent civil society. I will contend that, to the contrary, tyranny coincided with, and was partly a consequence of, an elaborated ideal of the state and a proliferation of independent non-governmental groups characterized by the same sorts of values that are usually considered diagnostic of modern democratic citizenry: individual autonomy, social mobility, equality, competitiveness.
Although I generally accept Ernest Gellner's Khaldunian model of the oscillation between center and periphery in Middle Eastern culture, here I focus more on the central importance of the historical advent of Mohammad and on the values urbanites, particularly tradesmen, share with their rural cousins. And, where Gellner employs Hume to extend Khaldun's analysis, I make use of Tocqueville.
Based on extensive fieldwork, this ethnographic account of life in Pukhtun village outlines char... more Based on extensive fieldwork, this ethnographic account of life in Pukhtun village outlines characteristic patterns of exchange, marriage, politics, family life, socialization, as well as exploring notions of honor, hospitality, feud, warfare, It argues that there is direct correlation between the cultural elaboration of masculine rivalry and the ideal of generosity, and friendship
Beyond Swat: History, Society, and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Border. Eds. Magnus Marsden & Benjamin Hopkins. London: Hurst. , 2013
The paper is a description of the village in Swat, Pakistan, where the author did his fieldwork i... more The paper is a description of the village in Swat, Pakistan, where the author did his fieldwork in 1977, and a comparison with the present situation, where social ties have been eroded and taliban-like religious parties have gained authority, both through moral appeals and through force. Sources of this transformation are outlined, including the influx of impoverished migrants from Afghanistan, matched by increased encroachment by the Pakistani. The complexities of this situation are illustrated in a narrative about the relationship between a suicide bomber and a Pukhtun doctor.
The International News. Saturday Opinion Section., Jul 31, 2010
An interview conducted with me by Dr. Sher M. Khan about recent upheavals in the Pukhtun areas of... more An interview conducted with me by Dr. Sher M. Khan about recent upheavals in the Pukhtun areas of Pakistan
.” In Ethnicity, Authority, and Power in Central Asia. Eds. Robert Canfield & Gabriele Rasuly-Paleczek. London: Routledge., 2010
The Pukhtun of Swat Valley assume that persons are essentially independent actors, each sepa... more The Pukhtun of Swat Valley assume that persons are essentially independent actors, each separately responsible for his or her own fate and endowed with a God-given potential for free choice and agency. Each separate individual is believed to be motivated by a natural desire for self-aggrandizement and the accumulation of desired goods. Furthermore, all men (though not women) are regarded as equal before God and the law, and have an absolute right to assert their value as human beings deserving of respect. Given this ideology, a major problem is how authority is legitimized.
One route to power is to rule by 'natural' force. Strong men have the right to dominate. But they can rightfully be displaced by a stronger figure at any time. A second road to power is by the acquisition of spiritual gifts (baraka) through submission to a teacher.
Authority that is secular and deemed 'natural' must be fleeting and weakly legitimized, while power that is potentially permanent is held by ambivalent characters whose very essence is a refutation of Pukhtunness. We see efforts by the Pukhtun to overcome this quandary through myths of spiritual blessing and by devaluation of the saints as lecherous, mendacious, and avaricious. Yet the impasse of secular authority remains unresolved, meaning that holy leadership lies just below the surface, ready to redeem the tribesmen from their eternal battles and rescue them from external invasion by a revelation of mystical authority.
This model implies that religious figures, whether Sufis or scholars, will continue to call for purification of the faith and the ascendance of the righteous – that is, themselves; in times of stress their efforts may succeed in the short run, but will eventually be met by accusations of hypocrisy from Pukhtuns who find their deepest values threatened by content of saintly claims for secular authority. This paradigm can be profitably be extended to apply to societies in the Middle East and elsewhere which have similar beliefs in egalitarian individualism, and which share a similarly disenchanted view of the secular state.
The article concludes by illustrating this pattern in the rise of Taliban (TNSM) in Swat.
The Pukhtun of Swat in Northern Pakistan refer to Islam to justify their practice of polygamy and... more The Pukhtun of Swat in Northern Pakistan refer to Islam to justify their practice of polygamy and female subordination. However, Islamic law is far more egalitarian than Pukhtun practice. Using case studies and statistical evidence, this article argues that husbands in Swat take second wives mainly in a spirit of revenge, reflecting the endemic hostility between spouses that exists within this strongly patriarchal segmentary lineage organization in which romantic love is ideally reserved for chaste extramarital relationships. An ideology of the primacy of paternal blood underlies the misogynistic attitudes characteristic of Swat, and prevalent elsewhere in the Middle East and the
Circum-Mediterranean region.
Unpublished manuscript prepared for AAA panel , 2008
Fasting in Islam during Ramadan and at other times is not imagined as atonement for sins, nor as ... more Fasting in Islam during Ramadan and at other times is not imagined as atonement for sins, nor as suffering. Rather, as befits the Islamic ethos, the fast is pragmatic, egalitarian, and oriented toward the unity of the community as well as the salvation of the individual. The personal restraint and virtue of the faithful during the day is rewarded both by a communal celebration at night, and by redemption in the afterlife. High and low are leveled through the giving of alms, while sharing in hunger gives the wealthy a sense of the contingency of their plenty and their brotherhood with the impoverished, who, like all other Muslims, share in both the fast and the feast. Muslim identity and the fast are thus deeply intertwined, and can only be disentangled at the price of apostasy.
What are the reasons behind the inferior status of women in Middle Eastern society? Why are th... more What are the reasons behind the inferior status of women in Middle Eastern society? Why are they veiled, secluded, mistreated and degraded? For many Western commentators the answer is obvious and singular: Islam. In this paper I will demonstrate that this easy answer is mistaken, and that the cultural denigration of women is best understood as the result of what Deniz Kandiyoti has called the "patriarchal bargain." I will then trace the historical and cultural roots of this invidious bargain, which has been generally understood as an inevitable consequence of the evolution of patrilineality in situations of cultural complexity. However, the case of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, which was patrilineal, culturally complex, but yet very friendly to women’s rights, shows that this common understanding is insufficient. Alongside complexity and patrilineality, a belief in female inferiority requires a fateful linkage between blood and belonging. This linkage, I suggest, is correlated with an unstable environment and a competitive social formation where power is ephemeral and hard to maintain.
Jang (Pakistan) International Sunday Edition. Section 3. Political Economy, Oct 26, 2003
Dr. Sher M. Khan conducts an interview with me covering various aspects pertaining to Pakistan an... more Dr. Sher M. Khan conducts an interview with me covering various aspects pertaining to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11.
IInterpreting Islam. Ed. H. Donnan. London: Sage. , 2001
This paper briefly discusses the history of and prospects for an anthropology of Islam. The essa... more This paper briefly discusses the history of and prospects for an anthropology of Islam. The essay is focused on the Middle East, the Islamic heartland, and only cites works that I believe are especially groundbreaking or representative of a type. My intent is simply to inform the reader about the trajectory, contradictions, and vicissitudes of a particular scholarly tradition.
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Religious Studies. Eds. N. Smelser and P. Baltes. Section ed. D. Martin. Amsterdam: Elsevier., 2001
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Third Series, 9: 375-88, 1999
What is the connection between civil society, Islamic law, and the state? To provide some provisi... more What is the connection between civil society, Islamic law, and the state? To provide some provisional answers to these questions, I supply a capsule historical background of the complex relations between these three elements, which are analytically separable but empirically entangled, and will conclude with a short case study of their intersection in a political uprising in Northern Pakistan.
unpublished paper prepared for 1998 AAA meetings panel on fictive kinship, 1998
in the Middle East adoption from outside the immediate patriline is extremely unusual. In Islami... more in the Middle East adoption from outside the immediate patriline is extremely unusual. In Islamic law, such children, if they are taken in, have no automatic rights of inheritance, in contrast to the children of slave women, who have a full legal share in the patrimony. This paper argues that the antipathy toward adopted children is a consequence of the powerful patrilineal blood ideology of Middle Eastern peoples, which was challenged but never superseded by the communal message of Islam. This ideology insists that those descended from a common forefather have a shared substance, an equivalence made explicit in feuds, wherein the blood of any member can serve as payment for injuries done by any other. The ideology of shared paternal blood also has great impact in terms of personal and familial relationships. When purity of paternal blood is a central cultural value, then veiling, female seclusion, and enforced chastity follow. The data lead to the hypothesis of a causal correlation between status instability, a cultural ethic of competitive egalitarianism, a cultural idiom of natural difference located in blood inheritance, rejection of adoption, and the evolution of patrilineality and patriarchy.
Embodying Charisma. Eds. P. Werbner and H. Basu. London: Berghahn., 1998
Using historical data, I argue that tensions implicit in the Muhammad's charismatic enunciation o... more Using historical data, I argue that tensions implicit in the Muhammad's charismatic enunciation of an emissary religion of unparalleled purity inevitably led to the rise of charismatic saints who could serve as embodied moral exemplars for ordinary people. In the Middle East, these figures had their heyday as alternative power sources in periods of cultural and political disruption, but were gradually pressed to make greater and greater claims for their own powers and more extreme demands on the devotion and self-sacrifice of their disciples. This tendency was in contradiction to the general cultural ethos of equality and autonomy, and eventually led to the delegitimization of the Sufi movement.
However, this same trajectory did not occur in South Asia, where Sufism has maintained its hold on the public. This is partly because Sufi saints retained more autonomy and wealth in South Asia, which allowed them to offer disciples concrete rewards and also to present themselves plausibly as moral alternatives to corrupt politicians. Furthermore, the oppositional character of South Asian Islam inevitably heightened the anxiety of the faithful, and pressed them to seek personalized charismatic leaders. Finally, the hierarchical and devotional traditions of South Asian culture favor saint worship, despite the egalitarian messages of orthodox Islam. Hence, while Sufism has almost died in the Middle East, it has retained and even improved its position in South Asia.
The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner. Eds. J. Hall & I. Jarvie. Poznan: Rodopi., 1997
I argue that the prevalence of despotism in the premodern Middle East was not, as is often assert... more I argue that the prevalence of despotism in the premodern Middle East was not, as is often asserted, a consequence of the lack of a notion of legitimate government, or the absence of an independent civil society. I will contend that, to the contrary, tyranny coincided with, and was partly a consequence of, an elaborated ideal of the state and a proliferation of independent non-governmental groups characterized by the same sorts of values that are usually considered diagnostic of modern democratic citizenry: individual autonomy, social mobility, equality, competitiveness.
Although I generally accept Ernest Gellner's Khaldunian model of the oscillation between center and periphery in Middle Eastern culture, here I focus more on the central importance of the historical advent of Mohammad and on the values urbanites, particularly tradesmen, share with their rural cousins. And, where Gellner employs Hume to extend Khaldun's analysis, I make use of Tocqueville.
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Papers by Charles Lindholm
One route to power is to rule by 'natural' force. Strong men have the right to dominate. But they can rightfully be displaced by a stronger figure at any time. A second road to power is by the acquisition of spiritual gifts (baraka) through submission to a teacher.
Authority that is secular and deemed 'natural' must be fleeting and weakly legitimized, while power that is potentially permanent is held by ambivalent characters whose very essence is a refutation of Pukhtunness. We see efforts by the Pukhtun to overcome this quandary through myths of spiritual blessing and by devaluation of the saints as lecherous, mendacious, and avaricious. Yet the impasse of secular authority remains unresolved, meaning that holy leadership lies just below the surface, ready to redeem the tribesmen from their eternal battles and rescue them from external invasion by a revelation of mystical authority.
This model implies that religious figures, whether Sufis or scholars, will continue to call for purification of the faith and the ascendance of the righteous – that is, themselves; in times of stress their efforts may succeed in the short run, but will eventually be met by accusations of hypocrisy from Pukhtuns who find their deepest values threatened by content of saintly claims for secular authority. This paradigm can be profitably be extended to apply to societies in the Middle East and elsewhere which have similar beliefs in egalitarian individualism, and which share a similarly disenchanted view of the secular state.
The article concludes by illustrating this pattern in the rise of Taliban (TNSM) in Swat.
Circum-Mediterranean region.
However, this same trajectory did not occur in South Asia, where Sufism has maintained its hold on the public. This is partly because Sufi saints retained more autonomy and wealth in South Asia, which allowed them to offer disciples concrete rewards and also to present themselves plausibly as moral alternatives to corrupt politicians. Furthermore, the oppositional character of South Asian Islam inevitably heightened the anxiety of the faithful, and pressed them to seek personalized charismatic leaders. Finally, the hierarchical and devotional traditions of South Asian culture favor saint worship, despite the egalitarian messages of orthodox Islam. Hence, while Sufism has almost died in the Middle East, it has retained and even improved its position in South Asia.
Although I generally accept Ernest Gellner's Khaldunian model of the oscillation between center and periphery in Middle Eastern culture, here I focus more on the central importance of the historical advent of Mohammad and on the values urbanites, particularly tradesmen, share with their rural cousins. And, where Gellner employs Hume to extend Khaldun's analysis, I make use of Tocqueville.
One route to power is to rule by 'natural' force. Strong men have the right to dominate. But they can rightfully be displaced by a stronger figure at any time. A second road to power is by the acquisition of spiritual gifts (baraka) through submission to a teacher.
Authority that is secular and deemed 'natural' must be fleeting and weakly legitimized, while power that is potentially permanent is held by ambivalent characters whose very essence is a refutation of Pukhtunness. We see efforts by the Pukhtun to overcome this quandary through myths of spiritual blessing and by devaluation of the saints as lecherous, mendacious, and avaricious. Yet the impasse of secular authority remains unresolved, meaning that holy leadership lies just below the surface, ready to redeem the tribesmen from their eternal battles and rescue them from external invasion by a revelation of mystical authority.
This model implies that religious figures, whether Sufis or scholars, will continue to call for purification of the faith and the ascendance of the righteous – that is, themselves; in times of stress their efforts may succeed in the short run, but will eventually be met by accusations of hypocrisy from Pukhtuns who find their deepest values threatened by content of saintly claims for secular authority. This paradigm can be profitably be extended to apply to societies in the Middle East and elsewhere which have similar beliefs in egalitarian individualism, and which share a similarly disenchanted view of the secular state.
The article concludes by illustrating this pattern in the rise of Taliban (TNSM) in Swat.
Circum-Mediterranean region.
However, this same trajectory did not occur in South Asia, where Sufism has maintained its hold on the public. This is partly because Sufi saints retained more autonomy and wealth in South Asia, which allowed them to offer disciples concrete rewards and also to present themselves plausibly as moral alternatives to corrupt politicians. Furthermore, the oppositional character of South Asian Islam inevitably heightened the anxiety of the faithful, and pressed them to seek personalized charismatic leaders. Finally, the hierarchical and devotional traditions of South Asian culture favor saint worship, despite the egalitarian messages of orthodox Islam. Hence, while Sufism has almost died in the Middle East, it has retained and even improved its position in South Asia.
Although I generally accept Ernest Gellner's Khaldunian model of the oscillation between center and periphery in Middle Eastern culture, here I focus more on the central importance of the historical advent of Mohammad and on the values urbanites, particularly tradesmen, share with their rural cousins. And, where Gellner employs Hume to extend Khaldun's analysis, I make use of Tocqueville.