Capitalism Lives in the Anbar; On the Failures of the Islamic Economic Order
I was listening to the Iraqi version of Radio Sawa just yesterday, and they had on a fellow by the name of Isam Qasim Ibrahim, or maybe Qasim Isam Ibrahim, it doesn't matter. Anyway, this fellow has just been appointed president of the Investment Committee of the Anbar province (for those who don't know, Anbar is the Sunni dominated province holding Falluja and Ramadi). He was explaining how the Committee, essentially a government owned entity, selects its seven members and what kind of foreign investment it is looking for. And the guy is really out there trying to find anyone from any country who will invest, in everything from residential construction to plaster to cement factories.
Now the ideas were a little naive it seemed, they wanted the Committee to have 35% ownership and 35% revenue, which could work if they really were going to supply a huge amount of capital (I can't imagine they'll be doing any work and there's a hell of a risk premium), and I don't know if they've thought through it or not. Anyway, it was a radio interview, the interviewer clearly didn't know what to ask, it's Sawa, American owned, the point is to show how the country is improving and rah rah go go USA, not ask penetrating questions concerning the nature of the foreign investment. Still, they don't make things up, this guy has a position and he is working for the province, and he seems very sincere going on the show and talking about all of this.
What is really striking to me, and this is just one example, is how deeply and thoroughly Islam has more or less adopted the modern economic global order. I don't mean by this they embrace American economic values qua American economic values, clearly that's not true. Arab websites are still fulled of paranoid conspiracies, I found one on a few Arab websites just yesterday that "proved" that oil was still embarrassingly cheap because of American hegemony and force, not the free market, through comparing the price of a gallon of oil to, among other things, a gallon of Chanel (according to the site, $1.66 million). Which I guess would make a lot of sense if anyone found much value in spraying a bit of oil on themselves, and Chanel was pumping millions of barrels of the stuff out every single day.
Still, while America is an economic evil is still out there as a theory, there is also no doubt that ideas of the free market have thoroughly penetrated, even in places like Anbar. This is not a liberal area, my wife and I were almost attacked in Anbar because I did something very scandalous there--I sat in the back of the cab with her rather than in the front with the driver. This is not done in the Anbar, even your wife with you when you drive is sort of a stretch for many, she should be in the back. (That came as a total shock, while woman alone in the back of the cab while the man is up front is de rigeur in Baghdad (and Jordan let me point out, for all you Westerners that go there and don't have to put up with the crap we do as Arabs and so think you're in some Westernized paradise when all we see, regrettably, is a nation slowly being taken over by Wahhabist extremism. Slowly, but surely.), the idea that you throw your wife in the back seat of the car and leave the front seat empty when there isn't a man to take it is totally foreign to my experience, in Baghdad, in the Kurdish north, in Amman, in Cairo, in Qatar, etc. This is very conservative country. yeah they got sick of the Al Qaeda types out there, but it's all very relative, being more liberal than Usama bin Laden isn't saying much.
So when you get Qasim Isam or Isam Qasim out there, appointed by the Anbar province, seeking foreign investment, and more or less having some vague sense of how it works (local partner, foreigner does the work and gets most of the profit) and more or less trying to get investment, and you've got similar movement down in Najaf, trying to get an airport and to bring about development through investment, it's something to pay attention to. The days of Islamic economics, the ideas of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr of an independent Muslim commercial system challenging the West (which I've written about here), all of that has been fading it seems.
It's not by any means gone, as I've noted, there's still demonization of the US, and more importantly, there's the sham of Islamic finance. Sadr lives in rhetoric, we don't take interest, we loan out of generosity, and what we get is a Reward in the Afterlife, it's the West that's greedy and rapacious. But break it down, and Islamic finance is basically Western finance plus a few meaningless and pointless hoops that don't change the basic economic structure. Want to learn about that, check out my article here. And other means of finance, used in Iraq for example, that draw on similar ideas, that interest is evil, end up in many ways being more rapacious, see my hands on direct experience here (I recommend this piece the most and yes I just linked to three of my own things, but this is my field).
And of course, not everyone wants Islamic finance, or its analogs, to be this formalistic and silly. Some of us would like it to mean something, many of its proponents want it to mean something, hence my recent Forbes.com article on Islamic finance and the tension of letter and spirit. But there is a world of difference between saying "if you want Islamic finance, add something of social justice to the world's notions of commerce and finance, that's what Islam should be about" and "we have an independent economic and global system of commerce and economics that is as different communism as it is from capitalism and it comes to us from God." To the extent that that kind of revolution is called for, as Qasim Isam's remarks, or those of the governor of Najaf, or other contemporaries from time to time might show, only lives in occasional rhetoric for the most part.
HAH
Now the ideas were a little naive it seemed, they wanted the Committee to have 35% ownership and 35% revenue, which could work if they really were going to supply a huge amount of capital (I can't imagine they'll be doing any work and there's a hell of a risk premium), and I don't know if they've thought through it or not. Anyway, it was a radio interview, the interviewer clearly didn't know what to ask, it's Sawa, American owned, the point is to show how the country is improving and rah rah go go USA, not ask penetrating questions concerning the nature of the foreign investment. Still, they don't make things up, this guy has a position and he is working for the province, and he seems very sincere going on the show and talking about all of this.
What is really striking to me, and this is just one example, is how deeply and thoroughly Islam has more or less adopted the modern economic global order. I don't mean by this they embrace American economic values qua American economic values, clearly that's not true. Arab websites are still fulled of paranoid conspiracies, I found one on a few Arab websites just yesterday that "proved" that oil was still embarrassingly cheap because of American hegemony and force, not the free market, through comparing the price of a gallon of oil to, among other things, a gallon of Chanel (according to the site, $1.66 million). Which I guess would make a lot of sense if anyone found much value in spraying a bit of oil on themselves, and Chanel was pumping millions of barrels of the stuff out every single day.
Still, while America is an economic evil is still out there as a theory, there is also no doubt that ideas of the free market have thoroughly penetrated, even in places like Anbar. This is not a liberal area, my wife and I were almost attacked in Anbar because I did something very scandalous there--I sat in the back of the cab with her rather than in the front with the driver. This is not done in the Anbar, even your wife with you when you drive is sort of a stretch for many, she should be in the back. (That came as a total shock, while woman alone in the back of the cab while the man is up front is de rigeur in Baghdad (and Jordan let me point out, for all you Westerners that go there and don't have to put up with the crap we do as Arabs and so think you're in some Westernized paradise when all we see, regrettably, is a nation slowly being taken over by Wahhabist extremism. Slowly, but surely.), the idea that you throw your wife in the back seat of the car and leave the front seat empty when there isn't a man to take it is totally foreign to my experience, in Baghdad, in the Kurdish north, in Amman, in Cairo, in Qatar, etc. This is very conservative country. yeah they got sick of the Al Qaeda types out there, but it's all very relative, being more liberal than Usama bin Laden isn't saying much.
So when you get Qasim Isam or Isam Qasim out there, appointed by the Anbar province, seeking foreign investment, and more or less having some vague sense of how it works (local partner, foreigner does the work and gets most of the profit) and more or less trying to get investment, and you've got similar movement down in Najaf, trying to get an airport and to bring about development through investment, it's something to pay attention to. The days of Islamic economics, the ideas of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr of an independent Muslim commercial system challenging the West (which I've written about here), all of that has been fading it seems.
It's not by any means gone, as I've noted, there's still demonization of the US, and more importantly, there's the sham of Islamic finance. Sadr lives in rhetoric, we don't take interest, we loan out of generosity, and what we get is a Reward in the Afterlife, it's the West that's greedy and rapacious. But break it down, and Islamic finance is basically Western finance plus a few meaningless and pointless hoops that don't change the basic economic structure. Want to learn about that, check out my article here. And other means of finance, used in Iraq for example, that draw on similar ideas, that interest is evil, end up in many ways being more rapacious, see my hands on direct experience here (I recommend this piece the most and yes I just linked to three of my own things, but this is my field).
And of course, not everyone wants Islamic finance, or its analogs, to be this formalistic and silly. Some of us would like it to mean something, many of its proponents want it to mean something, hence my recent Forbes.com article on Islamic finance and the tension of letter and spirit. But there is a world of difference between saying "if you want Islamic finance, add something of social justice to the world's notions of commerce and finance, that's what Islam should be about" and "we have an independent economic and global system of commerce and economics that is as different communism as it is from capitalism and it comes to us from God." To the extent that that kind of revolution is called for, as Qasim Isam's remarks, or those of the governor of Najaf, or other contemporaries from time to time might show, only lives in occasional rhetoric for the most part.
HAH
Comments