Bundling the Twigs, A Riposte:  The Organic Solidarity of Nations versus the Collectivist Uniformity of the State

      The very thought of respecting the integrity of organic nations in the State of Iraq has triggered protests that this may play into the hands of those who want to weaken the Muslim world through a strategy of divide and conquer.  This protest was triggered by my article,  “Bundling the Twigs” Forecasting the Future of Afghanistan: Confederal Regionalism and National Liberation.  This position paper supported the role of confederalism as a means to facilitate solidarity among the independent nations of the Fertile Crescent and of the world and as a bulwark against foreign exploitation and the machinations of demonic “globalization.” 

  Confederalism is a system of governance that is looser than federalism because it relies on unity from below rather than from above.  Confederal governance derives its legitimacy from its spiritual foundation, the sacredness of the human person, rather than from the monopoly of coercion in the state.  Confederalism derives its reason for being, its raison d’etre, from the higher morality of transcendent justice rather than from the positivist power of either the elite or the mob.  Civil wars have been fought over the difference between the two forms of government when the bi-polarization between the two, such as we now see in Iraq and are beginning to see in the United States of America today and even throughout the entire world, reached the point of no return. 

  One critique of the article “Bundling the Twigs” in Iraq suggested that this call for self-determination in Iraq is setting the stage for what Daniel Pipes is advocating as discussed in John Walsh’s article, “Daniel Pipes Finds Comfort in Muslims Killing Muslims,”.  In fact, the two approaches are opposites.  Pipes position is exactly what one would expect from a professional Muslim baiter who seems determined to bring about a clash of civilizations. He seems to relish the prospect of continued movement for self-determination throughout the world, whether in Palestine or the Fertile Crescent or anywhere else, because he thinks that the revolutionary nature of national liberation is inevitably disintegrative and deconstructive if it can pit nations against each other.  Such “creative destruction” fits well into the Neo-Con strategy to stabilize the world through the consolidation of a single global empire.  Pipes is merely stating the standard colonial strategy of every empire in human history.

  The flaw in Pipes’ apparent plan for the future of the world is his failure to recognize the power of human nature, especially every human being’s instinctive awareness of a transcendent source of truth and love, and every person’s instinctive search for union with it, even when the person has been educated to deny its very existence.  Pipes’ vehement denial of anything spiritual or sacred in existence leads him to deny the international legal right of genuine nations and of any lower levels of community to existence based on the sacredness of the nation’s individual members. The right of nations to a level of sovereignty that derives from the higher sovereignty of each component part, i.e., each individual, in turn, derives from the highest sovereignty of God. The Neo-Cons do not and cannot acknowledge or even understand power flowing from God through the human person to human community, because all meaning for them originates in themselves. They worship the god of their own power and wealth and their own intellectual brilliance in justifying this reversal of truth and falsehood, which is the very definition of existential evil.

  The standard imperial strategy calls for splitting nations up into artificial states, as well as for imprisoning nations into a single artificial state. Africa represents a continental size application of the splitting strategy, especially splitting single nations among two or more colonial states, whereas Iraq represents the classic example of both strategies culminating in a prison house of nationalities. Either strategy is equally effective in countering solidarity among occupied peoples, depending on the specific situation.  To assume that big states, no matter how artificial, are the best way to maintain stability is an over-simplification.  In fact, the instability in Iraq derives nor from Al Qa’ida, which feeds off of American policy like a buzzard off of dead carrion.  The instability in Iraq comes from the efforts to create stability by imposing a big central federal state and to criminalize what America’s Founders considered to be the ultimate defense of confederal rights, namely, the National Guard.
 
  “Creative destruction” is the password for Schumpeter’s “capitalism,” and it is also the password for Neo-Con conquest of the world. Creative destruction in Iraq calls for destroying the organic nations that have existed there for centuries and even millennia, foremost of which are the Kurds.

  Kurdistan was not recognized as a country after the First World War precisely because perhaps more than any nation in the entire Middle East it deserved recognition as a sovereign state. The Kurdish statesman and general, Sallahudin, liberated the Holy Land from the Christian Crusaders, and this has never been forgotten. Kurdistan therefore was split up among five different states, including the monstrosity known as Iraq.  Saddam Hussein carried out this strategy further by demographic genocide through ethnic cleansing of the Kurds from their capital, Kirkuk, in order to replace them with Arabs.
 
  Extremist critiques of confederalism as developed in the article “Bundling the Twigs” may amount to complicity in Saddam Hussein’s crime by supporting the U.S. strategy to do the same.  Prime Minister Jaafari unfortunately may have made himself into a mortal enemy of the Kurds during his visit to Turkey two weeks ago when he reportedly made a deal with the Turks to prevent the Kurds from recovering their capital. This is why the Kurds want him to be ousted, not because he has failed to enforce the ridiculous American effort to impose stability from above.

  Those who react negatively to even the idea of considering a confederation of states, each with representation in a central authority, rather than a single, unitary state, seem to reflect the brainwashing from which most Muslims have suffered during recent centuries of European colonization.  They reflect a reversal of the most basic principles of Islamic law, one of which, haqq al nasl, is the duty to respect not only the nuclear human family but every level of community beyond that all the way to civilizations as the highest level of community on earth other than humankind itself.  This also denies another basic principle of the maqasid al shari’ah, namely, haqq al hurriya, which is the duty to respect political freedom as a means to self-determination.  Furthermore, opposition to the privatization of the oil in the Fertile Crescent in equal voting shares vested for life to every person living there, as outlined in the article, “Bundling the Twigs,” constitutes the denial of another maqsud, which is the duty to respect and universalize access to private property, namely, haqq al mal.  The vehemence of the opposition to this position paper on bundling the twigs might constitute violation of the seventh of the maqasid, as they existed in classical Islamic thought, which is haqq al ‘ilm, the duty to respect knowledge, including the second level of subsidiary objectives or hajjiyat, namely freedom of thought, speech, and assembly. In fact, since all the universal principles in Islamic jurisprudence are interdependent as parts of the most sophisticated code of human rights ever formulated or even conceived, one might conclude that the extremist critiques of confederalism in Iraq violate every single principle of Islamic law. This is precisely what Daniel Pipes is doing.

  The missing dimension in such extremist arguments, as well as in American foreign policy in general, is the developing body of human rights law derived from the paradigm of justice and its roots in the spiritual nature of human beings.

  For more detail on a truly constructive solution to the turmoil in Iraq we must focus on justice as advocated by all the great world religions.  Since most Iraqis are Muslims, justice must be explained as it is spelled out in Qur’anic guidance and in the teachings of the classical Islamic scholars, beginning with Imam Ali, a.s., and extending through Imam Jaafar, who was the first of the universally recognized jurisprudents of the classical period, and ending with Imam Al Shatibi.

  Those who undertake the task of building a confederalism in the Fertile Crescent, and indeed throughout the Middle East, would do well to study the universal principles of Islamic law as explored by Ahmad al Raysuni, whose 441-page tome, entitled, Imam al Shatibi’s Theory of the Higher Objectives and Intents of Islamic Law, has just been published by the International Institute of Islamic Thought.  This appears to be the first attempt at a systematic study of the maqasid in the last six hundred years, ever since Imam al Shatibi died as the last great classical scholar in Sunni Islam. This tradition never died out in Shi’a Islam, but the lack of justice as a framework for thought among the Sunni resulted from and caused the suppression of Shi’a teachings on justice. 

  These teachings derived not merely from the maslaha or greater good of the community, which can be distorted into Western utilitarianism, but from the spiritual nature of personhood and community.  This wisdom is the principal contribution of Islam as a religion to the civilization of humankind today, just as it was of the Islamic civilization a thousand years ago.

  A broad framework for the study of confederalism in Iraq or anywhere else can be found in the article published on March 4, 2006, in http://www.theamericanmuslim.org, entitled “The Vision of Communitarian Pluralism: The Conflict between State and Nation.”  This is an updated version of an article originally published almost forty years ago in the Summer, 1969, issue of Orbis: A Quarterly Journal of World Affairs.  The world has not changed much in the last half century except that the chronic problems in the world are getting worse, which means that it is becoming increasingly important to base hopes for the future on the perennial wisdom of the great religions.