Tinker Toy columns

I never understand what people whose worst fear is Sharia law--wherever it may arise--really mean when they say something could lead to "the imposition of Sharia law." It sounds like they think of it sort of like the Rapture: when the conditions are right, the prophecies are fulfilled and BAM! Each is judged and found wanting or worthy, and all of a sudden your wife can't drive the kids to school because driving is a big no, and you can't even drown your petty sorrows in a Scotch. Or maybe it's more like fairy dust: one minute you're sitting there in your nightgown, the next you're flying to Neverland, where all children are orphans, the infrastructure sucks, and nobody is allowed to kiss.

The Rapture model of sharia is one example of a kind of Tinker Toys, modular way of putting columns together that is sadly widespread, especially when dealing with complex subjects. This "instant sharia" idea is one of the Tinker Toys: it can be slotted in almost anywhere without much worry for logistics, time frame, context, etc., because it is a unit unto itself.

You see, this thought was triggered by this post by Aaron Goldstein on what might happen next in Tunisia (via Larison). In it, at one point, he writes:

The thing that has caught my attention about the events in Tunisia is the support it has received from al Qaeda. If elections are not held in a timely manner or if the results of said election are not deemed acceptable by the new administration an opportunity could present itself for al Qaeda to assert its influence and impose Sharia law. Should such a development come to pass then it could have grave implications not only in the Middle East but for the United States and the West. We could have an Afghanistan in Africa.

This is a brilliant example of Tinker Toy thinking, which I consider the worst kind of ignant, pundit-infected platitudinous thinking on Middle East politics. It's worse than the completely crazy stuff, like the thing about Hizballah and Mexico a few posts down, because at least the crazy stuff involves an actual thought process. The ingredients are totally wack, but at least there is an effort and some, um, creativity. Plus, it's pretty easy to spot.

Here, though, the writer is working with a highly limited set of ideas that came from elsewhere. To continue the toy analogy for a minute (follow me, here), if all you ever had was Tinker Toys--and not that many of them, either--there would be a limit to the kinds of things you could come up with. You could in theory go to the store and get a newer, fancier, more complex toy--by, oh, consulting an expert or doing some research--or you could play with something very basic and abstract, like blocks, and create almost anything just with your own thoughts. But Tinker Toy columns have neither of these virtues. They just keep plugging around the same limited repertoire.

Let me break it down for you here. Let's look at the last paragraph again:

The thing that has caught my attention about the events in Tunisia is the support it has received from al Qaeda. If elections are not held in a timely manner or if the results of said election are not deemed acceptable by the new administration an opportunity could present itself for al Qaeda to assert its influence and impose Sharia law. Should such a development come to pass then it could have grave implications not only in the Middle East but for the United States and the West. We could have an Afghanistan in Africa.

It's depressingly easy to translate this entire paragraph into some snarky equations and lose pretty much none of the meaning. Each equation is a Tinker Toy piece that we've all seen a million times in a million columns, most of which were likely Tinker Toy ones. The pared-down set of equations looks like this, where t = time:

Poorly understood Middle East event + (Al Qaeda connection ± relevance(x)) = DANGER
DANGER + (Elections + Perfection(x)) = Al Qaeda takeover
Al Qaeda takeover + t = Sharia law
Sharia law + t = problem for U.S. = Afghanistan

As it happens, the trusty formula has failed, because none of it actually makes any sense for Tunisia. This is what happens when you just string together a bunch of modular bits and bobs in a time-honored pattern without thinking too hard about it. Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (North Africa) is pretty negligible; their support for the revolution is because, um, they're revolutionaries. Their exhortations to the Tunisians to fight on in the good fight so they (Tunisians) can impose Sharia law later are just that: exhortations. That does not mean that they will be followed. This will really not happen. Fun fact: Tunisian feminists are talking about greeting one of the exiled opposition leaders--a fundamentalist--at the airport in bikinis. (I say rock on.) On a broader note, this Foreign Policy piece on Tunisia's history of fanatical secularism argues--convincingly, IMO--that the Tunisian political structure caved as easily as it did precisely because the revolution was absolutely not Islamist.

All that is well and good--after all, it's not a real day if someone writing about the middle East hasn't gone overboard regarding the threat of fundamentalism--but what really kicks the excerpt up a notch in Tinker Toys silliness is the nod to Afghanistan. The only way that makes sense is if you think of Afghanistan as more or less simply a cipher bearing the conditions of Fundamentalist, Uncivilized/Backward*, Scary, Ungovernable, and Big Problem For Us, which would mean anything else that bore those same conditions would be the same thing.

It's much easier to think this way when you don't know much of anything about the subject--if Tunisia is a completely non-defined cipher, it can become anything very easily, and if Afghanistan is an ill-defined cipher, then it's very easy to find parallels to it. The two places are very, very different, and no AQ In the Maghreb boogeyman can just show up, declare sharia, and change that. A much better parallel for Tunisia is probably Turkey: like Turkey a few decades ago, Tunisia has a fairly strong economic track record for a developing nation; trade, tourism, geographic and institutional ties with Europe (including strong French influence in political thought); an ingrained history of state-enforced secularism; and a strong class of intellectuals and professionals (who spearheaded the revolution in Tunisia's case). Turkey has evolved and grown since the '80s, but Tunisia is a plausible younger sibling.

The real things to worry about for Tunisia at this point are a relapse to authoritarianism, as has happened with many of the so-called color revolutions in the past few years; or, a bloody fight for a new equilibrium that leads to civil war like the Algerian Civil War. One of the things to definitely not worry about is impending, sudden sharia law.

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*Barf. I do not endorse yada yada I hate those words.