Medieval Afghanistan?

Matthew Gabriele is a thoughtful history professor who occasionally posts some of those thoughts over at Modern Medieval. This week he's got something good to say on the abuse of comparative history:

Is Afghanistan medieval? No.

Yet, people keep asking this question.

Yesterday (June 2, 2010), it was Prof. Thomas Barfield of Boston University, writing at ForeignPolicy.com. Barfield points out, quite rightly perhaps, that comparisons between the European Middle Ages and contemporary Afghanistan come fast and quick, most recently by the current UK Defense Minister, Liam Fox. Indeed, when looked at quickly, the religious and political situations seem quite analogous -- a decentralized power structure with several loci that have recourse to legitimately use violence, the permeation of religion into the discourse of everyday life, etc. Makes you wish that someone would study the intersection of religion and culture, doesn't it?

Anyway, after drawing the outlines for his comparison, Barfield concludes his essay by suggesting that any Western diplomats charged with helping modern Afghanistan should learn their medieval history, because "at least in medieval Europe, the centralized state emerged victorious."

This is what's called "neomedievalism" in foreign policy circles, and if you don't know about this, go read you some Bruce Holsinger. Basically, the idea is that all states follow the same basic evolutionary model that roughly maps onto the (Western) European experience -- anarchy, increasing centralization during the Middle Ages, finally emerging as strong, coherent nations in the 19th century or thereabouts. There are some problems with that.

Leaving aside the fact that my description of Afghanistan above (taken from Barfield's essay) could easily describe today's United States (think about it), and the fact that I would NEVER discourage people from studying the European Middle Ages, there are some other problems here. Let me count off a few, and I'm tired right now so I won't take too much time. I'll even bullet-point them:

1. The European Middle Ages are not a repository for all that people today consider "backwards" and/ or "barbaric." It is not a synonym for "religous" (let alone "Islamic") either. The people who lived during that age were more cultured and intelligent than you think they were, and they were more violent and narrow-minded than you can imagine. Just. Stop. Generalizing.
2. Relatedly again, there's something really patronizing about thinking that the European example has all the answers. We're not all on the same timeline. Historical context matters for the very simple reason that each situation is different.
3. Relatedly again, the narrative of European political centralization that Barfield's relying on is very old. It goes back to Charles Homer Haskins, who attended the Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919 as an advisor to Pres. Wilson, and then to Haskins' student, Joseph Strayer, who worked for the CIA and wrote the famous On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. There's been a lot of work done since then on how this model is problematic. It's almost like me looking at Prof. Barfield's Afghani tribes and using French Structuralism to explain their behaviors. Wait a minute...

That's what Barfield's doing. It's all deep structure, isn't it? The idea here is that certain fundamental, almost transcendental, structures dominate human existence and govern individuals' actions. If you understand those structures -- best evidenced, of course, in the European example -- then you can shape them to your liking. But there's a problem with that. As Barfield himself says, "[My] medieval analogy is not an exact one, of course. Afghanistan's Sunni Islam never had an institutionalized clerical hierarchy, monasteries, or religious figures with the power of a pope." So, except for the fact that the lived religious experience of the 2 wildly different times and places are wildly different, they're the same, right? Do I have to answer that last question?

Look, Afghanistan is a mess. But it's a mess because we THINK it to be a mess -- because we don't like the way the state functions. It looks "primitive" to us and that bothers us (and, to a degree, threatens our American interests and security, were the Taliban to regain power). But it is what it is. I do know, however, that turning Karzai into Louis IX or Henry II isn't really going to solve anything and could very well make things worse.

I am not sure I can go along with Prof. Gabriele all the way. I certainly agree that Afghanistan is not medieval, but although I understand why he said "Just. Stop. Generalizing." (and perhaps beat his head against the wall for good measure), I don't think that was the right response. My top two reasons I don't think Afghanistan is medieval are:

1. The area we now call Afghanistan existed during the Middle Ages, and back then it was not much like it is now, or like France or England at that time. Studying Afghanistan's actual historical development, from home of empires (instead of football of empires) to the decentralized home of Pashtunwali, might just be more relevant than trying to visualize Afghanistan as a rather slow off-the-mark Europe.
2. These pictures. How does categorizing Afghanistan as much like medieval Europe account for the fact than an independent Afghanistan, not yet occupied by foreign forces, looked like this just four decades ago? Remember that some of the people in those pictures are still alive, in Kabul, or Peshawar, or Columbia, Maryland, or Toronto. In what way have their lives been like that of medieval Europeans? Be precise.

In some ways, we don't generalize enough in history. Generalization is all too often avoided by the prudent scholars and left to daring souls who, as a friend of mine once said, "extrapolate from the last two points on the graph." Or plunk down a handy "Western" analogy on a distant culture because it is more convenient than learning the details of its own specificity.

I wouldn't say "just.stop.generalizing." Rather, "check your generalizations carefully, and don't insist your analogy is a magic key to everything." It's not always Munich in 1938, nor Paris in 1793. The dead, as Modern Medieval says on its masthead, still have something to say, but they won't do the hard work of understanding for you.

Image: Not the Loire Valley, or the Welsh border.

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