Mern Þonke

The recent testimony of Condoleezza Rice to the commission investigating the attacks on September 11 has reminded me of a phrase I saw in Richard Kaeuper’s War, Justice, and Public Order: England and France in the later Middle Ages: something to the effect of the blood feud being characteristic of mostly stateless societies. It occurs to me that terrorists are placing themselves within that paradigm by existing in the fringes of the state or in countries where the state is a very weak institution. They couch their justifications for terrorist attacks in the language of Islam, but let’s think a bit about what this means. Muslim friends tell me that one of the attractive features of Islam is the way it possesses prescriptions for how to behave in almost every situation in daily life (rather like the state in some ways—but that’s an aside). The terrorists, in seeing the drive to attack those who have wronged them in the codes of Islam, are in a sense using Islam as the “institutional” basis for their blood feud. Many Muslims would no doubt say that they are perverting Islam, but that is not a debate I want to get into here. I’m interested in the intellectual issues raised by the blood feud. The Anglo-Saxons had something to say about this, notably in Beowulf. It’s too late now to write any more (and Camille is dragging me off the computer), but I may write further about this tomorrow.