Re: Sisera Slayer and Honor

Some disagreements of the origin of honor in MENA societies and comments

A fellow substoocker Sisera Slayer published a series of posts (I, II, III) whose objective was an overview of the Palestinian society from dispassionate POV, in order to try to make sense of some of their endemic political and cultural dysfunctions. I recommend everyone read the series before engaging with this article, as it is gonna be a form of rebuttal and expansion in some ideas. It is all in good faith and all criticism is not to attack the author but to show disagreements. This is gonna be a quick and dirty article to give an opinion that a comment box was too small to contain, so sorry for the grammar errors ^^

She¹ brings forth some very interesting ideas breaking down the Palestinian people in a very marxian way, but instead of your class being determined by how far you are from a factory, it is done by how far you are from the clannish tyranny of cousins. This gives us the concepts of Palestine I and Palestine II.

• Palestine I: This group is a small one, usually Western educated, English or French speaking elite concentrated around Ramallah (PA, NGOs, secular nationalists). A superset over the clan system. Saint Levant² and his listeners are the perfect example for this category. If you are safe in the West while brandishing the Palestinian flag, you are from this group.

• Palestine II: the unwashed masses, majority organized around armed hamulas (clans), dominant in Hebron, Jenin, Nablus, and Gaza. Hamas maps onto Palestine II and the PA maps onto Palestine I. If you are being bombed by the great and little Sheytan you are from this group.

These are semi-useful models to map reality, and the fun thing is that they also map to basically most third world countries where the elites are western influenced (Xi’s daughter is a Harvard graduate after all) and the masses are the ones following the authentic inherited culture.

This is where my agreements with the original author stop. From here on I will be mostly discussing Part III here, because it is where the author builds what I disagree with most.

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Frontiersman’s Dilemma

Before I take his model apart, let me lay out his model fairly. The author's causal story for Palestinian honor culture goes something like this: agraria and pastoralia collide along a thin strip of arable land in the MENA region due to geographic reasons. Nomadic pastoralists (pastoralia) hold mobile wealth (think goats, sheep) which makes them simultaneously raiders and targets. Thus their survival depends on a credible reputation for disproportionate retaliation. Their key unit of social organization is the clan or hamula, bound by patrilineal kinship, which might be real or fictive. Settled farming populations (agraria) adjacent to this frontier are forced to adopt the same reputational logic or be continually predated upon. The author calls this adopted stance sumud which is steadfastness in Arabic.

Over millennia, this pastoralist-farmer dynamic generates a shared cultural grammar across West Asia and North Africa: blood mediates trust, hospitality signals clan wealth, collective guilt is enforced, temporary truces (hudna) serve as strategic pauses rather than permanent settlements. Permanent peace is structurally impossible because clans maintain long memories and grievances are assets, not liabilities. Truth is subordinated to clan unity (incorrectly labeled ‘assabiyah).

He calls this the “Frontiersman’s Dilemma” which is as elegant as wrong.

Honor amongst hunter gatherers

The main issue in this thesis is that the honor complex predates the conditions that supposedly created it.

If we take the author's model, honor surges from the interaction between agraria and pastoralia: mobile wealth creates vulnerability, vulnerability creates the need for reputational deterrence, reputational deterrence becomes honor culture. A nice clean causal chain. The only problem here is that everything he describes in pastoralists seems already present in their hunter-gatherer ancestors (the Yannomanö are a good example) which is the common stage preceding both agrarians and pastoralists.

This idea comes from Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization, which documents organized violence, reputational deterrence, raiding for women (and cows!!), prestige warfare, blood feud logic (amongst Irishmen), and kinship-based collective retaliation among pre-agrarian hunter-gatherers. The full honor complex is already there, but it is driven by status competition for reproductive access and calories.

If the honor complex exists before anyone domesticates animals, then pastoralism cannot be its origin. The Frontiersman's Dilemma does not describe a context where honor logic gets created. It only describes a context where pre-existing honor logic gets applied. That is a very different claim, and the author does not seem to make the distinction.

But there is also another empirical problem other than chronology. Palestinians were overwhelmingly not pastoralists. The author himself establishes in Part II that Palestinian society is organized around fellahin hamulas. Multiple sources converge on the same figure: fellahin comprised roughly 70% of Palestine’s population in the late 19th century, with 20-25% urban and the Bedouin a minority concentrated in the Negev and parts of Gaza. The “Frontiersman’s Dilemma” describes Bedouin life but Bedouin were a minority subculture within Palestinian society, not its core.

The fellahin were settled farmers and thus their wealth was immobile: land, crops, olive groves, terraced hillsides. Their adversaries were not raiding clans from the steppe or Petra. The natural predators of the Palestinian fellah are Ottoman tax collectors, moneylenders, and rival families competing over water rights and inheritance. Not exactly the Mad Max frontier scenario the model requires.

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Immaterial or symbolic capital

So the timeline is wrong and the population historically is wrong. But grant the author both and let’s pretend honor really did originate with pastoralists and pretend Palestinians had pastoralists predating them. Even then, the second problem remains: he has the causal arrows backwards.

The author’s causal sequence runs like this: material scarcity → competition over resources → honor as instrumental reputation management. This is a materialist reading where honor serves survival and it has the usual seductive clarity that materialist readings always have. Well, to cure a materialist disease we will need to use a scary French philosopher with undecipherable books, Bourdieu.

Aside from being one of my favourite french philosophers, Bourdieu also studied the Kabyles which are an Algerian Amazigh community in exactly the MENA arid-frontier ecology the author describes. The precise pastoralist-farmer margin. His big finding is that symbolic capital is the primary currency, and honor is its language. Material wealth that is not converted into honor through hospitality, generosity, and martial reputation is worthless for social survival. A rich and honorless coward is raided while a poor honorable sidi with a fearsome name is left alone.

The author’s own scenario confirms this inadvertently. His pastoralist looks at the farmers and already reads status signals “they sell their daughters, they let their wives wander” and through the already existing honor system concludes: weak, dishonorable, therefore raidable. Their symbolic capital is deficient and then he reverse engineers the justification of survival. The raiding calculus runs on honor assessment first, material opportunity second.

The author needs the material logic to be primary but wrote a scenario where the symbolic logic is clearly doing the targeting work. He even concedes this obliquely when he admits he is presenting a Homo economicus for the sake of making the material logic “legible” and that the “actual lived experience would be much less rational.”

Bourdieu’s term for this is misrecognition: actors within honor systems experience their status calculations as if they were material calculations. The author has reproduced this misrecognition analytically presenting a status-driven system as if it were materially driven, because that is how it feels from inside the logic. He has, in other words, been fooled by the same trick that fools the pastoralist.

So basically, honor precedes pastoralists, but it is also an immaterial capital that is used to make value and all types of other judgements. Very cool, but what is honor actually ?

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Honor

Honor is the currency of social trust in the absence of institutions. This is my definition, it is a way to keep people accountable in the absence of a Leviathan so you distribute the responsibility and authority to a multitude of eyes. This of course works best in shame based societies.

Another issue I have with the article is that it treats honor as a unified phenomenon with one mechanism: reputational belligerence. Maintain a reputation for disproportionate retaliation to deter predation and survive. This is the pastoralist model, and for some pastoralists in stateless frontiers, it has genuine explanatory power. In MENA societies and specifically in Palestinian fellahin culture honor is not a single mechanism. It is more a complex of overlapping, often contradictory, retarded social codes that govern vastly more of life than warfare or political adhesions.

There are actually many honors in Islamo-Arabic culture:

• Hschuma which comes to shame or acting properly. It is most common in Morocco/Algeria and operates primarily as a restraining force. This is the closest honor equivalent to the Confucian idea of face present in China/Japan/Korea.

  The highest ideal is do not embarrass yourself and MOST IMPORTANTLY do not embarrass the family.³ Do not escalate. Do not be loud. Do not be seen failing publicly. Do not draw unwanted attention. This truly governs a lot from table manners, marriage negotiations, how you dress, how you speak to elders, how you conduct business, how you handle disagreements with neighbors. The overwhelming majority of hschuma‘s daily operation is about avoiding conflict, not pursuing it.

• ‘Ird concerns the regulation of female sexuality and family reputation through it. It doesn’t have this word in all arabic countries but it is the same shit. This is the dimension most familiar to Western observers and most sensationalized in Western accounts. This is what the honor killings of women because they were raped comes down to

• Sharaf which maps to public prestige. This is the form of vestigial honor in the west.But because we talk about clans it concerns the family’s standing in the community: their generosity, hospitality, keeping one’s word, being a reliable mediator, having successful children. Sharaf is accumulated through social competence, not through violence. A family with high sharaf is one that resolves disputes, hosts generously, and maintains extensive social networks

• Muruwwa is honor but in the chivalric, virtue sense. In classical Arabic culture this encompasses generosity, patience, forbearance, eloquence, and self-control as well as courage. The pre-Islamic ideal of muruwwa was explicitly about restraint under provocation as much as about retaliation. A man who lost his temper easily was not displaying muruwwa.

And once you see the full picture of these different types of honors, an irony emerges that the article’s framework cannot accommodate: honor cultures spend most of their energy avoiding conflict. This is the point that someone without skin in the game consistently misses. When you get to violence, this whole theater of honor has already lost, it resembles more to the Albanian Kanun than traditional Islamic clan honor.

The elaborate social protocols of MENA societies like the extended greetings, the hospitality rituals, the mediation traditions (sulha), the face-saving mechanisms, the role of the mukhtar as arbiter, the institution of the hudna exist precisely because honor cultures understood some time ago that actual violence is catastrophically expensive. The entire architecture of social interaction is designed to prevent the escalation that the article treats as the default mode.

The Palestinian sulha⁴ tradition is a sophisticated restorative justice system: a wronged party’s honor is publicly acknowledged through ceremony, the offending family makes visible amends, community witnesses validate the resolution, and social relations are restored. This is not an afterthought to the honor system. It is the honor system. The violence that the article focuses on is what happens when the system fails.

Bourdieu’s Kabylie fieldwork (more or less similar to Palestinian fellahin society) demonstrated that honor operates as a complex economy of symbolic capital involving exchange: challenges, ripostes, gifts, counter-gifts, all calibrated to maintain equilibrium. The point is not to destroy the adversary but to demonstrate that you are a player worth reckoning with, and then to settle. The man who escalates to violence when a symbolic riposte would suffice is not displaying superior honor.

For the fellahin, honor was immaterial capital serving a different function entirely: mediating inter-family relations like marriage, land disputes, debt, inheritance, water rights, labor arrangements in conditions of weak or predatory state institutions (absence of Leviathan). The Ottoman state taxed them but did not provide courts, police, or dispute resolution that the fellahin trusted or could afford. The fellahin needed a currency for social coordination beyond the nuclear family. Honor specifically sharaf, ‘ird, and hschuma was a very good currency. This also explains the Sprachbund of honor across MENA societies as well.

Also the fellahin honor economy was agricultural, not martial. Honor attached to land ownership and stewardship. The Nakba was an honor wound because of land loss, not because of military defeat per se.

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The author is still right, but by another way

So if the author’s OG honor theory does not explain Palestinian dysfunction, what does?

My opinion is that the problem the author diagnoses does not come from clannish honor culture. The problem is originally in the statelessness of Palestiniains.⁵

Here is what never strikes anyone as strange: Egypt has hamulas. Algeria has clans. Tunisia has tribal structures. Morocco has its own version of everything I described above with clans on different languages even and their own hschuma. Yet none of these societies exhibit the specific pathologies the author attributes to Palestinian honor culture. Egyptian clan feuds in Upper Sa’id do not produce a permanent war footing. Algerian Kabyle honor disputes do not generate suicide bombings. Moroccan tribal rivalries do not collapse into civilizational confrontation. The variable is the state and not honor per se.

In every one of those countries, the post (and pre) independence state performed one essential function: it established a monopoly on legitimate violence and imposed formal institutions that directly attacked clan-based dispute resolution. The authoritarian states buckbroke their societies into fitting one mold (its called Arabisation I think) and modernizing somewhat, they also increased state capacity. They didn’t destroy honor culture but layered over it. The Egyptian fellah still has sharaf. But he also has courts, police, a civil registry, conscription that mixes clan identities, a national education system, state media that constructs a national (rather than clan-based) identity. The state could (and would) not destroy the honor system. It made the honor system a social system subservient to the state, subordinated to a Leviathan that could actually enforce contracts and punish defection.

Palestine (Israeli Arabs partly too) never got this. What Palestine got was the worst possible combination: incomplete modernization that disrupted traditional mechanisms without superseding them completely.

The Mandate period, then the Nakba, the occupation each wave stripped away pieces of the fellahin social order. Sulha mediation requires a stable community with recognized elder mukhtars and continuous social relations. Displacement shattered those communities, sharaf accumulation requires land and stewardship across generations. The effects of 1948 dispossession eliminated that basis by rendering Palestinian permanent refugees in other arab states. Theit traditional honor economy that tried to avoid conflict was gutted.

What replaced it was not really a state as the PA is not a state. It does not have a monopoly on violence, it does not control its borders, it cannot enforce contracts across its own territory, it cannot prevent Israeli incursions, and its courts operate at the pleasure of an occupying power. Gaza under Hamas operated closer to a militia controlled by a fanatical clan with a tax base than a sovereign entity. Neither provides the one thing that eroded traditional clanism everywhere else in the region: credible, impersonal institutional authority.

So you get a vacuum. The old honor system is broken because the social substrate it depended on no longer exists. But no Leviathan arrived to fill the gap. Into this vacuum rushes exactly what the author describes: a degraded honor culture, stripped of its mediating institutions, reduced to its most martial and reactive elements. Clans reassert themselves not as sophisticated social coordination mechanisms but as survival units in a pure Hobbesian landscape. Reputational belligerence becomes dominant not because honor culture is inherently belligerent but because the parts of honor culture that restrained belligerence have been destroyed along with the communities they depended on.

And this reframes every one of the author’s “four pillars of narrative management” (divine favor, defanging the enemy, nurturing grievances, recontextualization of defeat) from cultural essences into political symptoms. These are not unique to clannish honor cultures and are more classical under a Hobbesian cadre, such as classical wars, civil wars or conquests. Stateless peoples maintain maximalist narratives because they have no state apparatus through which to negotiate, compromise, and institutionalize a lesser outcome. The narrative must remain total because no institution exists to implement a partial one.

The author cites Richard Hanania’s observation that Palestinian extremists have a “spoiler’s veto” and then corrects him: it is not the extremists, he says, but the entire clan-based honor structure. I disagree. The spoiler’s veto exists because there is no monopoly on violence. Any armed faction can torpedo a peace agreement when no Leviathan exists to enforce compliance.⁶ Hamas does not veto peace because of ‘assabiyah. Hamas vetoes peace because it has guns and no one (palestinian) can take them away.

The author even provides the evidence against himself without noticing it. He writes that any Palestinian leader who compromises the four pillars “will be murdered. Just like Sadat.” But think about what happened after Sadat. Egypt still made peace. The Camp David Accords held. Mubarak continued them. Egypt has been at peace with Israel for nearly half a century, because Egypt is a state. It has an army that answers to a chain of command, a bureaucracy that implements treaties, courts that enforce contracts, and a security apparatus that can suppress spoilers. Sadat’s assassination did not derail Egyptian peace because the institutional infrastructure survived the man. Palestine cannot make peace not because its leaders would be assassinated but because there is no institutional infrastructure that would survive the assassination.

This is why his model maps so poorly onto historical Palestine and so well onto contemporary Gaza. Historical fellahin Palestine operated on the complex honor economy I described above. Contemporary Palestine under its corrupt, dispossessed, displaced, governed by pseudo-states with no real authority operates on a stripped-down martial version because that is what survives when you remove everything else.

A funny detail is that part of the author’s own historical comparisons prove my own thesis. He brings up three cases where honor-based societies eventually shifted their narratives:

• Arabization across the Levant and North Africa

• the Mexica becoming Mestizo under Spanish rule

• the American South after the Civil War.

He presents these as examples of total defeat compelling narrative change. But look at what actually changed in each case. The Arabs established a state, a caliphate with courts, administration, and a legal system that absorbed conquered populations into a new institutional order.

The Spanish built a colonial state apparatus that restructured land tenure, religion, education, and legal identity across Mesoamerica.

And the American South was subjected to Reconstruction, an imperfect imposition of federal state authority over a region whose own state structures had been dismantled.

In every single case the author cites, the mechanism of narrative transformation was not “total defeat” in some abstract cultural sense. It was the imposition of state capacity. A new Leviathan arrived, monopolized violence, and built institutions that made the old honor logic obsolete as a primary coordination mechanism. The author presents these as evidence that Palestinians need a sufficiently crushing defeat. They are actually evidence that Palestinians need a competent and authoritarian state, a Hobbesian Leviathan capable of performing the institutional functions that every one of his examples required.

He even gestures at this inadvertently when he discusses the American South and notes that the Lost Cause myth persisted for over a century “with measurable consequences for millions of African Americans.” The reason it persisted is precisely that Reconstruction was incomplete, the federal state withdrew its institutional presence from the South, leaving the honor-based social order to reassert itself through Jim Crow. When the federal state returned with force in the Civil Rights era ( courts, federal marshals, legislation, institutional enforcement) the Lost Cause finally began to recede. Not because Southerners experienced a cultural epiphany (they are still working through that one). but because the state became more powerful than the clan. His best example proves my point.

The comparative evidence beyond his examples is equally damning. Every MENA society that achieved genuine state capacity saw clan-based honor dynamics recede as the primary organizing logic into a subordinate cultural register. Turkey under Atatürk, Tunisia under Bourguiba, Egypt under Nasser which were all authoritarian and all with serious failures, but all successful at the one thing that matters: making the state more powerful than the clan. The Palestinian experience is what happens when that transition gets interrupted by force, held in suspension for seventy-five years, and then diagnosed as a cultural essence rather than a political condition.

The cause as always is 1948⁷ and everything else is just downstream.

1. Idk the gender of the person, I will follow the Latin rule of the Masculine as the neutral in this post. Sorry if you are a girl ^^’

2. To remind you I am a zoomer, Saint Levant is basically me if I was handsome, levantine and with music talent. Most of his songs are English/Arabic with French.

3. I will someday write exclusively about hschuma because I think it is the aether of Maghrebi culture, every single fucking thing is tampered and cloaked by hschuma. My own mom would be saying hschuma a wldi to my substack if she could read it. It can be best understood as an extreme “what would the neighbours think”

4. It seems to be a native Levantine characteristic that predates Islam

5. I know duh but please read until the end

6. The Jews are also victims to this problem, Yitzhak Rabin didn’t die in his bed from what I remember.

7. More exactly, the cause is the French with the Dreyfus affair which pushed Theodor Herzl into Zionism as an ideology, convinced that Jews would never be accepted as themselves in Europe.