A version of this essay was originally published as Rosen 2010b. I am grateful to Adam Garfinkle for his editorial advice and for the comments of David Brooks, who awarded it one of his Sidney Awards for best articles of the year.
First, let me tell you an Arab joke, then a couple of personal stories.
The joke goes like this:
There was once a policeman and he was very corrupt. He always stopped people and asked them for bribes. It happened once that he worked all day and didn’t stop anyone. He realized as the sun was going down that he didn’t have anything in his pocket, so he said to himself: “I’m going to stop the next person I see.” Shortly thereafter, there came a man riding a new moped. The moped appeared to be working fine and the man was wearing his helmet, but the policeman stopped him anyway. The man’s papers were all in order and the corrupt policeman couldn’t find a reason to ask for a bribe. “But,” he said to the man, “aren’t you scared to be riding out here all by yourself?” The man answered, “I’m not by myself, I have God and the Prophet with me.” Smiling broadly, the corrupt policeman responded, “Three of you on that little moped? You’ll have to pay a fine!”1
Now for the personal stories:
Gathered in the guest room of a Berber friend in the Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco after the Friday prayers, Hussein turned from the assembled village men and asked me: Is there corruption in America? Yes, I answered. Give us an example, he said. So, as the room quieted, I gave an example of a kickback arrangement. Ah, no, said Hussein, as the others’ heads shook in unison, that is just buying and selling. So I mentioned the Watergate scandal. No, no, Hussein replied to common assent, that is just politics. So I gave an example of nepotism. No, no, no, all voices cried out, that is just family solidarity. So, as I struggled to think of an example that would save the honor of my country for being every bit as corrupt as anyone else’s, Hussein turned to the others and said, with genuine admiration: You see why America is so strong—they have no corruption!
A few years later I attended a meeting with workers from Grounds and Buildings to discuss the nepotism rules a committee of our university had proposed. One after another the workers expressed concern. What do you mean I can’t hire a fishing buddy’skid or my nephew, said one: Often guys don’t show up on time or at all, but if the kid is my nephew and he doesn’t get here or pull his weight I’ll go to my brother who will see to it the kid shapes up. If I don’t have that kind of hook in a guy how am I ever going to be sure he will do his work? To the bafflement of my colleagues on the committee, all of the workers present heartily agreed.
* * *
The dictionaries define corruption as “morally degraded,” “debased in character,” or “the perversion of an original state of purity.” Scholars speak of corruption as “the misuse of public power for private gain.”2 But you do not have to be a total relativist to suspect that these characterizations beg many questions: Indeed, the very criteria applied often incorporate a distinctly Western concept of corruption.3 When, for example, I asked the men in Hussein’s settlement, as I have so many in the Arab world, what they mean by corruption I always receive the same answer: Corruption is the failure to share with those with whom you have formed ties of dependence whatever largesse comes your way. Theirs is a world in which the defining feature of a man is that he has formed a web of indebtedness, a network of obligations that prove his capacity to maneuver in a world of relentless uncertainty. Failure to service such attachments is thus regarded as not only unmanly and stupid but corrupt.
This is, of course, rather different from an American view of corruption as influencing the enactment of a public duty meant to be performed gratuitously. Corruption for us may also apply to a private act that tips “the level playing field.” Whether in the U.S. or the Middle East there may, of course, be subtle commonalities affecting corruption. This may be true for both parties. Debt may entail fear, as one may later have to accept less than was bargained for, or one may become obliged in ways that cannot be fulfilled. Both situations may lead to cutting some corners. So, too, the cost of favoritism may simply be passed along—“a supplementary tax in disguise”—whether it is in the mafia control of waste management and construction or the more genteel pricing of pharmaceuticals and military hardware. But it is invariably the local pattern of corruption—its connections among a wide range of distinctive social, religious, economic, and political factors—that accounts for its meaning and implications. And nowhere are the cultural features of corruption more important to understand than in our encounters with the people of the Middle East.
Reciprocity is important to an understanding of the meaning of corruption in the region but it is not the only factor raised as one listens to discussions on the topic. There is an Arab saying: “God loves those who hide their sins.” It sounds hypocritical to Western ears but for the Arabs it implies that it is only when a private act adversely affects others’ nested sets of relationships that it becomes a matter of public concern.4 Traditionally, therefore, unlawful sex was regarded as socially disruptive only if it could be verified by four eye witnesses, while a man carrying a bottle of liquor under his cloak could not be faulted since no relationships are affected as long as the forbidden substance remains unseen. The Afghans have a similar saying: “A shame that nobody talks about is no shame.” The role publicity plays in the concept of corruption underscores its capacity to disrupt. In Arabic the word fasād, which means “to dirty or prostitute,” may originally have implied something so eaten away from within that it can no longer act as a support, while a common term for a bribe, reshwa, originally meant water drawn from a well with a bucket, in contrast to the more natural flow of a stream.
Most important, however, is the concept of fiṭna, a term that properly translates as “chaos,” and through its added meanings—“temptation,” “fascination,” and “disbelief”—implies not only risky allure and political disaffection but the dissolution of all those ties that hold society together. Society is thus like an electrical grid in which it is the running imbalance of pluses and minuses, the differential charge of obligations and indebtedness, that holds the system together. To render everything identical or equal is like pulling the electrical plug, while failing to engage in the process of ingratiation and recompense is to be left socially isolated. As an Egyptian woman once told anthropologist Unni Wikan, “an unreciprocated obligation is a terrible burden to have to bear.” Indeed, the Prophet Muhammad is said to have warned that Islam might fail if the bonds of indebtedness that held his community together began to fray. Even the Quran (29:64) refers to this life as a sport and a game, in which it is the constant fluctuation of ties, regularized by keeping to one’s contracts and sustained by sharing with one’s momentary allies, that alone preserves the community of believers (umma) from premonitory chaos.
This fear of social chaos, highlighted both in sacred texts and common perception, is reflected in various usages. Ask Americans what they think is the opposite of tyranny and most will likely say “freedom” or “liberty.” Ask the same question of Arabs and they will most likely reply, “chaos.” Many proverbs support this contrast: “tyranny is preferable to chaos,” “an unjust government is better than corruption,” “to make a person live in chaos is worse than killing him.” Corruption, as the failure to share with one’s dependents, is the fearful solvent that renders social ties vulnerable to dissociation and death. And yet, it is, as Ernest Gellner suggested, that very fear of chaos that gives rise to the patterns of relationship that closet its manifestations or inform those rituals that seek to both license and contain it.5 The rage for order is thus balanced against the rage for chaos, both of which are simultaneously generative and threatening.
Seen from this perspective, forms of interdependence that Westerners would regard as corrupt are commonly regarded in the Arab world as constitutive of a workable preservation of the political order. Like his inquiry about corruption in America, it was Hussein who, in his characteristically ironical attitude toward politics, once surprised me by saying: “You know, bribery is our form of democracy.” “Really,” I said, “how does that work?” “Well,” he replied, “if the big man says ‘do such-and-such’ but someone below him is bribed to do otherwise isn’t that a check on the power of the big man, and isn’t the point of democracy that it be a system of limited powers?” Or, as the Middle East historian Patricia Crone (2003, 33) put it: “There was nothing shameful about patronage as such: it benefitted employer and employee alike. Wherever trust mattered as much as or more than skills, nepotism was a virtue, not a sign of corruption.” Indeed, to some, bribery and favoritism are essential to the working of the state. In the Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Corruption a bureaucrat tries to convince a reluctant colleague to accept gratuities:
Everyone knows that most salaries are symbolic. The state knows it. It closes its eyes. It has to; otherwise there would be a revolution. Citizens participate in whatever ways are available to them to fill the gaps. It’s normal. It’s a national consensus, a balancing mechanism. The whole trick is to do it discreetly, even elegantly if possible. What you are placing in the realm of morality and what you call corruption I choose to call a parallel economy—it isn’t even underground, it’s a necessity.6
As an aspect of the political, then, corruption highlights the inherent weakness of the state. For it is only in relations of negotiated reciprocity—relations that partake of the face-to-face contact by which people assess one’s another’s reliability and obligational bonds—that a relation of trust can be forged. By contrast, the state is the very embodiment of unreciprocity: You cannot have a personalized relationship with so faceless an entity. “Injustice can be committed only by persons who have power and authority,” said Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century, because only such figures can bar one from access to the multiple bases on which mutual indebtedness can be constructed. Figures of authority, then, must build up their constellations of indebtedness in order for people to begin to attribute to them the qualities of someone who will share benefits with his dependents and not (in the Arabic idiom) “eat” everything himself. It is the formation and maintenance of such a network that renders the exercise of power legitimate; it is the implicit understanding that only someone who services his network wisely will not find himself alone in his need.
The result is not a system of “amoral familism,” where one justifies acts outside some bounded domain that would be immoral within: The need to form beneficial ties of reciprocity wherever possible undercuts such discreet boundaries of moral behavior. Indeed, as one seeks favorable connections or raises money to grease the system those bonds of indebtedness that grant predictability to others’ behavior are further reinforced. To use another as a go-between (wasiṭa) to obtain a job or benefit is not generally regarded as corrupt, even though others, lacking such connections, are put at a competitive disadvantage.7 To the contrary, such ties are constitutive of an orderly society as they hold people together by requiring them constantly to negotiate the reciprocal obligations that are the very structure of the social fabric. That such “favoritism” is seen as vital to the social order rather than a requirement of emotion or sentiment is neatly embraced in the results of a survey taken among Saudi students who said that “exchanging benefits” is perfectly acceptable but acting as a facilitator of benefits out of “sympathy” is not.8
Corruption, as bribery or favoritism, may just be incidental to the formation of these embedded associations and actually contribute to that sense of equal opportunity through which, as one saying has it, you could be a beggar in the morning, a vizier of the king in the afternoon, and hanged in the public marketplace the next day. Thus a survey designed in 2010 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that in Afghanistan “the bribe system seems to be of mutual benefit for public officials and citizens: for example, citizens indicate that they pay bribes to avoid fines or receive better treatment.”9 Ironically, too, such favoritism contributes to transparency, since discerning or displaying connections are vital to one’s own reliability.10 Similarly, the whole process brings new players into the game, constrains players whose questionable conduct is known or rumored, and fits with those other mechanisms—from gossip and scandal to the deep-seated ambivalence toward power—that inform so much of Arab social organization and ritual.
But there is also a strong countercurrent to this ethos. For the whole basis of mutual dependence that renders many practices permissible has now been so overwhelmed by the disruption of “the game” that one has no way to preserve the constraints that used to accompany its organization. Now, you may have to give a “gift” to a clerk to produce a document, to a hospital attendant to visit a relative, or to a utility employee to commence service—and all without having a chance to form an interpersonal relationship on the basis of which you may seek some later return. Moroccans say that where once society operated through kin (nasab), and later through friends (ḥsab), now it works only through money (flus), and the more one relies on money the less one needs to service a varied array of people whose dependency is based on nonmaterial sources. Indeed, what bites deeply for many Arabs is not just that money has become the overriding medium of relationship but the sense of discourtesy that accompanies it. Where once another may have offered you tea and engaged you in an extended discussion, now people feel they are treated curtly, with no consideration for establishing an ongoing tie that may prove useful in other ways at a later time.
This loss of personalized interaction has no doubt been exacerbated by the massive movement of people from the countryside to heterogeneous cities and the state’s domination of information and resources. Sadly, corruption may also accompany increased levels of education, with poorly paid government jobs and the decline of informal mechanisms of social leveling contributing to one-off relationships rather than multi-stranded, longer-term alliances. In all of this, however, one cannot underestimate how uncomfortable people feel in so depersonalized an atmosphere, how hurt they are by the incivility, how at sea they feel when a debt incurred, say, in arranging a marriage or a loan, cannot be carried over into a different form of reciprocal “favor” at a later time. As the repertoire of relational possibilities is displaced by monetized connections frustration boils over, whether in personal anxiety or in taking to the streets in protest.
In certain respects Islamic law and social practice have developed mechanisms to address official corruption. The ambivalence to power, together with the recognition that someone who builds a superior network of allies can be regarded as the legitimate holder of power are counterweights to the failure to service one’s dependents and the temptation to “eat” the benefits of one’s position alone. Similarly, in the past, the death of a ruler might lead to a period of social strife which served to redistribute assets and afford others the opportunity to rise to power, an odd sort of check on corruption only if one fails to see corruption in terms of reserving everything for oneself. Indeed, one could point to the emphasis on procedure in Islamic legal proceedings as a kind of anti-corruption device: To require multiple witnesses appearing before several pairs of notaries and to read documents for who is speaking in them (and hence one’s general reputation) rather than whether they were drawn properly (perhaps as a result of a bribe) could all be seen as ways to limit potential corrupt practices. Yet few of these devices were so institutionalized or envisioned as mechanisms that would form part of an anti-corruption structure as to amount to a full-scale, formal system for containing the worst aspects of corruption. The question then arises whether the experience of other nations may be of some use in thinking about new ways to limit corruption.
An American army captain who served in Iraq and Afghanistan has written that to eliminate corruption in those two countries—and, one assumes, in others within the Middle East and North Africa—one must promulgate clear rules, institute a reporting mechanism to which ordinary citizens can have ready access, and constantly attend to the forms of action that the local people themselves regard as corrupt.11 Such reforms sound admirable and may even be tailored to different local cultures. But they are not self-evident or self-executing. After all, is a lobbyist who puts one in touch with a decision maker necessarily corrupt? Is help given a client to gain entry to an exclusive club an act redolent of immorality? Can one really dissociate arguably corrupt practices from the whole web of religious, social, and economic concepts in which they are necessarily embedded?12
The history of anti-corruption efforts may nevertheless be instructive. If we set aside such mechanisms as executing corrupt officials or only appointing as overseers one’s closest kin—hardly always effective in any event—the reduction of corruption usually entails an element that may be decisive. The reference here is not to the development of a civil service alone: Increased salaries may allay some rationalizations for accepting gifts, while job security and advancement in the service may hold off illicit entanglements in some cases. Nor can one rely on threats of supernatural sanction. Rather, it may be that in an increasingly bureaucratized society professional pride is indispensable to reform. Just as many of the lawyers and accountants, businessmen and educators in the Arab world would love to be able to practice their crafts without having to engage in petty bribery and favoritism, so, too, they need an independent forum in which those desires can receive expression and reinforcement.13 The rise of professional associations in the United States, for example, coincided with the civil service reforms of the early twentieth century, but they did not develop simply as agencies of the state or as NGOs that mimicked, even as they avoided, government control. Rather, professional associations were to a not inconsiderable degree built on the self-respect and pride their participants craved. They were also semi-autonomous, in the formation of their codes of ethics and the vehicles for enforcing them. When one sees lawyers or teachers taking to the streets of Cairo or Casablanca to protest a corrupt legal decision or educational policy, therefore, a good deal more than political partisanship is often at work: One is seeing this yearning to express professional pride at its moment of confirmation.
Nor is pride limited to the technical professions or the craftsmen’s associations. It is the base on which so many in the Arab world would hope to construct a civil society. Of the many attractions of fundamentalist organizations not the least is that they often have a reputation for being uncorrupt. Where government personnel may show up at the scene of a disaster granting more favorable treatment to some than others, socialists and fundamentalists frequently arrive first and distribute aid evenhandedly; where government agents may offer food parcels in exchange for votes, the Islamists may offer medical aid and food supplements as a generalized “gift” knowing that delayed reciprocity is often more effective and long-lasting. People will even choose to buy from a merchant with a long beard, assuming he may be more honest than one not dressed as an ardent believer. Purification has always been tried as the antidote to corruption, but it too may carry its own corrupting forms. Archibald MacLeish was right when he said there are two kinds of people in the world—the pure and the responsible. Pride can go either way in that equation, but being indispensable to both it cannot be ignored in either.
Hussein, too, was right to think that reducing corruption lies at the heart of a nation’s strength. But there is no simple correlation of political form or cultural construct to its reduction. Edward Gibbon, after all, called “corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty,” and those who define it as the absence of an opportunity to be treated equally would have to indicate, for example, why in some traditions not allowing a woman to be a priest or rabbi or imam should be called corrupt. To grasp that for most Arabs equivalence is of greater relevance to justice than equality, that for them it is only realistic to believe that society is better served by webs of obligation than impersonal roles, and that institutions are always defined by their occupants and not by depersonalized powers is to enter a world of enormous decency and order, even if it is not our own.14 Perhaps if we in the West attend to the longing for integrity that accompanies this complex web of relations and crosscutting constraints, we may still have a chance to form with the Arabs incorruptible ties of mutual indebtedness and moral worth.
