One wonders why a particular “megaculture” seems to have arisen in the Middle East where Druze, Alawi, Arabs, Jews and Persians seems to share a similar cultural mindset via diffusion, probably originally reflecting the nature of their homelands.
I am not sure what is going on here, but if you look at the region it is a pretty nasty area. Resources are poor and scarce. In resource poor regions, culture is often characterized by nomadic grazing, robbing and raiding cultures.
On the other hand, they can be extremely hospitable. This is probably also down to geography. We are talking about a desert here. In desert, what comes around, goes around. The inhospitable or selfish man is soon enough dead. Even if you are basically an opportunistic raider sort, you need to live by a desert code of kindness to strangers. Why? Due to a saintly conscience? No, due to your own needs.
Why must you be kindly and welcoming to the stranger wandering in from the desert? Because if you do not take him in, the desert is so harsh that he may soon die. Still, why take him in? Just to be nice? No. Because as you are a desert man yourself, you may soon find yourself in similar straits, wandering alone in the desert with only the kindness of strangers to rely on between you and the vultures. When you are wandering about in the desert, you want to be able to rely on hospitality to save your own life, so to return the favor in the interest of a general culture of needs-based reciprocity, you also take strangers in yourself, as you may soon be one yourself one day.
In the desert, you have your family, or you have nothing. There is no larger society. In fact, there is no society at all. Thatcher should have been born in the Najd. Yet the desert is a perversion and partial antithesis of Thatcherism. There is no real society, but you are a small-time collectivist, or you are a corpse.
Radical individualism in the desert will result in the deaths of all. This is why radical free market capitalism has gone over so poorly in the region. In this region, nobody wants this type of economics, not the Jews, nor the Arabs, the Persians, the Berbers or the Christians. Only the Lebanese Maronites, who insist that they are not Arabs and are instead Rome-gazing individualistic Europeans stranded in the Levant, promote Libertarianism and radical free-market economics. Everywhere else it is anathema. The Middle Easterner is a natural socialist.
Even the mindset of the Maronite is a conceit. Spend a bit of time around them, and in spite of all of the Europeanist posing and posturing, it becomes clear soon enough that these are children of Arabia as loathe as they are to admit it, and no quantity of statues of Mary will change that.
Hence families stay together for protection and form alliances against marauding strangers.
The desert is a cruel land, and it is not unusual for deserts to breed cruel and brutal humans. The Arabs are as harsh, unforgiving, cruel and brutal as the land in which they reside. They often show contempt for other living things – livestock get their throats slit, wild animals are often exterminated, plant communities razed – but in this way, they are only reflecting the desert itself. The desert itself kills the domestic and wild animals and wild plants that live there without even trying. In fact, the desert itself is a deathtrap, a sinkhole of murder and bones. The desert is a killer. That place isn’t even trying to keep you alive. The desert is trying to kill just about anything in it.
Anything surviving in the desert is there by wiles alone and not by the grace of the land. Hence the wily Arab, still alive and aging well in the blazing, blowing dunes.
