An Essay
By Tarek Heggy
12-26-3

        I- The Big Change in Islamic Societies. 
         
        A comparison between Islamic and Arab societies today and those of a century 
ago reveals how much more widespread the mentality of violence, has become in today,s 
societies. But the real danger lies less in the mentality of violence that has come to 
permeate many, if not all, sectors of Islamic and Arab societies than in the spread of 
the culture that is conducive to its growth and development. This culture is what 
spawns militants who promote the mentality of violence and the general climate that 
allows it to take hold. I believe five factors are responsible for the phenomenon: 
political oppression (at the hands of autocratic forms of government marked by a lack 
of democracy); the rise of the Wahhabi brand of Islam (along with the retreat of the 
tolerant model which had prevailed for centuries); the spread of tribal values which 
came with the spread of the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam; educational systems that 
are completely divorced from the age; and, finally, widespread corruption, which is 
the inevitable result of political oppression. 
         
        Possibly the most dangerous of the many negative effects of political 
oppression is that it kills social mobility, in the sense that it denies the best 
elements in society the opportunity to rise to leading positions in various fields. 
The death of a healthy process of social mobility makes for a static situation in 
which inept and mediocre elements come to occupy top positions by dint of accepting, 
indeed, of supporting, oppression and through unquestioning loyalty to their 
superiors. As oppression kills social mobility, so does the lack of social mobility 
kill competence in all fields. Oppression produces followers, not competent people, 
with the result that widespread mediocrity becomes the norm. This produces a general 
climate of despair, and from this comes the mentality of violence, with its attendant 
devaluation of the value of human life, whether of oneself or of others. In other 
words, Arab and Islamic societies in general are today caught in an equation which I 
call the equation of destruction,: autocracy kills social mobility; lack of social 
mobility destroys competence at all societal levels; lack of competence at all 
societal levels creates a powerful evil energy which is despair; despair breeds a 
mentality of violence, cheapens the value of human life and creates a desire for 
revenge. 
         
        Over the last four decades, many have written about the rising violence in a 
large number of Islamic and Arab societies; strangely enough, none of them used the 
terms competent, or incompetent, in their analysis of this phenomenon. This is as true 
of eminent professors in top-notch universities, like Harvard,s Samuel P. Huntington, 
as it is of journalists. I have never come across this key word in all my readings on 
the subject. This calls to mind a talk I gave a few years ago to MBA students at the 
American University in Cairo, in which I remarked that in hundreds of conversations I 
had had with various interlocutors about public figures, both local and international, 
the word competence never came up. It is an incomprehensible omission, especially for 
a management man like myself, who knows that problems are created by lack of 
competence while success in all its forms comes from competence. In fact, I believe 
the despair felt by so many in Islamic and Arab societies, the sense of helplessness 
and hopelessness that breeds anger then violence, stems from the fact that these 
societies are run by human resources selected not for their competence but for their 
subservience and allegiance. After all, competence, as defined by modern management 
science, is of no great concern to an autocratic political system. 
         
        Educational systems that are out of step with the age are a vital link in the 
chain of destruction. Educational systems in most Islamic and Arab societies encourage 
insularity and reinforce a sense of isolation from the rest of humanity, promote 
fanaticism and lay down, without any scientific basis, religious frameworks for 
struggles that are purely political. By invoking religious texts taken out of context 
they not only promote intolerance, non-acceptance of the Other,, and a lack of belief 
in pluralism, but consecrate the lowly status of women. Moreover, most of the 
curricula are designed to develop a mentality of answering, rather than of 
questioning,, in a world where progress and development are driven by the dynamics of 
questioning. In most Islamic and Arab societies, educational programmes fail to 
instill in the minds of the young that progress, is a human process, in the sense that 
its mechanisms are neither eastern nor western, but universal. This is borne out by 
the fact that the list of most advanced countries in the world includes some that are 
Western/Christian, like the United States and Western Europe, and others with a 
Japanese, Chinese or Muslim background (like Malaysia). There is a clear and growing 
tendency in the humanities and social sciences to disengage, as it were, from the 
common fund of human experience, the cumulative legacy built up over the ages by 
various civilizations. In a lecture I delivered recently at a British University, I 
said that in the sixties I had read most of the classics, from Homer to Sartre, 
passing through hundreds of names, languages and backgrounds. Like many of my 
contemporaries, I read these works in Arabic. The unfettered access we had at the time 
to the timeless classics of world literature linked us to humanity in a way that is 
inconceivable today, with the paucity of translations in the cultural arena in Arab 
and Islamic countries. My audience at that lecture were amazed to learn that, along 
with others of my generation, I had read Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, 
Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Racine, Moliere, Voltaire, Jean Jacques 
Rousseau, all the Russian classics, Flaubert, Balzac, Bernard Shaw, Pirandello, Albert 
Camus, Steinbeck, Faulkner and the gems of German philosophy in Arabic, translated by 
people predominantly from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, and published mainly in Egypt and 
Lebanon. Today, the gap between the minds of young people in Islamic and Arab 
societies and the masterpieces of human creativity has increased dramatically. In 
addition, the new generations have become increasingly local,, setting themselves 
still further apart from humanity and increasing the mentality of violence and its 
culture. 
         
        II - Muslims and the Clash of Civilizations. 
         
        The mentality of violence is the product of internal factors, a variable that 
has emerged only in the last four decades, and its inclusion as a constant in the 
clash of civilizations, paradigm is not only forced but belongs more to the realm of 
science fiction than political analysis. A case in point is the famous book by Samuel 
P. Huntington, whose theory is closely linked to the issue of mentality of violence. 
First published as an article in 1992 under the title "Clash of Civilizations? it was 
expanded into a book and published the following year under the same title but without 
the question mark. The significance of the omission will not be lost on the reader. 
The book was a publishing event, selling more copies and provoking more controversy 
than any other book that year (with the exception of fiction bestsellers). While I 
cannot pass the same kind of sweeping judgment against the author, his motives, aims 
and intentions as those passed against him in various parts of the Arab and Islamic 
world, I will say that I found the book to have three major flaws: 
         
        ¨ The first is that the author talks of Islam as though the Wahhabi model is 
the only Islam. In fact, Wahhabism was not a major trend in Islam until the alliance 
that took place between Mohamed ibn-Abdul Wahab and Mohamed ibn-Saud in the second 
half of the eighteenth century. Prior to that, there were ideas similar to the Wahhabi 
interpretation of Islam but they were completely marginal. Mainstream Islam was quite 
distinct from the Wahabbi interpretation of Islam and its culture. The only 
relationship between the Ottoman Empire, which represented Islam politically as a 
superpower for several centuries, and Wahhabism was one of extreme animosity. I would 
have been willing to accept most of what Huntington wrote about the probable clash 
between the West and Islam if he had used the term Wahhabi Islam, instead of Islam. I 
can only conclude that Huntington is not very well versed in the history and factors 
which led to the rise of the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. 
         
        ¨ The second is that he did not present any evidence to support his theory of 
an impending clash between the West and what he calls Confucian, societies, making the 
theory closer to fiction, specifically the writings of H.G. Wells, than to political 
analysis. It also owes much to Noam Chomsky,s equally unfounded theory that the United 
States needs an enemy to survive, and that this role was filled by the eastern bloc 
from 1945 to 1990. Following the collapse of communism, Chomsky believes Islam is now 
the prime candidate for the role! But if so, how to explain the enormous progress made 
by the United States between 1500 and 1900, without any external conflicts and without 
any clear enemy during this period of the development and completion of the American 
Dream? How to explain that despite Winston Churchill,s efforts from 1939 to 1941 to 
convince the United States to join the war on the side of the Allies, it was only 
after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 that his efforts were crowned with 
success? How could the United States have resisted the opportunity to benefit from the 
existence of a ready-made enemy which, according to Chomsky, it needed for its very 
survival? 
         
        ¨ The third is that he did not devote enough space in his book to the largest 
conflict in the history of humanity, World War II, which was fought between forces 
belonging to the same Western civilization. It was also a conflict within the 
Christian world, but nobody ever mentioned religion as a factor in this huge conflict, 
which was primarily a conflict between European Fascism and European democracies. 
         
        III- The Mentality of Violence . and the Games Nations Play! 
         
        Although I believe the mentality of violence is caused primarily by internal 
factors, I also believe that an external factor contributed to its spread, namely, the 
misguided attempts by some to use the forces produced by the mentality of violence for 
political purposes. A case in point is the support offered by the India office of MI6 
to a group that was attempting at the beginning of the twentieth century to unify the 
Arabian Peninsula under a political system deriving its legitimacy from a Wahhabi 
interpretation of Islam. The Najdi movement, known as the Ikhwan or brotherhood, was a 
prime example of this trend during the twenties of the last century. King Abdul Aziz 
ibn-Saud, founder of the third incarnation of the Saudi state, was forced to go to war 
against them after they accused him of deviating from the tenets of real Islam by 
accepting such Western abominations as radios, cars, telephones, etc. During the same 
period, Egypt saw an alliance formed between the British and the monarchy, who both 
had an interest in creating an alternative political entity, deriving its popularity 
from the popularity of religion in Egypt, to counterbalance the influential Wafd 
Party, which spearheaded the Egyptian struggle for a Constitution, a parliamentary 
life, and independence. Forged in secret, the alliance is now known to any student of 
Egypt,s modern history. An example of the dangerous game politicians play with the 
mentality of violence in the hope that they can use it to further their own ends, the 
game was played again in Egypt in the nineteen seventies and repeated by the United 
States in Afghanistan. All these cases illustrate how an external factor helped the 
mentality of violence reach such a level of political and military growth. Had it not 
been for the Cold War and for the short-sighted belief by some that religion could be 
used as a winning card in the confrontation, the mentality of violence could never 
have reached its present proportions. Thus although it is largely a product of 
internal factors like political oppression, lack of social mobility, disappearance of 
competence, prevalence of despair, reinforced by obsolete educational and information 
systems, the mentality of violence was given a huge boost by an external factor which 
can only be described as the greatest miscalculation of the twentieth century. 
         
        IV- Implications of the Cairo/Al-Dir,iyah Confrontation. 
         
        In the second decade of the nineteenth century, Mohamed Ali, who introduced 
Egypt and the entire region to the modern age, sent a huge army to the Arabian 
Peninsula. Led first by the Egyptian ruler,s son Tousson then by his son Ibrahim, the 
army had as its objective the destruction of a newly established state in the Eastern 
Province of the Arabian Peninsula. Based in Najd, it was governed according to the 
strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. In 1818, Ibrahim Pasha defeated the enemy, 
destroyed their capital, Al-Dir,iyah, and captured their leader, who was later 
executed in Istanbul. The war was an expression of the confrontation between two very 
different models of Islam: the Egyptian-Turkish model, based on an understanding of 
Islam that was shared by the Muslims of the Levant on one side versus the Wahhabi 
model on the other. But although the moderate, tolerant, mainstream version of Islam, 
which accepted to coexist in peace with others and was not pathologically opposed to 
progress and modernity, emerged victorious in that particular round of its 
confrontation with the forces of obscurantism, it was later forced to retreat before 
the internal factors I have previously mentioned, namely, oppression, absence of 
social mobility, spread of incompetence, despair, reactionary educational systems and 
corruption. 
         
        As to the other version of Islam, it found unprecedented opportunities to 
spread its uncompromising message to every corner of the world. International 
conditions (and lack of vision) allowed what had once been an obscure sect confined 
behind the sand dunes of Najd to impose itself on the world stage and boldly proclaim 
its brand of Islam as the one and only true Islam. As the drama played out, some of 
the spectators chose to look the other way because the sword-wielding hero of the 
piece was playing the role required of him at the time. Thus they failed to realize 
that the hero was no longer sticking to the script set for him, and was now playing a 
much more central and dangerous role. 
         
        V- A Movement Bred in the Isolation of the Desert. 
         
        The man who founded Wahhabism was not a theologian but a proselyter who was 
determined to convert the faithful to his harsh brand of Islam. Intellectually close 
to the dialectical Islamic theologians who asserted the primacy of tradition (naql) 
over reason (aql), Mohamed ibn-Abdul Wahab was a disciple of ibn-Taymiyah, a strict 
traditionalist who allowed little scope for reason or independent thinking. He was 
also a product of his geographical environment, a remote outpost of history. Unlike 
Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, where ancient civilizations had flourished and 
made their mark on human history, or places like Dubai and Hijaz, which lay on trade 
routes and dealt extensively with the outside world, the desert of Najd in the Eastern 
Province of what is now Saudi Arabia had no civilization to speak of before Islam. Nor 
did it ever become a cultural centre like the capitals of the Caliphate, Medina, 
Damascus and Baghdad. Thanks to its arid, barren landscape, Najd remained a cultural 
backwater, its sole contribution to the arts a traditional form of poetry that spoke 
of narrow tribal matters. 
         
        The harsh and unforgiving environment in which the Najdis lived explains why 
Mohamed ibn-Abdul Wahab found a receptive audience for the equally harsh and 
unforgiving brand of Islam he preached. The same environment that produced the founder 
of Wahhabism later produced the radical Ikhwan movement which challenged the authority 
of King Abdul Aziz ibn-Saud. In the nineteen twenties, the king took on the Ikhwan, 
who were openly accusing him of deviating from the true faith. When he returned to 
Riyadh after joining Hijaz to his kingdom, the Ikhwan said he had left on a camel and 
come back in an American car! This was just one of many clashes between the movement 
and the king over such issues as whether the radio was sinful or the telephone an 
invention of the devil, in short, over any of the fruits of modernity which threatened 
their fundamentalist vision of the world. It is a vision that can only be understood 
by studying what is known as the secret sects of Islam (radical fringe movements that 
never became part of mainstream Islam), as well as the message of Mohamed ibn-Abdul 
Wahab, the product of many factors, including the sociological and geopolitical 
environment of the deserts of Najd. These factors allowed the Wahhabis, after they 
invaded Hijaz, to impose their austere understanding of religion throughout the 
Arabian Peninsula. Among other things, they banned headstones and any structures 
identifying burial sites, insisting on unmarked graves flush with the land. They 
combated Sufism in Mecca and elsewhere as contrary to the teachings of Islam. They 
even entered into an armed clash with the Egyptian mahmil, a splendidly decorated 
litter on which the Egyptians sent a new cover for the Ka,bah every year. The mahmil 
ceremony was a merry occasion celebrated by the Egyptians with their traditional love 
of music, dancing and revelry. For the Najdis, who had launched their puritanical 
revival movement to purge Islam of what they saw as deviations from the straight and 
true path of orthodoxy, such unseemly displays of levity could not be tolerated. 
         
        What I want to cast light on here is that, throughout its history, the desert 
wasteland of the Arabian Peninsula,s Eastern Province had suffered greatly from its 
geography. However, it contained the richest oil fields and, following the oil price 
boom that turned the desert kingdom into a major financial power, it was inevitable 
that this part of the world should try and market its ideas. This it did with 
missionary zeal in the second half of the twentieth century. With a virtually endless 
supply of funds at their disposal, the Wahhabis were able to successfully propagate 
their model of Islam throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Disillusioned populations, 
facing massive internal problems caused by political oppression, lack of social 
mobility, widespread corruption, institutions run without any competence and 
deteriorating educational systems were easy prey, and mainstream Islam gradually lost 
ground to the austere, puritanical Wahhabi model that was now presenting itself as the 
one and only true Islam. 
         
        In short, while under non-Wahhabi Islam the Muslim communities in Egypt, 
Syria, Lebanon and Turkey were forward-looking, in tune with the times and living in 
harmony with large Christian and Jewish communities, it is inconceivable that 
Wahhabism would have tolerated the kind of cosmopolitan and tolerant societies that 
flourished in Alexandria, Cairo, Istanbul, Beirut, Damascus and Aleppo at the turn of 
the twentieth century. On the contrary, the Najdi version of Islam exhorts its 
followers to remain in a constant confrontation with others, with the age and with 
modernity. Under Wahhabism, the word jihad is interpreted as the need to carry a sword 
at all times, although mainstream Islam for centuries understood it as requiring them 
to resort to force only to defend themselves from outside aggression. Even 
semantically, the word jihad is totally unrelated to the notion of armed violence. 
Mainstream Islam also accepted the possibility of Muslims merging with the rest of 
humanity (especially before the chauvinistic tribal culture of Najd gained ground), 
while Wahhabism regards this as impossible and unacceptable. Indeed, it is regarded as 
synonymous with subservience, a term that is widely used by those whose thinking is 
shaped by the Wahabbi model of Islam. If Noam Chomsky,s theory is valid, it applies 
just as much to the Wahhabis who need a strong enemy in order to survive. 
         
        VI- The Fall of the Oppressors and the Emergence of the Sword. 
         
        Over the last few decades, many Islamic societies were subjected to various 
types of despots who ruled their countries with an iron fist in the context of 
widespread autocracy. This led in many cases to the downward spiral I described 
previously. Oppression killed social mobility; the absence of social mobility led to a 
widespread lack of competence; lack of competence resulted in the collapse of all 
institutions; this engendered feelings of despair and rage out of which was born the 
mentality of violence, that came to permeate many of these societies. The problem is 
that no sooner are there changes that cause the downfall of the despotic ruler in 
these societies (Suharto in Indonesia, Saddam Hussein in Iraq) than there emerge on 
the scene symbols of the Wahabbi interpretation of Islam putting themselves forward as 
saviours! Some people are fooled into thinking that they are the only political power 
produced by those societies. There is a compound error here: what produces this state 
of affairs is the despotic rulers and their autocratic regimes that kill social 
mobility, prevent the growth of civil society, generalize incompetence and divide 
political life into two levels: a level above ground (which belongs exclusively to the 
rulers and their cohorts) and a level below ground (which belongs to the symbols of 
Wahabbi Islam, who receive the best possible training in the art of growing 
underground in secrecy). As soon as the despot is removed, the only political force 
which existed underground emerges and, in the absence of civil society, the lack of 
social mobility and the prevalence of incompetence, the stage is set for a new set of 
oppressors who are at the same time incompetent. They will lead their societies to 
greater depths of backwardness, distance them still further from the modern age and 
sink them even deeper into social problems. 
         
        In short, both sets of oppressors, those operating above ground and those 
belonging to clandestine underground organizations, are products of the equation to 
which I have repeatedly returned in this article: an autocratic political system that 
paralyses social mobility and allows incompetent elements to take over the running of 
society,s institutions, thereby causing standards to deteriorate, despair to prevail 
and the mentality of violence to take hold. The educational and media institutions are 
incapable of righting this tragedy, because they too have been corrupted at the hands 
of incompetent elements. A valid question here is why this is the only model that 
emerges whenever an oppressive regime falls in a Muslim or Arab country. The answer is 
simply that this is a natural result of the widespread despair felt by those living 
under an autocratic regime that allows no political activities above ground, so that 
the only organizations that can survive in its shadow are those operating underground. 
The cure must start with the first link in the chain, not the last. 
         
        VII- Muslim Societies a Hundred Years Ago. 
         
        To disprove the allegation that the violent groups and trends which turn their 
backs on modernity and call for a return to the Middle Ages are the true 
representatives of Islam, one has only to consider how some of the principal Islamic 
societies were functioning at the turn of the twentieth century. Countries like Egypt, 
Greater Syria (which included Lebanon at the time) and Turkey were models of 
tolerance, their majority Muslim populations living peacefully with minorities of 
other faiths. Famously cosmopolitan cities like Alexandria, Beirut and Cairo were home 
to a wide diversity of minorities. Acceptance of the Other, and of modernity, as well 
as a hunger for the great masterpieces of human creativity were features shared by all 
these societies. Intellectuals translated Homer, the plays of Ancient Greece, the best 
of modern European literature and the great philosophers like Descartes, Jean Jacques 
Rousseau, Diderot, Locke, Hobbs, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Although 
they were in complete harmony with the scientific, philosophical and artistic 
consequences of the Renaissance, they retained their identity as Egyptians, Turks and 
Syrians. It was a time when Muslims saw no contradiction between their religious faith 
and their enthusiasm for the material and cultural fruits of European civilization. 
         
        The peaceful and harmonious coexistence of devout Muslims with the religious 
minorities living in their midst, their equally harmonious relationship with the 
fruits of Western civilization proves conclusively that the adherents of real Islam 
are not violent fanatics and that mainstream Islam has nothing to do with the Wahhabi 
model of militant Islam, whose success in winning over converts is due to the 
declining conditions in many Islamic societies (an autocratic political system leads 
to the total paralysis of social mobility which leads to the spread of incompetence 
which leads to a drop in standards which leads to despair which, in the context of 
backward educational systems, creates the mentality of violence and a cultural climate 
that accepts it.) 
         
        Thus it is not the Islamic system of belief that leads inevitably to violence 
and clashes with the Other., Violence and fanaticism are features of only one fringe 
sect that was virtually unknown outside the deserts of Najd as recently as one century 
ago. Non-Wahhabi mainstream Islam prevailed in Islamic societies until two cataclysmic 
developments forced it to retreat: the first was the eruption of the violent model of 
Islam from behind the sand dunes, the second the decline in living standards in many 
Islamic societies which allowed it to spread. 
         
        VIII- The Crisis Facing Non-Wahabbi Islam. 
         
        There are no permanent social phenomena; they are the result of circumstances 
and factors. Therefore the fear that non-Wahabbi Islam, which was the main trend among 
the majority of Muslims for several centuries, is being edged out of its central role 
is a legitimate one. The moderate brand of Islam will not be reinstated in its former 
position unless the factors making up the equation of internal collapse to which 
Islamic societies are exposed are solved (starting with autocracy to the mentality of 
violence to lack of competence to declining living standards to despair to the 
collapse of educational systems) and unless the outside world in general and the 
world,s only superpower in particular realize that adopting hostile stands against 
Islam and Muslims indiscriminately can only provoke negative reactions. This is all 
the more true given that they were partners with those responsible for the downward 
spiral and helped bring about the series of external factors that allowed the cycle of 
violence to attain its present level. Humanity,s failure to support and reinforce the 
gentle, non-militant brand of Islam to which most Islamic societies until recently 
belonged by helping remove the internal and external landmines, which eroded the 
ability of those societies to stand up to the assault of militant Islam is a crime 
committed by humanity against itself, a crime for which we shall all pay an exorbitant 
price. I fear that the primary cause of this is the infantile culture, of the world,s 
foremost superpower. The United States, despite its great achievements in tens of 
fields suffers from what I call in my lectures the "cultural infantilism of American 
policies. If we liken humanity to a body, the spinal cord of that body would be 
culture, a rare commodity among most citizens of the United States and a large portion 
of its intellectuals. The only explanation for this is the gap between 
material/scientific/technological advances and cultural richness,, and the confusion 
in all intellectual and cultural centres in the United States between information, and 
knowledge,. Perhaps a comparison between "A Study of History by Arnold Toynbee and the 
writings of most of the famous American writers on politics and the struggle of 
civilizations would clarify the point I am trying to make. 
         
        IX- Islamic Societies and Problems with the Meaning of Progress, and 
Modernity,. 
         
        A combination of closed autocratic regimes, outdated educational systems, 
state-controlled media, and a rigid, often extremist, understanding of religion 
renders many Muslims and Arabs wary of notions like progress, and modernity,. The 
internal factors I have mentioned coupled with a number of external factors, such as 
the infantile culture in some highly developed nations, have led the Muslim Arab mind 
to think that the call for progress and modernity is a call for dependence and the 
loss of cultural specificity. What exacerbates the situation is that many Arabs and 
Muslims feel that the values of Western civilization are for westerners only, not for 
everyone. I have exerted tremendous efforts to make it clear to my readers in Egypt 
and the Middle East that modernization is a human phenomenon first and foremost. The 
prescription for progress has no nationality or religion, as borne out by the 
different cultural backgrounds of such developed societies as the United States, 
Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, and South Korea. I devoted one of my books, "The Values of 
Progress, to demonstrating to the young people in my society the fallacy of the 
argument that progress and modernization will result in the loss of our identity and 
cultural specificity. As a man who has applied modern management techniques on a large 
scale, I know that there is successful management, and unsuccessful management,, but I 
have no knowledge of Arab, Chinese, African, or French management. Japan developed in 
leaps and bounds over the last fifty years, but Japanese society, especially outside 
the capital, is still quintessentially Japanese. Whoever denies that progress is a 
purely human phenomenon and that the process leading to it is also human has obviously 
never seen the mechanics of progress at first hand - which may be the reason most 
academics are not interested in the issue. 
         
        Oppressive regimes are matched by the local citizen who lacks any connection 
with the outside world and who thinks that modernity is the other side of the coin of 
dependence. He would not believe that democracy is a human product, and a human right 
and not a Western commodity for westerners, nor realize that the maxim that "for each 
society, there is the brand of democracy that suits it is misleading. For while it is 
true that there are many forms of democracy, it is equally true that they all contain 
mechanisms of accountability designed to bring rulers down from the realm of masters 
to that of servants of society. 
         
        The question over the future of the Muslim mind is the same as the question 
over the future of Islamic societies: is it a future of freedom, democracy, prosperity 
and progress, or the opposite? The answer to this question will determine the answer 
to the question about the future of the Muslim mind: will it follow the route of 
moderate Islam or that of Wahabbi Islam? 

            The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy"
            Groupe de communication Mulindwas 
"avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie"


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