Dan said:
I really don't see this. For example, with AQ, the evidence is that
they see
the lifestyle of the West as decadent and evil, and the dominance
of the
West to be anathema to the proper order of things.
My take is that the radical fringe of Islam is a sort of cargo cult.
I think that fundamentally most people everywhere want prosperity and
security for themselves and their families, and a sense that they're
respected. The Islamic world once had all of those things. For the
period from, say, AD800 to AD1400, Islam was one of the world's two
most powerful civilisations (especially in the period when an
expansionist Abbasid Caliphate skirmished with China's T'ang dynasty
in central Asia). Indeed, even at the end of that period the great
conqueror Temur-i-Lang thought that the important parts of the world
were the Islamic states, India and China, and that Europe was too
insignificant to bother conquering. Since then, the position of the
dar al-Islam relative to the European civilisation has clearly
shifted dramatically in favour of Europe and its overseas extensions.
For the last two centuries, the once mighty Islamic world has
suffered military reverses, the dismemberment of its last major
empire, and near total colonisation by Western powers. The essential
problem facing us today is that the model used by the radical
Islamists to explain this immense political, economic and social
cataclysm is utterly incorrect.
The reason for the explosive expansion of the Arab armies was
partially the unity given them by Islam, but was mostly the weakness
of the Roman and Persian empires in the aftermath of their final
apocalyptic war. Following that expansion, the reason for the
prosperity of the Islamic states in the AD800 to AD1400 period wasn't
their adherence to strict Islamic laws - in fact most of them were
pretty lax about applying such things - but their position straddling
the trade routes crossing Asia. For most of that period, the most
important trade routes in the world were the "silk roads" that ran
from Chang'an in the east through the Tarim basin or the northern
foothills of the Tien Shan mountains, through Samarkand and the other
great trading cities of Central Asia, into Persia and Iraq and then
to the Levantine ports on the Mediterranean and south into Egypt. The
power and wealth of Islam were the result of its openness and
encouragement of trade. Then later the Atlantic states of Europe
mastered the art of oceanic navigation, discovered America and
bypassed the silk roads by opening up direct contact with India, the
East Indies and China. As transcontinental trade dried up, so the
Islamic world supported by that trade began the long, slow decline
from its brilliant apogee into today's decrepitude.
Unfortunately, the radical Islamists don't see it that way. One of
the characteristics of Islam is that the success of Islam-the-
religion and the success of Islam-the-states are closely tied
together in the minds of many Muslims (certainly more so than the two
kinds of success are in the minds of Christians). Attacks on the dar
al-Islam are easily seen as attacks on Islam itself, and failures of
the dar al-Islam are easily considered the effects of moral failings
on the parts of the people. In my opinion, the radical Islamists have
built a cargo cult on this basis: they see the recapitulation of the
forms of Muslim behaviour from the great days of Islam as the key to
regaining prosperity, security and respect. But the shallow aping of
forms misses the deep reasons for the success of Islam.
This is seen most clearly in the case of the Taliban, whose viewpoint
seems to be that the relative poverty and impotence of Afghanistan
isn't due to the withering of trade through the region (which once
supported some of the most magnificent and rich cities in the world)
or other more recent but secondary historical factors but is caused
by the people not being strict enough or literal enough in their
interpretations of the Koran and application of the Sharia. It's also
apparent in the web of international Islamic terrorism, which seeks
to regain the greatness of the Islamic world through fantasies of
recapitulating the heroic military actions of the first armies of
Islam against the infidels. Unfortunately, although these attitudes
are clearly idiocy of the first order to most of us, they are pretty
seductive to certain groups of people both inside and outside the
Islamic world. Equally unfortunately, they are doomed to failure and
generally deleterious to the well-being both of Islam and the dar al-
Islam.
Quite how we can convince people in the regions where the failure of
the Islamic states is most total that the things they ought to be
emulating from the glorious past of Islamic are openness to trade,
toleration, meritocracy, egality, respect and encouragement for
science and scholarship and so forth, I just don't know. I think the
admission of Turkey - former heartland of Islam's last great empire -
into the European Union will be an important step. Engaging with the
educated, partially Westernised elites of Iran might be another. But
the near total failure of the heartlands of Islam to provide anything
like a viable model for the organisation of modern industrial
societies is an immense and complex problem to solve, and certainly
not amenable to the sorts of quick and easy fixes that the more
primitivist branches of Islam are desperate to try.
Rich
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
