By Fouad Ajami, Published:
September 14
“Why is the Muslim
world so easily offended?
“Modernity requires the willingness to be offended. And as anti-American violence across the Middle East and beyond shows, that willingness is something
the Arab world, the heartland of Islam, still lacks.
“Time and again in recent years, as the outside world
has battered the walls of Muslim lands and as Muslims have left their places of
birth in search of greater opportunities in the Western world, modernity — with
its sometimes distasteful but ultimately benign criticism of Islam — has
sparked fatal protests. To understand why violence keeps erupting and to seek
to prevent it, we must discern what fuels this sense of grievance.
“There is an Arab pain and a volatility in the face of judgment by
outsiders that stem from a deep and enduring sense of humiliation. A vast chasm
separates the poor standing of Arabs in the world today from their history of
greatness. In this context, their injured pride is easy to understand.
“In the narrative of history transmitted to
schoolchildren throughout the Arab world and reinforced by the media, religious
scholars and laymen alike, Arabs were favored by divine providence. They had
come out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century, carrying Islam from
Morocco to faraway Indonesia. In the process, they overran the Byzantine and
Persian empires, then crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Iberia, and there they
fashioned a brilliant civilization that stood as a rebuke to the intolerance of
the European states to the north. Cordoba and Granada were adorned and exalted
in the Arab imagination. Andalusia brought together all that the Arabs favored
— poetry, glamorous courts, philosophers who debated the great issues of the
day.
“If Islam’s rise was spectacular, its fall was swift
and unsparing. This is the world that the great historian Bernard Lewis
explored in his 2002 book “What Went Wrong?”The
blessing of God, seen at work in the ascent of the Muslims, now appeared to
desert them. The ruling caliphate, with its base in Baghdad, was torn asunder
by a Mongol invasion in the 13th century. Soldiers of fortune from the Turkic
Steppes sacked cities and left a legacy of military seizures of power that is
still the bane of the Arabs. Little remained of their philosophy and
literature, and after the Ottoman Turks overran Arab countries to their south
in the 16th century, the Arabs seemed to exit history; they were now subjects
of others.
“The coming of the West to their world brought
superior military, administrative and intellectual achievement into their midst
— and the outsiders were unsparing in their judgments. They belittled the
military prowess of the Arabs, and they were scandalized by the traditional
treatment of women and the separation of the sexes that crippled Arab society.
“Even as Arabs insist that their
defects were inflicted on them by outsiders, they know their weaknesses…”
Cassi Creek:
The article
above is well written, penned by a respected author. It touches directly upon the explosive
content of the matter. “The Arabs once
ruled the Mediterranean basin and much of South Asia. They became the dominant culture in that
region. Then they were thrown from power
and prominence. They’ve never gotten
over the defeat.
Western
culture was able to divorce itself from many aspects of religion that dominated
political power. European recognition
that science explains the real world allowed Europe to defeat societies that
use magic and myths to explain the world. There has been little scientific
discovery by Arab cultures since the Spaniards threw the Moors out of
Europe.
Missing in
the explanation by Ajami is the tribal culture and attitudes that hold the
Middle East in thrall to a destructive pattern.
The belief that asking for help brings shame to one’s entire family
keeps hundreds of thousands as essentially stateless victims of their own
histories. The thousands currently
fleeing Syria for Jordan will be held in minimally livable compounds. This is exactly what happened to would-be
Palestinians in 1948. The “refugees”
were held separate from Jordanians while Jordan annexed the land that was to be
Palestine. Every Arab state that lost to
Israel in 1948 built cannon fodder compounds to hold and house brother Arabs
and brother Muslims who could then be pointed out as evidence of how Israel
stole the lives of Muslims.
But the lack
of civility and rationality began long before Israel’s renaissance; It will not
be resolved until the tribal culture and the stranglehold of Islam are stripped
from the political realities of self-destructive tribal cultures that must be
dragged into the 21st century, one bleeding pseudo nation at a
time.
What needs to
be heard throughout the Arab and Muslim world is “goodbye Mohammed!”
No comments:
Post a Comment