WEST ‘IN A SLOUGH IGNORANCE OF ISLAM’

Alalam News Network
sp?newsid=039180120080512145553
May 12 2008
Iran

Once again the CIA and MI6 are publishing dire warnings of the vitality
of Al-Qaeda. Once again the Islamic world as a whole is being tarnished
by association.

US presidential contender John McCain is saying that America needs
a leadership to confront the transcendent challenge of our time:
The threat of radical Islamic terrorism.

And the words still ring in our ears from Samuel Huntington’s treatise,
"The Clash of Civilizations", the book that in many ways triggered
this paranoia that infects the politicians, the press and the public
discourse. "The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic
fundamentalism, it is Islam", he wrote.

Few, if any, in the Western leadership seem to make the point
that Al-Qaeda is a deviant phenomenon within the Islamic world,
just as Hitler was a deviant phenomenon within the Christian world
(commentators seems to overlook Hitler’s early speeches calling
on Catholic principles). But Islam has a much better record
over the ages of dealing with its deviants who take violence to
excess. Islamic culture has never been tolerant of Nazism, fascism
or communism. Christianity has spawned all three. Buddhism failed to
resist Japanese militarism and Confucianism provided hospitable to
Maoism. Yes, there was Saddam Hussein but he was an atheistic brute
without an ideology.

Of course, there have been many incidents in the long history of
Islam when there have been large-scale losses of life. The massacres
and starvation of the Armenians in 1915 still stirs the waters of
contemporary debate. But Islam has never spawned anything comparable
with Hitler’s systematic genocide of the Jews – indeed throughout
its history Islam has been protective of the Jews, regarding them as
"people of the book" to whom it had a special responsibility. Nor has
it settled other parts of the world and systematically obliterated
other civilizations as did Christian Spain with the Aztecs and
Incas. Nor have Islamic societies created anything equivalent to
South Africa’s apartheid or the racist culture of the old American
South. Unlike many Christian churches, the mosque has never separated
people by race. Even today Americans confess that nowhere is there
more segregation in their society than at the Sunday noon hour.

Western memories are highly selective. When at Easter time the Greek
peasants of the Peloponnese began to kill all the Muslims in the
land there was silence. But fifty years later when there were mass
killings of Christians in Bulgaria there was a great outpouring of
moral outrage. Delacroix immortalized the massacre in his painting,
"Massacre of Chaos", with Christian women pursued by Turkish lancers
and Gladstone wrote a best-selling pamphlet in which he described the
Ottomans as leaving "a broad line of blood marking the track behind
them, and as far as their domination reached civilization vanished
from view".

Almost forgotten today is that it was the Ottomans who gave refuge to
the Jews when they were expelled from Iberia, as were fleeing German,
French and Czech Protestants, but every cultivated Westerner knows
Voltaire’s "Fanaticism or Muhammad the Prophet" or Dante’s portrayal
of Muhammad in hell.

Christianity has always been led or dominated by people of European
descent. But the leadership of the Muslim world has been much
more fragmented – between AD 661 and 750 it was the Arab Umayyad
dynasty. Between 750 and 1258 it was the multiethnic Abbasid
dynasty. And from 1453 to 1922, the Turkish-dominated Ottoman
Empire. In India there was the separate Moguls and in Persia the
Safavids. In sub-Saharan Africa there were the Muslim empires of Mali
and Songhai.

Despite their relative poverty today, with great teaming cities like
Cairo, Dakha and Jakarta, criminal violence is much, much lower than
in Christian-influenced societies.

Muslim countries, according to the UN’s annual Human Development
report, have the world’s lowest murder and rape rates. In Tehran,
the capital of Iran, and according to the CIA (allegations) the
most important single source of terrorism today, you can go out at
11 or 12 pm at night and find families with children picnicing in
city parks. When my daughters’ friends ask me where can they safely
travel alone in an interesting Third World city I say Cairo. Certainly
not Catholic Rio or Protestant Cape Town. Not only are murders and
muggings comparatively rarer, there is much less prostitution and
hard drug use. Neither is there that much AIDS.

The Western debate about Islam is frankly infantile. Even Barack
Obama, with his own personal experience to go off, either is ignorant
or just scared of going into battle on these issues. I have not read
one speech by one Western politician who seriously attempts to educate
public opinion. We live in a slough of ignorance.