Interesting IBD story today...
Feature Story
Thursday, September 27, 2001
Behind Radical Muslim Discontent: Economic Failure Of Modern Islam
By Peter Benesh
Investor's Business Daily
A great swath of humanity — 1.3 billion people, or one-fifth of the world’s population — lives in countries where Islam is the dominant or state religion. Most are poor.
They’re less educated than Westerners. They live shorter lives. Infant mortality is higher.
By any measure, modern Islam is an economic failure. Most Islamic countries are locked in a struggle between a glorious past and a grim present. Angry militants blame the U.S. and Europe for this.
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Image: Islam's Poverty
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Scholars see a pattern based as much on psychology as theology. Radical Muslims blame their poverty on those with more wealth. Those who have wealth must be taking it away from those who have less.
Once Dominant
Islam once dominated the world — at least the world centered on the Mediterranean and its trade routes. Cordoba and Granada in Spain were ancient centers of Islamic learning, symbols of prosperity and influence.
But that was 1,000 years ago. The Moors lost Spain to the Christians in 1492. Today, Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians sneak into Europe by boat to find opportunities.
The Ottoman Empire, rooted in what is now Turkey, once reached Vienna, Austria. The last vestige of Ottoman rule in Europe - in the Balkans - ended 80 years ago. Its vestiges sparked the Balkan wars of the last decade.
How did a civilization that gave the world its numeric system, transliterated Aristotle and opened trade routes to the Orient wind up in such an economic mess despite its vast riches of resources?
Basic Disconnect
The answer lies in a brew of royalty, psychology, history, myth and theology, scholars say.
Muslims are unable to reconcile a basic disconnect, says professor Akbar Ahmed of American University in Washington, D.C.
“They say to themselves: ‘We are not poor people. We have oil. We have resources. Why is it being mismanaged? Why are our leaders not able to organize our lives so we can live as good human beings and good Muslims?’ ” he said.
One answer lies in the myth of their lost glory, he says.
“Muslims have a feeling of having achieved so much over 1,000 years, up to the period of European colonization in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They expected they would take off and achieve something,” Ahmed said. Instead, the Muslim world is falling behind.
A root problem is that most of the wealth is in the hands of royalty or dictators, Ahmed says. “There is prosperity for some. The standard of living there can rank with European countries. But it’s all clustered at the top.”
That’s a key cause of anger, he says. “A radical in the Muslim world is attacking primarily his own establishment,” Ahmed said.
“Fundamentalists identify their own corrupt governments with the West. They say to themselves, ‘We have crooks ruling us and behind them you have the Western powers,’ ” he said.
Reformation Wanted
Economic misery is also a product of ignorance, says Paul Kurtz, emeritus professor of philosophy at State University of New York in Buffalo.
“Islam needs a reformation, a renaissance. Islam desperately needs to come into the modern world,” he said. “Islam is based on developments in the seventh and eighth centuries. It is based on nomadic and agricultural civilizations. Fundamentalist forces want to return to that era. For them, religion becomes the be-all and end-all,” Kurtz said.
In 46 Islamic countries, those who want to modernize are at odds with fundamentalists, he says.
“The economic hardships they suffer result from inadequate education. Unless they develop science, technology and expand university curricula to include all subjects and allow freedom of inquiry, they’ll find it difficult to advance,” he said.
“Look at Egypt. The population is growing by leaps and bounds. The government would like to modernize, but fears the mobs spurred by the fundamentalists,” he said.
A key factor is the union of theology and government, he says. “There’s no separation of mosque and state except in Turkey, which became secular in 1923. But even there the military is always on guard against Islamic fundamentalists,” he said.
Militant Islamists are driven by a vision of their faith that goes back almost 1,500 years, Kurtz says. “Thirty years after Mohammed (570-632) died, his followers took Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Within 80 years they had reached both the Atlantic and the Indian oceans.”
Missionary Zeal
“Now it’s a missionary religion. The principle of jihad is that, in the name of Allah, you can kill anything that endangers Islam,” Kurtz said.
A chance for economic improvement in Islamic countries rests with the children of Muslim families in the West, Kurtz says.
“With 7 million Muslims in France, 3 million in Germany and 7 million in the U.S., I hope their kids who go on to university will find enlightenment and take their knowledge back,” he said.
It’s not a certain thing, he says. “Some of the second generation are breaking away, but some are going back to Islam.”
The oil sheiks proclaim their wealth as a benefit from God, says John Voll, professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. That belief sustains an elite and hinders development, he says.
Whose Oil Is It?
“The elite see oil as God’s gift of prosperity to the royal families in Saudi Arabia and the (United Arab) Emirates. They claim it is Islamic to keep that wealth to themselves because God gave them the stuff,” he said.
“Muslims have a sense that something went wrong. They have tried to do something about it. There was a century of reform in the 19th and early 20th century,” he said.
He cited Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) and Gamel Abdel Nasser (1918-1970). Ataturk, Turkey’s first president after the Ottoman Empire’s fall, separated mosque and state.
Nasser deposed Egypt’s monarchy and seized the Suez Canal. His bid to launch a union of Arab states failed.
At Your Own Peril
Modernizing an Islamic country is risky. Radicals killed Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on Oct. 6, 1981, for his efforts.
“They tried to do something, but what they tried to do didn’t do them much good,” Voll said. By the 1970s people in the Islamic world saw that they had failed, he says. “They felt they had been defeated by the West.”
How did they make that leap?
“They tried radical socialist and Marxist ideology. That didn’t work,” Voll said. “Then they tried hard-nosed entrepreneurial reform. That didn’t work. So they thought maybe they were wrong to try copying the West.”
“They learned it wasn’t about just copying technology but also ways of thinking,” Voll said.
“This drove the intellectuals to say, ‘Maybe we are weak because we copy somebody else. Let’s go back to our roots,’ ” Voll said.
That led to a universal human tendency - blaming others for their own misfortunes, Voll says. “European and American imperialism became the scapegoat,” he said. And the shift to fundamentalism only made matters worse.
“Conservative religious rigidity, whether indigenous tribal, old-fashioned Christian or Muslim have been hindrances to economic development,” he said.
The Malaysian Example
One Islamic country is different, he says. That’s Malaysia. But it’s far from the Middle East and has a long history of trade.
“Embedded in the concept of a traditional Islamic society in Southeast Asia is a cosmopolitan tolerance and pluralism,” he said.
Malaysia is building an economy based on technology and education. Why is Malaysia not a model for the rest of the Islamic world?
“Malaysia is viewed by Muslims throughout the Islamic world as interesting but marginal,” Voll said. There’s no one to tell all Muslims to follow Malaysia’s example.
Islam is vague, Voll says. “It has no papacy and no church. It has mullahs who issue fatwas (edicts), but no formal institution to define what Islam means or says.”
Why Are We Behind?
The Muslim countries of the Middle East are shackled by their view of history, says Jere Bacharach, professor of international studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.
“Arabic-speaking Muslims believe God revealed his final truth in Arabic. Their influence once stretched from Spain to Central Asia. They said to themselves, ‘Clearly God favored us,’ ” Bacharach said.
“Now they ask, ‘Why are we so far behind?’ The reason, they say, is, ‘We don’t have the faith of our founders. If we go back to the values of the founders, we will have the glory we once had.’
“Of course, they cannot go back to the early 700s,” he said. |
