An outstanding article re: Muslim culture clash

[likearock 2]

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Can the root of the radical extremism be found in the Wahabis?

Short term yes, long term no.

Extremism has been an on-again off-again thing in Islam, historically. The Kharijites for instance make the Wahabis look like kindergarteners.

So what are you saying, that extremism is on-again off-again, but right now it's at an ebb? That's not too reassuring.

[zoobrothertom 5]

I have a suggestion. How about both of you go check some history books about the region prior to the introduction of Islam. Center of science, creativity, etc. Perhaps a short writing assignment with a comparison and contrast flavor is in order for both of you.

Have fun!

____________________________________
I'm back in the USA!!

[redlegphi 0]

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I have a suggestion. How about both of you go check some history books about the region prior to the introduction of Islam. Center of science, creativity, etc. Perhaps a short writing assignment with a comparison and contrast flavor is in order for both of you.

Have fun!

Actually, I don't think the Middle East became a center of science, creativity, etc. until after the Muslims consolidated their rule of the area. Though maybe that's what you were trying to say and I'm just read you wrong.

[Royd 0]

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The roots of radical extremism can be found in poverty, a general feeling of being unjustly held down by "the West", and the support of various nations for radical Islamist groups who happened to be fighting against a common enemy

We've been fighting the war on poverty in this country since the mid 60's, and we still have people with their hands out , saying that we haven't given them enough.

Believe me, if the Islamists ever got ahold of that principle, it would just be one more form of terrorism.

The fact is that there is probably enough oil money in those countries to make every individual a rich person.

They are the ones who need to step up to the plate, not the Evil West.

[rickjump1 0]

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The fact is that there is probably enough oil money in those countries to make every individual a rich person.

They are the ones who need to step up to the plate, not the Evil West.

I just ordered "Twilight in the Desert, The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy" by Mathew R. Simmons and I QUOTE: There is strong evidence that the Saudi's may have peaked and will struggle to maintain the current levels without tremendous investment. Saudi population is growing rapidly, power is generated by oil and gas, the drinking water takes intense energy for desalinization,they are becoming ever increasing users of their own energy, Secondly, when oil fields are produced hard, as in the case in Saudi, early water break through occurs leaving unrecoverable oil. Once water breaks through, there is a steep decline in oil production. UNQUOTE Ok. It isn't happening overnight, but in the case of Saudi Arabia, we may be seeing the beginning of the end. Sometimes you get what you wish for. Hope we will be ready.

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[redlegphi 0]

How much oil does Afghanistan produce each year?

[akarunway 1]

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How much oil does Afghanistan produce each year?

Not a lot but plenny opium to smoke

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

[StreetScooby 5]

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The Kharijites for instance make the Wahabis look like kindergarteners.

I spent some time reading about the Kharijites. Very interesting. Thanks for the post.

We are all engines of karma

[DaVinci 0]

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IMO the economics issue is more macro than micro. For hundreds of years the parts of the koran that prohibited usury were interpreted to mean basically no interest at all.

Which puts quite a damper on banking. If I understand it correctly, it's only in the past 30 years or so that western banking companies have found ways to concoct instruments acceptable to hard-line Islamic governments.

So would you agree that the religion has held the region back?

[nathaniel 0]

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So would you agree that the religion has held the region back?

I'd point to the decline of and uneven dissolution of the Ottoman Empire before I'd point to Islam as a root cause. Islam is scattered right now, there are more divisions within than without.

In the waxing periods the area has done much better than its surrounds, to the benefit of both the locals and to the rest of the world in hindsight. In particular between around 800CE and around 1200CE (when the Mongols invaded, murdering most of Baghdad in 1258) Islamic nation states were the most advanced in the world. It was up and down after that, the Ottomans were the last really strong Islamic nation empire builders.

edit: I should say empire builders rather than nation builders...the modern idea of nations is a bit too recent...

I think it's about as fair to blame Islam for the state of the ME today as it would be to blame Christianity for the state of Europe in 1200 or again in 1900. IOW not very.

My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

[DaVinci 0]

OK but above you said "...For hundreds of years the parts of the koran that prohibited usury were interpreted to mean basically no interest at all.

Which puts quite a damper on banking. If I understand it correctly, it's only in the past 30 years or so that western banking companies have found ways to concoct instruments acceptable to hard-line Islamic governments."

And to me that sounded like you think the Islamic prohibition against usury had kept banking down until the last 30 years. And that that is quite a big obstacle to an economy.

[nathaniel 0]

Nobody, including the West, understood banking very well until the Ottomans were already well into decline. FWIW the Ottomans did quite a bit for their vintage, but things went haywire as the Ottoman Empire went out of style.

The problem IMO is that many of the pieces of Ottoman cruft lying around weren't competent enough to recognize the good in modern banking, and turned out to be a lot of fundies. It's not that Islam prohibits banking, or that Islam has changed all that much in the last 30 years, but that a set of incompetent leaderships decided to interpret banking as bad. They kept this backward mentality until a set of enterprising western corporations recently intervened out of self interest.

Besides, it is not one Islam but dozens of related beliefs and practices that are commonly rolled up under the name. This way of looking at it, it is ineffective Islamic leadership and the absence of pan-Islamic alignment that is the root cause of both failure to embrace banking and failure to keep up with the West since the 18th C. Rather than too much Islam.

My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

[nathaniel 0]

Could you imagine what the world would be like in 50 years if, instead of chasing away Muslims the US embraced them? Invited Pallys, Indonesians, Iraqis and Darfurians to immigrate by the millions? What if the next Pan-Islamic movement were based out of US citizens?

Would it not be valuable to have one and a half billion people on our side to counter China's growing influence?

Xenophobe apoplexy ensues.

My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

[Elisha 1]

Here's another...and actually by the New York Times.


THE NEW YORK TIMES

October 17, 2006
Iraq’s Christians Flee as Extremist Threat Worsens
By MICHAEL LUO
BAGHDAD, Oct. 16 — The blackened shells of five cars still sit in front of the Church of the Virgin Mary here, stark reminders of a bomb blast that killed two people after a recent Sunday Mass.

In the northern city of Mosul, a priest from the Syriac Orthodox Church was kidnapped last week. His church complied with his captors’ demands and put up posters denouncing recent comments made by the pope about Islam, but he was killed anyway. The police found his beheaded body on Wednesday.

Muslim fury over Pope Benedict XVI’s public reflections on Islam in Germany a month ago — when he quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor as calling Islam “evil and inhuman” — has subsided elsewhere, but repercussions continue to reverberate in Iraq, bringing a new level of threat to an already shrinking Christian population.

Several extremist groups threatened to kill all Christians unless the pope apologized. Sunni and Shiite clerics united in the condemnation, calling the comments an insult to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. In Baghdad, many churches canceled services after receiving threats. Some have not met since.

“After the pope’s statement, people began to fear much more than before,” said the Rev. Zayya Edward Khossaba, the pastor of the Church of the Virgin Mary. “The actions by fanatics have increased against Christians.”

Christianity took root here near the dawn of the faith 2,000 years ago, making Iraq home to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. The country is rich in biblical significance: scholars believe the Garden of Eden described in Genesis was in Iraq; Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees, a city in Iraq; the city of Nineveh that the prophet Jonah visited after being spit out by a giant fish was in Iraq.

Both Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Christians, the country’s largest Christian sects, still pray in Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

They have long been a tiny minority amid a sea of Islamic faith. But under Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s million or so Christians for the most part coexisted peacefully with Muslims, both the dominant Sunnis and the majority Shiites.

But since Mr. Hussein’s ouster, their status here has become increasingly uncertain, first because many Muslim Iraqis framed the American-led invasion as a modern crusade against Islam, and second because Christians traditionally run the country’s liquor stories, anathema to many religious Muslims.

Over the past three and a half years, Christians have been subjected to a steady stream of church bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and threatening letters slipped under their doors.

Estimates of the resulting Christian exodus vary from the tens of thousands to more than 100,000, with most heading for Syria, Jordan and Turkey.

The number of Christians who remain is also uncertain. The last Iraqi census, in 1987, counted 1.4 million Christians, but many left during the 1990’s when sanctions squeezed the country. Yonadam Kanna, the lone Christian member of the Iraqi Parliament, estimated the current Christian population at roughly 800,000, or about 3 percent of the population. A Chaldean Catholic auxiliary bishop, Andreos Abouna, told a British charity over the summer that there were just 600,000 Christians left, according to the Catholic News Service.

At the Church of the Virgin Mary, Father Khossaba showed a visitor the baptism forms for parishioners leaving the country who need proof of their religious affiliation for visas. Some weeks he has filled out 50 of the forms, he said, and some weeks more.

Attendance on Sundays has dwindled to four dozen or so, he said; it used to be more than 500 on average, and on Easter Sundays, before the collapse of the Hussein government, more than 1,500. Not all the missing members have left, of course; some simply stay at home on Sundays because of fears for their safety.

Many Christians have relocated, changing neighborhoods or even cities. About a thousand Christian families, from Mosul, Baghdad, Basra and elsewhere, have taken refuge in Ain Kawa, a small town outside the Kurdish city of Erbil, which has become an oasis for Christians, said the Rev. Yusuf Sabri, a priest at St. Joseph’s Chaldean Catholic Church there.

A Christian man with Baghdad license plates on his car who asked not to be identified said he had just arrived in Ain Kawa to inquire about moving there. A leaflet had been left at his home demanding he leave in three days. It bore the signature of Muhammad’s Army, a Sunni insurgent group.

“They regarded me as an agent for the crusaders,” he said.

Asaad Aziz, a 42-year-old Chaldean Catholic, is one of those trying to leave the country. After the ouster of Mr. Hussein, he bought a liquor store in a mostly Shiite neighborhood. Nine days after he opened, the store was bombed. Mr. Aziz was hospitalized for a month.

The employees rebuilt the store. But several months later, a note slipped under the door gave Mr. Aziz 48 hours to close.

“Otherwise, you will blame yourself,” it said.

Mr. Aziz closed. But after an unsuccessful stint at a friend’s printing company, he returned to the business he knew best, opening a liquor store in a mostly Christian neighborhood. Last month, a gunman riddled the new storefront with bullets as Mr. Aziz cowered in a back room.

He told another story: the teenage daughter of another Christian family he knows was kidnapped recently. The captors initially demanded a ransom, but later sarcastically said the pope was the only one who could release her. She was eventually killed.

“When the pope gave his statement, it destroyed any last hope that we had here,” said Mr. Aziz, who has forbidden his daughters, one in high school and the other in college, to return to school.

He recently went to the Turkish Embassy to inquire about a visa but was rebuffed. At this point, he said, he will go anywhere.

“We cannot practice our rituals and we cannot bring food home to our families,” he said. “That’s why I want to leave the country.”

Mosul, near the historic heart of Christianity in Iraq, has also become increasingly dangerous. The recently murdered priest, the Rev. Boulos Iskander Behnam, is just the latest member of the Christian community to be kidnapped or killed there.

Conditions have been especially bleak for Christians in Basra, the southern city that is dominated by radical Shiite militias. Christian women there often wear Muslim head scarves to avoid harassment from religious zealots trying to impose a strict Islamic dress code. After the pope’s statement, an angry crowd burned an effigy of him.

In Baghdad, Juliet Yusef attends St. George’s, the country’s lone Anglican church. She, too, now wears a head scarf anytime she ventures outside her neighborhood. “I am afraid of being attacked,” she said.

Dora, a neighborhood in southern Baghdad that was once heavily populated by Christians and has been plagued by sectarian violence, has now been mostly emptied of them. Christians were singled out there by insurgents who accused them of being friendly with the occupying Americans.

“They are Christian, we are Christian,” said one holdout, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Suzan. “They think most likely we know each other well.”

Two priests were kidnapped over the summer in Dora, although both were released, one after nearly a month.

Oddly, before the pope’s comments, as sectarian violence has escalated in Baghdad in the past year, some said the situation might have actually improved for Christians as Muslim militants turned their attention on one another.

Canon Andrew White, the Anglican vicar of Baghdad, who lives in Britain but visits Iraq frequently, said his driver was kidnapped recently but was promptly released after his Sunni Arab captors discovered he was a Christian. He said his captors apologized by saying, “We thought he was Shiite.”

“It must be the only occasion when being a Christian actually helped in this country,” he said.

Wisam H. Habeeb and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Mosul.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[StreetScooby 5]

Nathaniel, your posts are quite good, and I appreciate your effort here.

What do you think would happen if Islamic banks "reformed" their decision on usary? Would that start to alleviate their poverty?

We are all engines of karma

[nathaniel 0]

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What do you think would happen if Islamic banks "reformed" their decision on usary? Would that start to alleviate their poverty?

Well, effectively they've already entered the 20th century courtesy western financial companies. Compound interest and all that, it takes along time for the effect to well up.

But better banking doesn't solve the main problem, which is leadership. It's tempting to me to share some blame with the "victors" of WWI for screwing up the conditions in the ME much the same way they did in Europe resulting in a 2nd world war. Then after the 2nd world war the situation in the ME doesn't really seem to have been helped -- the borders are still all screwed up. There was no Marshall plan for them.

The Islamic fundies are onto something IMO in that the region would improve with the reemergence of a pan-Islamic movement. They are even less qualified than their contemporaries, unfortunately, to lead it.

My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

[StreetScooby 5]

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The Islamic fundies are onto something IMO in that the region would improve with the reemergence of a pan-Islamic movement. They are even less qualified than their contemporaries, unfortunately, to lead it.

Interesting.

So, what do we do about it?

We are all engines of karma

[nathaniel 0]

I dunno...

* start an Islamic cultural revival ourselves. We'd need to import some more Muslims to do this convincingly.
* reconquer the whole lot and try again.
* Marshall Plan 2.0: Middle East. Probably wouldn't go down too well with the current fundies, or would encourage them to new heights of corruption and inanity.
* continue on as we are today: let it simmer and from time to time intervene precipitously according to the latest political trends in foreign lands.

I do like the idea of fostering a global Islamic cultural revival based in the US. It wouldn't go over with the isolationists, xenophobes and our own fundies tho--it would be very turbulent.

My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

[StreetScooby 5]

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I do like the idea of fostering a global Islamic cultural revival based in the US.

Now that is out-of-the-box thinking. I kind of like it. My current summary of this Muslim thing is - the Muslims need a reformation. I posed the question somewhere's in this thread asking "can we do that externally". This might be one way to do it. But, then again, it's a hell of a sales pitch to both Mulsims and non-Mulsims here in America.

We are all engines of karma

[nathaniel 0]

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the Muslims need a reformation

Well, it would fit very well with Islamic history. Islam has had a knack for getting conquered and then insinuating itself among the invaders. A real omelette of a religion for all the flips it's been through. At least if it was Americans leading the charge for revival they'd be inclined to work with our national interests, or at least to defuse the Great Satan line coming out of Persia.

On the other hand a lot of our fundies (and some of our allies, heh) openly consider Christianity to be America's national interest. They've had their fair run and screwed up enough, imo.

It'll still be decades of bickering before people come around to this, if they ever do.

My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

[StreetScooby 5]

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At least if it was Americans leading the charge for revival they'd be inclined to work with our national interests, or at least to defuse the Great Satan line coming out of Persia.

So, how would we keep them from creating their own little "caliphate" in our neighborhoods? Even though the US is diverse, we're all still supposed to be Americans, first and foremost.

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On the other hand a lot of our fundies (and some of our allies, heh) openly consider Christianity to be America's national interest.

Especially with GWB in power. I personally find it frightening. I'm a middle of the road Republican. That's now an oxymoron.

We are NOT a Christian nation. Our Christian forefathers got it going, but we are now a tolerant nation that allows non-violent diverse opinions.

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They've had their fair run and screwed up enough, imo.

Agreed.

We are all engines of karma

[billvon 3,090]

>So, how would we keep them from creating their own little "caliphate" in our neighborhoods?

Same way we prevent Irish-Americans from opening Irish clubs and bars. Same way we keep the Chinese from creating a Chinatown in a big city. Same way we keep the Italians out of Little Italy.

In other words, we don't. We're americans first and foremost, which means we respect people's right to do whatever the hell they want (as long as it's not illegal.)

[StreetScooby 5]

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In other words, we don't. We're americans first and foremost, which means we respect people's right to do whatever the hell they want (as long as it's not illegal.)

Agreed, as long as they don't try to set up local Islamic courts that "rule" over their neighborhood. They have been known to do that elsewhere.

We are all engines of karma

[billvon 3,090]

>Agreed, as long as they don't try to set up local Islamic courts
>that "rule" over their neighborhood.

Hmm. I know a few synagogues that "rule" over some Jewish communities in NY. Heck, you can't even get married without the rabbi's approval! But as long as participation in their communities is optional - no problem.

[StreetScooby 5]

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Hmm. I know a few synagogues that "rule" over some Jewish communities in NY. Heck, you can't even get married without the rabbi's approval! But as long as participation in their communities is optional - no problem.

Interesting. It sounds reasonable. It'd be great if we were all reasonable on this planet.

We are all engines of karma