QandO

March 18, 2004

Reclaiming Islam
Posted by McQ

We hear a lot about Arabs and Muslims not saying enough to condemn terrorism. Here's Fawaz Turrki of the Arab News doing exactly that. Maybe its my warped sense of humor, but for whatever reason I thought he might not be very popular for his stance in Arab circles, and his email address seems to indicate I might be right.

Anyway some snippets from his editorial "The Shame of It":

Arab terrorists may consider their pursuit of terror a career of high note, but do they, and we, know how mockingly remote their acts are from Islam, how uniquely rooted instead these acts are in the pathology of the terrorists’ political experience?

We continue to hear that the jihadists don't represent Islam or its tenets. I'm encouraged to see a Muslim journalist making the point in print.

Here he goes to my point of the clash of cultures (modern v. feudal) but puts the onus of failure where it belongs ... on the Arab cultures, not the west.

You have to be an outright optimist to believe that all has been well with the Arab world, and gifted with self-deception to have ignored its unraveling at the seams in recent decades. Modern-day Arabs have suffered repeated military defeats, watched helplessly as their polities have become progressively sapped of élan — their innovative intellectuals silenced or hounded to destruction or into exile — and have come to see themselves as mendicants in a world beyond their control. And now outsiders are in that world intent on reordering it for them, armed with master plans to introduce it to “democratic reform” and “free markets,” presumably because Arabs have failed by themselves to meet the challenges of modernity.

This validates one of Thomas Sowell's point in his "Why They Hate Us" article:

Nowhere have whole peoples seen their situation reversed more visibly or more painfully than the peoples of the Islamic world. In medieval times, Europe lagged far behind the Islamic world in science, mathematics, scholarship, and military power.

Even such ancient European thinkers as Plato and Aristotle became known to Europeans of the Middle Ages only after their writings, which had been translated into Arabic, were translated back into European languages.

Today that is all reversed. The number of books per person in Europe is more than ten times that in Africa and the Middle East. The number of books translated into Arabic over the past thousand years is about the same as the number translated into Spanish in one year.

There are only 18 computers per thousand persons in the Arab world, compared to 78 per thousand persons worldwide. Fewer than 400 industrial patents were issued to people in the Arab countries during the last two decades of the 20th century, while 15,000 industrial patents were issued to South Koreans alone.

The result. Per Turrki, a feeling of humiliation and shame. He offers this not as an excuse, but as an explanation.

If we look nearer at the crisis of the Arab sensibility, we see the rent body of a whole generation that had grown up on the ethic of fear and defeat — and harrowing shame.

And herein, I say, lies the answer.

Different cultures conceive of and deal with shame differently. In ours it is associated with humiliation and disgrace, sentiments almost obsessive in their intensity. When your nation bows its head and casts down its eyes before constant defeat, you feel the shame of it, which you then either run away from or deny, in order to avoid moral judgment and the pangs of conscience. Denial and flight, however, are feelings that will continue to torment you with their psychic pain — till you liberate yourself from them by lashing out. And it takes a man of conscience to be put to shame.

There are two obvious paths then, from which Arabs can choose ... lash out at all those they see as their "enemies" and the perpetrators of their "shame", no matter how misplaced their animosity, or look within and take the steps necessary to improve their culture by being honest about the reason they are in their present condition.

Just as obviously, the latter requires some very uncomfortable soul searching, which, to this point, most Arabs seem unwilling to commit too.

Turrki then "bottom lines" the root of terrorism for us. But he also makes a VERY important point that the "why do they hate us" crowd never seem to understand.

All of which is by way of saying that terrorism directed at targets in and outside the Arab world, by Arab terrorists, is rooted in social, emotional and, yes, pathological — not religious — sources.

They “hate America”? Heck, these folks hate everybody.

And it is this last statement which is now dawning on the rest of Europe, where non-participants in the Iraqi war have felt smugly safe, until now.

The theme is universal: Terrorism is the product of despair, humiliation and disgrace, shame at one’s inability to be a determining force in one’s destiny, and at the involuntary forfeiture of one’s powers of self-determination. The antithesis of that condition is democracy.

If we ourselves have failed, and miserably so, to enact that in our political lives over the last half century, then where’s the harm in considering the US proposal for a Greater Middle East Initiative?

You call that a pact with the devil? I call it a pact with historical necessity, for as democrats we shall have our day, and terrorists — posturing behind our appropriated faith — shall have their eclipse.

Turrki's final plea is both interesting and courageous. Interesting because he "gets it". The antithesis of terrorism is democracy. Democracy does two things. It establishes those institutions which will remove the "shame and humiliation" through modernization of an essentially feudal culture (all under the umbrella of true Islam) and by so doing removes the reason for terrorism as well as reclaiming the Islamic religion as a religion of peace.

Its courageous because most Arabs prefer the "blaming of others" for their present plight. Its refreshing to see an Arab who recognizes what the future must include for Arabs and has the courage to speak out about it.

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