Commentary
Throughout world history succeeding generations have learned from and improved upon their predecessors' successes. Not so in the Middle East. Islam, for all its undoubted virtues has had a distinctly subduing effect on progress of any kind. While it has enormous benefits for its believers in offering the comfort of a protecting spirit under the umbrella of the practise of brotherly love, it has also led these believers to fail to grasp their place within the community of nations.If it is, as claimed, a religion of peace, the outside world sees very little evidence of that singular claim. There has been no Age of Enlightenment within Islam. Human societies tend to progress, to lean upon the past to enable us to reconcile our present, and to reach toward the future. We gain knowledge of all kinds of assets to humankind, not the least of which is to ensure that there are sufficient grounds for us to recognize our shared humanity.
Because all people began their short adventures in life belonging to a particular clan whose function was to offer protection and the opportunity as a group to find shelter and food sufficient to enlarge the chain of human evolution and presence, we all share a primitive need to belong, and a corresponding suspicion for all those who belong elsewhere. Those other groups whose very presence on our 'territory' meant competition for scarce habitation and food sources.
As we became more adept at learning how to manipulate our environment to provide better shelter, more food opportunities, and began to grow as communities, our harshest and most present fears could be abated, but never entirely expunged from our collective memory. In the process of civilizing ourselves we invested our belief in the protective presence of a superior being, a spirit of great power who demanded of us allegiance.
In turn that spirit who looked down upon us benignly and comfortingly, highly recommended that we learn to look after ourselves by offering aid and comfort to those of our tribes who shared our community and beliefs, most particularly our spiritual beliefs. Mankind has clung to the comfort and spiritual elevation and hope that these beliefs have offered us ever since, supplanting over prolonged periods of time a panoply of 'pagan' gods with the final belief in an all-powerful single figure of divine inspiration.
It would be nice to end the story with that comforting homily that everyone lived together forevermore in understanding and harmony, but that isn't the story of humankind. We have indeed developed, as a single race, some elemental and humane emotions which permit us to recognize one another as ourselves reflected with minor differences. That's at the best of times, when a social and political climate of freedom from any kinds of coersion permit us that opening of ourselves to others.
At the worst of times, when groups of peoples are ruled by despots, self-interested dictators, their attention is handily diverted from the ill-doings of their rulers whose guiding concerns are always their own enrichment at the expense of those they rule by the handy identification of other, alien groups conspiring against their interests. This little ruse, ancient in concept and usage, has never failed to engage the frustrated and the dissatisfied.
Throughout history there have been conventional scapegoats of one derivation or another. Upon whom could be heaped blame for all the ills a society harboured, all the hardships that their citizens faced, all the missed opportunities for improvements and advances in community events and lifestyles. That wreaking deadly vengeance on the scapegoats never quite seemed to solve the problems of the mis-ruled never seemed to result in identification of the real culprits.
Who, in any event, were largely untouchable by the great mass of the mis-ruled. Until fairly recent history when manifestly civilization-altering events such as revolts against mis-rule changed the trajectory of human misery and history. As the mis-ruled wreaked their final savage revenge against their true oppressors history did a slow but inevitable turn-about and a slow ascent toward just rule and democracy of and for the people emerged.
Western-style society-democracy was in the ascendency, followed soon afterward by much of the rest of the world, and the enlightenment engaged and altered the quality of our lives. Without the social and political structure that permitted people to prosper along with the newly-emerging economies of their countries at the dawn of the industrial revolution and beyond, our social/political/economic evolution would have faltered and fizzled.
The Middle East finds itself stuck halfway between advancing technology and medieval society. Islam itself has never undergone any kind of evolution to match that of society at large. Muslims living within diverse cultures and political systems that are based on secular, not religious rule are able to realize the same human ambitions that do others with similar entrepreneurial skills and ambitions to succeed.
But in the social and political structure of the Arab world within the Middle East the individual is discouraged from personal discovery, advancing the genius of invention. Political and religious inhibitions entwined as a way of life, act as strictures to guarantee social and economic backwardness. The ruled continue to be manipulated by ruthless dictators, or self-absorbed theists.
In a part of the world once celebrated for its enormous advances in art, poetry, music, architecture, philosophy, medicine and science, a steep decline occurred and populations live in a state of arrested development. Adherence to Islam discourages individual development, development of the individual. Awareness is always first and foremost of Allah and His injunctions and while that need not be entirely detrimental to societal advancement, the currency given to self-serving interpretations of those holy writings is.
In the Middle East the kind of religious charlatanry practised on a wide scale to enforce religious observance, to maintain the status quo, to manipulate the highly-charged emotions of a still-emerging civilization with a population still clinging to tribal blood-feuds mitigates against civil evolution. The people remain prisoner to their own tribal loyalties and religious devotion with native intelligence nowhere evident in the equation.
The population is prey to and easily persuaded by the fiery condemnations of their mullahs and ayatollahs, their imams who storm on about the demonic intent of Allah's enemies who must be halted with the fury of all the collective rage they can muster. And the collective responds on cue, never seeming to pause to think matters out logically, in the round. Because there is no logic, only the passion of the true believer.
The imams reinforce the isolation of Islam day after day, they encourage the true believers to understand that the world at large wishes them ill, considers them inferior, their god an imposter, their presence in the world a humiliation beyond endurance. This raging, living furnace of divine heat is relentless, becoming the reason for their existence.
The inevitable appearance of an avenging cadre of bitterly anti-Western soldiers of god is the result, but only one of the results. The most visible result is anarchic disorder, because of the assaults they've been able to mount upon the iconography of the West, on civilian targets with a ferocity of purpose and that leaves horror in its wake, and an ever-growing fear from within their victims' homelands. But does this advance Islam?
In a very real sense, it is the huge populations of Muslims, often themselves hapless targets of the self-appointed avenging angels of Islam that are the true victims. They can retreat into Islam and a world more familiar and comforting to them than the hostile presence they feel surrounds them, or they can advance toward a more enlightened practise of Islam. This would require a groundswell of support that doesn't appear likely to materialize any time soon.
History is yet to be fully written.
Labels: Middle East
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, February 11, 2007
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