I'm under the impression that we cannot truly understand the war on terrorism, or our involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or several other places, or even the Arab-Israeli conflict without first understanding Islamic society and culture. I just wanted to post somewhere some of the articles that I read about the Islamic world. Here's one that I saw today:

http://news.yahoo.com/pakistan-shuns-ph ... 57298.html

The pioneering work of Abdus Salam, Pakistan's only Nobel laureate, helped lead to the apparent discovery of the subatomic "God particle" last week. But the late physicist is no hero at home, where his name has been stricken from school textbooks.

Praise within Pakistan for Salam, who also guided the early stages of the country's nuclear program, faded decades ago as Muslim fundamentalists gained power. He belonged to the Ahmadi sect, which has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants who view its members as heretics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OXCStY7yXI

and another

It's like 17th Century Christendom, innit?

danivon wrote:It's like 17th Century Christendom, innit?

Really? In what way(s)?

Well, actually, a bit less deadly in places. But let me see...

Large scale wars across Europe over religion (30 years war for starters), religious persecution from pretty much most sects whenever they had power (and that happened in the American colonies too), not much concern for human rights, belief in absolute power vested in monarchs by God, rampant superstition, political upheaval...

The 30 Years War? Huge regular national forces led by kings meet other national forces led by kings... leading states involved in major international alliances, seeking continental hegemony.

RayJay posted about a Nobel laureate who was not respected because he belongs to a weird sect and about a woman who was executed for adultery. What has this to do with the 30 Years War??? In what way is anything about "Islamic society and culture" reminiscent of the 30 Years War? Simply the fact that religion plays a role in a conflict?

Or are you simply noting that Muslims today have only achieved the level of political sophistication, general ethics, and morality of tolerance achieved by the average Christian 350 years ago?

Or were you making some other point?

Islamic civilization is very different than their own. It will be interesting to see whether Samuel Huntington's theory on the clash of civiliations turn out to be largely correct ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clash_of_Civilizations) or whether what we believe are our superior Western values will be adopted everywhere. I would bet on the clash of civiliations hypothesis, myself.

Purple, I was talking about the whole of it, the 30 years war is but one nasty and deadly episode in a whole century of religious bigotry. It may have been led by kings, but it was fought over religion

But I suppose a wider point is that there's an awful lot of variation in Islamic society, and it's not to easy to 'understand'. It is, of course, easy to point at the worst aspects and extrapolate.

danivon wrote:It is, of course, easy to point at the worst aspects and extrapolate.

That was really your whole point, wasn't it? That Ray Jay was being gratuitously critical? (Perhaps you could have said that straight out instead of making a gratuitous and unilluminating comparison that happens IMHO not to hold a lot of water.)

It is considered, in many quarters, to be impolite or crude to point out certain facts about Islam. After all, if we are "the other" to Islam, they are "the other" to us, and in our more enlightened circles we've gotten over blaming "the other" for all our ills. We've also learned that, in general, even though alien systems and beliefs seem strange to us, they always have a logic and beauty of their own that can be hard for us to appreciate - and so we should be slow to criticize. As a rule, this sort of tolerance is very healthy, but rules have exceptions. Islam is exceptional. Danivon says "It's like 17th Century Christendom." That's exceptional. Nothing else 1/100th as large as Islam is anything at all like 17th century Christendom. And when asked how it was similar, Danivon notes the very worst aspects of a culture that's a full 350 years behind the Europe of today. Surely when 1.5 billion plus in today's world start taking on aspects of 17th century Christendom, we are entitled to criticize. Indeed, we would be derelict in our duty as moderns if we didn't.

I'm not sure you get me, Purple, but I can be obtuse I guess.

I do wonder about the intial premise of RJ's post. Do we need to 'understand'? Can we not just show what is good, what is bad, what is neutral/ambivalent or just undefined?

A lot of the 'issues' within Islam are actually far from exceptional. There is tribalism, which we can see anywhere. There is misogyny, which can be seen anywhere. There is theologically driven ignorance. Equally there is a lot of diversity in any group of 1.5 billion people. I suppose one question is how much is down to the leaders and power structures and how much is down to the people themselves, and what part the religion plays in that.

I'm not convinced that I needed to 'understand' the sectarian motivations and culture of Irish Catholics and Protestants to be able to look at why we (meaning my country) had an issue with IRA terrorism and had soldiers stationed in Ulster. That the IRA practised kneecapping didn't necessarily mean that Catholicism was responsible. That the intransigent Loyalists would scupper any moves toward a deal with a firm 'Never, Never, Never' and a strike doesn't necessarily mean it's all about how Presbyterians think. There were other issues for a start, and the same applies to Islamic countries and people. Some of those issues are likely to be just as common among non-Islamic countries and people.

I am not saying we should not be critical of bad behaviour. Far from it. I just don't get the idea of.. Psychoanalysing? Based on some stories of bad behaviour.

I was not, by the way, saying that Islam is 350 years 'behind' us. I was actually thinking that we are not all that far ahead. When it comes to the shunning of a scientific pioneer, is the way that Turing was treated because of his homosexuality only a few decades ago all that much different?

Here's the thing. Are the problems in Iraq down to Islamic Culture and Society, or are they the result of a dictatorship that used divide-and-rule with brutal tactics to maintain power among a minority ethnic group's elite, followed by a hamfisted and badly timed invasion by foreign powers who then compounded things in occupation?

The tribes of Colorado (?) don't execute women for adultery.

"Are the problems of Iraq down to" X or Y? Are the problems in Sudan down to X or Y? Nigeria? Mali? Somalia? Chechnya? Kashmir? If you take all the world's violent conflicts and list all characteristics, you'll find Islam to be a factor in a disproportionately high number. Now this could be due to several reasons. Islam has spread certain places for certain reasons, and other things have taken up similar geographic residencies. Or maybe Islam is irrationally hated by a wide variety of infidels, from animists to Hindus to Jews. Or maybe, just maybe, there's something about Islam itself that makes it incompatible in some way with coexistence and with modernism. With the statistics as they are, with the anecdotal evidence that stares us in the face, with Islam's totally unique history and origins, with the disturbingly hostile tenor of the Quran, and with the self-reinforcing conservatism of Islam, I think we'd be total idiots to ignore the latter possible explanation, that there's something deeply wrong with Islam.

Note: I'm not being comparative when I criticize Islam. I'm no fan of any organized religion. I have a huge problem with the nature of Christianity in the USA. The most devout/conservative strain of Judaism is like the worst of Islam on a small scale (but less amenable to violence). And even some of the eastern religions can flare up into xenophobic rages.

You list a few of Iraq's non-religious elements. Every conflict is complicated by history and circumstances, and has deep roots. [One of the the roots of conflict in Iraq that we westerners have the most trouble appreciating is the lingering sectarian ill-will directly traceable to battles and atrocities that took place in the earliest centuries of Islam. There's a type of non-forgetting in the Arab world (if not the entire Muslim one) that we have a lot of trouble understanding.] But when locales with different histories but Islam in common are experiencing violence, and locales with similar histories but no Islam aren't, a hypothesis that Islam itself is a causative agent of violence has to logically be considered. A causative agent, not the (only) causative agent. And an agent, not a direct and simple A-leads-to-B.

Danivon:

I do wonder about the intial premise of RJ's post. Do we need to 'understand'? Can we not just show what is good, what is bad, what is neutral/ambivalent or just undefined?

I think that you have a point that I'm am pointing out egregious examples of Muslim behavior. Certainly there are some Pakistanis that are proud of their Nobel prize winning scientists and many (most?) Muslims do not believe that death by many gun shots is the right punishment for adultery. Certainly those Muslims who diligently went to work, exchanged pleasantries, and then went home to treat their family kindly did not make yesterday's news.

On the other hand, I didn't choose examples of aberrant behavior. I chose examples that reflected the society mores in general. There were many who attended the women's murder; text books have been written by government officials to expunge Pakistan's (only!) Nobel prize winner's accomplishments. These aren't isolated events but reflect the society and culture at large.

Purple wrote:The tribes of Colorado (?) don't execute women for adultery.

Nope, but the tribe that ran Massachussets in the 17th Century did. Mary Latham was sentenced to death in 1641 for that very crime.

If you take all the world's violent conflicts and list all characteristics, you'll find Islam to be a factor in a disproportionately high number. Now this could be due to several reasons. Islam has spread certain places for certain reasons, and other things have taken up similar geographic residencies. Or maybe Islam is irrationally hated by a wide variety of infidels, from animists to Hindus to Jews. Or maybe, just maybe, there's something about Islam itself that makes it incompatible in some way with coexistence and with modernism.

Nearly 100 years ago it was being noticed that some of the most deadly wars had been fought involving democracies. The US Civil War, the First World War, various wars of colonisation by European 'liberal democracies'. Would it be right to surmise that there was something about Democracy that makes it incompatible with coexistence and with modernism?

With the statistics as they are, with the anecdotal evidence that stares us in the face, with Islam's totally unique history and origins, with the disturbingly hostile tenor of the Quran, and with the self-reinforcing conservatism of Islam, I think we'd be total idiots to ignore the latter possible explanation, that there's something deeply wrong with Islam.

I do worry a bit that you seem to want to put a lot of weight on anecdotal evidence. It has its place, but it can be very misleading indeed. Likewise, a snapshot of statistics may not give a full picture.

While Islam is unique (like any religion is), I'm not sure that the Quran is any more violent than the Torah or the origins of Sikhism. Every religion has at some point had a violent expansive period, with the exception perhaps of the Baha'i. And each major religion has had 'self-reinforcing conservatism'.

You list a few of Iraq's non-religious elements. Every conflict is complicated by history and circumstances, and has deep roots. [One of the the roots of conflict in Iraq that we westerners have the most trouble appreciating is the lingering sectarian ill-will directly traceable to battles and atrocities that took place in the earliest centuries of Islam. There's a type of non-forgetting in the Arab world (if not the entire Muslim one) that we have a lot of trouble understanding.]

I seemto recall that in recent times we've had lingering sectarian ill-will between Catholics and Protestants (in Northern Ireland, traced back to battles several hundred years ago), between Orthodox and Catholic (in Croatia and Bosnia, traced back to events of nearly a millenium ago) and between Buddhist and Hindu (in Sri Lanka over rivalries that go back centuries). Disputes and rivalry between many long established neighbouring countries will often include heartfelt reference to events of many years past. We can do 'non-forgetting' and with a little application can easily understand it.

But when locales with different histories but Islam in common are experiencing violence, and locales with similar histories but no Islam aren't, a hypothesis that Islam itself is a causative agent of violence has to logically be considered. A causative agent, not the (only) causative agent. And an agent, not a direct and simple A-leads-to-B.

Can you supply me with an idea of what you mean by locales with similar histories but no Islam? Where are you talking about?

Most of Africa, most of non-Islamic Asia except China and Japan, and most of South America were all subject to colonialism, have all suffered poverty and poor education, and dictators. Differences? A thousand. And wars are certainly not unknown in these places.

Next you'll ask for a detailed statistical breakout. (At least I would!)
I'm not going to take the time, so you may consider the point conceded.

A study of the evolution of religions demonstrates that all religions are constructed by men, and used by men for their purposes. Often it has been used to control the general populace by an elite.
Islam is no different in that regard.

You may choose to beleive whichever religion provides unique revelations about the world we live in, but most religions share that feature. Competing revelations....
Whether a backwards group in Afghanistan is using Islam, oeosn't say anything about the religion more than the peaceful practice of the faith by millions of Indonesians - suppossedly of the same faith. Or indeed of millions of Americans who share the same faith. If it is inherently bd in some way, why is it possible for peaceful people to practice in peaceful ways?

Islam is said to be oppressive to women, and as practiced by many I agree. But it wasn't long ago that the Christian bible was used to oppress women. Still is if you consider the Catholic prescription against women in the church, and against birth control...
Islam will change and evolve as the populace becomes more enlightened. Using Taliban hill billies as an example of Islam at its worst would be like using bigamist cults to define Mormonism.
If Poggio Brocollini and his friends of the 14th century had not rescued so many of the books of the Greek antiquities from rotting in forgotten monastery libraries, it ,might have been a very long time till the renaissance was ever experienced. The West evolved from a dark age that was largely created by the spread of Christianity and its imposition on the pagan populace. Without exposure to the evolved ideas of the Greeks, would we still all accept the indisputable word of the Pope and the idea of monarchs appointed by God?
Brocollini served in the Popes court (one of the three popes that lay claim to the throne of Peter at the time) and witnessed countless persecutions and tortures for blashphemy and heretical ideas.... And yet it was the inspiration provided by books he rescued that largely lead the West to evolve past the Dark Ages...
I suspect that in the era of modern communication, Islam will modernize and moderate far more quickly than Christianity did.