Can Islam Reform Itself?
By Alan
Caurba
“The most pressing challenge that the
Arabs have yet to confront is the reform of Islam. If the Arab world
can’t or won’t accept the concept of the secular state as being
consistent with Islam, then neither high-speed economic growth, nor
liberal democracy have much chance in the Middle East.” So says Steven
Schlossstein in his book, “Endangered Species: Why Muslim Economies
Fail.” ($24.95, Stratford Books)
“The prophet Mohammed came into the world
some six centuries after Christ. So maybe it will take Islam another six
hundred years to reform. Even after the breakout priests launched their
Protestant Reformation, it still took the people of Europe four centuries
to stop killing each other.”
One can only hope that the combined efforts
of many nations will take far less than six hundred years to end the era
of terrorism initiated when the father of Islamic terrorism, Yasser
Arafat, came on the scene in the early 1960s. It gained momentum with the
1979 takeover of Iran by Shiite mullahs and, with the creation of al Qaeda
following the defeat of the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Islamic
terrorism has since manifested itself around the world as the one response
Islam has ever had to change, the sword.
Those who still argue against the US use of
force after 9-11 to impose democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq totally
ignore the most astonishing facts about the Middle East. Every single
nation in that region has suffered from the kind of oppression we have
come to associate with Islamic governments as well as those in so-called
“secular” Arab nations such as the former regime of Saddam Hussein or
the current one in Syria. All have experienced a lack of economic growth
that, combined with growing populations, results in massive domestic
discontent.
Al Qaeda and other Jihadist organizations
have tapped into that discontent to introduce the world to young men and
women who are so desperate, so lacking in any hope, that they have
transformed themselves into human bombs in order to advance the domination
of Islam throughout the world.
I suggest that what we are seeing is not a
religion that is growing due to its theological message, but one that is
in the throes of a slow death, sacrificing its children in a vain effort
to survive. You never hear of the Muslims that have become apostates to
Islam because, in the Middle East, that comes with the penalty of death.
Outside the region, many former Muslims have fled this cult built around
the worship of Mohammed’s life and the strictures of the Koran and
Sharia law.
The Middle East must be rescued from the
stagnation that is the direct result of Islam’s control over the lives
and the economies of its twenty-two nations. “Last year,” writes
Schlossstein of 2003, “nearly two-thirds of global foreign direct
investment was in East Asia, but only three percent in the Middle East,
which bought fifty percent of all arms and weapons sold in the
world.” Again, the sword.
“The Islamic model,” says Schlossstein,
“is an intellectual bust, a lethal combination of Holy Law, repressive
government, tragic overpopulation, and anesthetizing unemployment, from
Iran to Morocco.”
The contrast between the economic model of
the Far East in which nations like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, lifted
themselves up from the ashes of World War II (with the help of the US) and
transformed themselves into one of the most powerful economic region in
the world stands in stark contrast to the abject failure of the Middle
East.
While the Far East concentrated on building
their economies from the ground up, instituting rigorous educational
systems, the nations of the Middle East have remained mired in self-pity,
seeing themselves as the humiliated victims of the outcome of World War I
that ended the control of the Ottoman Empire. The region was carved up
into new “nations” to be controlled by Great Britain and France by
means of the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement.
Something is very wrong when a tiny nation
like Belgium, with a population of about ten million people, publishes
more books every year than all twenty-two nations of the Arab world
combined, which has more than 200 million people. Barely 300 books a year
are translated into Arabic, only a fifth as many translated by Greece for
its citizens. Illiteracy is endemic throughout the Middle East.
Then, too, is the failure to utilize the
talents of half the population of the Middle East, its women.
“The result of this leaves the combined
GDP of all twenty-two nations of the Arab Middle East, totalling about
$530 billion, at less than the gross domestic product of Spain alone.”
Only Turkey whose leader, Ataturk, turned that Persian nation’s gaze to
the West, has escaped this fate. Its secularism, a break from Islamic
control, was and continues to be backed up by an educated military elite.
The US is in the Middle East to insure the
flow of oil to ourselves and Western allies, but it is there also because,
unless the continuing problems of the region are solved by introducing
democracy and by reversing the impact of Islam on the region, there will
be no end to the terrorism it will export, threatening the economic
engines of the West and Far East.
The good news, of course, is that many
Middle Eastern nations are feeling the demand of their people to
democratize. They can and they will. One can only hope it will lead to an
Islamic Reformation.
Alan Caruba writes a weekly commentary,
“Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety
Center, www.anxietycenter.com.
© Alan Caruba
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