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some disagreement

Posted by Baldur on 2010-March-18 10:47:13 EDT, Thursday
In reply to Re: You are wrong posted by Ominous on 2010-March-18 12:54:55 EDT, Thursday
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My experience is that many, perhaps most Muslims in the Middle East want change, but they do not like it to be imposed. It makes only a little difference whether western ideas are imposed firsthand by the American army or secondhand by native leaders strongarmed into making the changes.

While the situation is complicated, it should also be remembered that most forms of Islam have traditionally been reasonably tolerant - certainly more tolerant than the Wahhabi version. I'm sure that volumes have been filled with speculation, but I think it is fair to say that the modern West has played a role in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism - but not so much the Western part as the modern part. A similar phenomenon occurred in the United States, where people confronted with modernity often flocked to Christian Fundamentalism in an effort to deal with new things they did not understand. Oddly enough, some televangelists like Jerry Falwell actually exerted a modernizing effect on these subgroups, by allowing them to understand and accept new technologies and ideas on their own terms.

Of course, Islam has never been as tolerant as most Muslims believe it has been - for instance, many Islamic rulers taxed Christians and Jews in order to pressure them to change their faith, or enslaved young Christian boys and removed them from their homes to train them as soldiers (janissaries). Likewise, there was a famous incident in which a Libyan ambassador in Paris told Thomas Jefferson that the Koran justified Libyan pirates attacking American ships and enslaving American sailors. (That did not go over well with the man largely responsible for Freedom of Religion in America, and led directly to America's first foreign intervention - an attack on Tripoli.) But these things are not stressed in modern schools in Islamic nations, any more than the dominance of Yankees in the Slave Trade or in the Chinese Opium Trade has been stressed in American public schools, and the average person in these Islamic nations is unaware of this part of their history.

My point in all this is that it is by no means clear which side is more at fault, but it is still natural to resent being forced by outsiders to change one's culture, even if these changes are in the direction that the people would like to go. Sometimes it is best to allow people and nations room to grow for themselves.



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