|
Recent
Stories
May
12, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Bush, Bin Laden, Bechtel, and Baghdad
Dave
Lindorff
America's Dirty Bombs
Sam
Hamod and Elaine Cassel
Resisting the Bush Administration's War on Liberty
Uzi
Benziman
Sharon and Sons, Inc.
Jason
Leopold
The Decline and Fall of Thomas White
Rich Procter
George Jumps the Shark
Federico
Moscogiuri
Going to Israel? Sign or Else
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/12
Book
of the Day
Fooling
Marty Peretz
Website
of the Day
T-Shirts to Protest In
May
10 / 11, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Rosenthal Faces the Music in Key
Med Marijuana Case
JoAnn
Wypijewski
Labor in the Dawn of Empire
Annie
C. Higgins
The Last Time I Saw Mus'ab
Ron Jacobs
The Devil in New England
William
Mandel
One on One with Sen. Joe McCarthy
Jason Leopold
Halliburton Still Flouts the Law as It Profits from Terror
Patrick
Cockburn
The Iraqi Quagmire
Larry Magnuson
William Bennett: Next Viceroy
of Iraq?
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
The Good Terrorists?
Anthony
Gancarski
Chalabi: Drowning in Ba'ath-water?
Steven
Sherman
A Letter to My European Friends
Khaled
El-Bizri
Mr. Bush Comes to Santa Clara
Bruce
Jackson
How Fear Curdles the Soul
Adam Engel
Flag in the Rain
Poets
Basement
Reiss, Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/10
Website
of the Weekend
Killing Again
May
9, 2003
Rahul
Mahajan
Don't Lift the Sanctions Yet
Wayne
Madsen
When Lying Pays Off: Neo-Con Fabricators
Chris
Floyd
The Karamazov Question
Don Monkerud
The Great Christian Schism: War or Peace?
Sam
Hamod and Elaine Cassel
Drunk on Power: Bush, Power and the
Pathology of the Dry Drunk
Hammond
Guthrie
Bombastic Promise Keeping
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/09
May
8, 2003
Julie
Hilden
When It's a Crime to Visit Your Son
Mickey
Z.
Partisan Protests?
Mark
Zepezauer
Evil is as Evil Does
David Lindorff
The Coming Senior Revolution
Abu
Spinoza
The Detention of Dr. Huda Ammash
Ben
Tripp
The Other "F" Word
Norman
Madarasz
God in the Service of the Security
State: a Dispatch from Brazil
Stew Albert
Pushovers
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/08
Website
of the Day
Department of Sexual Security
May
7, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Quoting Under the Influence: Breasts,
Martinis, Hitchens
David
Krieger
Winning the War; Alienating the World
Sen.
Robert Byrd
Bush's Troubling Speech
Bruce Jackson
Bill Kunstler's Last Big Speech
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/07
Website
of the Day
The Truth About Bush's Military Records
May
6, 2003
Paul
de Rooij
An Activist in the Trenches: an Interview
with Gretta Duisenberg
Anthony
Gancarski
Money to Burn: in Defense of Bill Bennett
John
Stanton
Bush's War on Jesus
Sam
Hamod
W. Bush: the Little Snot, the Little
Bully
Robert
Fisk
Bush Says the War is Over: Tell It to
the Shi'a
Kathleen
Christison
A Roadmap to Nowhere
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/06
May
5, 2003
Gary
Leupp
Phase Two: Syria and Iran
Jorge
Mariscal
The Militarization of US Culture
Ishmael
Reed
A Family Values Man
Tarif Abboushi
Sharon's Confidence: Bush Won't Come to Shove on Roadmap
Leila
Matsui
Regime Change Begins at Home...Literally
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Sam
Smith
Coalition of the Shilling
May
3, 2003
Ron
Jacobs
Tears of Rage: Remembering May 1970
Elaine
Cassel
William Bennett, a Freudian Perspective
Sam
Hamod
Understanding the Shi'a of Lebanon
Scott
Fleming
Getting Shot on the Oakland Docks
Mickey
Z.
Cuba and Puerto Rico: 100 Years of Terror
William
S. Lind
Don't Take Col. John Boyd's Name in Vain
Dr.
Bruce Blair
The New Nuclear Terrorism Threat
Joanne
Mariner
Cluster Bombs Over Iraq
Anthony
Gancarski
Hot Fun in the Summertime
Ilian Pappe
Searching Jenin
William
MacDougall
America's Kids Are All Right: Pre-Teen Conservative Commentators
Seth Sandronsky
Incarcerated and Invisible
Rich
Procter
Over Our Dead Bodies
Lenni Brenner
How Bob Dylan Found His Voice
Adam
Engel
American Bulk
Poets'
Basement
Reiss, Guthrie, Albert
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/03
May
2, 2003
Caoimhe
Butterly
Crowd Control American-style
Neve
Gordon
US: No Right to Know About the Disappeared
John
Chuckman
Tom Friedman's Life as a Pet Hamster
Bradley
Burston
Betting on Abu-Mazen...To Lose
Harvey
Wasserman
Bush's Military Defeat
John
Troyer
Question Those Writing History
Saul Landau
The Cuba Conundrum
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/02
Website
of the Day
Moussaoui's
Quiz
May
1, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Santorum: That's Latin for Asshole
Iain
Boal
A May Day Message to the FCC: "We
Are Many; They are Few"
Diana
Johnstone
About Cuba
Sam
Hamod
Killings at Al Fallujah, City of Mosques
Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Intelligence Fiasco
Lee Sustar
Greed Air: Airline Workers Agree to Pay Cuts, While Bosses Stuff
Their Pockets
Peter
Linebaugh
May Day at Kut and Kienthal
Stew Albert
Straight Shooters
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/01
Website
of the Day
South Bay Mobilization
April
30, 2003
Ashley
Smith
Under Uncle Sam's Thumb: a History
of Washington's Occupations
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/30
Gary
Leupp
Shooting Schoolboys: Preliminary Thoughts on the Fallujah Massacre
Robert
Jensen
Fighting Alienation in the USA
Wayne
Madsen
The Four Horsemen of Propaganda
Ahmad
Faruqui
Bush's Strategic Myopia About the Middle East
Gabriel
Kolko
Iraq, the US and the End of the European Coalition
Adolfo
Perez Esquivel
A Nobel Laureat's Letter to Bush:
"You Talk of Freedom; You Detest Freedom"
April
29, 2003
Gary
Leupp
Disorder and Opportunity: the Results
of the Iraq War
Uri
Avnery
Don't Envy Abu-Mazen
Anthony
Gancarski
Brush with the Law
Mickey
Z.
POWs: Then and Now
CounterPunch
Wire
How to Spin Israel on the Hill: Internal Lobbying Documents
Robert
Fisk
Did the US Murder Journalists?
Chris
Floyd
Bush Telegraphs His Punches on Syria
Wayne Madsen
About Those Iraqi Intelligence Documents
Wallace
Gagne
Pilgrimage or Demolition Derby?
Eliot Katz
Playing Catch with Cracked Globes
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/29
Hot Stories
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
May
13, 2003
Has Islam Failed?
Not by Western
Standards
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
We hear over and over again that Islam has failed,
that it is in crisis. The claims always involve comparing Islam
to something else, though to what is often unclear. If 'failed'
just means 'hasn't kept up with the West', Islam has indeed failed.
So has every other culture, except to the extent it has Westernized.
And if a culture fails whenever it falls behind the economic
or technological front runners, Italian culture has failed in
relation to Japanese or American culture.
But if 'failed' means something else,
what is that? Bernard Lewis says: "In the course of the
twentieth century it became abundantly clear that things had
gone badly wrong in the Middle East--and, indeed, in all the
lands of Islam. Compared with Christendom, its rival for more
than a millennium, the world of Islam had become poor, weak,
and ignorant." He also tells us that "Arab" nations
rank poorly on a scale of "economic freedom".
Even if we knew whether we were comparing
the West or Christendom with The Middle East or the Arab World
or the Muslim World, the terms of the comparison would be uncertain.
It is almost as if any parameter will
do, as long as Islam comes out on the bottom: should my heart
really swell with pride if I hear that my country has lots of
'economic freedom'? Sometimes Islam seems to have failed primarily
in areas where there is no consensus that it is good to succeed.
Should Egyptians envy the Americans their
fine electoral system and the impressive leaders it produces?
Ought Tunisians to learn criminal justice
from US courts and  prisons?
Should impoverished Iranians yearn for
the medical care they would get in America?
We needn't be relativists when we compare
civilizations. But it is one thing to insist on applying 'Western
values' to practices such as slavery or female genital mutilation.
It is quite another to suppose that Western values are whatever
today's ideologues declare them to be-- economic freedom, for
instance, as opposed to equally Western values like asceticism,
environ-mentalism, socialism and communism. And it is something
else again to compare Islamic realities, not with Western ones,
but with America as it looks to patriotic bar-stool warmers after
six beers.
Suppose, then, that we retain 'Western
values', but spare ourselves the ideological claptrap about democracy
and economic freedom. One Western value, I think, is that one
should attempt some degree of objectivity when comparing cultures:
if one cannot entirely avoid applying one's own values, one can
at least rely only on their most nearly uncontroversial, universal
elements. This means avoiding even such apparently undoctrinaire
measures as 'average annual income' (also a Lewis yardstick).
What's more important, after all, the average or the minimum?
What if the average rises only because the rich get richer, despite
immense suffering at the bottom of the scale? Western values
oblige us to measure the success of society in genuinely moral
rather than ideological terms.
If we insist on judging a whole civilization,
three constraints might curb our arrogance. First, we should
be looking at the basics--poverty, health, exposure to violence.
For all the critics of Islam praise freedom and democracy, they
offer as proof of their ideological pudding the allegedly superior
capacity of non-Islamic societies to deliver these basics. Second,
we should measure the success of society by how things are at
the bottom of the social scale. Delivering the basics doesn't
mean much if you don't deliver them to everyone, and even a dazzling
civilization can't be counted successful if it's built on misery.
Third, any judgements delivered must be strictly comparative.
The issue isn't whether Islam has failed to meet certain standards,
but whether its failures are worse than those of Christianity.
The comparison, in this form, defines
two civilizations by their adherence to two religions. Islam
is being compared, not with the West--not with a region--but
with Bernard Lewis' 'Christendom'. We could, it is true, compare
the Islamic Middle East with Western Europe and the US. That
would lead only to the unsurprising truth that the West, which
actively colonized or occupied the Middle East for many years,
did better. We would draw exactly the same conclusions if we
compared the West with Latin America, or sub-Saharan Africa,
or the Indian subcontinent. To compare regions is not to compare
civilizations, and to single out a lagging Islamic region when
there are many lagging non-Islamic regions is just plain dishonest.
So a comparison of Lewis' "all the lands of Islam"
with 'all the lands of Christendom', which focuses on civilizations
rather than regions, seems more likely to transcend particular
regional problems and advantages. We will say something about
the Middle East versus the West later.
To make the comparison, let's look at
some numerical indicators of well-being, as well as some recent
history: you can't very well assess well-being within a culture
or society without looking at the wars they have experienced.
The idea is to see whether Islam is worse than Christianity at
protecting people from the worst things in life. I'll base the
initial comparison on UN statistics. These seem to be the best
available, though they have one drawback: for each parameter,
the UN figures offer information on a slightly different batch
of countries.
The UN offers some 'millennium indicators'
of material well-being, including health. (There are 48 indicators
in all, including HIV incidence, condom use, malaria incidence,
educational indicators, market access, internet use, and so on.
I have selected some of the ones most directly related to material
well-being. The reader can readily verify that my selection is
not slanted to favor Islam.) The figures will be integrated with
information about the religions of the countries listed, compiled
from the Information Please Almanac and the CIA World Factbook.
To start, take infant mortality rates for the latest year available,
2000. Do these figures make Islam look worse than Christendom?
Here are figures for the 27 countries
whose infant mortality rate is a horrific 10% or more, i.e.,
at least 100. (This cutoff doesn't skew anything; the next three
countries are not Islamic.)
Infant mortality rate (0-1 year) per
1,000 live births (UNICEF estimates), 2000
Sierra Leone
180
Islam 40%, Christian 35%,
Other 20%
Angola
172
Roman Catholic 47%,
Protestant 38%, Other 15%
Afghanistan
165
Islam (167 in 1990
under secular ruler Najibullah)
Niger
159
Islam 80%, Animist
and Christian 20%
Liberia
157
other 40%, Christian 40%,
Islam 20%
Mali
142
Islam
Somalia
133
Islam
Guinea-Bissau
132
other 65%, Islam 30%, Christian 5%
Congo-Kinshasa
128
Roman Catholic 50%, Protestant 20%,
Kimbanguist 10%, Islam 10%
Mozambique
126
other 60%, Christian 30%, Islam 10%
Mauritania
120
Islam
Chad
118
Islam 44%, Christian 33%, other 23%
Ethiopia
[from
1993]
117
Christian
Malawi
117
Christian 75%, Islam 20%
Central African
Republic
115
Christian (other influence) 50%,
Islam 15%, other 35%
Burundi
114
Roman Catholic 62%, Protestant 5%,
other 32%
Guinea
112
Islam 85%, other 7%, Christian 8%
Zambia
112
Christian 50%-75%, Islam and
Hindu 24%-49%, other 1%
Nigeria
110
Islam 50%, Christian 40%,
other 10%
Burkina Faso
105
Islam 50%, Christian (mainly Roman
Catholic) 10%, other 40%
Iraq
105
Islam
Tanzania
104
Christian 40%, Islam 33%
Equatorial Guinea
103
predominantly Christian
with pagan practices
Cote d'Ivoire
102
other 60%, Islam 23%,
Christian 17%
Djibouti
102
Islam
Swaziland
101
Christian 60%, other 40%
Rwanda
100
Roman Catholic 56%, Protestant 18%,
Islam 1%, Other 25%
Certainly the Islamic religion figures
prominently among those states with high infant mortality, but
Islamic civilization does not. Sierra Leone, for instance, was
not only a British colony from 1808 to 1961, but also a seat
of British administrative and education institutions for the
region. Its current misery is due largely to the "reign
of terror" (Infoplease) of Catholic-educated Johnny Paul
Koroma, now a born-again Christian. Afghanistan's infant morality
rate was even worse under the secular, Western rule of Russian-backed
Najibullah; Iraq's is a result of Western sanctions policies
and Saddam Hussein's secular, Westernized rule. Otherwise, every
single state on the list with a substantial Islamic population
has been a Christian colony or protectorate for much of its history.
More purely Islamic states, like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Lybia,
are nowhere to be found. Nothing here suggests that the worst
infant mortality rates are found in the Islamic rather than in
the Christian world.
Suppose then we look at something perhaps
even more basic: nutrition, specifically those undernourished
as percentage of total population. For simplicity's sake we'll
consider only the worst ten cases. Again, readers can easily
consult the original source to verify that this abbreviated view
doesn't distort the comparison.
Nutrition, undernourished as percentage
of total population (FAO estimates 1998-2000 average)
Congo-Kinshasa
73
Christian
Somalia
71
Islamic
Afghanistan
70
Islamic
Burundi
69
Christian
Tajikistan
64
80% Islamic population: anti-Islamic government
Eritrea
58
not predominantly Islamic; long Christian rule
Mozambique
55
not predominantly Islamic; long Christian rule
Angola
50
Christian
Haiti
50
Christian
Zambia
50
mainly Christian
Nothing here suggests that Islam is particularly
bad at nourishing its people.
What of poverty? There are UN figures
on the percentage of population who consume less than $1 a day.
'Poverty, percentage of population below $1 (PPP) per day consumption
(WB)' (1998 figures when available, otherwise 1999, indicated
with *)
Zambia
63.7
Mainly Christian
Gambia
59.3
Islam
Madagascar
49.1*
Christian 41%,
Islam 7%, other 52%
Ghana
44.8*
Islam 30%, Christian 24%,
other 38%
Honduras
24.3
Christian
Venezuela
23
Christian
El Salvador
21
Christian
Colombia
19.7
Christian
Paraguay
19.5
Christian
China
18.8*
Other
Again the figures give no support whatever
to the 'failure of Islam' hypothesis. (Admittedly the list is
very incomplete--where are the poverty-stricken Christian states
of Haiti and Ethiopia?--but not, I believe, unrepresentative.)
Sanitation is another relatively uncontroversial
indicator of how well a society is doing. This time I'll list
the twelve worst, because the last three on the list are tied.
Sanitation, percentage of population
with access to improved sanitation, total (WHO-UNICEF 2000)
Rwanda
8
Christian
Afghanistan
12
Islamic
Ethiopia
[from 1993]
12
Christian
Eritrea
13
not predominantly Islamic;
long Christian rule
Cambodia
17
Buddhist
Niger
20
Islamic
Congo-Kinshasa
21
Christian
Benin
23
Christian 15%, Islam 15%,
other 70%
Central African
Republic
25
Christian (animist influence) 50%,
Islam 15%, other 35%
Haiti
28
Christian
India
28
predominantly Hindu
Nepal
28
predominantly Hindu
Islam is certainly no standout in this
hall of shame.
Note that for individual countries, these
indicators work very well. Haiti, Burundi, Afghanistan, Somalia,
and Ethiopia would, as expected, score much lower on all of them
than Britain, France, Switzerland, and the US. Pretty much anyone,
regardless of religion or culture, would agree that the low scorers
are doing worse than the high scorers. If we were comparing democracy,
or freedom, or ignorance, we couldn't get anything like the same
consensus: Cuba or Saudi Arabia are doubtless less democratic
than Mexico or Argentina, but not everyone would be sure which
are the failed societies.
So on these non-ideological measures
of well-being, Islam is no failure in comparison with 'Christendom'.
Indeed Christendom, with its economic dominance and technological
superiority, might well be considered more reprehensible in its
failures to provide for its poor. Another relatively unbiased
but somewhat less materialistic measure would be the degree of
violence in a society. One indicator is the murder rates, and
the countries with high ones are overwhelmingly Christian. But
since murder statistics are debatable, we might also want to
survey the propensity of these two civilizations to generate
wars. In recent times, if there any failure, it is Christianity.
It is not just(!) that 'Christendom' has produced two world wars,
and Hitler. The postwar period is hardly more encouraging. There
is the Korean war, in which Christians but not Muslims played
a central role, the Vietnam War which accounts for the deaths
of as many as four million people, and terrible civil or colonial
wars in Mozambique and Angola. Nor are the death tolls simply
a function of Western technology: the horrendous low-tech killing
in Rwanda and now in the Congo are thoroughly Christian. On the
Islamic side, not much is in the same league. There is the Iran-Iraq
war, instigated by secular, Westernized, Iraq. The Lebanese civil
war involved both cultures, as does Algeria's colonial past and,
to a lesser extent, its present. So Islam, compared either to
the West or to Christianity, has far less killing on its conscience.
What about internal repression? The great
killing of Communists in predominantly Muslim Indonesia took
place, not as part of some fundamentalist upsurge, but within
the context of ongoing American cold-war interference. As for
Syria and Iraq, Bernard Lewis himself says that
If you look, for example, at the regimes
of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, of the late Hafez el-Asad in Syria,
these are not part of the Islamic or Arab tradition; they are
the results of European influence and the Europeanization of
the Middle East, sometimes also called modernization or Westernization.
(Truman News, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Volume V, Issue
1 March 1, 2003)
Iran is certainly Islamic, but it inherited
its brutal secret police from its very Westernized and US-sponsored
Shah. Though undeniably horrible cruelties are perpetrated throughout
the Muslim world, Christianity--even forgetting that Hitler business--
easily matches these in the recent past of Haiti, Greece, Chile,
Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, El Salvador, Guatemala, South Africa,
Peru, Ethiopia, and many only slightly less vicious Christian
dictatorships. And though none of these 'Christian' régimes
deserve to be called Christian, their crimes are entirely the
product of Christian civilization. The crimes of 'Islamic' régimes,
by contrast, have in most cases important links to non-Islamic,
indeed to 'Christian' influences.
So compared to Christendom, Islam doesn't
seem to have failed. What if it is instead compared to the West?
Certainly on most measures of material well-being (but not of
violence), the West triumphs. Yet virtually no one claims Christianity
enabled the West to come out ahead, because the rise of the West
coincides with the often violent fragmentation of Christianity
and the spread of secularism.
'Experts' and pundits prefer to attribute
Western dominance to democracy. But the West did not exactly
elect itself into the lead: it triumphed largely because of its
progress in science and technology. And it is a bit odd to see
Western success as a failure of Islam, as if Muslims
had contracted some strange mental disease: every other civilization
fell equally far behind. In any case, can the West's progress
be attributed to democracy? Not likely, because its scientific
and technological dominance came first.
The first major advances that put the
West ahead included the astronomy of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe,
Galileo, and Kepler, the explorations of Columbus and Magellan,
and the mathematics of Pascal and Fermat. All these occurred
before there was the slightest hint of democracy. The English
provided the impetus for a second wave of discovery and invention.
It developed when the power of the monarchy had been reduced,
but certainly before England could be called democratic: the
vote excluded women, a large segment of the lower classes, and
was in any case so corrupt and manipulated that no one considered
it even remotely representative. This only began to be corrected
with the First Reform Bill of 1832. Even by 1867, less than 10%
of the adult population could vote, and real democracy came only
in the early 20th century. Yet before 1832 we get Napier's logarithms,
Snell's law of refraction, Harvey's work on the circulation of
the blood, the calculus of Newton, the economics of Adam Smith,
Herschel's discovery of Uranus, Hutton's uniformitarianism, Priestly's
discovery of oxygen, Jenner's smallpox vaccinations, and Dalton's
laws. In technology, we have Hargreaves' spinning jenny, James
Watt's steam engine, Cartwright's power loom, Whitney's cotton
gin, Fulton's steamboat, Stephenson's locomotive engine, and
the first railroad. This activity is complemented on the not
even nominally democratic continent by Bernouilli's work on probability
and fluid mechanics, Michel and Montgolfier's hot air balloon,
Berthollet's chemical nomenclature, Volta's battery, Ampère's
work on electricity, Gauss' and Lobachevsky's mathematics, Avogadro's
chemistry, and Ampere's force law.
All the subsequent progress of the 19th
century and beyond, up to and including the theory of relativity,
occurred before the institution of women's suffrage (1919) and
truly universal suffrage (1928), and therefore before the existence
of any 'democracy' in the modern sense of the term. (This fact
weakens another claim, namely that Islam's treatment of women
was a contributor to its relative underdevelopment.) It is also
worth noting that when England eliminated famine in the 1620's
and France around 1709, both countries were securely in the grip
of absolutism. (As for literary and cultural achievement, no
one claims that the West first flowered in its democratic phase.)
So if the comparison is between the Middle East and the West,
it is far more plausible to attribute the West's lead to the
formation of cohesive, undemocratic nation states than to the
progress of democratic societies. This certainly fits the story
of Germany, a scientific and technological giant throughout the
19th and early 20th centuries, known otherwise for the conspicuous
failure of its democracy.
So if Islam has fallen behind the West,
it is not because of either Christianity or democracy, and in
this respect Islam is no different from any non-Western culture.
Whatever caused the West's incredible technological surge in
the 17th and 18th centuries, the reasons are bound to be big,
complex, and, well, un-American. This is not at all the sort
of 'going wrong' Lewis and others are after. But suppose we make
the comparison Lewis may really want us to make: the Islamic
Middle East with the West. Suppose too that we look, not at whether
democracy accounts for 'Western success', but simply at whether
Islam has done as well as the West. Can we then say that Islam
has failed?
Only, I think, if we resort to a subterfuge
in defining "The West". Certainly if the expression
is restricted to Western Europe and the United States, Islam
will fare poorly by many standards of well-being, though not,
once again, by measures of violence. And Eastern Europe might
be excluded because it was so long under 'non-Western' Soviet
rule. But there is certainly another part of the world that should
be counted as belonging to the West, and that is Latin America.
It was under Western (mainly Spanish and Portuguese) rule for
centuries. It has been a declared sphere of US influence since
1823, a major focus of 19th century British investment, a thoroughly
Christian region, and the beneficiary of Kennedy's Alliance for
Progress. Almost all its countries, at some points in their histories,
have been democracies. Its cultural outlook is overwhelmingly
Western, as are its languages. But once it's included, things
don't look so good for the West. Minimal levels of well-being
in Middle Eastern countries are on the whole higher than in,
say, Colombia, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia,
Guatemala, and now Argentina. In the recent annals of violence
and repression, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Haiti, Paraguay,
Brazil, El Salvador, and Guatemala figure as prominently as Algeria,
Iraq, or Iran, and much more prominently than that perennial
favorite of liberal head-shakers, Egypt. And, since we're considering
the Islamic Middle East, note that the most repressive
Middle Eastern countries have all experienced long and pervasive
Western influence: Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the former French colony
of Algeria, Westernized Turkey, and the erstwhile US client,
Iran. The same may be said of Afghanistan, perhaps the worst-off
Middle Eastern country in material terms. The much 'purer' and
often fundamentalist Gulf states come out much better than the
West (including Latin America), even if we look at averages rather
than minima. So once again, the failure of Islam has slipped
away.
Perhaps Islamic civilization, like Christian
civilization, has failed according to some more or less objective
standards. But in relative terms, it has not. It does no worse
than Christendom in providing for its own. In its most degraded
impulses, it has no cruelties to teach the civilization responsible
for Auschwitz and Hiroshima. And if the comparison is between
Western technological success and the relative backwardness of
Islam, nothing suggests that democratic or Christian values are
involved. More likely, the civilization that almost took Vienna
in 1683 simply rested on its wealth and laurels until it was
too late. That Islam 'has failed' in some morally significant
and comparative sense is an illusion induced by looking at the
world in the fun-house mirrors of free-market demagogues.
Michael Neumann
is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada. Professor Neumann's views are not to be taken as those
of his university. His book What's
Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche has just
been republished by Broadview Press. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca.
Yesterday's
Features
Alexander
Cockburn
Rosenthal Faces the Music in Key
Med Marijuana Case
JoAnn
Wypijewski
Labor in the Dawn of Empire
Annie
C. Higgins
The Last Time I Saw Mus'ab
Ron Jacobs
The Devil in New England
William
Mandel
One on One with Sen. Joe McCarthy
Jason Leopold
Halliburton Still Flouts the Law as It Profits from Terror
Patrick
Cockburn
The Iraqi Quagmire
Larry Magnuson
William Bennett: Next Viceroy
of Iraq?
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
The Good Terrorists?
Anthony
Gancarski
Chalabi: Drowning in Ba'ath-water?
Steven
Sherman
A Letter to My European Friends
Khaled
El-Bizri
Mr. Bush Comes to Santa Clara
Bruce
Jackson
How Fear Curdles the Soul
Adam Engel
Flag in the Rain
Poets
Basement
Reiss, Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/10
Website
of the Weekend
T-Shirts to Protest In
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|