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One thing has been holding back the Middle East
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: One thing has been holding back the Middle East
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a Theory. Before the advent of Islam in the 7th century AD, the area that is currently geographically named the "Middle East" basically consisted of different and well developed cultures spread out over Persia (Iran, Iraq etc.), The Levant (Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Syria etc.), North Africa (Egypt, Algeria etc.), Turkey and regions around the Mediterranean. They were all traveling/learning to/from the rest o…
When do you think " Europe threw off the Christian Church's yoke "?
I would say the Reformation was the start followed by the Enlightenment.
Re: One thing has been holding back the Middle East
#23While this article focuses on the anti-science stance of fundamentalist Islam, I wonder if it isn't also an oblique reference to the current anti-science campaign in the U.S., and for the same basic reason, to stifle logical and critical thinking for church-state control.
I think it's hard to argue Trump is going for church-state control, when he never goes to church, practices no Christian virtues, and only ever talks about himself. The guy never partners with anyone; there are just subordinate loyalists and everyone else. There's no way Trump will let anyone apart from himself be in control.
Trump keeps releigious people close to him, not so much for advice as for validation. I personally think the ones he aligns with are the most grifty ones, but YMMV. There's a much stronger more visible religiosity (performative or sincere) among his subordinates. A cync might look at this and conclude that since Trump won't be around forever his less charismatic underlings want a tried-and-tested social technology to keep the herd together.
Re: One thing has been holding back the Middle East
#24I'd offer a much easier explanation! Middle East only became a laggard when it became wholly owned by Ottoman Empire. It meant that when Europe transformed into unitary nation-states where unity of blood, religion, language, and culture defined what the state was (the only exception being Roma and Jews that lived everywhere and were kicked around at the first opportunity), nothing like that happened there because Ottoman Empire was well, an empire - it didn't care about ethnicities.
As a result, once it collapsed in 1921, we got a bunch of places that had nothing intrinsic to hold them together - places randomly drawn on the map by dudes in top hats somewhere in Paris and London, populated by a multitude of peoples holding a great variety of sectarian beliefs (not just Sunni vs Shia, but also different schools of those, some of those like Druze, becoming like ethnicities of their own). Because there is no internal cohesion - people living there are well, random people speaking random languages with random faith and having nothing to do with one another - there is either a hard power that forces them into obedience (e.g. Syria under Assad the Elder), in which case there is order, but no true progress - or not even that, in which case well, there is endless bloody chaos.
Only solution here is slow, gradual genocide of "others" until a semblance of an individual ethnicity defining a state, is formed. In Europe it took centuries and culminated in World Wars. Eastern Europe only became truly unblocked in its progress after the end of Communism, predated by the ethnic purges orchestrated by victorious Allies ("move all Poles to Poland, all Germans to Germany, etc") in late 1940s. Before WWII, Eastern Europe states resembled modern Middle East with ethnic strife preventing development and forcing those countries either into hard-power authoritarianism (Poland), or dysfunction (First Czechoslovak Republic).
Ethnic cleansing, i believe, is deemed "bad" for the only reason: it gives a nation that executed it, a massive competitive advantage, so those who did it a long time ago, strive to prevent others from doing the same.
Re: One thing has been holding back the Middle East
#25It happens everywhere, not only in the middle east, not only with religion. People who crave control rise to the top, apply tight control to stay there, kill creativity in the process.
>People who crave control rise to the top, apply tight control to stay there, kill creativity in the process.
There is nothing about authoritarian regimes which prevents them from making scientific progress. See e.g. China, a society with substantial authoritarian features, a massive surveillance state and one party rule. At the same time they became one of the best manufacturers of everything in the world. Within a decade they built up a world class car industry, which both the US and the EU had to ban from competing.
Re: One thing has been holding back the Middle East
#26This is all very good but like most articles written by Westerners ignorant of 19th and 20th-century history it completely forgoes the part where European colonialism did everything in its power to remove progressive governments, generate division amongst any clans that could have possibly aspired to modern identities, and sabotaged anyone who could have posed a thread to Western interests who, coincidentally, we som…
That argument is anticipated in the article.
And it has no real rebuttal. It's all "over here in the West we were better". Completely ignores the role of functional progressive states and how the West shitted all over them during critical times because it wasn't in their interests.
Re: One thing has been holding back the Middle East
#27This is all very good but like most articles written by Westerners ignorant of 19th and 20th-century history it completely forgoes the part where European colonialism did everything in its power to remove progressive governments, generate division amongst any clans that could have possibly aspired to modern identities, and sabotaged anyone who could have posed a thread to Western interests who, coincidentally, we som…
The author’s father is Pakistani, for what it’s worth.
And? Being a child of immigrants doesn't mean your opinion on the place of origin of your family can be any good.
Re: One thing has been holding back the Middle East
#28> I guess I am not alone in wondering how different the Middle East might have been had it not been for the seismic influence of Al-Ghazali, that revered scholar of Sunni thought, who in the 12th century argued that science is not a liberator but a threat to the word of God and a danger to the clerics, who had every incentive to thwart the thirst for knowledge to maintain their power and privileges. “Innovator” was n…
That's a very interesting video. It persuaded me that Al Ghazali was much more pro-science than I had thought.