friedman on the islamic world

theodore dalrymple, phyisician and psychiatrist who writes for the daily spectre in london, learned from talking to imprisoned muslim youth,

"...most schools of islam today treat the qu'ran as a divinely inspired text that is not open to any literary criticism or creative reinterpretation. it is a sacred book to be memorized, not adapted to the demands and opportunities of modern life. but without a culture that encourages and creates space for, such creative reinterpretation, critical thought and original thinking tend to wither. this may expalin why so few world-class scientific papers cited by other scholars come out of the arab-muslim universities."

"if the west had made shakespeare, 'the sole object of our study and the sole guide of our lives,' said dalrymple, 'we would soon enough fall into backwardness and stagnation. and the problem is that so many muslims want both stagnation and power: they want a return to the perfection of the seventh century and to dominate the twenty-first, as they believe is the birthright of their doctine, the last testament of god to man. if they were content to exist in a seventh-century backwater, secure in a quietist philosophy, there would be no problem for them or us; their problem , and ours, is that they want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and instituitons that guarantee that free inquiry. they are faced with a dilemma: either they abandon their cherished religion, or they remain forever in the rear of human technical advance. neither alternative is very appealing, and the tension between their desire for power and success in the modern world on the one hand, and their desire not to abandon their religion on the other, is reolvable for some only by exploding themselves as bombs. people grow angry when faced with an intractable dilemma; they lash out.'

"...it does not make wars obsolete. and it does not guarantee that governments will not engage in wars of choice, even governments that are part of major supply chains. to suggest so would be naive. it guarantees only that governments whose countries are enmeshed in global supply chains will have to think three times, not just twice, about engaging in anything but a war of self-defense. and if they choose to go to war anyway, the price they will pay will be ten times higher than it was a decade ago and probably ten times higher than whatever the leaders of that country think."

"america's role in the world, from its inception, had been to be the country that looks forward, not back. one of the most dangerous things that has happened to america since 9/11, under the bush administration, is that we have gone from exporting hope to exporting fear. we have gone from trying to coax the best out of the world to snarling at it way too often. and when you export fear, you end up importing everyone else's fears. yes, we need people who can imagine the worst, because the worst did happen on 9/11 and it could happen again. but, as i said, there is a fine line between precaution and paranoia, and at times we have crossed it."

"in societies that have more memories than dreams, too many people are spending too many days looking backward. they see dignity, affirmation, and self-worth not by mining the present but by chewing on the past. and even that is usually not a real past but an imagined and adorned past. indeed, such societies focus all their imagination on making that imagined past even more beautiful that it ever was, and then they cling to it like a rosary or a strand of worry beads, rather than imagining a better future and acting on that. it is dangerous enough when other countries go down that route; it would be disastrous for america to lose its bearings and move in that direction."

"i believe that history will make very clear that president bush shamelessly exploited the emotions around 9/11 for political purposes. he used those 9/11 emotions to take a far-right republican domestic agenda on taxes, the environment, and social issues form 9/10- an agenda for which he had no popular mandate- and drive it into a 9/12 world. in doing so, mr. bush not only drove a wedge between americans and the world, he drove a wedge between america and its own history and identity. his administration transformed the united states into "the united states of fighting terrorism." this is the real reason, in my view, that so many people in the world dislike president bush so intensely. they feel that he has taken away something very dear to thenm- an america that exports hope, not fear."

i will end with saying that he goes on to say that one of the largest population of muslims today resides in india- and they are prospering. why? there are no suicide bombers there because they have something to do and work for. with oil at all time highs, the american oil men and arab oil men get insanely rich- but the population doesn't. there aren't taxes and there aren't jobs- uneployment rates are in the 20%-30% range in many arabic countries. if you are living in a world where all you do is have time to think about how great you used to be-- our math comes from ancient arabia--and how backwards your country is now- and you don't have a way to fix it- then you get mad. very simplistic i know and there is no excuse for the taking of human lives. i just think that it behooves us to have some insight into what is going on in the minds of the middle east. forewarned is forearmed.