Okey, I just got home.
Watched the movie "Osama" with my father.
Good movie, although very upsetting.
www.indiewire.com/movies/...osama.html (http://www.indiewire.com/movies/movies_030912osama.html)
Bottom line of this movie can be summarised with that the average muslim love the Talibans about as much as the average christian love the Ku Klux Klan.

Yet, this bloodthirsty extremist regime is often considered to be representive of Islam as such. It isn't. No single group of muslims is. Just like no single group of christians is representive of christianity as such. Both religions span over millennia. They have very complex and multifaceted history, and they are FAR from cohetent. All over the world, the common struggle for freedom and human rights is carried by atheists, moslems, christians, buddhists, et cetera alike. And it is opposed by totalitarians, bigots and other bloodthirsty assholes of ALL these faiths.

During the golden age of islam, over a millennia ago, the islamic world was ruled by leaders who was both political and religious leaders. This is what the current islamist bastards claim to be emulating. But during the golden age, the islamic world was number one on secularism and human rights. Including freedom of religion. Christians and Jews alike fled from Europe to the Middle East because they could be free there. Without converting to one doctrine or another.

The Middle East can turn democratic. And it must. For this to happen, we must promote the benign versions of all faiths. Including Islam. Especially Islam.

Mirdorr have mentioned Bernard Lewis, a guy who seem to know a lot about this. Care to tell more about him and his books?

So far I have only found one article by him, and I found it most interesting.

www.theatlantic.com/issue.../lewis.htm (http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/01/lewis.htm)

A more sophisticated form of the blame game finds its targets inside, rather than outside, Islamic society. One such target is religion—for some, specifically Islam. But to blame Islam as such is usually hazardous and not often attempted. Nor is it very plausible. For most of the Middle Ages it was neither the older cultures of the Orient nor the newer cultures of the West that were the major centers of civilization and progress but the world of Islam. There old sciences were recovered and developed and new sciences were created; there new industries were born and manufactures and commerce were expanded to a level without precedent. There, too, governments and societies achieved a freedom of thought and expression that led persecuted Jews and even dissident Christians to flee Christendom for refuge in Islam. In comparison with modern ideals, and even with modern practice in the more advanced democracies, the medieval Islamic world offered only limited freedom, but that was vastly more than was offered by any of its predecessors, its contemporaries, or most of its successors.

The point has often been made: If Islam is an obstacle to freedom, to science, to economic development, how is it that Muslim society in the past was a pioneer in all three—and this when Muslims were much closer in time to the sources and inspiration of their faith than they are now? Some have posed the question in a different form—not "What has Islam done to the Muslims?" but "What have the Muslims done to Islam?"—and have answered by laying the blame on specific teachers and doctrines and groups.

For those known nowadays as Islamists or fundamentalists, the failures and shortcomings of modern Islamic lands afflict those lands because they adopted alien notions and practices. They fell away from authentic Islam and thus lost their former greatness. Those known as modernists or reformers take the opposite view, seeing the cause of this loss not in the abandonment but in the retention of old ways, and especially in the inflexibility and ubiquity of the Islamic clergy, who, they say, are responsible for the persistence of beliefs and practices that might have been creative and progressive a thousand years ago but are neither today. The modernists' usual tactic is not to denounce religion as such, still less Islam in particular, but to level their criticism against fanaticism. It is to fanaticism—and more particularly to fanatical religious authorities—that they attribute the stifling of the once great Islamic scientific movement and, more generally, of the freedom of thought and expression.

BUT. They did not flee to ALL parts of the Middle East. The Muslims, for instance, didn't want them anywhere near Mecca or Medina, or really in most of what is now Saudi Arabia. Christians were tolerated in several port cities and areas.

It's important (and somewhat worrisome, I suppose) to note that there are conservative Islamic movements in just about every major Islamic population group.

Egypt, for instance is moving toward being more conservative, and it's starting from the population, not from religious politicians. Possibly because Egypt is majority SUnni, and not the more, I dunno, centrist Shiite.

Chicago Trib has run a series of articles on Islam - here's the one from last weekend on Egypt: www.chicagotribune.com/ne...255.story. (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0403210513mar21,1,7758255.story.)

So, question. Suppose in 10 years the young people manage to make Iran better. Will Iran's MASSIVE support of terrorism stop?

Bernard Lewis is considered the Western world's foremost authority/historian on Islam. I first heard of him from a post on econopundit.com that pointed to a New York Times article he wrote. The article isn't there anymore, which is too bad because it talked a bit about how we SHOULD be handling the MidEast. Lewis apparently has maintained for decades that our cold war policies of containment were wrong.

I'm reading one of his books, "The Crisis of Islam" and it's very interesting. I'm trying to find where he's written about what we SHOULD be doing in the MidEast.

I also mentioned Karen Armstrong, who has written several books - not just on Islam, but on other religions, as well. Here's a link to the Trib article that talked about her: www.chicagotribune.com/fe...768.story. (http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0403240050mar24,1,15768.story.) I have not read any of her stuff.

Your first thought, of course, is to throw money at the problem. After all, one of the major problems is poverty, and another is education - the personal income, GDP/person, and literacy rates of many of the Islamic countries are very low.

But whom do you trust to handle the money? What do you do when the people are too proud to accept your money, or too proud to attend the schools your money built?

Then, of course, you hear the wonderful stories. A woman at a church I attend was a teacher at a school several churches established in a MidEast country. They weren't teaching religion - it was a poor area with no school, so they set up a school. Of course, they were Westerners. So the school was blown up.

>>"It's important (and somewhat worrisome, I suppose) to note that there are conservative Islamic movements in just about every major Islamic population group."

No, that is not important and it is not worrisome. There are extremist assholes in all countries. Including Sweden and USA. The question is how large they are getting, and why.

>>"Egypt, for instance is moving toward being more conservative, and it's starting from the population, not from religious politicians. Possibly because Egypt is majority SUnni, and not the more, I dunno, centrist Shiite."

Palmer claims that the real reason is the regime. And he's sure making sense. Egypt is a repressive dictatorship. With legitimate dissent being flushed down the toilet, extremist dissent fills the void.

>>"So, question. Suppose in 10 years the young people manage to make Iran better. Will Iran's MASSIVE support of terrorism stop?"

Absolutely.
Of course, there will still be terrorists in Iran. Hello? We still have a active terrorist movement in Spain for crying out loud. And we had one in Ireland until just a few years ago. I'm not even sure that shit really stopped for good yet.

The question is how large they are getting, and why

Name the extremists in Sweden that fly planes into buildings or bomb commuter trains. I believe it IS worrisome.

But during the golden age, the islamic world was number one on secularism and human rights. Including freedom of religion

Oh, another interesting idea. A friend of mine was reading about the "stages" of religion (though I haven't gotten him to forward links yet). Religion can go through stages - peace, enlightenment, expansion, violence, etc..

The idea was that Islam is going through now what Christianity was going through in the Middle Ages. Repression, violence, poverty, etc.

But. Obviously, the world is different. Feel like getting revenge? Pretty trivial to buy guns or hop on a plane, isn't it? Easy to draw get attention for your group, too. The big questions was: Islam will most likely grow out of this as the religions and or the countries where Islam is the majority mature. However - will the rest of the world wait for this to happen?

Keep in mind Islam didn't so much pioneer those traits, they more preserved them while the rest of the western world went to hell. Secularism was more pioneered by the Romans and Greeks, trade/economics by many ancient cultures (Phoenicians as an example) and freedom of religion was an early hallmark of the Romans. Science has been advanced by all cultures, including islam.

IMO for democracies to succeed in the Middle East, there will need to be a fundamental change in the role of religion in their societies. As long as the mullahs hold so much sway, they will hold the power for themselves once it is wrested from the various dictators/monarchs. I don't see them following a secular model of government.

Even Turkey's secular constitution is under assault by islamists these days. We may end up with fewer democracies in that part of the world before I die rather than more.

Lewis says that Muslims are especially sensitive, and the fundamentalists are especially mad, about Turkey. That was where the caliphate was until Western powers threw him out after WWI. He was the "successor" to Mohammad and basically the leader of Islam, apparently.

>>"Even Turkey's secular constitution is under assault by islamists these days. We may end up with fewer democracies in that part of the world before I die rather than more. "

From what I understand, anti-democratic islamist groups are rather weak in Turkey. The last election was won by a conservative islamic party if I remember correctly, but they remain democratic. Conservative moslems can be democratic, just like conservative christians can. The "conservative" field is much wider then the "totalitarian" field.

Anyway, like I mentioned in the conspiracy theory parody thread, one of the Swedish tabloids made a really pathetic analysis of the the violence in Iraq today.

However, a more serious newspaper also made a analysis today. This one is a morning newspaper, called "Dagens Nyheter", and it's analysis was much more interesting. The article claimed that there are three major forces in the Islam of the middle east. Sunni, Shia and the Taliban/Al-Queada style. The third is rather marginalised, but a big source of mayhem and it might also contribute to further radicalization of the Sunni. The Shia, however, is in a post-revolutionary phase. It's getting ready for democracy, and it's also gaining in power. The fall of Saddam Hussein have turned Iraq from a country where the shi'ite majority is suppressed to a country that will be dominated by this same majority in one way or another.

Will the Shia countries (mainly Iran and Iraq) turn towards increased freedom or increased oppression? In either case, there will be increased tension. Including terrorrism. Maybe including war. Call it a war between civilizations if you will. But it's not between the west and Islam. It's between the Sunni and the Shia.

The forces most afraid of a democratic Iraq are Sunni teocrats. To them, the Shia are heretics. Enemies. In their eyes, there's only one thing worse then a teocratic shi'ite dictatorship in Iraq, and that's a prosperous democratic shi'ite Iraq.

These sunni teocrats mostly come from Saudi, Egypt, and Syria. I'd like to point out that the two first are "friendly" dictatorships. In other words, dictatorships supported by the west - and thus dictatorships where the opposition have reason to hate the west.

Will the Shia countries (mainly Iran and Iraq) turn towards increased freedom or increased oppression?

I think this is the key question. It's gonna boil down to whether or not they'll tolerate opposing viewpoints, like the Sunnis. At this point, it doesn't apear that they want to.

I have to be honest, I enjoyed my tour in the Middle East. In some ways I felt safer there than I did in North America. Their laws are certainly stricter, but at the same time there is hardly any violent crime. I actually agree with cutting someones hand off if they are a thief or killing someone that is a drug dealer or a rapist.

but at the same time there is hardly any violent crime

???