Islam Looking Inward

Fire of Liberty

Reuel Marc Gerecht has a good article in the February 20, 2006 edition of the Weekly Standard that focuses on the fact that as long as leaders within the many governments of the West keeps on standing up a denouncing newspaper editors and others for printing images or writing something things critical of Mohammad and Islam they give shelter to the dictatorships and folks like al Qaeda who go after folks in their own religion who they deem infidels. As he notes, countries that have an Islamic culture needs to have their own form of a reformation within their religion or some move that allows them to talk freely about their religion and various aspects of it without fearing for their lives. In a way, Gerecht's ideas are very similar to the one in Bernard Lewis's timely book "What Went Wrong?" which is that instead of looking to the West or the Jews(Unfortunately some learned folks in the West keep on pushing this blame theory) as the root to their problems or pointing to some critical cartoons, Muslims societies of the world need to look inward and initiate some changes to their own society. While this is a really short synopsis of a great article, I thought I'd share with you one of the most clear-spoken but informative paragraphs out of the whole essay below:

And the controversy over the Danish cartoons could conceivably betray the most important, though least remembered, player in this controversy: the average Muslim in the Middle East. Far more than most Middle Eastern Muslims and politically correct Western scholars of the region and Islam would like to admit, Western standards for individual liberty, curiosity, personal integrity, scholarship, and the political relations among men have become the defining benchmarks for Muslims everywhere, however resented or admired. If our standards collapse and give way to fear, theirs in the long-term have no chance whatsoever. The psychology of victimization--surely one of the worst gifts the Western anti-imperialist left has given the Muslim world--can only be made worse by Westerners who treat Muslims like children unable to compete and to defend their religion.

In the Middle Ages, Christian theologians said vastly worse things about the Prophet Muhammad than the Danish cartoons implied. Back then, Muslims cognizant of what the Christians were writing usually took it in stride, not too perturbed by the ruminations and calumnies of a superseded faith. Non-Muslims living beyond the writ of Islamic law were not expected to respect a prophet not their own. That is, after all, what it means to be benighted infidels.

To be healthy, Muslim pride and political systems need to be based on real accomplishments, where the average believer can feel that he is participating in a larger, productive enterprise. (In the classical and medieval Islamic eras, when Muslim armies usually defeated their non-Muslim enemies, manifestly fulfilling the divine promise that Muslims were God's chosen people, maintaining both collective and individual pride was much easier.) Western indulgence of supposed Muslim outrage over these cartoon insults to the prophet is pretty demeaning. It can only fortify the destructive, self-pitying impulses that all too often paralyze Muslim conversations and thought. (One of the more bizarre facts of the modern Middle East is to see the ruling Muslim elites of these countries--men and women of considerable influence and privilege--bemoan their powerlessness owing to the hidden, omnipresent, all-powerful machinations of the West, in particular, the United States.)

I just hope some of the intellectuals and the "true democrats" who live in these societies(and some of our leaders/intellectuals) are able to read this great article and get some inspiration on what they can to turn themselves around.