Cairo, Dhaka, Jakarta, criminal violence is much, much lower than Dilli
VognoDuut166
Despite their relative poverty today, with great teaming cities like Cairo,
Dhaka and Jakarta, criminal violence is much, much lower than in
Christian-influenced societies.
Jonathan Power
Once again the CIA and MI6 are publishing dire warnings of the vitality of
Al Qaeda. Once again the Islamic world as a whole is being tarnished by
association. U.S. presidential contender John McCain is saying that America
needs a leadership "to confront the transcendent challenge of our time: the
threat of radical Islamic terrorism". And the words still ring in our ears
from Samuel Huntington's treatise, the "Clash of Civilizations", the book
that in many ways triggered this paranoia that infects the politicians, the
press and the public discourse. "The underlying problem for the West is not
Islamic fundamentalism, IT IS ISLAM", he wrote.
Few, if any, in the Western leadership seem to make the point that Al Qaeda
is a deviant phenomenon within the Islamic world, just as Hitler was a
deviant phenomenon within the Christian world (commentators seems to
overlook Hitler's early speeches calling on Catholic principles). But Islam
has a much better record over the ages (despite its founder being far more
warlike than the founder of Christianity) of dealing with its deviants who
take violence to excess. Islamic culture has never been tolerant of Nazism,
fascism or communism. Christianity has spawned all three. Buddhism failed to
resist Japanese militarism and Confucianism provided hospitable to Maoism.
Yes, there was Saddam Hussein but he was an atheistic brute without an
ideology.
Of course, there have been many incidents in the long history of Islam when
there have been large-scale losses of life. The massacres and starvation of
the Armenians in 1915 still stirs the waters of contemporary debate. But
Islam has never spawned anything comparable with Hitler's systematic
genocide of the Jews- indeed throughout its history Islam has been
protective of the Jews, regarding them as "people of the book" to whom it
had a special responsibility. Nor has it settled other parts of the world
and systematically obliterated other civilizations as did Christian Spain
with the Aztecs and Incas. Nor have Islamic societies created anything
equivalent to South Africa's apartheid or the racist culture of the old
American South. Unlike many Christian churches the mosque has never
separated people by race. Even today Americans confess that nowhere is there
more segregation in their society than at the Sunday noon hour.
Western memories are highly selective. When at Easter time the Greek
peasants of the Peloponnese began to kill all the Muslims in the land there
was silence. But fifty years later when there were mass killings of
Christians in Bulgaria there was a great outpouring of moral outrage.
Delacroix immortalized the massacre in his painting, "Massacre of Chaos",
with Christian women pursued by Turkish lancers and Gladstone wrote a best
selling pamphlet in which he described the Ottomans as leaving "broad line
of blood marking the track behind them, and as far as their domination
reached civilization vanished from view".
Almost forgotten today is that it was the Ottomans who gave refuge to the
Jews when they were expelled from Iberia, as were fleeing German, French and
Czech Protestants, but every cultivated Westerner knows Voltaire's
"Fanaticism or Mohammed the Prophet" or Dante's portrayal of Mohammed in
hell.
Christianity has always been led or dominated by people of European descent.
But the leadership of the Muslim world has been much more fragmented-
between AD 661 and 750 it was the Arab Umayyad dynasty. Between 750 and 1258
it was the multi ethnic Abbasid dynasty. And from 1453 to 1922, the
Turkish-dominated Ottoman Empire. In India there was the separate Moghuls
and in Persia the Safavids. In sub-Saharan Africa there were the Muslim
empires of Mali and Songhai.
Despite their relative poverty today, with great teaming cities like Cairo,
Dhaka and Jakarta, criminal violence is much, much lower than in
Christian-influenced societies. Muslim countries, according to the UN's
annual Human Development report, have the world's lowest murder and rape
rates. In Tehran, the capital of Iran, and according to the CIA the most
important single source of terrorism today, you can go out at 11 or 12pm at
night and find families with children picnicking in city parks. When my
daughters' friends ask me where they can safely travel alone in an
interesting Third World city I say Cairo. Certainly not Catholic Rio or
Protestant Cape Town. Not only are murders and muggings comparatively rarer
there is much less prostitution and hard drug use. Neither is there that
much AIDS.
The Western debate about Islam is frankly infantile. Even Barack Obama, with
his own personal experience to go off, either is ignorant or just scared of
going into battle on these issues. I have not read one speech by one Western
politician who seriously attempts to educate public opinion. We live in a
slough of ignorance.
(Jonathan Power is an internationally renowned freelance columnist.
Copyright Jonathan Power. Dateline London; May 9th 2008.
E-mail: Jonat...@aol.com or
phone: +46 706 510879)
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