I’ll get right to the point. Why is the Islamic world so backward and ignorant? A thousand years ago, we hear, Arab culture put Europe in the shade, with great achievements in mathematics, astronomy, and architecture. Now it all seems to have boiled down to sadists and fanatics. I know this is a lot to explain in a column where they don’t even let you jump to an inside page, Cecil, but give it a whiz: Where did our Muslim brothers go wrong? –Bud Clarke
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Let’s watch the glib generalizations, Bud. The Islamic world isn’t uniformly “backward and ignorant.” (And these days less than a fifth of its population is Arab.) Among the relatively nonignorant, nonbackward parts are Turkey and Malaysia, which, while not without their problems, have made considerable strides toward what Americans understand as modernity. But I’ll grant you that those countries are exceptions. I’ll grant you another point too: Throughout the Crusades, which began in 1095 when Pope Urban II called upon Christians to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim control, one side might reasonably have been described as civilized, tolerant, and progressive, while the other was by and large a bunch of backward, ignorant, bloodthirsty fanatics. Hint: It wasn’t the Muslims who, upon capturing Jerusalem in 1099, gleefully slaughtered everyone there.
The truth is that the present gap between the fortunes of the Islamic world and those of the West isn’t a result so much of Muslim failure as European success. For roughly a thousand years, from the death of Muhammad in 632 to the breaking of the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, Islamic rulers vied with Christian ones for dominance in the Mediterranean. In the end the Muslim powers lost because the circumstances of empire didn’t compel them to develop their human resources the way the Europeans did–they were outmanned, outwitted, and outgunned.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
