In reference to Cecil’s recent article about why muslim and arab cultures lag behind european cultures in education and maybe even civility.
I think there was one very important point Cecil did not bring up. Around the time of the crusades it could be argued that the muslim cultures were more advanced and less savage, this Cecil does mention. However, the great set back to muslim culture comes about in the 1200’s when Genghis Khan decided to decimate every middle eastern city. Reportedly, Khan killed a large percentage of all able bodied muslim males and then sold the women into slavery. Khan did the 13th century equivalent of bombing the muslims back into the stone age. The European societies were poised to easily vault past the Muslims in both technology and power after such cateclysmic event.
Interesting point xcalibre. I seem to remember that the Mongols had originally a religion that was a form of Shamanism. Images of the ancestors were kept in family tents; they had shamans that communicated with the spirits; they worshipped high places (that give unimpeded access to the “Heaven Spirit” (if that’s the right term); and they occasionally sacrificed animals (e.g. horses) and used purification by fire - a european traveller reports being required to pass between too fires when entering a Mongol leader’s tent.
But they were not strongly religious and were generally tolerant - in Persia and the lands of the Golden Horde they embraced Islam, and Tibetan Buddhism in China. So actually they didn’t really supplant Islam.
P.S. This information was taken from a book I’ve read (that I can’t find right now) : The Mongols by David Morgan.
For an interesting look into examples of the non-Western mind, and a great pick-me-up for patriotic-American types, try “What’s So Great About America?” by D’nesh D’souza (think that’s how it’s spelled)
Another issue in the difference between “us” and “them” is the idea of social class. It seems that everywhere democracy has been implemented in the world and failed is the lack of a naturally developed middle class. In a place where there are some very rich, and everyone else “just getting by” there is such a small or non-existent middle class that the way of life we take for granted will just not work.
In that thread, I mentioned a book that I had recently read, What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response by Bernard Lewis. In the book, Dr. Lewis explains in 200 pages what Cecil covers in 800 words. The book is scholarly but accessible, and a fascinating read. My quickie summary of the book, from the other thread, was:
Dear me - An error in one of Cecil’s columns, no doubt an inadvertent slip-up by some newly hired and incompetent editor :). Istanbul/Constantinople was not renamed by the Ottomans - The Greeks who lived there had been calling it Istanbul for some time before it fell in 1453. It seems to derives from Greek and as in many cities seems to have arisen from the common impulse of metropolitan inhabitants to refer to their city as THE CITY. In this case ‘Polis’ - “the city” became eist-enpolin - is-tin-polin - istanbul. Maybe, anyway. But at any rate it seems to have cropped up as early as the 11th century in Byzantine records, long before Constantinpole to the Turks.
The Turks did “Turkicize” the name Constantinople - They called it Konstantiniye. Just as Adrianople became Edirne and Brusa became Bursa. They seemed to have used Istanbul and Konstantiniye interchangeably right up until the dissolution of Sultanate in the 20th century ( at times a couple of other names as well ). It was Ataturk who fixed the name change permanently in the 1920’s.
Now as to the Mongols - Hard to say in some respects. Certainly it is a potentially contributing factor. But I’m not certain how much of one as a singular event. It is likely that Khurasan in particular ( eastern Persia ) never fully recovered from the damage inflicted by Tolui’s ( Chingis’ fourth son ) scorched-earth campaign and of course Baghdad was wrecked. But the Il-Khanate and the Golden Horde eventually both converted and we see a minor reflowering of Islamic culture in at least the former. Not too mention that of course such culturally rich and even sophisticated periods as the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughul followed the Mongol conquests. The Ottoman state in particular was quite modernist and forward-looking in its own peculiar way ( until stagnation set in, of course ) - This despite its ‘ghazi’ heritage and the damage wrecked on it by my namesake. The Europeans certainly did not vault past the Ottomans ( or Muslim states period ) until the 17th century, so in that sense I’d disagree with xcalibre
But I would agree that in a more general sense the fracturing of the Pax Islamica in the 10th-13th centuries did clearly have an intellectual as well as material impact. The growth of reactionary conservatism in Islamic thought truly seems to have gotten a boost by the overall chaos of this period and this started well before the Mongols state emerged ( the Mongols perhaps were the final blow, at least in parts of the the east, before things started to slowly re-coalesce in the 15th-16th century ).
Not to disparage anyone, but the notion that medieval Christianity was savage, fanatical, and bloodthirsty while medieval Islam was uniformly tolerant and progressive is simply false. The latter image comes mostly from medieval Islamic Spain, which indeed was enlightened and progressive. People often bring up the Crusades, but fail to mention that they did not just spring out of the blue - they were a response to earlier Muslim aggression - the destruction visited on Anatolia and the Holy Land by Muslim Turks (so much that Anatolia remained a near-wasteland populated by roving nomads for quite a while afterwards). The early Muslim Arabs were by no means tolerant - they practically exterminated a major religion (Zoroastrianism) and followers of other religions (“People of the Book”) were only allowed to stay in dhimmitude.
So, the overreaching tolerance and benevolence of medieval Islam is a popular idea, but nonetheless a myth.
As someone who’se travelled a bit in the Muslim world, I’m with Cecil on this one. But I’ll just give one example:
My son, who is home from university for the summer, was off work (he does landscaping) with an injured finger for a few days and discovered some show called something like “Extreme Construction” on the Discovery Channel (which is slightly different in Canada, but is basically the same outfit as in the US). They ran 3 episodes back-to-back which happened to concentrate on great construction projects that Canadian companies were involved in. One of them was the design and construction of one of the most fantastic looking buildings I’ve ever seen – it’s the world’s tallest hotel, built on a man-made island just offshore of the city of Dubai. But it looks like a sailboat, and actually has a complex double-covering of teflonized fabric of some kind which shimmers in the sun during the day and captures laser light shows from within at night. The atrium is 150 metres high. Dubai and its sister emirate, Abu Dhabi, are competing to become the “new Hong Kong” of the Middle East, and I must say, Dubai is going at it full bore. They have a really neat water park (also built by a Canadian company from Vancouver called Whitewater), and another architectural firm in Toronto is building an entirely new city out of what is now desert in Dubai. It’s to be the “Venice of the Middle East” and it’s built with a kind of lagoon/canal snaking through it. The lagoon, known as “the marina” is made from 40-tonne stones, each of which has anywhere from a 1 mm to a 6 mm offset to create the gentle curves. Skyscrapers and a 7.5 million sq ft residential area are part of the new city. The lagoon is self-flushing through tunnels to the sea and is already complete; work has started on the residential area now.
Hardly sounds backwards to me.
OTOH, travel to Niger or Somalia (where they celebrate female genital mutilitation and call it “Islam”)…
[mind you, you can travel to Appalachia and see people handle poisonous snakes as a New Testament cult, too]
While it is of course correct to say that medieval Muslims were frequently far from paragons of tolerance in any modern sense, the point that they were often ( but hardly uniformly ) more tolerant towards minority communities than contemporary Christain states is a fair one. Especially the very early Islamic regime, 7th-10th centuries, when Muslims were a distinct minority and unthreatened internally or externally. It isn’t until the tenth century that we see major pressure/persecution being applied to minority commmunities in any widespread fashion ( this relates to the breakdown of the Pax Islamica I mentioned above ).
Also it is probably inaccurate to say early Muslim Arabs “exterminated” Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrians ( unlike, say, Hindus ) fell under the same protected status as Christians and Jews and the early Arabs sought no non-Arab converts. While many Zoroastrian elites ( including the military class in this category as there was plentiful opportrunities for employment in the expanding Caliphate ) converted for social advantage ( or genuine piety ) the bulk of the populace in Persia did not convert ( rather than being slaughtered ) until the 10th-12th centuries. In that period the multiple pressures of growing Muslim intolerance ( again, scattered and local, usually ), economic breakdown ( general disruption with the decline of Iraq and the eruption of the Oghuz Turks and spread of pastoralism ), the progressive weakening of the non-Muslim churches and the destruction of the landed gentry In Iran and Iraq, caused a sea-shift in local demographics. Zoroastrianism was completely engulfed by the Muslim world, unlike Christianity, and thus was almost completely converted. Hence its scarcity today. But it wasn’t exterminated in the sense of adeliberate campaign of suppression and regardless was the majority religion in Persia until a few centuries after the Arab conquest.
Tamerlane’s right, imho. Around 1900 around 20-25% of Baghdad’s population was Jewish, for instance – in fact, Jews were far better off in the Muslim world during the period from about 700 - 1900 than in the “Christian” world, with notable exceptions on both sides.
Incidentally, I’ve met some Zoroastrians. We have a large South Asian population in Edmonton, where I live (Edmonton as in the world’s largest shopping centre*) The ones I’ve met seem to share a rather odd characteristic, and I’m wondering if others have encountered this: their family names tend to be trade names. Now, you say, that’s not so odd – look at all the Weavers, Taylors, Smiths and so on. But the family names I’m talking about are ones like “Contractor.” That’s the only one that comes to my middle-aged mind at the moment, but the others have been just as exotic (in the sense, I suppose, that they’re not manual trades. Will one of my great-great-great-great-grandchildren have a surname some day like Javaprogrammer or Ceeplusplus?)
*terrible to be remembered for living in a city with a mercantile claim to iconic fame, isn’t it? Well, if you come here in February you’ll know why we have so much public or semi-public indoor space!
Fair enough, but what you’re saying is that the UAE (that’s the search you should have done, since Dubai is just a city, or more technically, one of about half a dozen of emirates in the United Arab Emirates) is not a modern western liberal democracy, and I don’t doubt that for a moment. Same with Kuwait and Qatar, incidentally. They are “benign dictatorships” where the sheikh ultimately has the last word. But we were talking about “backwards” in a number of senses, and one of those senses was technological, and that was the area I was addressing.
In fact, for aficionados of tall buildings, forget the US. The US is past its prime in that sense. The innovative tall buildings are being built in places like Malaysia, PRChina, the UAE and so on.
The thing I find interesting is that the buildings you describe are being built by Canadian companies. Isn’t that the larger issue? Everyone knows that oil rich countries in the Middle East have plenty of money. Do they produce anything else? Why aren’t Middle Eastern companies building skyscapers in the West instead of the other way around?
I asked a friend of mine who holds an MA in Hebrew and a graduate certificate in Middle East area studies to take a look at Cecil’s column. He had a few interesting things to add:
In The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy devotes the first chapter to why Europe outpaced not only the Arab world but China and India as well. His conclusion was that due to geographic and historical circumstances, Europe was less vulnerable to having innovation stifled by those with a vested interest in the status quo.
Jared Diamond talks a bit about this in his famous book Germs, Guns and Steel (iirc; am going from memory). As I recall he also adds the discovery of the waterwheel, of all things, as revolutionary technology that gave the European world an advantage in agriculture. It was first used in irrigation and was powered by oxen, and later the idea was reversed and it became powered by water and used to power mills.
As far as I know, most of the Arab World and Asia (maybe with the exception of China) used a less efficient method of raising water for irrigation, and that was the “dip a stick” method whereby you have a bag of some sort at the end of a long stick, levered in the middle. The bag carried the water but it was usually human labour which lifted it, sometimes getting a bit of a mechanical advantage by changing the position of the lever. Not nearly as efficient as the waterwheel, however (in fact, some of the very first ones looked like hamster wheels, except they were powered by humans treading inside – sometimes it was a method of prison labour, especially in England).
As Cecil suggests, it was really a whole lot of things; but there is one event that everybody here seems to miss. The discovery (and subsequent exploitation) of North and South America by Europeans led to an explosion of progress in Europe. The Arabs, the Asians, the Africans, the Russians, everybody who was not in on the biggest windfall of the last 1000 years was certainly doomed to be eating European dust. The intra-European rush to conquer and control these new lands led to countless advances in technology, politics, economics, and science. Ironically, this all came about because of the European desire to find more expedient trade routes to Asia and the Middle East. Add in the moveable metal type printing press, the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of Science and you have the ultimate formula for success: Opportunity, necessity, and luck. So… it isn’t so much what did the Arabs (and everybody else) do wrong, but what did the Europeans do right? Essentially the answer is that, although not the first ones to find it, they were the first culture to recognize the potential bonanza that was the New World.
Good point, Billowen. Just one nit – the Russians actually had a period of massive expansion of their own. Mostly eastward. It started under Peter the Great and involved the conquering of the Ukraine, Finland (parts of which Russia still occupies), White Russia (Belarus), most of the Caucasus and of course Siberia. It’s a huge area. From 1999-2001 my oldest son was in and around Yekaterinburg, which was exactly 12 hours ahead of us (we live in Mountain Time, and he was in the Ural Time zone). Made it easy for arranging phone calls
And wrt the New World, it didn’t hurt (geopolitically speaking) that the Europeans had been exposed to a greater variety of microbes (again, Diamond brings this out in his book), and basically, according to the diffusionist theory, wiped out up to 95% of the autochthonous population here unintentionally (let alone the intentional eradications)
Peter the Great illustrates my point perfectly. By the time he does his thing in the early 1700’s the European juggernaut has already been rolling for a good century and a half. And while Peter does expand Russia’s borders, his primary goal seems to be the “Westernizing” of Russia itself. In other words, here is a guy who recongizes that his nation is behind the times and does his best to catch up through immitation. Unfortunately, the monarchs that follow Peter don’t share his passion for progress, and Russia remains isolated from the rest of Europe. Also, it isn’t just about gaining territory, but rather about what the sudden abundance of new, uncounqured lands does to a culture.
Interesting point, except that the Arabs and Islam were already taking the short route to Asia.
They colonised, traded, or exported their religion to India, Africa, and large parts of South East Asia. Hence the world’s largest muslim country is Indonesia.
The dividing line between Christian and Islam worlds is set in the Phillipines. Northern Phillipines is Christian, Southern Islamic.
One of the reasons Christopher Columbus went West was to avoid going through Muslim lands to get to the South and South-East Asian lands
All right, next question then: what is Asia doing right that Arabs are doing wrong? They are achieving fabulous levels of economic growth throughout the region, with only a few exceptions like North Korea and Myanmar. They did not have the benefit of colonizing North America. Why are they achieving so much more than the Arabs are?
