I’m sure more than a few people will take offense to this question, so I will claim general ignorance of the religion up front.
From the layperson’s perspective I noticed that some nations seem not to be plagued by violence in the ways many of the Islamic Middle Eastern countries are. For example I don’t I don’t hear of constant suicide bombings or terrorist attacks going on in Malaysia or Indonesia.
I understand that is geographic difference, but is there anything else that causes some Islamic nations to be particularly prone to terrorist types of violence?
The last time I saw King Abdullah II of Jordan on the Daily Show, where he is a frequent guest, he commented that the Arab monarchies have been better suited to deal with civil unrest than the republics have been.
While that comment might have been somewhat self-serving (though Abdullah, to his credit, has gone a long way towards giving up the traditional powers of the king in favor of a constitutional monarch), I think there’s a hint of truth there in that the monarchies have done a better job of establishing a single national identity. You don’t see the kind of tribal/sectarian divides in Jordan or Saudi Arabia or Qatar or the UAE that we’ve seen in Iraq or Syria or Yemen, because the people have been encouraged to think of themselves as nationalists first and as tribalists second.
My w.a.g. would be how divided the country is between Sunnis and Shiites. In Iraq for example, Saddam kept the Sunni minority on top and the Shiites suppressed; then the US invasion toppled that power structure. Whereas Saudi Arabia is almost entirely Sunni, while Iran is mostly Shiite.
Anyone less lazy than me care to research whether this holds consistantly?
Wahhabi infiltration of public education is also a major issue.
The Wahhabi are an extremist version of Islam that originated in Arabia in the 18th century. When the Saudi were seeking political power they formed an alliance with the Wahhabi religious movement. This alliance still exists in Saudi Arabia, albeit not always smoothly.
Anyway, this has given the Wahhabi access to a lot of money. They can finance missionary activity in other countries. One common program is to approach dictatorial regimes in Muslim countries and offer to set up a public school system. The dictatorships often agree - they’re getting a public school system for their citizens that they don’t have to pay for.
But these Wahhabi school systems combine radical religious indoctrination in with basic education. These schools create a pool of potential recruits for extremist groups to tap into.
Both Malaysia and Indonesia are diverse nations with significant contributions by non-Islamic peoples. Both countries had the sense to not wipe out all traces of such cultural wealth. The result: a relatively tolerant and peaceful climate where hardline Islamic tendencies remain subdued.
The ME however wiped out all traces of its pagan past, disowned all cultural wealth not tinged green, and genocided all populations not Muslim and that refused to convert. Having become a monolithic Islamic block, the most hardline and fundamentalist strains have emerged, and a constant battle to “purify” Islam and eradicate the “less-pure” versions is now underway.
And, add OIL to the mix, and you have a recipe for endless violence.
It’s completely false to say that Middle Eastern countries “genocided” their non-Muslim populations. Ten percent of Egyptians, for example, are Christians. Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Turkey also have significant non-Muslim populations.
Arab countries have high birth rates, stagnant economies, and madrasa schools that teach Islam, rather than marketable job skills. Millions of young men enter job markets that have little use for them.
A high youth population and a stagnant economy is a combustible mixture that can lead to terrorism, revolution, or war.
Let me inform you then, that many of these “revolutionaries” are trained, financed and organized by USA and its closest allies.
And when that isn’t enough… just send the aircraft carriers and bomb the damn place!
Wait a minute… what nonsense is that?
What “strange” views on History…
NATO never bombed Libya, and didn’t destroy its infrastructures…
neither did the Western oil companies got their hands on the Libyan oil, after the death of Muammar Gaddafi.:rolleyes:
The revolutionaries were trained by the United States? Where did that happen? Were they brought her to America for training? Funny how nobody mentioned it when Obama was bringing millions of Muslim revolutionaries into the country for training in overthrowing the government. You’d think Fox News, at least, would have said something.
Or maybe, they were trained at home. If so, I for one think Gaddafi really dropped the ball on that one. He should have asked questions when the United States set up a program for training revolutionaries inside his country.
views on History…