The early Muslims produced great
mathematicians and scientists, scholars, physicians and astronomers etc.
and they excelled in all the fields of knowledge of their times,
besides studying and practicing their own religion of Islam. As a result
the Muslims were able to develop and extract wealth from their lands
and through their world trade, able to strengthen their defenses,
protect their people and give them the Islamic way of life, Addin, as
prescribed by Islam. At the time the Europeans of the Middle Ages were
still superstitious and backward, the enlightened Muslims had already
built a great Muslim civilization, respected and powerful, more than
able to compete with the rest of the world and able to protect the ummah
from foreign aggression. The Europeans had to kneel at the feet of
Muslim scholars in order to access their own scholastic heritage.
But halfway through the building of the great Islamic civilization
came new interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge
by Muslims meant only the study of Islamic theology. The study of
science, medicine etc. was discouraged.
Intellectually the Muslims began to regress. With intellectual
regression the great Muslim civilization began to falter and wither. But
for the emergence of the Ottoman warriors, Muslim civilization would
have disappeared with the fall of Granada in 1492.
The early successes of the Ottomans were not accompanied by an
intellectual renaissance. Instead they became more and more preoccupied
with minor issues such as whether tight trousers and peak caps were
Islamic, whether printing machines should be allowed or electricity used
to light mosques. The Industrial Revolution was totally missed by the
Muslims.
Nowadays the Muslims are providing the perfect example of the way of
thinking responsible for the poverty, repression and strife endemic to
the Islamic world.
They speak about the "humiliation and oppression" suffered by Muslims
at the hands of non-Muslims and the need for Muslims to "regain their
dignity." The inability to accept responsibility and the need to see
every set-back and frustration as an affront to honor inflicted by
Islam's perceived enemies is pervasive, juvenile and crippling. In an
individual it would be symptomatic of pathological insecurity.
Yet where in the non-Islamic world to Muslims face the discrimination
experienced by non-Muslims in Islamic countries? If Muslims find
themselves condemned as terrorists, perhaps it is because so many of
them have embarked upon killing innocents in the name of their God. And
if, throughout the world, they find themselves unable to live peaceably
with their non-Islamic neighbors, perhaps the fault lies within.
The primary enemy is, of course, "the Jews." Antisemitism has become
part and parcel of Islam and entirely ignores the fact that the
Arab-Israeli conflict continues to exist, not because of Jewish designs
upon Islamic lands, but because a substantial majority of Muslims aspire
to the eradication of the Jewish state. But the Jews are not the only
enemies of Islam, in the eyes of the mainstream Muslims, Islam's enemies
include pretty much the whole non-Islamic world, or at least those
parts of it that have to misfortune to abut or interact with the ummah.
Their insistence on identifying plots and conspiracies and enemies,
their excusing of Muslim aggression as defense, is a manifestation of
the disease that consigns Islamic society to the world's sickbed. In
nearly every instance, Muslims could peaceable co-exist with their
neighbors were they to resolve to live peaceably.
Sadly, live-and-let-live, is not an tenet of Islam. That the most
Muslims are not able to understand this, does not bode well for the
future.
