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- Harold Rhode: Questions Facing the Muslim World
- Shoshana Bryen: The Process Trap
Questions Facing the Muslim World
by Harold Rhode
June 1, 2012 at 5:00 am
June 1, 2012 at 5:00 am
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Palestinian
political leaders, however, seem to have decided that the rewards from the
international community, at least for them, will be greater if they are seen as
victims receiving perpetual handouts, rather than as leaders receiving rewards
linked to accomplishments. The economic system seems to have evolved into
bribes in exchange for promises that are never kept, followed later by the request
for still more bribes.
Many parts of the world, such as Korea, China,
and India - basically medieval kingdoms fifty or sixty years ago -- are now
among the pacesetters of the modern world, both producing, and improving on,
existing inventions. The Muslim world, however, often better off than these
countries just half a century ago, has remained as it was, or has even, in many
instances, deteriorated.
This inertia in the Islamic world seems to stem
not from any genetic limitations, or even religious ones, but purely from
Islamic culture.
Although one can gain some insight into Islamic
culture from books and other written material, if one is to really understand
the Muslim world, there is no substitute for sitting in coffee or tea houses,
spending time with Muslims, and asking them questions in their own surroundings
and in their own languages. A result of these approaches would seem to
indicate, with respect, some of the factors citizens of the Arab and Muslim
world might wish to consider to use their extraordinary talents even more
fully:
The Ability to Question: Western culture is
predicated on questioning: inquiring of authorities how they came to the
conclusions they reached -- a concept from the ancient Greek word "historayn,"
to learn by asking. Although in the Shiite world questioning occurs among
religious authorities and the educated elite, in the Sunni world, for
centuries, asking questions of those more learned or in positions of authority
has been unacceptable. Until Muslims once again allow themselves to ask
questions and engage in critical examination, they are disabling themselves
from accomplishing as much as they otherwise might.
The Role of the Individual vs. the Role of the
Group: In much of the Muslim world, people are often seen not as individuals
but as members of particular families, clans, tribes, ethnic groups, or
religions. In the Muslim and Arab world, a problem between two people can
become a problem between two families, with the individual becoming a
"soldier" in the ensuing feud. What an individual might think
personally – who is right and who is wrong – becomes irrelevant, fostering a
mindset that obstructs the impersonal and dispassionate analytic thinking that
defines the modern world.
Encouraging Creativity: A good way to define
Western intellectual creativity in the Muslim world is to use the Arabic word ijtihad,
roughly meaning using one's intellectual and reasoning capabilities to
determine answers. Today's Islamic culture seems not to encourage this ability:
among the Sunni Muslims, who comprise about 85% of the approximately 1.4
billion Muslims, the "Gates of Ijtihad" were closed about a
thousand years ago, apparently for the political reasons: religious authorities
declared that all questions had been addressed during the past four centuries,
so there was therefore no more need for questioning. Since then, Muslims have
been asked to accept institutionally what they learn from their authority
figures – as in the word Islam, itself, meaning "submission."
Islamic culture therefore does not only to encourage creativity as much as it
might; it appears actively to discourage it: people are educated to memorize,
not criticize.
Creativity requires, above all, questioning the
accepted ways of doing things. What many Muslims do, therefore – and do very
well – is produce things invented by others. The Turks, for example, who have
had longer and closer contacts with the West than most other areas of the
Muslim world have had, are superb at replicating what others have created. Although
the F-16, for example, was created in the US, the only perfect one ever
manufactured by the mid-1990's was assembled in an F-16 plant in Turkey.
Individual Turks would have been perfectly capable of inventing an F-16, but
often feel constrained to think creatively in their own country. This might be
a reason that gifted individuals in the Muslim world who feel the need to
expand their abilities often abandon their native countries for the West, and
do brilliantly there.
The Ability to Admit Failure and Learn from It:
Although no one particularly likes to fail, people in the West expect those who
have failed to examine why they have failed, and to learn from their mistakes.
Some high-tech firms even try to hire people who have failed at startups in the
hope of gaining insights so their companies will not pursue avenues that did
not succeed. It is hard to imagine a similar approach in any Muslim country,
where it is virtually impossible for anyone publicly to admit failure. The
concept of personal honor – (in Arabic, 'Ayib) what others say about you – is
prevalent everywhere: admitting failure means shaming yourself, a situation to
be avoided at all costs. In Western culture, this concept of shame is largely
alien; we are more of a "guilt" culture, in that what we think about
ourselves counts more than how others view us, and largely motivates our
advancement.
In Asian cultures, for example, which also care
deeply about "face," a more neutral way of recognizing problems has
evolved. The Japanese and the Chinese, for instance, do not say they have
failed; they say that the road that had been chosen did not prove to work, so
the direction should be changed. This indirect way of admitting failure has
helped them advance. Such a blameless approach, however, is virtually
non-existent in the Muslim world, and a major reason so much of it remains in
squalor.
The results of this contrast - the Asian and
Western and Asian cultures on one hand, and the Muslim culture on the other --
might be described as two kids of cakes: just looking at the cake tells you
nothing about how it tastes. The Western world is like a cake covered with an
uninviting khaki-colored frosting. Although it might look awful, the cake
inside tastes great: its ingredients are first class and well-baked. By
contrast, the Muslim world is like a cake covered with beautiful frosting, but
made out of ingredients that might disappoint the people at the table.
The Learning Process: Muslim culture emphasizes
memorization. Universities in Muslim lands grant degrees based on the students
memorizing vast amounts of material, but not necessarily knowing how to apply
them. In engineering, for instance, the Arab world graduates more than 250,000
engineers each year, but when the Arabs want to build an airport, they invariably
import foreigners to do it, In the Arab world, engineering degrees often have
become symbols of "personal honor" rather than knowledge to be used.
Taking Responsibility for One's Actions: In the
same vein, there is no equivalent in the Muslim world to the Western concept of
taking responsibility for one's actions. The word mas'uliya in Arabic,
Turkish, and Persian is usually translated in Western dictionaries as "responsibility,"
but it really has a meaning which corresponds more to the Western concept of "being
held responsible for, or being blamed for something not going well."
The meaning of this word in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish has little to do with
the Western concept of responsibility -- defined by the Oxford Dictionary as
"the ability to act independently and make decisions," and largely
devoid of personal honor.
How Information Is Passed On To Others: In
Western societies, information is usually passed down along a chain, based on
information moved up it by subordinates. In Muslim societies, the opposite
usually occurs: the job of the subordinate is to implement what superiors pass
command him to do; the subordinate almost never participates in the
decision-making process. The Middle Eastern subordinate fears not doing what
his superior tells him to do, even if the subordinate knows that what his
superior wants him to do is wrong or will not work. At best the subordinate is
discouraged, on pain of being fired, from questioning the decision -- true even
in the most Westernized country in the Muslim world, Turkey. Most officers in
the Turkish army, for example, have a sign behind their desks: "The
commander wants answers, he does not want questions." That attitude was
most likely the reason senior Turkish military officials could not learn how
deeply the Islamic fundamentalists had penetrated the military establishment:
their subordinates knew their officers did not want to hear that their units
had been penetrated by people who disagreed with Ataturk's philosophy of
separating religion from the state.
The Western Concept of Compromise: In the West,
the precept of "win-win" forms the basis of how we negotiate. To
reach an agreement, each side gives in to some of the demands of the other
side; doing so entails no loss of personal honor. In the Arab, Turkish, and
Persian worlds, however, giving in to the other side's demands involves
enormous amounts of shame and the loss of honor – which is why the culture in
these Islamic lands requires negotiations only after victory. Asking to
negotiate before one has won indicates weakness – or why else would one be
reaching out to end a conflict? -- and another loss of personal honor to be
avoided at all costs. After one side has decisively won, and has then imposed a
solution on the vanquished party, then one begins to negotiate: the
vanquished party licks his wounds and looks for the opportunity to redress his
loss. This is known in Arabic as sulh, somewhat like the Western concept
of a truce, by definition temporary. In such circumstances, there cannot be a win-win
situation. This is, unsurprisingly, why conflicts in the Middle East are never
permanently resolved, and why life in the Muslim world, unlike the West,
seethes in a constant state of tension.
The Western Concept of Peace: In Western
culture, making a peace boils down to putting the past behind one, letting
bygones be bygones, and moving on from there. This mindset already existed in
ancient Hebrew culture, in which the word shalom, from the root sh-l-m,
meaning completeness, involved leaving past disagreements behind. But in
the Arabic, Turkish, and Persian cultures, such a concept does not exist. The
Arabic word salam – used in all three languages - derives from the same
Semitic root, but instead means "the special joy that one gets by
submitting to Allah's will through Islam." The word Islam, from the same
root, means submission; not exactly the same as peace. If bygones
can never be bygones, conflicts can never be resolved. In these Muslim lands,
when one side is stronger, it attempts to subdue its ancient enemies. The
culture does not permit Muslims to put the past behind them: the internet, for
example, is filled with discussions among Muslims about how they must and will
reconquer Spain, which they lost to the West 520 years ago. In the Muslim
culture, individuals -- both the leadership and the common man -- spend so much
time looking for ways to right perceived wrongs, that they might find it
disconcerting to focus their energy on looking what we might think of as more productive
and positive activities.
Book Publishing: The subject of most of the
books sold in the Arab world, except for Lebanon and Iraq, concern either to
Islam or hatred of the West – more specifically, they are either anti-America
or anti-Israel. The number of books translated annually into Arabic is about
the same as those translated into Finnish. There are, however, about 365
million Arabs, compared to 5.5 million Finns. How are Arabs to acquire the
knowledge necessary to propel them into the modern world if they do not have
access to modern scientific and intellectual thought, easily available in their
own languages? Sadly, there does not seem to be a market in the Arab world for
these types of books. Is this because there is little desire for that knowledge?
If so, this inertia guarantees that as the outside world gallops into the
future, the Arabo-Muslim world will find it harder and harder to catch up to
Asia and the West. Arabs leaders can, of course, buy modern technology, but
this solution, although instant, only guarantees a permanent dependence on
outsiders.
The Status of Women: The great 19th century
Ottoman historian, Namik Kemal, argued that the Muslim world was in danger of
being left behind because of its oppression of women. He asked how a country
could advance if it oppressed and failed to educate half its population -- the
equivalent of intentionally paralyzing half one's body. Further, this paralyzed
part of society is the one responsible for raising the next generation of
males. Much of the Muslim world continues to place great obstacles in the paths
of its women. In Iran under the Shah, for example, the marital age for women
was 16; under the Islamic republic, this age was lowered to nine lunar years,
meaning that an 8-1/2 year old girl can legally be married off by her family.
In the Arab, Turkish, and Persian worlds, women can be murdered, often without
definitive proof, if the male members of their families believe that they may
have done something that could have put a stain on the family honor; if a woman
is regarded as contaminated, the entire clan can be held in disrepute and cast
out by the community.
In some parts of the Muslim world, females are
pressured to undergo various forms of "female circumcision," a
cutting of their genitals presumably intended to prevent women from having
sexual pleasure -- a practice that often takes place in unsanitary conditions
that can cause significant health problems, if not death. This practice,
however, has nothing to do with Islam; it is tribal, it pre-dates Islam, and it
has everything to do with the Islamic culture and a seeming male terror of
being tempted by women's sexual allure.
The Oil Curse: Since Muslims in the oil-rich states can now afford to have others do everything for them, they are not compelled to use the one renewable resource available to everyone: the human brain -- if exercised to think creatively, capable of amazing feats. But given the cultural realities and financial wealth available in so much of the Muslim world, there seem to be few incentives, if any, to be productive in ways other than gaining, conserving, or enjoying wealth.
Palestinians, as well, are easily capable of
accomplishing what anyone else does, if only their education, governance and
cultural incentives were changed from destroying their neighbor, Israel, to
building a felicitous society. Palestinian political leaders, however, seem to
have decided that the rewards from the international community, at least for
them, will be greater if they are seen as victims receiving perpetual handouts,
rather than as leaders receiving rewards linked to accomplishments. The
economic system seems to have evolved into bribes in exchange for promises that
are never kept, followed later by the request for still more bribes.
Ironically, all genetic analyses of the many
ancient Muslim Palestinian families indicate that they are largely from the
same genetic stock as Ashkenazi Jewry (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOolCRSf74I
minutes 5:00 to 6:16, and http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Features/Article.aspx?id=152408.
So what is the difference here? The Jewish culture encourages questioning and
thinking from an early age, whereas the Palestinian Muslim culture does not.
What is encouraged instead is the unexamined acceptance of whatever is set
before one, whether on government-run television or in government-written
textbooks. Religion has nothing to do with this situation; Islam therefore is
not the problem: Islamic culture is. Only when Muslims address their culture head-on
can there be any real hope for their world to overcome its self-imposed
limitations and start fully contributing to the wonders of the 21st
century.
Related Topics: Harold Rhode
The Process Trap
by Shoshana Bryen
June 1, 2012 at 4:30 am
June 1, 2012 at 4:30 am
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If Iran's
nuclear aspirations are thwarted, it will not be by talk.
Few things ought to be as urgent as keeping
Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, yet the West – led from the front by the
United States – has fallen into the "peace process" trap that
considers talk to be progress and, once a conversation has begun, that there is
nothing worse than stopping it.[1] Iran understands this as a Western
peculiarity, and has used it to cause a rift between Israel and the West;
receive assurances that that military action is not in the offing; and begin a
process that leaves the Islamic Republic in full control of its nuclear program
for a negligible price.
Talk about your demands. Talk about what you've
talked about. Talk about what you won't talk about. Talk about talking again.
Talk again. Repeat.
Several months ago, the media was ablaze with
war talk -– a potential Israeli strike against Iran, of course, but also the
war between Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his former Mossad chief, Meir
Dagan. While the PM was working to keep the threat of military action on the
Western agenda, Dagan was announcing to the world that military action was a choice
to which he was opposed. Time Magazine put "King Bibi" on its
cover and said he was "unlikely to forge a peaceful path." Everyone
seemed to know when Israel was going to "do it."
In truth however, Dagan was not so much opposed
to the military option as to its imminent exercise and its exercise by Israel.
He told Lesley
Stahl, "An attack on Iran before you are exploring all other
approaches is not the right way to do it."
Dagan: I heard very carefully what
President Obama said. And he said openly that the military option is on the
table, and he is not going to let Iran become a nuclear state.
Stahl: What I think you're now saying
(is), "Why should we do it? If we wait and they get the bomb, the
Americans will do it."
Dagan: The issue of Iran armed with a
nuclear capability is not an Israeli problem; it's an international problem.
Stahl: So wait and let us (the U.S.) do
it.
Dagan: If I prefer that somebody will do
it, I always prefer that Americans will do it.
Since there wasn't as much distance between
Dagan and Netanyahu as they had hoped, American officials – including the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – publicly denounced the idea of an
Israeli strike and talked up Iranian air defense capabilities, and
"containment,"
Reassured that it didn't face military action
in the short term, Iran - without actually stopping uranium enrichment and
without actually allowing inspectors into its facilities -- moved to block
upcoming Western sanctions.
Talk would do the trick.
The P5+1 met with Iran in Istanbul in April,
where EU negotiator Catherine Ashton lauded the "atmosphere," the
"body language" of the Iranians, and their willingness to go to
Baghdad in May. During the Baghdad talks, the IAEA discovered that not only was
Iran continuing to enrich uranium, but also had stockpiles enriched to 27%. The
Iranians called these developments a "technical
glitch" and said Western complaints were designed only to "damage
the existing constructive cooperation between Tehran and the IAEA."
The Western powers, however, did not complain
very much. "The two sides' commitment to diplomacy in the absence of any
clear agreement is a positive sign," said Ali Vaez, Iran expert at the International
Crisis Group. "All parties should be commended for returning to the
negotiating table. Obama should be commended for having turned diplomacy into a
process rather than the one-off meetings that existed in the past," wrote Trita
Parsi, President of the National Iranian American Council.
Eyes are now on Moscow for the next round of
talks in June. After that? Stockholm in July is lovely; August is for vacation;
then perhaps Vermont to watch the leaves turn in September.
The process is likely to continue as Iran's
nuclear program continues. But the recent – and ongoing – revelations of the
so-called Flame malware infecting computer systems in Iran are a reminder that
action has its place, albeit not necessarily with airplanes over Fordo.
60 Minutes narrator: Soon after (Dagan
became head of Mossad), Iranian cargo planes started falling from the sky,
nuclear labs were catching fire, centrifuges were malfunctioning. And then, one
by one, Iranian nuclear scientists started disappearing and getting killed, blown
up by shadowy men on motorcycles. But no matter how hard we tried, whenever we
asked about any of this, he stonewalled.
Dagan: I'm not going to discuss anything
about this issue.
Stahl: Okay, but that's pretty well
known.
Dagan: Nice try.
Stahl: So you were dealing with the
possibility of Iran getting a bomb for eight years.
Dagan: More than eight years.
Stahl: More than eight years. Did you
fail?
Dagan: I could say one thing – that when
I ended my role in Mossad, they still didn't have a bomb.
If Iran's nuclear aspirations are thwarted, it
will not be by talk.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The
Jewish Policy Center. She was previously Senior Director for Security Policy at
JINSA and author of JINSA Reports from 1995-2011.
[1] Israel is the original victim of the
"process" problem, trapped in an endless succession of talks,
confidence building measures, and demands that it offer inducements (bribes) to
its enemies in hopes of receiving some measure of satisfaction in return.
Nothing the Palestinians did – the so-called "second intifada," the
Hamas rocket war, the official PA incitement to violence against Israel – has
been deemed sufficient reason to stop the "peace process."
Related Topics: Iran
| Shoshana
Bryen
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