The Crisis of Islam

by Amin Farouk
April 12, 2013 at 5:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3667/crisis-of-islam

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The Islamists' fundamental mistake is that they believe Allah and Muhammad ... are so weak, so vulnerable, that they need Muslims to protect them. They thus deny the absolute omnipotence of Allah and Muhammad..., neither of whom, as is well known, needs protection, nor to have mortals killed to defend them, nor have people become shaheeds [martyrs] to assure themselves a place in Paradise.

In 2010 the Egyptian-born German academic Hamed Abdel-Samad wrote a book called Der Untergang der islamischen Welt (The Fall of the Islamic World), in which he predicted the collapse of the Islamic world within 30 years. This groundbreaking book was written by a man of courage whose real intention was to improve the ranks of Islam and take us forward. As past experience has shown, publishing such a book is liable to cost Abdel-Samad his life, because the extremists among us, those still intent on murdering Salman Rushdie and who cannot bear the thought of pluralism, certainly will not stand for what they regard as more criticism of the prophet Muhammad (May peace and the blessing of Allah be upon him).
Abdel-Samad claims that Islam has not yet answered the fundamental questions of life, that it has passed its prime and that the Qur'an is relevant only for the seventh century, not the twenty-first. As an observant Muslim, I disagree with him. I believe that the Qur'an is eternally relevant, but I also believe that he has the right to criticize freely whatever he likes.
The Islamists' mistake is that they believe Allah and Muhammad (May peace and the blessing of Allah be upon him) are so weak, so vulnerable, they need Muslims to protect them, and to do it by killing anyone who breathes a word of criticism, even if it means killing other Muslims. They thus deny the absolute omnipotence of Allah and Muhammad (May peace and the blessing of Allah be upon him), neither of whom, as is well known, needs protection, nor to have mortals killed to defend them, nor to have people become shaheeds [martyrs] to assure themselves a place in Paradise.
Abdel-Samad's book describes the magnitude of the tragedy that will unfold for the Islamic world in the next 30 years. It describes the thundering collapse of the economies of the oil-producing countries the day after the wells run dry. Agricultural lands and green forests will turn into deserts, and sectarian strife, already chronic, will flare into full-scale battles.
The total decline of Islam, which began a thousand years ago, concluded Abdel-Samad, will result in mass emigration from the Arab-Muslim world to the West, especially Europe. That is because the Islamic tragedy, according to him, is based on conceptual backwardness, on a society whose economic and social thinking belong to the Stone Age, a society religiously and politically divided against itself. According to Abdel-Samad, Islam has brought mankind neither innovation nor creativity.
He bases his prediction on a number of factors, central to which is that the Islamic world does not have a creative economy, it has no significant social order and no constructive cognitive process, and therefore its collapse is inevitable. He notes that Islam knew better days: the Renaissance of the Middle Ages. Then, he says, Muslims opened themselves to the cultures around them and were released from their isolation. The Muslim scholars translated the writings of the Greeks, the Romans and the Christians, absorbed their wisdom and even brought it to the West -- but failed to bring it to Mecca, Al-Madinah or the Arabian Peninsula. The translations were not original Islamic works but rather reworkings of Cyrenaic and Assyrian translations, done by people who enjoyed – alas, for a short time – intellectual freedom under the aegis of Islamic rulers. While around the world various cultures were reaping the benefits of open, fertile dialogues with one another, Islamic culture froze, petrified and closed itself off to European culture, and now, absurdly, we accuse the Europeans of being infidels.
According to Abdel-Samad, our behavior is tragic: we gobble up everything the infidel West has to offer, whether scientific, technological or medical, without understanding that the train of modernism has passed us by and we have become an annoying burden for the Western world and all humanity in general.
Abdel-Samad paints for us, as Muslims, a pessimistic picture, and says that we will never be able to carry out reforms as long as it is forbidden to criticize the true significance and instructions of the Qur'an. This, he says is what prevents us from moving forward, paralyzes our cognitive processes and kills initiative. Muslims, he continues, sanctify ancient texts and force their thinking uselessly to stagnate. It is hard to disagree. Every Friday we see the dismal sheikhs in Europe and the United States repeating the ancient verses that tell us we are the best people Allah created, while the rest of the world is but riffraff whose very existence as non-Muslims is forbidden. Every Friday we see them huddling together, plotting in secret, hypocritically taking the money we contribute to charity and using it for destruction and terrorism. I am convinced, like Abdel-Samad and other liberal Islamic thinkers, that our nation is schizophrenic because of the great gap between the megalomanic illusions of its self image and our genuine, tragic situation.
It is hard not to agree with Abdel-Samad that our only hope as Muslims depends on whether or not we can come to terms with others, respect their cultural superiority and recognize the advantages of their scientific and technological creativity, which have enriched all mankind. And if we do, genuinely and without concern for our weaknesses, and if we understand the causes of our backwardness and failure, we may be able to cure ourselves. Until then our mistaken, well-intended people will continue to blow themselves up in our streets and kill our own innocent people, all in the name of Islam.

Related Topics: Amin Farouk

Does Welfare Have Limits?

by Douglas Murray
April 12, 2013 at 3:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3663/uk-welfare-limits

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Yes, the welfare system should be kind. But it is not just unkind, but actively cruel, to encourage people to lead lives of meaninglessness and indigence—where there is no punishment for bad actions, but there are incentives for them, to be paid out by the majority of the people.

Sometimes a thing so terrible occurs that it forces us to notice a reality otherwise unbearable. Such has been the case in Britain in recent days. A man called Mick Philpott, father of 17 children, has been jailed for life for burning six of his children to death in their own home. It appears that, while possibly intending to save them once the fire was started, Philpott lit it because he wished to persuade the local authorities of his need for a more commodious living accommodation to maintain his prodigious and promiscuous lifestyle. In particular, he appeared to wish to continue to produce the children which, thanks to the state of welfare in the UK, he saw as cash-cows to fund his lifestyle.
The precise contortions and confusions of this man's mind do not concern most people. The ineradicable fact of human brutality is something most people accept and can do little about in others. But the part of the case which has made people think – and caused even the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne to intervene, is that Mr Philpott, his wife, his mistress and their many children did not just live on the state, but were encouraged to live on the state. Not only did the welfare state support the life of Philpott as he produced child after child with no intention of working to support them – it actually established an incentive for these actions. By taking his obligation to provide off his shoulders, disincentivizing him from working and incentivizing him by paying him to have as many children as possible, the welfare state – while hardly encouraging him to kill his children – most certainly did encourage him to live a life of indigence, irresponsibility and moral squalor.
Certain tabloids and conservative papers in Britain have noted the above and commented on it with alarm. And the response to this has been inevitable;. Many eager to politicize absolutely everything that fits with their own agenda and worldview have objected with outrage at what they call the "politicization" of this tragic case. They claim that conservative papers and commentators are leaping on this human tragedy with too much glee and using the deaths of six children for political ends. Their message is clear: yes this man burned six of his children to death and yes we paid for his lifestyle, but this does not mean anything. No need to analyze it. Tragic, yes, but let's not pretend it tells us anything.
The only problem is that the case does tell us something. And for several startling reasons. First, of course, the public outrage about the case is not just propelled by its horrific nature. It is caused in part because this man was so evidently a product of a welfare system gone horribly wrong. In the years before his killing of six of his children Mr. Philpott had appeared on many British television shows -- the mid-morning Jeremy Kyle Show (a sort of downmarket Jerry Springer) and on documentaries about the state of welfare, including one presented by former Conservative Home Secretary Ann Widdecombe. In these programs the public were invited to see – and gawp at – the awful moral universe of this man. He kept a caravan in his garden in which he could alternate between his wife and mistress. He produced more than a dozen children by different women with no intention of providing for them. It was hardly a surprise when it turned out during his trial that he had encouraged his wife into sex with other men within hours of killing the children.
Anybody watching Philpott's lifestyle of casual drugs and even more casual child-production would be anti-judgemental to the point of lunacy if he did not have the confidence to say that this was not a life being well lived or a life which should be anything but condemned.
But at the root of the public revulsion to this crime has not just been a revulsion to the life and crimes of this man, but a revulsion at the disturbing fact that taxpayers did not simply encourage, but actively paid for -- lavishly bankrolled -- this man's lifestyle. Many people are always very happy to say that "we" are all guilty when it comes to some obscure historical sin and "all guilty" when it involves some long-ago historical error. But take a terrible thing in the present, which all of us actually paid for and incentivized, and nobody is meant to notice anything.
If there is any good to come from such a terrible crime it may be that there is now wider public acknowledgment of a problem which has too often appeared more theoretical than real. Just before Christmas, in an interview with the Financial Times, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said something which should be inscribed above every civil servant's desk and above every pamphleteer's computer. With just over 7% of the world's population, Chancellor Merkel pointed out, Europe produces 25% of the world's GDP. Yet, with this it has to finance 50% of the world's social spending. Europeans, she said, "will have to work very hard to maintain [their] prosperity and way of life." The only reason Europe has got to that position – and why America may yet follow it – is that it finds it difficult if not impossible to draw moral limits around a welfare system at the point of unsustainable overreach.
Mr Philpott was a demonstration of another way of looking at things. He was a product of that recent historical fantasy in which the welfare state could be so benevolent that it could not just be stretched beyond the point of financial bankruptcy but stretched far beyond the point of moral bankruptcy. Of course the Philpotts of this world are an exception. People willing to take things to such pathological ends as he did are almost always in a minority. But a look at what led someone in such a minority into such actions is something the majority must take and do something about.
Not least they can think again not about the limits but about the purposes of welfare. At the beginning of that discussion should be one realization in particular: that it is not just unkind, but actively cruel, to encourage people to live lives of meaninglessness and indigence – that it is wicked to encourage people to live lives where not only is there is no punishment for bad actions, but there are incentives for them, to be paid out by the majority of people.
America is having the same debate about welfare as Europe and the rest of the Western world. If there is any good at all to come from such tragedies it should be for people to think again about what the limits of our welfare tolerance should be. Yes, the welfare system should be able to be kind. No one wants the helpless to starve or lack shelter. But as we all know, it is possible to kill people with kindness. And the fear that this is what we have done is the reason that Britain is now having a debate so rancorous and so raw.

Related Topics: United Kingdom | Douglas Murray

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