The collapse of Arab civilization

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Doc
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The collapse of Arab civilization

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The Barbarians Within Our Gates

Arab civilization has collapsed. It won’t recover in my lifetime.

By HISHAM MELHEM

September 18, 2014

With his decision to use force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State, President Obama is doing more than to knowingly enter a quagmire. He is doing more than play with the fates of two half-broken countries—Iraq and Syria—whose societies were gutted long before the Americans appeared on the horizon. Obama is stepping once again—and with understandably great reluctance—into the chaos of an entire civilization that has broken down.

Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism—the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition—than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays—all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms. With the dubious exception of the antiquated monarchies and emirates of the Gulf—which for the moment are holding out against the tide of chaos—and possibly Tunisia, there is no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world.

Is it any surprise that, like the vermin that take over a ruined city, the heirs to this self-destroyed civilization should be the nihilistic thugs of the Islamic State? And that there is no one else who can clean up the vast mess we Arabs have made of our world but the Americans and Western countries?

No one paradigm or one theory can explain what went wrong in the Arab world in the last century. There is no obvious set of reasons for the colossal failures of all the ideologies and political movements that swept the Arab region: Arab nationalism, in its Baathist and Nasserite forms; various Islamist movements; Arab socialism; the rentier state and rapacious monopolies, leaving in their wake a string of broken societies. No one theory can explain the marginalization of Egypt, once the center of political and cultural gravity in the Arab East, and its brief and tumultuous experimentation with peaceful political change before it reverted back to military rule.

Nor is the notion of “ancient sectarian hatreds” adequate to explain the frightening reality that along a front stretching from Basra at the mouth of the Persian Gulf to Beirut on the Mediterranean there exists an almost continuous bloodletting between Sunni and Shia—the public manifestation of an epic geopolitical battle for power and control pitting Iran, the Shia powerhouse, against Saudi Arabia, the Sunni powerhouse, and their proxies.

There is no one single overarching explanation for that tapestry of horrors in Syria and Iraq, where in the last five years more than a quarter of a million people perished, where famed cities like Aleppo, Homs and Mosul were visited by the modern terror of Assad’s chemical weapons and the brutal violence of the Islamic State. How could Syria tear itself apart and become—like Spain in the 1930s—the arena for Arabs and Muslims to re-fight their old civil wars? The war waged by the Syrian regime against civilians in opposition areas combined the use of Scud missiles, anti-personnel barrel bombs as well as medieval tactics against towns and neighborhoods such as siege and starvation. For the first time since the First World War, Syrians were dying of malnutrition and hunger.

Iraq’s story in the last few decades is a chronicle of a death foretold. The slow death began with Saddam Hussein’s fateful decision to invade Iran in September 1980. Iraqis have been living in purgatory ever since with each war giving birth to another. In the midst of this suspended chaos, the U.S. invasion in 2003 was merely a catalyst that allowed the violent chaos to resume in full force.

The polarizations in Syria and Iraq—political, sectarian and ethnic—are so deep that it is difficult to see how these once-important countries could be restored as unitary states. In Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi’s 42-year reign of terror rendered the country politically desolate and fractured its already tenuous unity. The armed factions that inherited the exhausted country have set it on the course of breaking up—again, unsurprisingly—along tribal and regional fissures. Yemen has all the ingredients of a failed state: political, sectarian, tribal, north-south divisions, against the background of economic deterioration and a depleted water table that could turn it into the first country in the world to run out of drinking water.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... 11116.html
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Endovelico
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Re: The collapse of Arab civilization

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Even if there are good and peaceful Muslims around the world, Islam has poisoned the minds of so many people that all they have left is destruction. Religions can be very nasty things, and most of them have led to war and destruction. It's only when a majority of people acquire a secular frame of mind that religion may become rather indifferent. Christians have reached that point, and Jews probably too. But most Muslims are centuries away from that point, and will probably disappear before they become secular. The more fanatic they become, the more they will die a violent death, either at their own hands or at the hands of outsiders. Turkey, the Central Asian countries, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Maghreb countries may be the exception.
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Re: The collapse of Arab civilization

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Endovelico wrote:Even if there are good and peaceful Muslims around the world, Islam has poisoned the minds of so many people that all they have left is destruction. Religions can be very nasty things, and most of them have led to war and destruction. It's only when a majority of people acquire a secular frame of mind that religion may become rather indifferent. Christians have reached that point, and Jews probably too. But most Muslims are centuries away from that point, and will probably disappear before they become secular. The more fanatic they become, the more they will die a violent death, either at their own hands or at the hands of outsiders. Turkey, the Central Asian countries, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Maghreb countries may be the exception.
Every belief system is a religion. No exceptions. I think the large problem here is not the religion directly But in the "there is only one God Allah and Mohammed is his messenger" sense They lack of education and exposure to views that they need to move forward. They are flailing about in the dark. So some (ISIS) want to live in the dark where it is comfortable. However most Muslims really don't.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Endovelico
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Re: The collapse of Arab civilization

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Doc wrote:They are flailing about in the dark. So some (ISIS) want to live in the dark where it is comfortable. However most Muslims really don't.
I'm no longer so sure that most Muslims don't want that. Islam seems to be the only major religion without a reform movement. Why don't those supposedly moderate Muslims create a tolerant, non-fundamentalist branch of Islam, capable of peacefully coexisting with other religions and with agnostics?
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Nonc Hilaire
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Re: The collapse of Arab civilization

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

Endovelico wrote:
Doc wrote:They are flailing about in the dark. So some (ISIS) want to live in the dark where it is comfortable. However most Muslims really don't.
I'm no longer so sure that most Muslims don't want that. Islam seems to be the only major religion without a reform movement. Why don't those supposedly moderate Muslims create a tolerant, non-fundamentalist branch of Islam, capable of peacefully coexisting with other religions and with agnostics?
The Ahmadiyya Muslims are a tolerant, non-fundamentalist branch. The Baha'í can also be seen as a successful and evolved Muslim reform movement.

Islam is not organized in a Western hierarchy, but every Imam tends to be his own ultimate authority. There is no real need for them to create new branches if they do not conform to hierarchical organization in the first place.
“Christ has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks among His people to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses His creation.”

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Doc
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Re: The collapse of Arab civilization

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Nonc Hilaire wrote:
Endovelico wrote:
Doc wrote:They are flailing about in the dark. So some (ISIS) want to live in the dark where it is comfortable. However most Muslims really don't.
I'm no longer so sure that most Muslims don't want that. Islam seems to be the only major religion without a reform movement. Why don't those supposedly moderate Muslims create a tolerant, non-fundamentalist branch of Islam, capable of peacefully coexisting with other religions and with agnostics?
The Ahmadiyya Muslims are a tolerant, non-fundamentalist branch. The Baha'í can also be seen as a successful and evolved Muslim reform movement.

Islam is not organized in a Western hierarchy, but every Imam tends to be his own ultimate authority. There is no real need for them to create new branches if they do not conform to hierarchical organization in the first place.
Endo, I think the news media does not really tells thing like they are enough. Yesterday there was an article about the Yemeni capital being over run by Shiite Rebels. Milo pointed out that they have been making gains for month but the MSM simply was not reporting it. It was certainly the first I heard of it. And I do pay a lot of attention to this type of thing.

There have been several Muslim Clerics that have condemned both Al Qaeda and ISIS. I heard one from Canada complain that he has been doing that for years but the Media never covers it. It may be that they have not been promoting their condemnations out of ignorance on how the media works or that the media has been at fault. Maybe the media figures that people just don't want to hear it. But either way it all comes down to what people have vested their lives in.

Mg was saying something in response to me saying that the Kurdish people at least their peshmerga should get the Nobel peace prize this year for literally sticking their necks out to save those 10s of thousands trapped by ISIS.

Basically MG pointed out the Kurds part in the Armenian genocide. That they did much the same that ISIS is doing now at the behest of the Turks. That was their grand fathers and great grand fathers. Should we judge them based on what their grandfathers and great grandfathers did? Or should we judge them based on what they are doing? Someone I think I saw on TV but maybe I read it said the time the Kurds spent under the US no fly zone during the period between the gulf wars was used by the Kurds to develop a modern civilized government. I think you have to consider that Endo before you make a final judgement on whether Muslims want to live in the modern world or not. The point being that over the course of a few generations there has been a complete turn around in what they are about.

Besides we haven't even seen the annual calender of "The women that face death" yet :D

http://www.businessinsider.com/female-p ... ing-2014-9

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Go Kurds!
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
Mr. Perfect
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Re: The collapse of Arab civilization

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Endovelico wrote:Even if there are good and peaceful Muslims around the world, Islam has poisoned the minds of so many people that all they have left is destruction. Religions can be very nasty things, and most of them have led to war and destruction. It's only when a majority of people acquire a secular frame of mind that religion may become rather indifferent. Christians have reached that point, and Jews probably too. But most Muslims are centuries away from that point, and will probably disappear before they become secular. The more fanatic they become, the more they will die a violent death, either at their own hands or at the hands of outsiders. Turkey, the Central Asian countries, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Maghreb countries may be the exception.
The greatest slaughterers in the 20th century were secular/atheist.
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Re: The collapse of Arab civilization

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Islam is not just an abstract defined by its original sources and an understanding thereof.. but primarily a centuries old practice and tradition. Christianity does not stop being a Christian culture even if most fail to live like Jesus and half of the priests sexually abuse children.
Deep down I'm very superficial
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Alexis
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Mortals don't know the workings of the Gods

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Endovelico wrote:Even if there are good and peaceful Muslims around the world, Islam has poisoned the minds of so many people that all they have left is destruction. (...) Turkey, the Central Asian countries, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Maghreb countries may be the exception.
1) "The" exception? :) That's quite a lot of exceptions we are speaking of...

Note that Hisham Melhem was speaking of Arab civilisation, not of Muslim civilisation.

The majority of Muslims are Asians, from a good part of Indians up to majority of Indonesians, including Bengalis, Malays, etc. Whatever the problems these countries may face, their situation is not generalised religious civil strife around the Sunni / Shia divide, nor can it be said that all their hopes and ideologies of the last century have become colossal failures. That cannot be said either about Turkey, nor Iran. Nor the Maghreb countries, albeit these are Arab.

The failures are concentrated in a region stretching from Libya in the west to Iraq in the east, from Syria in the north to Yemen in the south, or at most Somalia and Sudan. Population of that region, even in its widest understanding, is something like 250 millions, that is barely more than 15% of Muslims.

That region is the Arab world, minus the Maghreb. It is certainly not the Umma, the Muslim world.


2) Like Melhem said, no obvious unique cause is discernable behind this series of failures. Factors which "didn't help" are indeed several, but none of them looks like a possible main cause.

Incidentally:

- most of Europe and all of Central Europe took part in the Thirty Years war 1618-1648, which were so murderous and barbaric that they left the warring regions one third to one half less populated. Do you know an explanation why this happened?

- almost all of Europe took part in the "second thirty years war" 1914-1945, whose barbaric acts and consequences we know. Do you know the reason why all of this happened?

As for me, even with the benefit of hindsight, I know no really convincing reason for either of these historical catastrophes. Oh for sure, factors which played a role can easily be found. But ultimately even their sum total does not amount to a convincing explanation.

Mortals don't know nor understand the workings of the Gods.

You can take that motto litterally like the Ancients would have said, you can modernize it speaking of the only God, or you can understand it in a metaphorical sense within an atheistic worldview. Anyway, it is the same.

No matter whether it's a higher Power who controls History, or chance, it certainly is not us mere mortals
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Endovelico
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Re: The collapse of Arab civilization

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Mr. Perfect wrote:The greatest slaughterers in the 20th century were secular/atheist.
They weren't. Their religion was called communism and nazism...
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