Replies

>They live in the Middle Ages to those of us in the 20thC.
>That I understand, the question is...why?
>
>Wasn't a major university located in Baghdad at one point before the arrival of Mohammad?
>
>I realize not EVERY Islamic person is violent. Some, like a lot of us, just want to raise our families in peace.
>
>But for one point in time, they EXCELLED the Western world in civilization, so what happened?
>

Not easy to explain such a large subject in such a small space. It would end up as "PzGr43's History of the World".

So ... slowly the earth cooled and ...

History lights upon attractive images and the unusual, not the everyday. So you get features like (classical, Pre-Islam) Arabic scholarship popping up, but don't mistake the fact that someone made a great achievement in Mathematics for the advances in the infrastructure of society necessary to achieve 20thC Industrial Democracies.

You need to understand that from way-back when the transition from hunter-gathering groups transited to tribal farmed-surplues, the guy who was at the top of the tribe, could enjoy the surplus better than anyone else, and could distribute it among his cronies, through which he could control more of the surplus producers (farmers), which gave him even more surplus. (Surplus is a crucial concept because without out, one human only produces enough to feed themselves. You can't do anything else except kill the odd deer and scrabble in among roots for ground-nuts. If someone takes 10% off you, you die). From that point on (homo sapiens sapiens, modern humans only appeared/left North East Africa 60,000 years ago), when we transited from hunter-gathering to tribal organization with surplus, being the head of tribe has brought with it a lot of benefits. Some regions transited to farmed-surplus before others (because they lived in better climates/regions). Some tribal leaders were good ones, and an enlightened dictatorship is a great place to live. As you would expect, the tribal leaders wanted to 'keep it in the family' and hereditary leadership was born. In other places the dice fell differently that day and you get things like democratic rule, elected rule, for example in some of the Greek city-states. They came and went with the ebb and flow of fortunes, climate change, disease, other tribes running out of food and productive land and deciding they could take someone else's - war.

Early history always looks mysterious and murky, but, since nothing changes, and homo sapiens sapiens has not evolved any since not long after moving to farmed surplus, you can bet that if we did know all of early history, it would be depressingly familiar.

The industrialized democracies are few in number and have not been with us that long, but occupy a disproportionate quantity of our attention because we live in them.

You can see as if in a test-tube, the formation of early tribal organization in conditions of surplus when a vacuum is created after the collapse or withdrawal of one organization. Remember Somalia and the warlords like Adide ? The difference between our own categories of tribal-warlord, boss of organized crime, and a Khan in a Khanate is really a question of degree. We all recognize organized crime and crime bosses as bad, hence the label, but what happens when they run a whole country ?

In a different way, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the same, with the standing joke in Russia being that all manner of people wanted to create minor republics because once they had a republic going, they could hand out 'state concessions' in concrete production, highway construction, building, import-export, and tax every import-export at their borders, etc etc, ie they got a shot at being the head of the tribe. That's the way it is run. Once you are head of the tribe, there is no incentive to just hand it over to someone else. Nor to a democracy / executive / legislature. Why ? Typically the fall from the top is a long one with a hard landing.

So most of the world is not industrialized democracy. Some of it is "better than nothing democracy" and a lot of it is tribal leader / organized crime boss. Generally the latter is unstable because the rivals know what great prizes await them if they kill the top man, and the top man knows this and has to run police-state to operations to keep these people down.

Check a map of the Islamic world and then see what type of organization persists in these regions. No surprises.

The other thing would help people understand the situation is a grasp of how cheap life is in many countries. This is not an easy concept to explain in a way which makes it accessible, you just have to experience it. A visit to somewhere like Cairo might help, where the underclasses are just like vermin. It's the same way we think of, say, feral pigeons in cities. There just there. They have a very low life expectancy. If they were placed at your disposal, you would treat them the same way you could, say draft animals, except worse. They are hear like the summer growth of grasses and gone again. Not something you would invest anything in.

The suggestion that inclusive democracy with universal suffrage would require your listener to first make the leap to conceiving off these feral pigeons as human, and just like him. An unusual concept which it require much effort to grasp.

Lastly, don't mistake the visible parts (ie visible in our wonderful media) of these structures or regions for the whole thing. It would be like trying to understand modern Japanese society by watching Kurosawa films, or trying to understand American society by watching TV cop series and Westerns. Remember, most of the world does this, so imagine how distorted their view of the US is, and then look at your own view of the Islamic regions and Muslims. Now do you see it ?