Blame the Koran and the Clan

Why is the Muslim world so backwards?
The 1.2 billion-1.3 billion people in the Muslim world, about 20% of the world’s population, have a smaller GDP than Germany, about 1.2% of the world’s population. The Muslim world boasts three of the world’s top 500 companies, on par with Finland, a country of 5 million or 0.08% of the world’s population, but is responsible for fewer international patents. In short, the people who believe that there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His prophet are clearly fighting for the “Who Has the Most Shit Civilisation?” award. Currently, sub-Saharan Africa is winning, but Islam is making inroads through seduction and slaughter into some of the world’s most backwards areas, think Darfur.
The question remains, why is the Muslim world doing so badly?
My current theory is that the culture of family honour and the insistence on the divine perfection of the Koran are at the root of the problem.
Let’s start with the Koran. Throughout much of the Muslim world, many people believe that the Koran contains all the wisdom needed. Anyone who questions the Koran or the Prophet is strongly chastised. Much Islamic education consists of little more than memorisation of religious texts and practical interpretation, which is a Herculean task given the huge number of internal and external contradictions. See endnotes for examples.
The problem is that endless repetition of dogma doesn’t make it true, it just makes people brainwashed. On an individual level, if someone believes that God/Allah created the world and everything in it, that person is not going to make a good evolutionary biologist.
Similarly, if someone believes that the rules for a perfect social structure is contained in a book written by a semiliterate 7th century incestuous paedophile merchant from a cultural backwater of a collapsing empire who suffered from auditory hallucinations, they are not going to make particularly wise legislator.
If that weren’t bad enough, the authoritarian clan structure and obsession with honour create a situation where lying is rampant and independent thought is stifled.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in The Caged Virgin: “This [Muslim] cultural background is characterized by three important factors. First, an authoritarian mentality based on strict hierarchy; second, a patriarchal family structure, in which the woman has a reproductive function and is expected to obey men in the family; if she doesn’t she will disgrace the family. Third, all thoughts revolve around the group; the group always comes before the individual; social control is very strong; and the fierce protection of the group’s honor makes people obsessed with avoiding shame at all cost, with the result that doing so through lying or simply denying what has really happened becomes the norm.”
Honour, as a concept, is relatively weak in the West, but in the Muslim, especially Arab world, it is central. That honour can be marred by weakness or wrongdoing, especially by women not following cultural rules designed to subjugate women. The preservation of honour can include murder of one’s own family members, something that I, as a Westerner, put at the very tippy, tippy top of the list of barbaric, uncivilised and dishonourable acts.
It is worth noting that the concept of honour is strong in eastern Asia in countries such as China and Japan. However, the rules against consanguineous marriage and small family size largely offset the effects, as does the importance ascribed to education.
The cultural influence of preserving honour in Muslim culture is exacerbated by the size and structure of clans in the Muslim world, especially the Arabic Muslim world. In the West, the Catholic Church, in the Middle Ages, banned marriage within the family to seventh degree of consanguinity (i.e. a couple couldn’t share the same great-great-great-great-great grandparent). That subsequently dropped to four degrees of consanguinity (great-great grandparent). The Church did this partly out of Roman and German culture and law and partly for its own benefit. By splitting up clans, families were more likely to give their allegiance to the Church.
By contrast, the Arab Muslim world is largely still based on clans with a very high frequency of marriage within the clan. According to various studies, marriages between first or second cousins are thought to account for 60% of Saudi couples, 58% of Iraqis, 55% of Kuwaitis, 50% of Jordanians and 48% of UAE natives. One consequence of this is that congenital diseases are much higher than in the West. The other consequence is social. The clans grow large and powerful and the individual’s independence of thought and action is subsumed into the good of the clan.
That combination of preserving honour and intellectual stagnation make progress in the Muslim world nearly impossible, which is why most Muslim countries are at least partly stuck in a mediaeval mindset where faith, pride, ignorance and tyranny rule and any voices of reason are threatened with death.
Is it any surprise then that the West, with societies largely based on reason, evidence and scepticism are far ahead of the Muslim world?


ENDNOTES:
Example of an internal contradiction from the Authorized English Translation:
[10:90] We delivered the Children of Israel across the sea. Pharaoh and his troops pursued them, aggressively and sinfully. When drowning became a reality for him, he said, "I believe that there is no god except the One in whom the Children of Israel have believed; I am a submitter."
[10:91] "Too late! For you have rebelled already, and chose to be a transgressor.
[10:92] "Today, we will preserve your body [Pharaoh’s], to set you up as a lesson for future generations." Unfortunately, many people are totally oblivious to our signs.
Contrast that with:
[17:102] He [Moses] said, "You know full well that no one can manifest these except, obviously, the Lord of the heavens and the earth. I think that you, Pharaoh, are doomed."
[17:103] When he [the Pharaoh] pursued them, as he chased them out of the land, we drowned him, together with those who sided with him, all of them.

Example of an external contradiction:
[51:49] We created a pair (male and female) of everything, that you may take heed.
Clearly Mohammed didn’t know jack about God’s creatures such as bacteria, fungi, snails, earthworms, bdelloid rotifers, and many others. This begs the question, if the Koran is God/Allah’s inspired word, why did God/Allah get it wrong?

N.B. The Bible is no better. Like the Koran, it is full of internal and external contradictions. The difference is that there are very few if any Christians who threaten to kill people who question it.

O'Reilly, JetBlue and Daily Kos

Fox’s Bill O’Reilly lambasted JetBlue for supporting the Daily Kos blogger convention, calling the website a collection of radical left wing hate mongers. They then sent a reporter to ambush Dave Barger, JetBlue’s CEO and asked him if his company supports a hatemongering website that has comments such as:
1. “The world would be better off without Tony Snow”, after his cancer returned;
2. “Better luck next time”, after an assassination attempt against Cheney in Afghanistan;
3. “Evangelicals are nutcases”;
4. “The Pope is a primate”; and
5.“Some attacks on coalition forces are legitimate”, which during the ambush interview changed to “attacks on coalition forces are legitimate”, a small but very significant change.
In response, JetBlue cancelled most of their sponsorship of the event.
Given that the Daily Kos has large numbers of comments that are mostly unregulated a smattering of such comments is not much of a surprise. What is surprising is that these were the best O’Reilly’s team could come up with, especially since some of the comments are pretty justifiable.
1. Tony Snow has done a terrible job and arguably the world would be a better place without him wielding power. I’m not saying I want him dead, just not in power.
2. Cheney has done an astonishingly bad job. Without him in power, the world would be a much better place. Frankly, given the amount of horror that the man has unleashed through his hamstringing the attack on Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan to pursue a disastrous policy in Iraq that has killed and maimed tens of thousands of people to no benefit and great harm to America's security, not to mention his flagrant abuse of power and of the US Constitution, if Cheney died, I wouldn't be overcome with grief.
3. People who embrace superstition that is directly contradicted by scientific evidence ARE nutcases. Think about it, if I said the sea is boiling hot, because my holy book, Alice in Wonderland, said so, you'd rightly call me a nutcase. Same logic applies to evangelicals and evolution.
4. The Pope IS a primate, under both definitions of the word, he is the highest-ranking clergyman and a human. That Fox picked up on this is amazing. It’s like when I was 7 years old and someone would say, “your epidermis is showing”. Also, the only people I can think of who would find this comment offensive are people who have decided that evolution is false despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary because it contradicts a literal interpretation of the Bible.
5. It depends on your perspective. From our perspective, no, but we’re the occupiers. There are Iraqi patriots who don’t want occupiers on their land. If the US were invaded because Bush had pissed off another country’s leadership, I think there would be quite a few people who didn’t like Bush and weren’t religious nutters who would fight the occupiers.
By the way, I’ve always thought that Bill O’Reilly really is the “no spin zone” because to spin, you have to start with the truth.

Rising fanaticism in the US and Middle East are similar

The rise of Christian fanatics in the US and Muslim fanatics in the Middle East is creating a very dangerous situation that must be addressed before we really do wind up in a clash of civilisations between the West and Islam. Reversing the trend may be difficult, but not impossible.
One of the features of both the Christian right and Al Qaeda-type Muslims is that they both focus on warring with their religious enemies and use their beliefs to brutalise others, allowing them to combine the joys of righteousness with cruelty – a truly heady mix. Think of all the “Christians” who support the idea of kicking women with children off welfare and all the Taliban-think-alikes who force widows to beg in street rather than work.
To reverse the trend we must figure out what are the chief causes of the increase in fanatical beliefs. In both the US and the Middle East, the rise of fanatical religious beliefs coincided with persistently declining standards of living and increasingly corrupt governments and a general slow loss of faith in the secular state. As people increasingly felt that their governments were more interested in shafting and controlling them than helping, and as making ends meet became harder and harder, people began turning to religion for solace. But it is a bitter, angry solace that seeks revenge. As the bitter interpretation of religion grows it spreads throughout the society.
Currently it is meeting some opposition. In Turkey, the military had to threaten to topple the government, again, if it gave control to the religious fanatics. In the US, the last Congressional election and various scandals have staved off control by the Christian right.
But the rise of the Christian right is especially worrisome in upper levels of the US government. The US is too powerful for senior decision-makers to adhere to religious beliefs that require them to wilfully ignore science. Similarly, the same right wingers are not just villainising science, but journalism too. It is a full assault on the finders and purveyors of truth. I suspect this is because the scientists and journalists aren’t agreeing with what the Christian right wants to believe. Look at the Christian right’s views of global warming. They honestly believe that it’s a great international conspiracy of the evil climatologists, atmospheric chemists and meteorologists against the good and pure oil and coal executives. They manage that feat by wilfully ignoring the scientific evidence and the glaring motives for self interest.
But it is not just the Christian right that has rebelled against science and truth. Muslim fanatics similarly create their own, equally fanciful versions of the truth, although they do tend to have and more hate propaganda of the sort that went out of style in the West after WWII.
Both strains of religious fanaticism are inherently authoritarian, requiring all who follow them to shun earthly pleasures and devote themselves to God. Notably, they also require everyone else around them to play along. Even in the US it seems that most people have been cowed by religious fanatics to the point where they are afraid to say they don’t believe in God lest they be labelled godless unbelievers (and probably liberals). The situation is much worse in the Middle East. Converting away from Islam in Afghanistan is punishable by death, in accordance with the Koran.
The problem is that the longer a society holds lunatic ideas and the poorer the sources of information, the worse it will run, creating a downward spiral of superstition and oppression.
It is high time to start looking seriously at the declining standards of living and education, and reverse them in both the US and Middle East. This means that the elites cannot keep pillaging their societies. In George Bush’s America, it means forcing US companies to compete internationally instead of relying on government gifts and taxing the wealthy to bolster the nation.
For the Middle East, the road is going to be harder because they are starting from a lower base and are generally more religious. However, the remedy is the same.