Birth of a Civilization

When Samuel Huntington wrote his now classic essay The Clash of Civilizations he was attempting to explain more than what became a series of conflicts between Islam and the rest of the world. He was describing a post Cold War world order laid out along largely religious fault lines. He placed across those lines not just Islam and erstwhile Christendom but what he called Confucian, Shinto, Hindu and African civilizations. It seemed appropriate at the time to also distinguish between the Orthodox Christian East and Western Europe with its Roman heritage. In something of a stretch he drew another line between Protestant North America and the Catholic South.

I would propose a different view, one based on language. I think it better reflects what is actually happening in the world. More important, it may offer a clearer way forward. It doesn’t ignore religion, the lines are much the same, but it is less emotional and more tractable and it accounts for both secular and religious differences in culture. Also, as has proved the case, it doesn’t necessarily bode open conflict. Tensions between Slavs and Catholics are still there in the old Soviet Block but they have largely settled out. China and India are elbowing their way into the first world commercially, not religiously, and they are learning English to do it. Africa’s brutal wars are more tribal than anything else, and they are internal. Japan hasn’t been close to war with anyone in more than a half century. So let’s look at language.

When Byzantine missionary Saint Cyril took Christianity to Slavs in the ninth century he did not require them to conduct the liturgy in Greek. The Eastern Church has always said Mass in the local language. One could say the vernacular but that would be a Latin term wouldn’t it? When Peter I became Tsar in 1682 Russians were a people with no secular literature. Cyril had given them their first alphabet, that’s why it’s called Cyrillic and why it looks like Greek, but you knew that didn’t you? Literacy was confined almost exclusively to the clergy and the Church had discouraged non-religious inquiry almost from the days of Constantine. Christians had burned the library at Alexandria and closed the philosophical schools in Athens centuries earlier. By Peter’s time Western Christendom had reestablished the old links but not so in Russia. There were none to rebuild. Even Russian art was almost entirely religious. With no language in common Slavs had never developed the secular cultural ties to Constantinople that most Westerners have to ancient Rome, or that Muslims have to 7th century Arabia.

Until recently disabused I thought everyone knew why we call them Romance languages. It’s got nothing to do with steamy novels. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and several other European languages are based largely on Latin, which they got from Rome, whence Romance. English picked up quite a bit of it after the Norman Conquest of 1066. It gives us a lot in common. For our 25th wedding anniversary Lynne and I gave each other a trip to France. In preparation we took French lessons from Parks and Rec, one night a week for ten weeks as best I recall. It wasn’t much but when we got to Paris I could look at a menu and have a pretty good idea what species I was ordering. In the museums we could more or less read the placards. When directed to the deuxième étage, I knew when to get off the elevator. I could ask where the bathroom was. With a little planning I could call ahead and make hotel reservations as we traveled around. Fractured though my French was, we were expected on arrival. We would have been able to do little of that in Eastern Europe, let alone Asia.

The influence didn’t stem entirely from Roman conquest. The Latin Mass played a very large part. All through late antiquity and the Dark Ages, right up until the Protestant Reformation it was the same across Catholic Europe. Even later, if a man could read he probably read in Latin. If he was well educated he certainly learned Latin, and probably Greek. In my church a few of the ritual prayers are in Greek and we still often sing our hymns in Latin. They are beautiful and there is something comforting about them even if we don’t understand the words. The most beautiful of all is the Ave Maria. If you are Catholic you know exactly what I mean. I wonder how many millions of brides from Poland to the Philippines have insisted it be sung at their weddings. The Latin Mass is poetry too. Before Vatican II it was sung at High Mass. No offence intended, some of my best friends are priests, but the typical priest sings even worse than he preaches and that could sometimes be painful. Still, one of my early Christmas Eve memories is of my mother and I sitting up late listening to Midnight Mass at St. Patrick’s from New York, and we weren’t even Catholic. If you’ve never heard a really good choir perform Schubert’s Mass in G you have been deprived of one of life’s finer things. I hope the changes were worth it. We’ve gained something with the Mass in English but we’ve lost something too.

Until the mid-twentieth century a classical education was required for one to be considered truly “cultured” in our society. That meant it was grounded in Latin and Greek. The learned man or woman had read not just Caesar but Horace, Virgil, Plutarch, Cicero, and Pliney the Elder. Isaac Newton introduced his calculus to the world in the Latin treatise Principia. Nor were Greeks neglected, Plutarch was a Roman citizen but was born Greek and wrote in Greek. Augustine and Aquinas were both accomplished students of Aristotle and Plato. Modern Christian theology is heavily influenced by their metaphysics, and not just Catholic theology. If you wish to read the original texts of the New Testament you must learn Greek, and Lord Byron thought Homer’s was the most perfect poetry the world had ever produced. We owe a great deal to both languages. Whenever a Western tourist visits the ruins of Rome or Athens he feels a compelling sense of heritage.

Something like that is true of Muslims as well, maybe more so because Islam has never accepted any translation of the Koran as authentic. If it isn’t in Arabic it isn’t scripture. Ritual prayers are everywhere recited in Arabic. My local Mosque offers Arabic lessons for its children in the evening and on weekends. The Koran is poetry too. We’ve all heard the Muslim call to prayer interrupting an otherwise quiet dawn over an Eastern city, even if only in the movies. It may not sound like poetry to the Western ear but to the Muslim it is beautiful beyond words. It is often said that the Koran must be not merely inspired but the direct word of God. When recited it is such perfect symmetry it could not possible come from mortal man. I suspect that’s one reason Muslims living in the West have so much trouble distinguishing culture from faith. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk would have agreed. The founder of the Turkish Republic waged a relentless campaign to modernize his people. To that end he replaced the Arabic alphabet in the language with a Romanized one and purged Turkish of thousands of Arabic words and phrases. It was one of his more controversial acts and eight decades later its ultimate effectiveness remains to be seen. Modern Muslim writers, including Turkish ones, sprinkle their Western language texts with Arabic, usually accompanied by elaborate definitions and the explanation that there is no comparable Western word. Most Western commentators on Islam and the Middle East do it too. To many Muslims even the Arabic script is sacred. Anything else is profane.

Which brings me back to Saint Cyril, or rather to Peter the Great. Like Atatürk, Peter is best remembered for his attempts to modernize his people. Also like Atatürk, Peter thought to modernize meant to Europeanize. Both men got decidedly mixed results. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Russia was geographically European, religiously Greek, and secularly Slavic. Three centuries on, despite the communist experiment, Russia is still Orthodox and only partly European geographically or culturally. That may be because Peter’s reforms began and ended with the Russian elite, never extending to the peasantry. He imported weapons, tactics, and generals for his army, built Russia’s first navy and styled it European, founded St. Petersburg and moved his capital to the Baltic, established European schools, changed the way the noble boyars dressed, and sent the sons of prominent families abroad to study but made no attempt to adapt the language or educate the common folk. Peter himself worked incognito for a while as a carpenter in a shipyard outside Amsterdam and spoke fluent Dutch. He later tried to learn German but mangled it and produced the sort of rolling eyes I get with my French. German did become a second language for many of the boyars and they brought back some philosophical and political ideas but, as I said, it went no further. The effect was to distance the wealthy even more from the common people than they already were. I wonder if it didn’t contribute to the Russian revolution 200 years later.

It seems a bit trite to say things changed with that. They are still changing, and quickly. If they did nothing else communists made literacy universal in Russia (China too) and in this day of globalization English is becoming almost as common. That isn’t just a communist legacy of course, it’s happening all around the world. A cultural transition has become obvious to everyone as well and to the non-American it is far more than obvious. It is overwhelming. That doesn’t mean Osaka is likely to be mistaken for Lisbon anytime soon but it does mean foreign sights are becoming everyday in places once distinctly monocultural. Irish Pubs are as common in Budapest as Spanish inspired tapas bars are in Atlanta. One of the most interesting books I’ve read in the past year is the true story of young Iranian women secretly forming an English literary book club in revolutionary Teheran. I don’t have to tell anyone the customer service rep on the telephone is speaking from Mumbai, and her accent is getting better. It is my thesis that as our language becomes more shared, so does our culture, I don’t mean American pop culture is conquering the world, though it sometimes seems like it. It works both ways. The Muslim teenager who has mastered the idiom in an American high school has become American but she has also brought something with her. She will have the same kind of influence on us the Irish had a century and a half ago, and still have today.

This sort of thing has happened before, though never so quickly or on such a global scale. As Arab Empire expanded in the seventh and eighth centuries Caliphs allied themselves with or conquered large numbers of people who eventually adopted Arabic and effectively became Arabs. They are not indistinguishable. The Egyptian is less different from the Saudi than the Frenchman from the Brit but his accent is different and so are his attitudes. Still, when he makes the pilgrimage to Mecca he finds himself at home more than his Indonesian coreligionist who’s Arabic is not so fluent and certainly more than Lynne and I did on our trip to France. Language does make a difference. The American visitor may complain that the Australian short order cook can’t fry an egg properly but at least he can reasonably expect that when he asks for it he will be served an egg. I wish I could say that about a martini but that’s another essay.

The point of all this is that English as a universal language is having more than a commercial effect. It is in large part responsible for the startling cultural phenomenon we see. Children the world over are learning it at very early ages because it is vital to their economic future. In the process it is unavoidable they learn things about Western culture that are far more important than Coca Cola, McDonalds, pop music, and designer jeans. Whether we think it a good thing or not they get ideas about values from Harry Potter, and politics from Bono. The best students vie for places in Western universities, and get them. This time they don’t just come from the elite. More and more of them are going home and starting international companies, sometimes after becoming fabulously wealthy during their stay abroad. They take with them more than technology and money. Not least are ideas about the rule of law, its role in allowing them to get rich in the first place, and its necessity if they are to build their companies into the juggernauts of their dreams.

Not everyone does think it a good thing, witness the anti-globalization riots of a few years ago, and nothing guarantees closer cultural ties will eliminate all the world’s disputes. In a way you can understand the rioters. They may be Luddites, fighting the tides of time, but they are losing something valuable too. We don’t all want to be the same do we? Even if some of it we won’t really miss. We don’t look back fondly on everything Roman after all. There was that thing with lions and Christians. We may have lacked common ground with Russians but it was Germany we fought in two twentieth century world wars. Will the changes be worth it? I think so. On balance they aren’t so bad. On the contrary they can be credited with enormous good. Trade is making a lot of people more prosperous than ever before, and the institutions that go with it are providing mechanisms for resolving disagreements short of dropping bombs. Economic interdependency is also proving a powerful incentive to utilize those mechanisms.

The Andalusian experience from a thousand years ago, The Netherlands of five hundred years ago, and the United States of the past two centuries have together demonstrated conclusively that given minimal legal protections and a modest spirit of tolerance it is possible for disparate religions to coexist side by side. When they do, the corresponding cultures tend to merge. That’s what seems to be happening around the world today. The incredible shrinking planet has us all living in effect side by side and the unprecedented emergence of a common language is paving over Huntington’s fault lines even if it doesn’t always seem like it. I’m surprised anthropologists and political scientists aren’t all over this. They ought to be clawing their way to center stage. They should be telling us we are witnessing one of the most profound events in human history. It’s more than a conflict between old civilizations. These are the birth pangs of a new one.

Who Killed Ashley Estell?

If Michael Blair didn’t do it who did? The physical evidence against Blair amounted to hair found in his car and on the girl’s body. A since discredited forensic expert testified the hair from the car was probably Ashley’s and that found on the child’s body was likely Blair’s. That was thirteen years ago. Seven years later a series of DNA tests all but exonerated Blair. None of the hair presented as evidence belonged to either him or the girl. If the hair from the body was not his, whose was it? When we thought it tied Blair to Ashley we assumed it meant he was the killer. Now yet another round of DNA testing indicates tissue found under the girl’s fingernails came from two different men, neither of them Blair. Is anyone trying to find out who it does belong to? Has whoever did this been free all these years to do it again?

Seven year old Ashley went missing from a crowded Plano soccer field Labor Day weekend 1993. A frantic search turned up her body the next day in a ditch alongside a rural road a few miles away. She had been strangled. The whole community was horrified. It wasn’t something we expected. Plano was still new. It represented the American dream; a house in the suburbs, children playing on the lawn, good schools, a place to raise a family. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The Estells were at a soccer game for Pete’s sake. How much more wholesome can it get? But Ashley was gone. Our focus turned to finding her murderer.

Pressure on authorities was enormous. There was the sort of media frenzy we often see, especially when the victim tugs at the heart in the way Ashley did. We wanted the killer found. First there was a massive search. There were over a thousand volunteers and Michael Blair was one of them. Police wouldn’t have been doing their job if they hadn’t run routine checks. Blair turned up as a child molester out on parole and that made him a prime suspect. When the child’s body was found there wasn’t much evidence to go on. Police thought what little there was pointed to Blair. Prosecutors built a case, charged him with abduction and murder, and asked for the death penalty. The defense put Blair on the stand and showed several hours of video taped interrogation to demonstrate he had cooperated fully and there was no hint of any admission of guilt, but it also meant prosecutors could introduce his background as a child molester. Bad strategy, he was a terrible witness. Jurors were convinced he did it and Blair has been on death row ever since. There’s just one problem, he didn’t do it.

The District Attorney at the time of trial, Tom O’Connell, insists there was more than enough evidence to convict Blair without the hair. He cites eye witnesses who saw Blair at the soccer field, candy found in his car presumably used to entice the second grader, fibers in the car similar to those from one of Ashley’s toys, and the fact that after the body was found Blair twice drove past the site. Current District Attorney John Roach says his office is prepared to retry the case if necessary. They are both convinced they got their man the first time. It’s hard to see why. None of that connects Blair to the girl or to the crime. The DNA connects somebody else.

None of the witnesses who claimed Blair was at the soccer field knew him. Though his appearance would make him stand out in a crowd their descriptions didn’t fit. They identified him only after seeing his photograph in the news. (If you think your drivers license photo is bad wait until you see yourself in a mug shot.) Nobody claims to have seen him with Ashley. Several witnesses who did know Blair placed him miles away at the time of the abduction and should have provided more than adequate reason to believe he wasn’t there.

There was no accomplice, no confession, not even a jailhouse snitch. The fibers were so common they could have come from anywhere. How many people do you suppose have candy in their car? It reminds me of the TV commercial trying to connect an insurance company with interplanetary aliens through a series of irrelevant coincidences. You’ve seen it. The clincher is they both spell their names with the same letters, MERCURY. Blair did show a high level of interest, so did a lot of other people. There was a fire in my neighborhood recently. A lot of people came out to see that too. It’s true Blair’s interest was more than normal. It still is. When there is a story in the news about the kidnapping or rape of a young girl he follows it with a morbid curiosity. These days he has an airtight alibi. He had one then too. Somebody else killed Ashley.

I’d like to know who and I would feel a lot better about this whole affair if police and prosecutors had reopened the case when they found out about the hair. If they have they are keeping quiet about it. Maybe it’s because they always knew the hair was a red herring. Let’s start with the state’s principle expert witness, one Charles Linch, purportedly of the Southwest Institute of Forensic Sciences (SWIFS.) It turns out he had been terminated from SWIFS shortly before trial, involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, and at prosecutors request temporarily released so that he could testify against Blair. None of this was disclosed to the defense. I’m not a lawyer but I believe that is called prosecutorial misconduct. Had they known, Blair’s lawyers would surely have impeached Linch as an incompetent witness, discrediting both his testimony and the prosecutors who put him on the stand. But they didn’t know until much later when the Dallas Morning News reported it in a series of articles. The Linch issue alone should have been enough to get Blair a new trial. Also, all the parties knew the sort of microscopic analysis Linch conducted can’t be used to positively identify a suspect in the way fingerprints can. It just isn’t that reliable. In fact the word “match” can’t even legally be used in that context. The word came up repeatedly however. Sometimes the defense objected, sometimes not. Toward the end even they were referring to the “matching” hair. In any case some of the jurors later said it was the hair that clinched it for them.

Jurors are not usually people who are trained to ignore their feelings and preconceptions when weighing evidence. Anyone who is is routinely dismissed at jury selection. (Know any lawyers who have ever been picked?) Lawyers on both sides regularly skirt ethical boundaries to play on the emotions of jurors as a matter of strategy. The prosecution painted Michael Blair as a monster. It was easy. He is only five feet tall and has a bad complexion. He testified that he was on parole for a burglary conviction which was technically true, the prison system hadn’t been notified of the sentence for molesting, otherwise he would not have been paroled, but he appeared to be obfuscating. His was a tough case to defend. He was not guilty of the crime at hand but by no means was he innocent. His court appointed lawyers were out of their league. Jurors saw evil personified sitting across from them. That was the real case against Blair, any relevant evidence was secondary. The image colored their view of an otherwise weak case and they convicted the wrong monster. So Michael Blair sits on death row. The real killer is still out there.

J’Accuse

It’s been well over a century now since Emile Zola published his famous essay exposing the Dreyfus affair. The French Army version of a kangaroo court convicted Dreyfus of passing military secrets to the Germans and sentenced him to life in the prison colony on Devil’s Island. The court quickly found it had very little evidence against Dreyfus but for reasons involving high level politics and intrigue they convicted him anyway. They were afraid the anti-Semitic press would accuse them of a Jewish cover up. The so called secrets were actually part of a disinformation campaign designed to mislead Germans about developments in French artillery. Dreyfus had nothing to do with it. He became a scapegoat and a further part of the counterintelligence ruse.

Once the affair was public it became an issue of honor. The reputations of the Army and of France were more important than any single man to some, the higher issue of justice a cause célèbre for others. Dreyfus was recalled, re-tried, re-convicted, and re-sentenced. Twelve years after it all began he was pardoned and his commission reinstated. He went on to serve in WWI, but the affair had torn French society apart. Wounds were deep. In 1985 President François Mitterand commissioned a statue of Dreyfus by sculptor Louis Mitelberg to be installed at the Ecole Militaire in the square where Dreyfus was stripped of his rank. The minister of defense refused to display it. Despite universal recognition of his innocense, the army formally acknowledged it in 1995, it remains a divisive issue today.

I can’t recall a similar incident in American history that excited quite that level of passion. The My Lai massacre in Vietnam comes to mind. When 1st Lt Hugh Thompson Jr. and his crew landed their helicopter and stopped the shooting they and Lt. William Calley became stand-ins for many who were either for or against the war. To war protestors Calley was a symbol for the “baby killers” as they came to call American troops. For his part Thompson was roundly condemned for calling undue attention to the atrocity. The Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq is an echo of the earlier event but in neither case can the American Army be fairly accused of a cover up. Both affairs were duly investigated and prosecuted in open court. President Johnson commuted Calley’s sentence for political reasons but he did that openly too. Maybe they learned comething from the French.

I wish I could say the same thing for American courts. When they railroad somebody into a conviction he stays convicted until somebody catches them red handed, with DNA evidence say, sometimes even then. Michael Blair is a case in point. He was convicted of killing Ashley Estell largely on the strength of hair thought at the time to connect him to the crime. It’s been six years since DNA testing demonstrated it did no such thing. Blair still hasn’t gotten a new trial. He remains on death row and I suppose that means we still intend to execute him. I can’t imagine any reason other than prosecutors’ unwillingness to admit a miscarriage of justice, and trial and appeals courts’ willingness to go along.

Michael Blair’s predicament isn’t going to arouse much public outrage. He is a serial child molestor after all, but he has not been proved guilty of any crime justifying his incarcerration on death row. Prison conditions in general are bad but people go insane where Blair is. It’s a hell hole as bad in its way as Devil’s Island ever was. Move him, and find Ashley Estell’s killer.

How a Society Treats Its Criminals

Many commentators have pointed out that inmates at the American military prison at Guantanamo enjoy better living conditions than most convicts, better at times and in some ways than even their guards. Some of them have put on a great deal of weight, becoming grotesquely obese. I’ll not argue for more or less humane treatment of terrorists, or what legal rights they should or should not have. That’s another essay. I just wish the same public passion and debate could be directed at the plight of everyday prisoners in our domestic penitentiaries.

We have two conflicting views of prison life. One is of “Club Fed,” with daytime TV, rec rooms, conjugal visits, and time off for good behavior. The other is of incarceration in a lawless environment of gangs and brutality. I suspect neither view is representative but I have to think life on death row must be the worst on offer from a society that considers itself humane. It is not exactly solitary confinement but it is a life of isolation and deprivation. Inmates spend years there, sometimes dozens of years. They spend every day in anticipation of being strapped to a gurney and given a lethal injection. They receive the death sentence not once but multiple times as one appeal after another is denied. Some of them are strapped in and given a last minute reprieve only to face it again. Some of them aren’t guilty of the crimes that put them there. Some of them are executed anyway.

Almost all death row inmates are destitute. In Texas they aren’t allowed to work and have no legitimate means of earning money though there is apparently a tiny underground economy even there. Michael Blair tells of spending hour after hour taking threads from his gym shorts and weaving “lines” for sale to his fellow inmates. They use them to surreptitiously slip notes and small packages to each other. If it’s true it’s a limited market. The guards must know about it. As you would expect, they read his mail. Postage stamps are the currency of choice. Anything else is contraband. Some have family or friends who make deposits to their prison accounts so they can buy a few things from the commissary, though there isn’t much to buy. Most things are, well, contraband.

Inmates occupy single cells and that’s where they spend their days. They are allowed out for an hour of exercise but there is no “equipment” room of the sort provided the Gitmo prisoners, just a small yard. They have no TV and no access to the internet. Blair had a manual typewriter for a while but lost it when he was sent to “level 2” for disciplinary reasons. He’s back on level 1 but the typewriter is gone. He writes long letters and prints them by hand. He is allowed to write as often as he likes so long as he has money for postage. He also draws and paints, the necessary materials are among the things he can buy. He reads but the choice is limited. I’ve sent him a few books but I have to order them from Amazon. He can only get them through an approved shipper.

It isn’t the dungeon of old certainly. Nobody hangs from the wall in chains, not in American prisons anyway, but it isn’t how anybody would like to spend the last dozen or so years of life either. They tell me conditions are much better for the general prison population. That’s where Blair belongs. He’s not guilty of a capital crime.

Law and Justice

A good friend who often disagrees with me observes that Jesus allowed himself to be nailed to the cross. He asks if that doesn’t represent an implicit imprimatur for the death penalty. Not being theologians my friend and I are both in way over our heads on this but that has never stopped either of us on issues we have opinions about. I think his question warrants an answer. I’ll let him support the affirmative and limit my response to a polemic.

Now I have never argued that society has no right to execute its criminals. I do argue that we will have risen to a higher level of humanity when we no longer choose to exercise that right. We will be a better society. As best I read the Gospels Jesus submitted to Pontius Pilate’s civil authority but that did not amount to a vindication of Roman justice and it doesn’t amount to an endorsement of American penal codes. I am Catholic and concur with Popes who in recent years have argued for the abolition of capital punishment on compassionate grounds. I also am of one mind with official church teaching which doesn’t question the right of the people to make that judgment. That’s the difference between law and justice. It is the former we must live within and the latter we aspire to.

The logic doesn’t stop with Jesus but extends to the martyrs as well. Nor does it address the issue of guilt or innocence. None of them were guilty of or even charged with what we would consider crimes but with the exception of Jesus, Mary, and, in the beginning Adam and Eve, no one has ever been innocent. Small children would be an exception if you are Muslim or don’t subscribe to the doctrine of original sin, but that’s another subject. The point is the law is a creature of its day and two thousand years ago Roman law was the best that could be had. The alternative was chaos. Even today we refer to Pax Romana with some reverence. Other things being equal peace is to be preferred over war, maybe even when other things aren’t equal.

Nor do I suggest the worst of our criminals don’t deserve what they get, and I concede that we have come a long way toward reserving the most severe punishment for the most serious crimes. We’ve long since stopped hanging horse thieves from the nearest tree and we pretty much restrict modern lynch mobs to the relative decorum of the courtroom. I do suggest that what passes for justice in our system is as often as not mere process. In Texas juries are charged to answer a series of questions regarding fact and opinion but rarely if ever asked to consider whether a verdict or punishment is just. Neither does the judge in a capital case. He rules on the law. Evidence is admissible, or not, based on technical rules, not those of equity. Only at the US Supreme Court can judges freely substitute their personal notions of fairness for the rules of statute and precedent. Even they rarely do it and always under the pretext of constitutionality.

The rules are meant to ensure justice of course, and sometimes they work, maybe most of the time. It may be the best we can do, but every now and then an injustice is done. In the case of capital punishment there is no way to undo it. There is nothing compelling us to make these irrevocable decisions, so why do we? Because Jesus approved it?

Economic Islam

The biggest obstacle to Arab reconciliation with the modern world may not lie in Islam’s incompatibility with Liberal Democracy but in its rejection of the attendant capitalism. Scholarly Muslim reformers are coming to a consensus that there is nothing in the concept of the former that is fundamentally at odds with Islamic principles. Tariq Ramadan in particular advocates that devout Muslims living in the West re-read the scriptures in light of their current circumstances, enthusiastically embrace the societies that have become their own, participate fully in cultural and political life not just as Muslims but as responsible citizens, and become role models for their neighbors through their faith. Nothing wrong with that is there? Well, yes there is a problem. Actually there are at least two. The Islamic prohibition against any form of usury is the first. Zakat, the third pillar of Islam, is the second.

The sixteenth century gave us three crucial innovations leading to the unprecedented prosperity much of the world enjoys today. No one would argue that the scientific method was one. Less widely recognized are John Calvin’s argument that a reasonable rate of interest in exchange for a loan does not amount to usury, and legal recognition of the limited liability corporation. Without all three the industrial revolution might never have occurred, certainly it would not have taken us as far as it has. The three were enthusiastically adopted in Protestant Europe, slowly and with reluctance in Catholic Europe, and not at all in the heart of Islam. One need only look at the development of New World colonies to see the relative effect. Commercial trading enterprises in the North thrived almost from the beginning. The South depended on sponsorship from crown and church and lags behind even today. The lack of an industrial base has been a millstone around the neck of West Asia and North Africa for five hundred years. The differences can be largely explained by the underlying economic systems.

I’m not suggesting that one cannot be a successful capitalist without borrowing money. My paternal grandparents scrimped and saved early in their marriage until they had what was for them a fortune. My grandfather used it a hundred years ago to go into the lumber business. He became a wealthy man for his day following a simple model. He used profits from one transaction to fund the next, never borrowing. Unfortunately for his heirs, his business acumen did not pass to his ten children. By the time the third generation received their inheritance it was little more than the original investment in absolute terms and no longer even a small fortune. That isn’t a complaint. I got a great deal more than money from my parents and grandparents. I tell the story to acknowledge that one need not necessarily borrow one’s way to financial success. My grandfather would have rightly said it is far easier to borrow one’s way to ruin. But it is also true that the judicious use of credit, including interest bearing credit, is the life blood of modern global economics.

Muslims object to usury for the same reason Catholics do. It is prohibited by the scriptures of course and that is because it has been a means of exploiting the poor down through the ages. But unlike Catholics Muslims still generally forbid charging or paying any interest. The conventional loan is illegitimate regardless of purpose or safeguard, with some modern reformers making temporary exceptions in cases of necessity such as mortgage loans for Muslims living in the West. Most don’t make even that concession, though there are Muslim financial institutions that get around the issue by artfully structuring agreements so they don’t appear to be interest bearing debt instruments. Catholics have long since redefined usury so that it applies only to “unreasonable” charges. The problem with the absolutist view is that it ignores the time value of money, the fact that a dollar in hand is worth more than a promise to repay the same dollar in the future. The argument is that only honest labor adds worth, to profit solely from the use of one’s savings is sinful. There is always the equity investment of course. One may build a house and rent it out but that too is a moral trap. The greedy landlord can be and often has been every bit as oppressive as the usurer.

This isn’t a petty argument. The difference severely constrains Muslims in their ability to finance roads, bridges, canals, schools, factories, inventories, accounts receivable, a new automobile, a student loan, or even seed and fertilizer for next year’s crop. It is a major impediment to economic growth in the Middle East, even in those countries sloshing around in petrodollars, and a barrier to some of the most innovative mechanisms for breaking the poverty cycle in large parts of the third world. It concerns us all not just because everyone wants to help the needy, but because integration with the world economy is proving to be a primary incentive for maintaining world peace.

I’m not the only one who thinks that. Just last week Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in developing the concept of the so-called microloan, very small loans to budding entrepreneurs and others in some of the poorest places on the planet. I’m not so naïve as to believe everybody who gets one of those loans becomes a success story, my grandfather was right about the dangers of credit, nor does the Nobel guarantee sainthood for Yunus. He joins a group known as much for its charlatans as for its statesmen, but if somebody has a better idea how to deal with grinding poverty in Bangladesh I’d like to hear it.

Critics of the microloan decry the injustice of the typical 20% interest rate when the rich can get much better terms. I would call it a fact of economic life. If the loan helps somebody get on his feet it is worth the cost. I can buy eggs in cartons of four, a dozen, or two dozen. There are stores in South Dallas that sell them one egg at a time. Everyone expects to pay more per egg for smaller numbers per transaction. The moral quandary comes in when the store makes its profits selling eggs to people who can only afford one, especially if they make large profits on millions of eggs. If they don’t the same people go without the eggs unless the government or charity steps in, which brings me to zakat.

It’s usually translated as charity but it is an obligation so it can also be described as a tax. Every Muslim is required to submit to God and make the profession of faith, pray five times a day, and if able pay the zakat, fast during Ramadan, and make the pilgrimage to Mecca once in his lifetime. I’ve over simplified but those are the five pillars. A number of modern Muslim reformers offer the zakat as an alternative economic system to capitalism. Bear with me, this gets tricky. The idea is to better manage the charitable giving, use it not just to feed the poor but to enable them to feed themselves, become self sustaining, and eventually pay their own zakat in turn. Over time more and more Muslims will be raised out of poverty and begin to participate on an equal footing in growing world prosperity. Reformists advocate changing the independent administration of zakat as it is currently practiced and direct it into more centrally controlled funds that can be applied more effectively. Western society does something like that today with systems of government grants, tax credits, and charitable foundations. Many of them are designed to promote economic activities and commercial projects that are deemed worthwhile by whoever controls the funds.

That’s the rub isn’t it? The people deciding which projects get funded do so without necessarily giving top priority to financial viability. If we learned any economic lesson in the last century it was that central control of monetary allocation cannot compete with liberal capitalism where the investor takes his chances with loan or equity based on his own best estimate of the risks and rewards involved. Communism proved an abject failure despite ideals quite similar at their highest level to those of Muslims. How can you argue with the manifesto “from each according to means, to each according to need?” We try to do something like that with our programs of progressive taxation. Even the early church practiced a form of the philosophy. It has its place but it has never worked as a stand alone system, not on a massive scale.

Before I go too far down this path I should also acknowledge that there was a time when Islamic economics did work. The power of the eighth century Abbasid Caliphate was grounded at least as much in trade as in its military strength, and the sixteenth century had its highlights for Ottomans too. Having lost virtually the entire Turkish fleet at Lepanto in 1571, in the last of the world’s great naval battles involving ships all powered by oars, the Grand Vizier told the Venetian ambassador they had merely cut off his beard. It would grow back. In six months they had rebuilt with new, more modern ships and went uncontested in most of the Mediterranean for another century. When asked by Selim II if his treasury could afford it the Vizier replied that if the Sultan wished he could plate the ships with gold.

The sixteenth century would prove to be the high water mark for Muslim dominance, militarily, economically, and culturally. Modern reformers (Muhammad Yunus is an exception) tend to be philosophers and theologians, not historians, not social scientists, and not economists. In attempting to reform zakat, they are trying to tweak a system that has been around for fourteen centuries and has been ineffective for at least five. The plan seems to be “we’ll get it right this time.” I don’t see much cause to think they will. Capitalism has been in a constant state of renewal from its inception. Despite its flaws we have learned to prevent many of the worst excesses. Bankruptcy laws mean we no longer turn debtors over to the torturers until they pay what they owe, antitrust legislation has more or less curbed the robber barons, and the decline of colonialism has put a brake on the rapacious nature of empire.

Tariq Ramadan and others rail at what they consider to be institutions of repression in the modern world, principally the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the multinational corporation. They aren’t alone. The 1999 riots in Seattle demonstrated wide spread discontent in the West too toward the evils of globalization in general and those institutions in particular. But like the Luddites before them these protestors are on the wrong side of history. The third world will emerge from poverty. They will do it despite the best intentions of moralizers like Ramadan and they will do it within the next generation or two. I think they will be led by their women. It is notable that most recipients of microloans are poor and uneducated women who see nothing evil in seizing an opportunity to become independent and reliably feed their children, even if it means paying higher rates of interest than their better off neighbors.

The most interesting thing about thinkers like Ramadan is just that, they are thinking about their faith within the context of the world around them for the first time in many, many years. They will get some of it wrong and I think Ramadan has gotten the economics wrong. A lot of other Muslims are thinking too, and not all of them have PhDs. Most of them are just trying to make a living. Some are devout, some not. Some are trying to get rich. More than a few see opportunities to do it, and not only from oil revenues. Participation in the world trading community has created more wealth in the six decades since WWII than has been seen in any comparable period in history. To join in that one must be something of a capitalist. One must certainly play by the rules of international commerce and that means adhering to the dictums of the WTO and the other institutions so many find so objectionable. One must also make a fundamental concession to reality. If you wish to use someone else’s money for a period of time, you are going to have to pay the owner a reasonable return on his investment.

I have a prediction. Muslims have historically taken their moral guidance from their religious intelligentsia, the ulama. The ulama are not well organized and one becomes a member by reputation more often than by appointment. They often disagree and no one can speak for them as a group. In recent years the more progressive among them have begun to recognize the pressures of a shrinking world and to advocate change in many long held cultural practices. They are consistently faithful to the scriptures however, re-interpreting passages that seem to allow it, continuing to read literally those that appear to require that. Among the least flexible of those relate to economic life, particularly regarding usury. My prediction is this. The ulama will either change their economic teaching, change it quickly, or their moral authority will go the way of that of the clergy in my church regarding issues of human sexuality.

It’s been two generations since the birth control pill was introduced. At about the same time Catholic women in the West began entering the workforce in large numbers, particularly middle class women. The church took stances on the pill, on other forms of birth control, and on sexuality in general that were inconsistent with the laity’s desire and new found ability to control family life, especially the number and timing of children. Within a few short years the battle was over. Catholic men and women by and large stayed in the church, attended Mass, and though they didn’t ignore the clergy, made their own decisions in the privacy of the bedroom. The clergy reluctantly adapted. We now rarely hear homilies on birth control and I haven’t heard anybody mention Humanae Vitae in years. If a Catholic wants a divorce today he can get one. If he wants a new marriage blessed by the church he has to call the divorce an annulment but he can get that too.

Something like that will happen with economic Islam. Muslims are going to integrate with the world trading community. To do it they will have to embrace liberal capitalism and its institutions. Economic prosperity depends on it. The ulama will have to find a way to reconcile it with their faith, either by reinterpreting the scriptures or by following the Catholic example and at least keeping quiet about it. Otherwise they risk becoming irrelevant. They would cringe at the comparison but they have the same problem the communist commissars had. Their people watch the world around them enjoying dramatic improvements in living standards and ask why that can’t be them. To rapidly increasing numbers the answer is, it can. The good news for the rest of us is it will require renunciation of violence.

Islam’s Woman Problem

Even the concept is changing for Muslims. Tariq Ramadan puts it this way, "…most of the classical texts concentrated on the role of woman as ‘child,’ ‘wife,’ or ‘mother,’ woman is now spoken of as ‘woman.” The difference is upending a civilization. The West has seen its share of male chauvinism of course but dominance over women (or members of an inferior faith) has never been quite so central to the typical westerner’s sense of self as it is to your average Muslim male. For centuries Arab travelers were shocked by European attitudes towards chivalry. The idea that a man might hold a door for a woman, allow her to eat at his table, and stand as she entered or left the room was incomprehensible. What Muslims consider to be licentiousness among Western women is a major source of Islamic angst today.

Ramadan also has this to say. “To believe that nothing in the message of Islam justifies discrimination against women is one thing: to say that they do not suffer any discrimination in Western (or Eastern) Muslim communities is another.” That such discrimination does exist is plain to see. For Muslim clerics and intellectuals to pretend otherwise and hide by quoting verses and prophetic traditions is a lie. This from a man the US State Department considers a national security threat. That he is right is obvious. That a prominent male Islamic thinker would say it is remarkable. He isn’t saying Islam is wrong. He is saying Muslims are wrong. He is saying the attitude is profoundly damaging not just to women but to the community at large. It is at root thoroughly un-Islamic and is one reason why Islamic communities are having so much trouble advancing into the 21st century. Ramadan is urging his co-religionists to go back to the scriptures and read them again in light of the world we live in. He is one of those rare Muslims who are willing to distinguish between Islam and the culture that surrounds it, and to argue that the latter must be changed.

I have thought for some time that it is women who will lead Muslims out of the Islamic version of the Dark Ages and it is happening. I don’t mean the bra burning Betty Friedan types. I mean educated Muslim women who are thinking seriously about their faith and rethinking their role in it; women like Ingrid Mattson who is the first convert, the first Native North American, the first woman to be elected President of the Islamic Society of North America, and one who sees nothing wrong with women in leadership positions; or Anzar Nafizi who wrote Reading Lolita in Teheran, her memoir about secretly gathering seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics while a revolution raged around them. I also don’t mean to imply it is happening quickly. It may take generations but these are women who have real ideas, they make too much sense to be ignored, if they are a small minority there are still a lot of them, and they are having an impact.

There has been so much insanity from so many Muslims over so many years I have come to believe Islam can no longer co-exist with its neighbors. Professor Samuel Huntington’s essay Clash of Civilizations struck a chord with me as it did with many others. Tariq Ramadan maintains the religion isn’t the problem. It is a civilization stuck in medieval times and faraway places that has to go. He is right but it isn’t me he has to convince.