Culture Shock

Religious historian Karen Armstrong recounts a story of a Christian monk in Andalusia who wanted to become a martyr. He walked into a market place crowded with Muslims and began loudly denouncing Muhammad as a misogynist, lecher, and false prophet, still today a good way to get oneself killed in certain parts of the world. Authorities arrested him before a riot could start and, not wanting to make too much of it, offered to let him go if he would recant. The monk only became more strident, giving them no choice but to summarily execute him. I am reminded of that story as we see one headline after another regarding intemperate Muslim outrage over any perceived slight from non-Muslims or any departure from tradition among their own. This week it is a Muslim girl from Toronto killed by her father for not wearing a head scarf. Last week it was a Saudi woman sentenced to jail and lashes for having been in a car with a former boyfriend when they were both abducted and raped. The week before it was an angry mob in Sudan calling for the head of an English school teacher who allowed her class to name a pet Muhammad. Many Muslims join the rest of us in condemning such attitudes as gross overreactions representing fundamental disregard for basic human rights. Others tell us to mind our own business or insist that the intolerance is un-Islamic and can’t be used to judge the community as a whole. Still, the incidents occur regularly enough to remind us all just how deeply mired many Muslims are in medieval attitudes, struggling to resist adapting to a world that has moved beyond them. They are like the Luddites of early nineteenth century England, trying to stop the industrial revolution. But Ned Ludd and his followers were just trying to protect their jobs by destroying looms. Modern Muslims are trying to protect a culture that is not serving them well. Both groups were and are acting in futility. It isn’t just intolerance. David Galula describes offering medical clinics to impoverished Algerian villagers in 1956. A big obstacle was a deep sense of fatalism that often kept mothers from seeking help for sick children. They came around as they realized help was there for the taking but it was slow and difficult. Galula thought, and I think it was a trait characteristic of the region. The recent Jones Report to congress on the status of Iraqi security forces describes two major cultural challenges in building an effective Army. One is an ingrained disdain for preventive maintenance on equipment, a large part of a greater problem in logistics. Another is a lack of a tradition for a non-commissioned officer corps and a reluctance to delegate authority. No wonder Arab armies can’t beat Israelis. Similar accounts are coming out of Afghanistan. Times are changing though. NATO advisors taught Bosnians the value of competent NCOs and Iraqis will learn too. Even Saudi women are becoming well educated. King Abdullah is building a 12.4 billion dollar university complex in the desert to catch Saudis up with the west in science and technology. It will be walled off from the rest of Saudi society because he wants to attract the best western minds and that requires academic freedom and gender equality. It will be a porous wall. Dubai wants to become the Singapore of the Middle East and that means increasing emphasis on a free market economy and rule of law. It is already a major tourist destination for Europeans. Libya wants to integrate into the world economy and to that end has dismantled its nuclear arms program and renounced old links to terrorism. Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim country, is dragging itself up out of historic poverty, and is emerging as a democracy in the process. This week’s murder notwithstanding, Muslims in the US and Canada are assimilating quite well and are beginning to have an impact on their ethnic origins. Canada is a major destination for Iranian immigrants and the community there is characterized by entrepreneurs who maintain ties and influence in Iran. And so it goes across large swaths of the Muslim world. The world is changing faster than at anytime in history and many Muslims are being dragged kicking and screaming along with it. They have no choice. The effects of globalization make the rest of society at last impossible to ignore. There is nothing in Islam that requires Muslims to remain forever poor. A lot of Muslims have already figured that out and a lot more are beginning to come around.