But that one fact is all we need to know! We don’t need to know about Islam; we just need to know that we don’t know much about it in order to disabuse ourselves that we can create an Islamic democracy.

Anyone who has studied logic knows that the burden of proof here is one the one asserting the positive claim. i.e., “we can create an Islamic democracy”. So if some neocons or some “ethical realists” or some liberal humanist secularists claim that they are going to turn this or that Islamic society into a democracy I have no logical obligation to prove that they can’t do it; instead tbey are obligated to prove that they can do it.

At least one majority Muslim country (Indonesia) is considered free and democratic, while a handful of others are moving in that direction.”

Indonesia hasn’t been a functioning democracy long enough to draw any conclusions. The only other long-term stable democratic Islamic nation is Turkey and they have only achieved it because the army, which is the real source of power in Turkey, is fanatically secularist. They’re so nutty on that count that recently a female member of their legislature was denied her seat because she insisted on wearing a headscarf! (…can you imagine that happening in the US Congress? I can’t. ) Beyond that the vast majority of Islamic societies are non-democratic.

But I was making a larger point. We have no track record on nation building, democratic or otherwise. We have no clue how to make it happen, or what the basic, minimum requirements are to have a peaceful, stable country with people in it who share a sense of nationhood. All our recent attempts have been failures – Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, Afhganistan, Iraq. And we certainly don’t know what it takes to create a democracy, so we have no way to know whether it can be done in a traditional Islamic nation like Somalia.

People sometimes cite Germany and Japan after WWII, but those places were ALREADY fully-functioning nations before the war, and, prewar, already had some of the basic institutions of modern governments, and they were eager, postwar, to get it right this time.

Second, and for the record, I didn’t and don’t mind the vaporization of the two posts in this thread (and I wish could eradicate a few more, here and elsewhere).

Third, this show was my first experience with the term ‘Islamism’ outside the usual Salafi/Wahhabi sort of context. I hope I’m not the only one whose prejudices took a well-deserved beating.

Thanks, ROS. Shows like this are why we listen with such dedication.

Which brings me back to the Becky Fischer comparison. Which, if valid, pretty much kills the ‘democracy’ prospects.

Worse, the situation there is not only bad, but has been helped along into its badness by yet more US foreign policy blunders. Lovely.
Having learned all this and taken up so much space in doing so, I’m done posting on this thread (at least until a few hours after the show).
Thanks…

A question for the show’s guests, or for anyone here on thread:
Do the Somali “Sufi Islamists” employ Sharia?
If not, is the application of “Islamist” a misnomer?

(Note however that Ruhollah Khomeini and other Islamists began their lives as Sufis: http://ddc.aub.edu.lb/projects/pspa/al-ahbash.html )

Example from another culture: we’re taught in school that “Ancient Athens was the world’s first democracy”. What we’re not so readily told is that Athenian women were not only isolated in their husband’s homes, but made to wear face veils when allowed outside. (And, of course, they couldn’t vote.)
If that, in the minds of anyone reading this, doesn’t render into an oxymoron the phrase “Athenian democracy”, then women apparently don’t qualify as ‘people’.

Secondly, we in the West are conditioned to look first at economic factors when trying to analyze the behaviors of other societies and cultures. This approach, it seems to me, sheds more light on our biases more than it does the social and cultural behaviors we’re seeking to understand. I don’t think economics should be our first focus when studying culture wherein “The Devil” is an omnipresent threat instead of a figment of mythology. People ruled by fear of a supernatural personification of ‘evil’ and ‘temptation’ order their lives somewhat differently than secular Westerners. As an example (albeit a weaker one than I’d like), in my own country, people who believe in “The Devil” regularly vote against the party that better represents their economic interests, in no small part because the other party has mastered fearmongering: blowing up “the terrorists” into earthly archetypal minions of “Satan”.

Religion, it seems to me, is the thunderous and redolent Elephant in the Room here that polite, politically correct Westerners would like to dismiss as trivial.
I don’t think it’s trivial at all:
(quote)
The question of the truth of a religion is one thing, but the question of its usefulness another. I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue…
We are sometimes told that only fanaticism can make a social group effective. I think this is totally contrary to the lessons of history… The world that I should wish to see would be one freed from the virulence of group hostilities and capable of realizing that happiness for all is to be derived rather from co-operation than from strife. I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than at imprisoning the minds of the young in a rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them through life against the shafts of impartial evidence. The world needs open hearts and minds, and it is not through rigid systems, whether old or new, that these can be derived.
(unquote) – Bertrand Russell, Preface to the 1957 edition of Why I Am Not A Christian

I don’t think we can pretend that religion doesn’t heavily impact ‘what’s happening in Somalia’. For all I know, it might just be driving ‘what’s happening’ there.
(However, if my suspicions are wrong, it won’t be the first time!)

Got to dash to the airport now! Hope the show goes well. I’ll listen when I get back from the UK.

A free market ecomomy has been proven time and time again to afford the best opportunities for the underclass to move up on the economic ladder. It has lifted more people out of poverty than all other economic systems combined.
We would see even more success if the government would become even less restrictive,and less regulating.

You also claim it is very hard for the poor to achieve wealth and succsess (I’m paraphrasing from one of your earlier posts) Have you not seen the incredible success that millions and millions of immigrants from Italy,Ireland, etc.have had in just 1 century. I’m sorry but you are way off base ” Only in America” may be a cliche but how true it is. and only under capitolism and democracy has this been allowed to happen.

I agree that there are many people walking around with million dollar trust funds that have been born through the labor of slaves and migrant workers.
It bothers me also. Unfortunately we live in an imperfect world. I’m not in favor of trashing the constitution in order to remedy this problem.

We would both like to see the poor succeed and prosper. I fear your solution would just create more poverty,as well intentioned as it may be.

Moving on: talking about “Islamism” as one thing is pretty silly, i.e. “are Somali Islamists likely to be like Afghani Islamists?”; talking about “Muslims” like Old Nick does above, is just dumb. Ayaan Hirsi Ali might be worth thinking about because at least she is actually Somali – but this show should be about Somalia – its culture, its colonial past (leading to breakaway Somaliland and Puntland), its international relations (being part of the Ethiopia/Eritrea security complex), its ecological problems, its tribal structure, etc. etc.

OpenSource is a good show because it does look at the world beyond the most obvious places – but even still as a non-American not living in America I can often see that there is a “US-prism” that things get seen through: “what do we need to know about this and why?”. Islamism is just one bit of the story of what is happening in Somalia, but it’s the bit that the US (and European to some extent) media gets hung up on because it gives a link to wider issues that Americans are interested in: terrorism.

The idea that Somalia could become some kind of breeding ground for terrorism is pretty laughable. When al-Itihad al-Islami had training camps in the 1990s that the Ethiopians saw as a threat to them, the Ethiopians simply invaded and destroyed them then left. You can do that to a failed state because there is no one to complain, and the US has a military base just around the corner in Djibouti if it ever feels the need. There has been very few Somali linkages to “international” (i.e. anti US/western) terrorists networks. The East African US Embassy bombers seemed to have transited through the country but that’s about it – but then the 9/11 plotters were in Germany so it doesn’t show much. I don’t know if now all the nationalities of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are known, but at least in 2003 when it was definitely secret I was told off-the-record by a UK govt. official who had access to the information that there were no Somali prisoners. Most Somalis in Somalia seem to be too busy either trying to struggle through life, or in fighting each other, to be interested in plannning international terrorism. Of course there could be a few, but in comparison to Iraq, or even Britain(!), its not something to worry too much about.

I would suggest for the show: don’t get too obsessed with Islamism – the regime in Somalia will probably end up being as good or as unpleasent as most of its neighbours whether Islamist or not (anyone remember how many peaceful protesters the Ethiopian “democratic”, “Christian” government killed last year? Probably not, but it was in the hundreds IIRC). Somalia should be seen as part of the regional security complex – Islamist militias might be fighting because of verse this-or-that of the Koran that the Wahabbi preachers likes to bang on about but yadda-yadda-yadda… its just as relevent that they are fighting because the Eritrean govt. has just given them a sh*t load of guns. Why? To piss the Ethiopians off mainly, it would seem.

So how much is the Somali fighting part of wider regional power competition? What is the current situation vis-a-vis Puntland and Somaliland? Is the Somalia we are talking about here really a rump of the historical country minus two thirds of its territory? What is the role of Somali diaspora communities in the West and in Africa? Are they fueling fighting or actively trying to help negotiate a solution? What are the politics of the current AU (in)action on Somalia? These are all the sorts of questions I would like to hear answers to on the show.

cheers all,

Toby in Helsinki.

Hell, I don’t think we ‘mainstream’ Americans – you know, we who blog at places like ROS – know much of anything about religious fundamentalism of any stripe.

Are the ‘Good Islamists!’ analogous to Becky Fischer? You know the ‘pastor’ of the kids populating the new documentary Jesus Camp?
Pastor Fischer wants to eliminate the division between church and state.
Hell, she doesn’t even believe it’s a historically verifiable constitutional guarantee.

None of her charges have killed anyone yet, nor do they seem to have orders to do so. However,

“I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places.”

Pastor Fischer is training her young charges as ‘soldiers’ for the culture wars, soldiers who will drive the ‘unbelievers’ from the country.
Our country.
Your country.

Are the Good Islamists! reliable democrats, do you think, like pastor Becky Fischer?
Please try to make the case.
But before you try, color me skeptical.
(quote)
And many Western thinkers and politicians exacerbate this Muslim tendency to avoid internal reflection by themselves avoiding looking at Islam. They lean back and opine: “Oh, well, it was like that with us once. The Church governed the West in the Dark Ages. Don’t worry, all will be fine with Islam in the end.” They do not know what they are talking about.
(unquote, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Caged Virgin, p.40)

(quote)
When Muslims insist, “We’re democracies in our own way,” you need pose only one question: What rights do women and religious minorities actually exercise?
(unquote, Irshad Manji, The Trouble With Islam Today, p.200)
Is it acceptable to you that these speculative, putative ‘Islamist democracies’ because of the necessity for faithfulness to Koran and hadith, won’t allow women equal rights?
Can patriarchal theocracies be authentic ‘democracies’?

Before you answer, read Irshad Manji, Ayaan Hirsi Ali…and, to really bore a destabilizing new hole into the foundations of your conventional wisdom, try the utterly relentless gadfly scholar Ibn Warraq.

I’m not closed minded. Present your case and I’ll read it thoughtfully and respectfully. (I’m not unpersuadable. But my color is skeptical. Damn skeptical.) If you can plausibly make the case, I’ll freely admit it.

Until then, I’ll take Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji—both born into Islam, and both still (self-identified) Muslims (and underdog but hopeful reformers)—as far more plausible sources for my admittedly paltry but steadily growing wisdom on the human realities of Islam and Islamism.

To answer the question of an Islamic Democracy in the Middle East it is possible, given the prevailing belief system that is presented in the media (both theirs and ours), that a Theocracy would be voted in to replace the Democracy that allowed the peoples’ will to reject it. If not a “pure” Theocracy then it could manifest Sharia as the rule of law or some variant of Wahabbism. Without ground rules and a method to mediate and enforce those rules, anything is possible.

As far as predictability goes if history teaches us anything, it is that predictability is elusive if not impossible when applied to human beings and societies (Psychohistorian, Harry Seldon’s theories notwithstanding.) We have problems enough with our Democracy and just because some people are convinced that it is the sine qua non of political systems, does that confer a moral imperative to convert those who aren’t? That is the modus operandi of fanatics and cannot succeed. Each society has to decide how they will live and how they will be governed and how they will interact with other societies – a political system cannot be compelled by a decider/deciders and succeed unless the populace is ready for that decision.

On the other hand, what is going on right now in Egypt, several groups pushing at the edge’s of a US supported dictatorship, may likely end up being a great example of democracy in the middle east.

My take on Africa is this. The majority of the continent is ruled by corrupt governments. Many are brutal and incompetent. Tribal animosities still seem to influence much of the violence and hate.Poverty and famine are an every day occurence. aids,malaria and other disease kills millions every year. No leader has risen that could even begin to solve the problems in Africa. With the end of colonialism the countries of Rwanda and South Africa have gone into a freefall towards impending disaster. Genocide seems to be the only answer that many of these so called African governments can acomplish with any degree of success.

Using plnelsons logic it apears obvious we should stay as far away from Africa as possible. You cant help those who are unwilling to help themselves.
Let us leave Africas problems to Kofi Annan , the UN and various hollywod stars like Angelina Jolie, Bono, George Clooney,and Maddonna.

At least one majority Muslim country (Indonesia) is considered free and democratic, while a handful of others are moving in that direction.

That’s pure speculation. If we’re going to be intellectually honest we have to admit that no one has any idea what social, cultural or other circumstances democracy needs to succeed!

When the neocons use bad logic and make broad, sweeping claims and predictions without substantiation we’re all quick to call attention to it. When peace-advocates and liberals do the same we are far less judgemental.

Our foreign-policy strategies should not be based on democracy -vs- autocracy, or “good guys” and “bad guys” or “liberal” and “conservative”, but on PREDICTIBILITY. Given the choice of different options we need to take more account of how confident we are that we can predict the outcome, rather than simply what our most desired outcome is.

While the Islamists are no saints and certainly will bring misery to many people in Somalia, the idea of a well armed neighboring country invading that country whenever they deem it in their interests is a dangerous and unsustainable one. What follows is most likely a long-running horrifying war with plenty of poor people caught in the middle.

Beyond what the US should do, the first thing this requires is recognition by the international community of a pending disaster. From there action can be taken and pressure can be applied. (vague I know)

My friends at Radio Open Source are putting together a show on the political tensions in Somalia – their overvie [...]

I hope you touch on the attempt by Somali Jihadist to make war in and on Ethiopia.