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.

First, Toby was kind to call my comments up the page aways ‘dumb’. ‘Ignorant and moronic’ would be more appropriate.

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 )

I understand that Sufism differs from mainstream fundamentalist Islam, but by how much? Are the Sufi Islamists instituting Shari’a? How, given what I quoted above, can that be ‘democratic’?

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.