“The Only Place that the Muslim Middle East Ever Goes is Backward” – A Brief Summary of the Muslim Middle East

The Map to the Muslim Middle East

By Daniel Greenfield

…No sudden Arab Spring will transform the Muslim Middle East. Uprisings can change governments, but they cannot bring civilization. The Muslim world has access to Western learning, just as it had access to Indian, Roman and Greek learning. It made use of some of those ideas in a slapdash fashion, just as it made use of Judaism, Christianity, Socialism and Democracy in a similar fashion.

A primitive society confronted with an advanced civilization does not become civilized, it adopts some of the habits and facades of civilization in cargo cult fashion, it uses some of its tools, and hybridizes some of its ideas, but all this is done in pursuit of its existing goals. Everything that the Muslim Middle East has taken in from the civilized world has been used to pursue the same goals that it was pursuing a thousand years ago.

Imagine savages buying advanced steel knives, designed with space-age technology, manufactured to never rust or grow dull, then shipped by jet plane to their island, where they are used to perform ritual human sacrifices so that the crops may grow. That in a nutshell is the relationship between the civilized world and the Muslim Middle East– except that the savages are not content to stay on their island and perform their human sacrifices only on their own tribe.

The Muslim leader of today may call himself a president or prime minister; more honestly he may call himself king, but whatever he calls himself, he is much the same figure that he was a thousand years ago.

The only place that the Muslim Middle East ever goes is backward. The great achievement of the Arab Spring was to hand over power in Egypt to Mohammed Morsi, a man who not only carries the same name as a 7th Century warlord, but whose party is based on restoring Egypt to the values of that 7th Century warlord as a cure for the damaging modernism of civilization. And those values are tribal power, ownership of women, repression of outsiders, and Muslim power under a Caliph-god whose fondest wish is that Muslims will one day get around to conquering the world in his name.

Read the entire article at Sultan Knish: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/