ISLAMIC RENAISSANCE: This will be the third and last (for now) installation of my comments on Islam in light of the recent controversy (and rioting) over the European cartoons. If it wasn’t apparent from my last two blogs, I believe that Islam is more than a religion; as with Christianity, it has a history of worldly empire. That history is long past, but the memories of its former greatness and power still reverberate amidst its tribes. As with Judaism, Islam is as much a cultural and social identity as a religion. However, over the past 5 centuries or so, the Islamic culture has been in a slump, not unlike the Dark Ages and Middle Ages that the Euro-Christian culture experienced after the fall of Rome in the Fifth and Sixth Century.

I believe that history runs in cycles, and while our Western Christian-based culture has been riding the positive side of the wave since 1500 or so, the Muslim-based culture has been on the down side. Eventually, the Islamic world will start coming up again (and the culture of the West will eventually see a downturn; hopefully it will be a soft landing). At some point, Islam will see a Renaissance, just as our culture did, probably followed by an Enlightenment and maybe even a Reformation.

But until then, they are going to be like our society was between the 6th and 13th Centuries: tied strongly to basic notions of survival, including war, violence, religious prejudice, intolerance, sexuality that is both repressive and crude, etc. To paraphrase Hobbes, their lives are too often nasty, brutish and short. This is, of course, a broad-brush interpretation. Just as during the Middle Ages there were Christian oases of civilization in Byzantium, many Muslims live peacefully as “Renaissance men” and “Renaissance women”. Unfortunately however, in the impoverished lands of Pakistan and Morocco and Iran and Saudi Arabia (remember, the oil wealth stays in the royal family and hardly trickles down to the masses), the average person lives in an older world, without access to art, education and critical thinking.

Take that situation and mix in a cultural memory of former greatness. Then add just enough access to modern media and technology to get a distorted view of Western culture, and provide relatively easy access to powerful weapons thanks to the evolving “one-world economy”. Then add a generous dash of Western addiction to the oil found under Islamic sands, and stir in a strong dose of support for a rival religious culture/state (Israel). Now what do you have? A good recipe for fundamentalism and terrorism, that’s what. Oh, and throw in increasing access to nuclear weapons, and you’ve got a real witches brew.

Some commentators have said that in order to protect ourselves from the Islamic Dark Ages, we need to come to grips with our energy situation and seek to achieve independence from Mideast oil. A few others have hinted that maybe we need to be a bit more equivocal about Israel. And then of course there is the homeland security mentality, i.e. try to wall ourselves off as much as possible from foreigners. Finally, some conservatives suggest that we are just going to have to fight them, sooner or later.

Although I definitely agree that the USA needs to face up to its insane and untenable energy situation, the second and third ideas are non-starters. We can’t walk away from Israel, and we can’t become fortress America; the multi-national corporations wouldn’t let us. And the fourth idea is the worst of all; the crusades with tactical nukes (I’m sure some US military types wish they could have hit Tora Bora with a quarter megaton device).

And then there’s the Bush administration, saying that democracy is the key. Democracy will certainly be a part of the Islamic Renaissance, once it comes. But when you emphasize democracy without enlightenment, you get things like Hamas (in Palestine) and Ahmadinejad (in Iran).

The only way out of this is for the Islamic world to begin its renaissance. But renaissances aren’t easily controllable. They seem to happen only when certain things come together, such as increased trade, better technology, and a critical mass of artists and thinkers who decide that “it doesn’t have to be like this”. America has always been a “can do” nation, but triggering such a macro-historical event within the Muslim lands seems beyond even our great genius. Having US Marines in Baghdad and Falluja doesn’t seem a good way to make it happen.

But then again, we do have one card to play with the Muslim world. We are one of the biggest providers of technical education to their children. A whole lot of kids from Jordan, Tunisia, Indonesia, Kuwait, etc. wind up in our science and engineering schools. Too many of them go back home with our technical skills, the best in the world, but without the wisdom to use them for the betterment of their societies.

It’s ironic how many active terrorists or other anti-westerners were educated in America or Europe, usually in technical schools. And that doesn’t surprise me. I went to an engineering school back in the early 1970s, and they made us take enough liberal-education courses to give us some appreciation for critical thought and social progress. But I’ve heard that the corporate and military establishments have since pressured the tech schools to cut the liberal crap way back. They want computer software analysts and petroleum engineers and weapons designers, not enlightened thinkers who ask questions — so that’s what the universities are now giving them.

We need to change that, especially for the children of the Islamic lands. They are sending us their children, their future, and we let them go without implanting the seeds of open-mindedness and free thinking. We need to REQUIRE that tech students spend a whole lot more time talking philosophy and learning ancient history and modern sociology. (And we need to work with Europe on this, so that the sheiks won’t be able to avoid our cultural learning requirements by sending their kids to pure-tech schools in Brussels or Vienna). We should probably require that foreign students spend FIVE years getting a techie bachelors degree, and encourage them to spend summers in our heartlands, getting to know our peoples and our institutions (they need to learn that America is not what they see on TV).

This obviously wouldn’t change things overnight. It would be a decade or two before the al Qaeda recruiters and the government nuclear programs in Iran and Pakistan noticed that their young geeks were now asking difficult questions. It would be even longer until this new breed would infiltrate the halls of power and have a chance to change things for the better (assuming that they somehow held on to the love of thinking and cultural progress that we tried to plant in them). It might not work. But to be honest, I don’t see any better ideas out there right now.