Outing Ignorance Together With Islam

Condoleeza Rice recently advocated democracy as a long term solution in the Middle East. Liberal democracy has to be distinguished from democracy. It respects minorities. The state leaves them be. It protects them. Muslims do not believe the USA walks the talk on this one. There are 1billion Muslims, and growing. They cannot be ignored. Many are now US and EU citizens and voters.

Effort is required now to make them feel part of the same human family as the rest of us. We have not made this effort. However until very recently Christians and Jews lived secure and comfortable lives in the Islamic Middle East. Some still do.

However most Muslims believe that Christians have always agressively blocked their good intentions. The Koran makes Christians, Jews and Muslims, one under God. The Koran tells Muslims that the “Way” to the end of religious schism is unity under the one all powerful God. The Prophet guided by this acted to be inclusive. He was rejected and attacked.

Christians should remember that Catholics and the Orthodox were massacring each other in the Balkans well before the existance of Islam.

Islam tries to show that by living the will of the one true God peace would reign. Unlike Christian’s they should not prozletise only model in themselves God’s desire for man’s behaviour. They tried this from the 6th -13th centuries. They were aggressively attacked by Christians among others. Their response, as is fundementally directed in the Koran, was aggressive defense. However Muslim’s are obligated to treat for peace if the enemy wishes. Unprovoked attack is expressly forbidden by God.

In the end they lost. Their leaders responded by seeking to be closer to God’s will so he would protect them. In the 14th Century they returned to fundamentals. They closed the Gates of Ishtehad and closed in ignorance to the Ummah. These virtual gates when open allowed the free interpretation of any aspect of the universe unexplained by the Koran or the Haddith of the Prophet. Till then scholarship banned elsewhere flourished under Islam. Scholars were aggressively persecuted or diverted to trivia in the West, Europe, and in the East, China but not in Central Asia, Moorish Spain or the Middle East.

This Islamic suppression of scholarship had an unintended consequence. Scholars fled West to create the Renaissance. A consequence of this was that Western Europe and so America became economically and militarily powerful and to be feared to an extent inconceivable in the 14th Century.

Left festering in Central Asia and the Middle East suppressed Islamic beliefs grew in ignorance unnurtured by scholarship. We now reap the harvest then sowed for our brutal suppression of Islamic aspirations.

To address current problems we could work to assist Islam see itself as at one with us in outing ignorance, as God’s united people seeking to understand better our common universe. Many thoughtful caring people in the West and Islam believe this is possible. An alientated ignorant Islamic community could act in a mutually destructive manner, a potentially global suicide bomb. For them this might be preferable to continuing the humiliation they feel when honestly attempting in ignorance to do good so as to demonstrate to us the vale of loving and being loved of God.

Israel, supported with billions of US tax payers dollars, is their symbol of their continuing humiliation by godless Western decadence. They see the US and EU as the Sodom and Gomorrah of our New Age. It is perhaps noteworthy that there are American’s who share this perception , the so called “Moral Majority” of fundamentalist US Christians.

However if offered our respect and understanding that their only wish is to demostrate not impose God’s Way then surely we can allow them to do so and work with them to do so. A start would be to encourage Islam to re-open the Gates of Ishtehad as a new joint investment in our humanity. We could then recognise the New Age as an an evolution of God’s universe which we could seek to understand to mutual benfit.

How could we harm each other then? What would God’s point be in it? We would all gain, physically intellectually and spiritually from such an advent. To achieve this we do not have to use force or even imperatives such as should or must etc it will simply happen.

It is our lack of knowledge that brings anger, then judgement and then self righteousness and then hate and then an implacable determination to expunge such an evil from our world. This is in humanity. It cannot be wished away by labelling it as evil and that it must stop.

Really, really decent people in the USA, Israel, Palestine, Iran and China allow “evil” to happen all the time. Good caring, loving, opinions and hopes cannot eliminate this. The only thing that could is unconstrained plenty. This could come from unconstained knowledge creation and distribution. Our at-one-ment is then an inevitable consequence not an aspiration.

When working and living in Kuwait I used to sit with a Kuwaiti friends's little kids on Saturday morning watching Iranian television. We watched a religious cartoon early on this Muslim holy day. It had jolly friendly little Smurf like cartoon characters in it.These critters extolled the virtues of learning about the power of God's universe. These children were told it was their right and duty to God to work to understand it. After every sequence, of this Arabic religious Sesame Street, the little Smurfs would say God is Great, God is Good. The sage presenting the program an old Imam would repeat this. The program ended with a picture of a slowly expanding, entirely beautiful, mushroom cloud, a nuclear explosion. A true picture of the power in our universe.

Should this vision be seen as a threat or a portend of salvation? Lovelock, with me, recently suggested the latter. Why not work to support Iran’s declared intend to understand how to access this power for good. The laternative is to alienate them in a corner with access to a power they could so easily feel the need to use aggressively in their defense.