All the experts agree that, back in the day, Islamic thinkers and philosophers were top of the class. Think of Avicenna on medicine, and Averroes on philosophy. But that was about a thousand years ago.
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What went wrong? Compact’s Ahmet Kuru has the receipts in “Why the Muslim World Fell Behind.” Says he:
In early Islamic history, Islamic scholars (the ulema) generally regarded close entanglements with political authorities as corrupting; they preferred to be funded by commerce and maintained close relations with merchants.
OMG! Philosophers ganging up with Oligarchs instead of with devoted activists and politicians! Bernie! AOC! That’s your cue!
However, the Muslim world underwent a transformation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries… This transformation led to a partnership between religious and political authorities. This alliance gradually marginalized the philosophers and merchants, leading to long-lasting scientific and economic stagnation in the Muslim world.
So, no flying cars. Meanwhile, in the wilds of Europe…
While the Muslim world was losing its intellectual and economic momentum, Western Europe experienced the opposite trajectory after the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with the distinction between church and state, opening of universities, and the rise of a powerful merchant class.
And it happens that I am reading Two Paths to Prosperity by Greir, Mokyr, and Tabellini, comparing Europe and China since 1000 AD. They describe Europe’s prosperity arising from rulers deciding to go easy on emerging merchants and trading cities. Why would they do that? The rulers kept their hands off the cities because they needed tax money from the flourishing cities to fight their wars.
Years ago, I wrote about the need for the Greater Separation of Powers, between the political, the moral/cultural, and the economic sectors. I stole the idea from Michael Novak in his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. The idea is that we should prevent any two of the three sectors from ganging up on the third.
So, experts, do you, at long last, agree that the merging of politics and ideology into totalitarian states and the subjection of the economic sector in Russia in 1917, Germany in 1933, China in 1949, had something to do with their failure to become vibrant societies? In all three cases, the intellectual and political elites knew that they had the magic key to the meaning of life, the universe, everything. Only they didn’t.
Still, the world is a scary place. There used to be Asian hordes threatening the eastern borders of Europe; now there are oppressor white males threatening the “safety” of tender young women in our nation’s colleges. There is AI threatening to take all our jobs. Who will save us?
Not the politicians. They got us into two world wars within 30 years in the last century. Not ideologists. They conducted secular witch hunts in the 20th century like you’ve never seen.
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Still, I’m a little disappointed that our best thinkers were not telling us, a century ago, that sucking up to politicians was not going to end well, based on their scholarly study of Islam and the Abbasid war on “certain Shiis, rationalist theologians, and philosophers” back at the turn of the first millennium.
You’ll be shocked to learn that Ahmet Kuru has had to deal with accusations of Orientalism and Eurocentrism over his book Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment. That’s because experts agree that to propose a separation between the ulema and the state in Muslim countries is colonialist and, no doubt, every other pejorative you can think of. But Kuru insists:
The ulema-state alliance is neither a theological necessity of Islam nor a continuous historical fact.
Of course, despite the sneers of the woke set, anyone with half a brain wants to keep the state and moral/cultural sectors separate. To suggest that religion and government in the Islamic states should maintain a close alliance is the most Islamophobic and Leftocentric idea I have ever read in my lifetime. It reminds me of the old song by George M. Cohan, “Racist is a Grand Old Slur”:
For it’s Islam-o-phobic
Plain as any slur can be
But with propriety, society will say: Said
But it was racist, racist
Long before the fashions came
And there is something there that sounds so CAIR
It’s an endless game.
Said’s the author of Orientalism. And I think the best way to cut the wokeys down to size is to make fun of them. Although you may think that mutilating a Cohan song is a bridge too far.
Meanwhile, I would advise our Muslim friends to stop sending their young men to Europe. The Muslim migrants here in the U.S. are merely joining our rulers’ Fraud Industrial Complex, bless their hearts. Their brothers in Europe are hip-deep in the lefty Riot Industrial Complex.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
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Image: Public Domain