One thing has been holding back the Middle East | Hacker News Reader

One thing has been holding back the Middle East

thetimes.com

21 pointsminifyre23 comments

For a couple of centuries, the Arab world took the science that the Greeks had developed and advanced it considerably further. But then the Muslim theologian al Ghazali persuaded everyone that science was contrary to true religion, and so it was abandoned. The result was when modern science was born and then lead to the industrial revolution and enormous economic and military power, the Middle East never modernized.

subheading: "Religious fanaticism has been catastrophic for a region that was once the intellectual hub of the world"

mirror: https://archive.ph/eW0m6

I have a Theory.

Before the advent of Islam in the 7th century AD, the area that is currently geographically named the "Middle East" basically consisted of different and well developed cultures spread out over Persia (Iran, Iraq etc.), The Levant (Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Syria etc.), North Africa (Egypt, Algeria etc.), Turkey and regions around the Mediterranean. They were all traveling/learning to/from the rest of the World and disseminating knowledge throughout their areas of commerce/influence. When Europe was backward in the doldrums under the anti-scientific/anti-knowledge influence of the Christian Church these pre-Islamic cultures collected, maintained and developed forgotten knowledge from Greek/Indian/Chinese/Other sources.

Then Islam happened and everything started going downhill slowly at first and then accelerating as Europe threw off the Christian Church's yoke and stepped into enlightenment thus increasing the knowledge gap. The so-called "Islamic Golden Age" is nothing more than these populations still preserving and developing knowledge in spite of Islam for a few generations when Islamic orthodoxy had not yet gained full ascendancy over the minds of these cultures. But once Islamic orthodoxy was imposed by the sword on the populations of these cultures, all striving towards scientific knowledge ceased and they were doomed, the results of which we see today.

Note that even after European Colonialism was thrown off, while other non-Islamic countries (notably India/China) have made great scientific progress, almost all current-day Islamic countries are going nowhere. Their record of scientific development, social reforms etc. is abysmal and they seem to not realize that it is their own belief system which is holding them back. Their only hope is to change Islam so it fits in better with the Modern World.

PS: Dr. Jamshed Uppal made a presentation with survey data across Islamic countries titled Are Muslim Attitudes Tuned For Economic Progress? (the data is a shocking and definitive no) but the video seems to have been removed from Youtube - https://theblackhole.pk/event/are-muslim-attitudes-tuned-for...

In this session, Dr. Jamshed Uppal explores how socio-religious attitudes and practices affect economic outcomes in Muslim majority countries. Drawing on World Values Survey data for 66 countries, he examines eight categories of attitudes that are conducive to economic growth, including attitude towards trust; towards government institutions; towards women; towards legal norms; towards markets; towards science; towards violence, and towards financial institutions. Through econometric techniques, he shows that religious values do significantly influence economic attitudes, with a milder degree of religiosity being growth conducive, but stronger forms of religiosity leading to growth retarding economic attitudes.

When do you think "Europe threw off the Christian Church's yoke"?

I would say the Reformation was the start followed by the Enlightenment.

It happens everywhere, not only in the middle east, not only with religion. People who crave control rise to the top, apply tight control to stay there, kill creativity in the process.

A successful religion ties together so many valued things in people's minds, that it is very hard to fight the cultural dysfunctions it may promote, or has become entwined with.

Few other sources of dysfunction come with organized cultural generational reinforcement practices, systemic social respect and judgement, daily personal energy investment, family and friendship bonds, and both elite and grassroots level power classes that a religion can create. Not to mention the afterlife plans and ancestor reunions.

Note how reliably political polarization is associated with one or both sides weaving the sticky glue of religion into completely unrelated (and blatantly contradictory) partisan identities.

Monotheism has proven a devastatingly effective way to consolidate control in the ancient world through the medieval period.

>People who crave control rise to the top, apply tight control to stay there, kill creativity in the process.

There is nothing about authoritarian regimes which prevents them from making scientific progress. See e.g. China, a society with substantial authoritarian features, a massive surveillance state and one party rule. At the same time they became one of the best manufacturers of everything in the world. Within a decade they built up a world class car industry, which both the US and the EU had to ban from competing.

> I guess I am not alone in wondering how different the Middle East might have been had it not been for the seismic influence of Al-Ghazali, that revered scholar of Sunni thought, who in the 12th century argued that science is not a liberator but a threat to the word of God and a danger to the clerics, who had every incentive to thwart the thirst for knowledge to maintain their power and privileges. “Innovator” was not regarded as a term of praise but, as the scholar Toby Huff has put it, “a term for a heretic and non-believer, subject to death”.

This quote has two parts, both of which are wrong and sensationalized. About al Ghazali being anti science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QjSXJSt7KI

And on the status of innovator. The author is equivocating, the negative term innovator is applied to people who innovate in religious matter, ie: altering the religion. Not referring to people who advance knowledge of the "worldly sciences".

Philosophers have long pointed out the missing feature with Science/Rationalism.

And that is when faced with randomness, unpredictability and lack of control, in general, a retreat takes place.

"There is no solution in the book/there is no time/there are no resources/it's not my fault/everyone else has to do x y z/don't hold me responsible for that persons suffering".

Basically any time a problem doesn't have a solution or a "elegant" solution, do a poll on how many scientists/innovators/business leaders/engineers will avoid it or not take responsibility for orchestrating an organized response to hold the space, until a solution is found. Its not in their training. So the majority just retreat. Into their work. "Doing" science/tech provides a very easy path to detachment. And then that detachment gets defended in all kinds of misguided ways, causing more confusion and misunderstandings as can be seen in this specific debate. But it applies in all debates.

Religious systems are much older and they have learnt to occupy the space when things get unpredictable. They will be there when people get cancer holding hands. They will offer rituals and prayer. They will be there praying with soldiers about to enter the battlefield and die. They will be there after they die. They will show up when people have health issues/financial issues/relationship issues. Do they fix all the problems? No. But all problems can't be fixed.

Showing up and holding the space and having something to offer and doing it in an organized and institutional way until a solution is available is what is missing.

All religious systems, not just the Abrahamic ones, people are trained for years to not run away from suffering but hold ground and have something to offer. Its not easy and can't be done without training.

Very few Fred Rodgers are produced by science and engineering institutions.

What is produced instead is mockery of religious systems, the uneducated, the misguided, the ignorant. And it naturally creates more issues.

That's a very interesting video. It persuaded me that Al Ghazali was much more pro-science than I had thought.

While this article focuses on the anti-science stance of fundamentalist Islam, I wonder if it isn't also an oblique reference to the current anti-science campaign in the U.S., and for the same basic reason, to stifle logical and critical thinking for church-state control.

I was about to say the same thing.

a lot of things rhyme.

I think it's hard to argue Trump is going for church-state control, when he never goes to church, practices no Christian virtues, and only ever talks about himself. The guy never partners with anyone; there are just subordinate loyalists and everyone else. There's no way Trump will let anyone apart from himself be in control.

I've said earlier: He has no philosophy, no beliefs, no religion. Only money counts, and power - power to garner more money and cover his crimes.

People believe in religion and various philosophical theories as an end. He uses them only as means. The believers do his heavy lifting and (surprise) everyone who is close to him or trusts him is betrayed in a matter of Scaramucci's.

He even betrayed his ... you know.

This is from (too) long observation.

Trump keeps releigious people close to him, not so much for advice as for validation. I personally think the ones he aligns with are the most grifty ones, but YMMV. There's a much stronger more visible religiosity (performative or sincere) among his subordinates. A cync might look at this and conclude that since Trump won't be around forever his less charismatic underlings want a tried-and-tested social technology to keep the herd together.

I'd offer a much easier explanation! Middle East only became a laggard when it became wholly owned by Ottoman Empire. It meant that when Europe transformed into unitary nation-states where unity of blood, religion, language, and culture defined what the state was (the only exception being Roma and Jews that lived everywhere and were kicked around at the first opportunity), nothing like that happened there because Ottoman Empire was well, an empire - it didn't care about ethnicities.

As a result, once it collapsed in 1921, we got a bunch of places that had nothing intrinsic to hold them together - places randomly drawn on the map by dudes in top hats somewhere in Paris and London, populated by a multitude of peoples holding a great variety of sectarian beliefs (not just Sunni vs Shia, but also different schools of those, some of those like Druze, becoming like ethnicities of their own). Because there is no internal cohesion - people living there are well, random people speaking random languages with random faith and having nothing to do with one another - there is either a hard power that forces them into obedience (e.g. Syria under Assad the Elder), in which case there is order, but no true progress - or not even that, in which case well, there is endless bloody chaos.

Only solution here is slow, gradual genocide of "others" until a semblance of an individual ethnicity defining a state, is formed. In Europe it took centuries and culminated in World Wars. Eastern Europe only became truly unblocked in its progress after the end of Communism, predated by the ethnic purges orchestrated by victorious Allies ("move all Poles to Poland, all Germans to Germany, etc") in late 1940s. Before WWII, Eastern Europe states resembled modern Middle East with ethnic strife preventing development and forcing those countries either into hard-power authoritarianism (Poland), or dysfunction (First Czechoslovak Republic).

Ethnic cleansing, i believe, is deemed "bad" for the only reason: it gives a nation that executed it, a massive competitive advantage, so those who did it a long time ago, strive to prevent others from doing the same.

This is all very good but like most articles written by Westerners ignorant of 19th and 20th-century history it completely forgoes the part where European colonialism did everything in its power to remove progressive governments, generate division amongst any clans that could have possibly aspired to modern identities, and sabotaged anyone who could have posed a thread to Western interests who, coincidentally, we some of the most educated and promising elites of the Middle East.

Really just another fluff piece about how great and smart us in the West are while we carry the weight of millions of corpses in Africa, the Middle East, and even Europe.

The author’s father is Pakistani, for what it’s worth.

And? Being a child of immigrants doesn't mean your opinion on the place of origin of your family can be any good.

That argument is anticipated in the article.

And it has no real rebuttal. It's all "over here in the West we were better". Completely ignores the role of functional progressive states and how the West shitted all over them during critical times because it wasn't in their interests.

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