Three Centuries of Humiliation
The culture of Muslim majority countries must become compatible with Capitalism and the Internet, or it will doom its adherents to misery.
The ongoing humiliation
Every Chinese child is taught about the century of humiliation. It’s the roughly one century between the burning of the forbidden city, through the great leap forward, up until the fruits of Deng’s reforms were realised. For muslim-majority countries, the humiliation began long before the Chinese forbidden city was burnt to ashes and it continues unabated into the present. Most muslims live in, to borrow a phrase from Trump, “shit hole” countries that most of them are trying to escape. My father, like many Pakistanis, left that country for a better life abroad and I’ve benefited immensely from that decision. However, today we see many immigrants escape their “shit hole” countries only to attempt the resurrection of their home culture in the new place. This resurrection of an idealised past is done under the protection of individual rights in countries like the USA or UK, though many of these immigrants seldom believing in such rights themselves.
Nobody is waiting around for scientific or academic innovations from the Muslim world, those who do go on to achieve great things do so by going to the West where they enjoy freedom of expression.
Why hasn’t the muslim world reformed? China certainly reformed. It made its culture accommodate capitalism and then the internet. Despite being nominally communist, the Chinese were able to adapt to the realities of capitalism and the internet and have even come to transcend the West in these domains. It might be called the Chinese Communist Party but they are better at Capitalism than most Europeans who get relatively poorer every year. If Muslim cultures are to have any hope in the modern world, they must make similar cultural changes. They must reform to accommodate the reality of the internet and capitalism. Any culture that is not compatible with capitalism and the internet is doomed to poverty.
Capitalism and the internet are giant assimilation machines into the global culture.
You can’t opt out of capitalism or the internet. It’s everywhere. As Marc Andreessen noted, “the internet is a giant assimilation machine” into the global culture, mainly Western culture - “it will rip every kid out of their own culture”. Capitalism is much the same, it’s like a giant assimilation machine into a globalised culture that fosters free trade.
What will muslims contribute to the internet’s culture?
Muslims largely hail from countries where women are humiliated by men. The men are humiliated by their own governments. The state is humiliated by the West. Draw a straight line from Casablanca to Islamabad on a map and there is not a single country in between that respects the dignity of a human being, the freedom of the individual or provides economic opportunity to the masses. Not a single one.
Young muslim men in England combine the worst traits of the British underclass, the chavs, with the puritanical elements of Islam. The worst of both worlds. They live in free societies but support policies that would turn their new homes into the places that their parents escaped. When Western commentators attack Muslim young men for their failure to assimilate, the young men appeal to values of human rights and individualism, values that they themselves do not believe in nor do they live by. No wonder, that nobody takes them seriously. How could you take such people seriously?
Almost everything is downstream of the culture.
Intolerance and dogmatic thinking are the norm in the muslim world. Reform and contrarian thinking rare, if not outright banned.
The repressive culture that forces the separation of men and women leads to a fanaticism in young men who are taught that “their” women are off-limits but the foreign jezebels are fair game. This manifest itself in incel culture and the harassment of women. Taken to extremes, it manifests itself in the grooming gangs of northern England.
Pakistan, Syria, Dafür, Myanmar, Gaza, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen.. the list goes on. Most of the violence in the contemporary world can be attributes to muslims of one sub-culture killing Muslims of another one, albeit often with international backers with their own agendas, see Syria and Libya. In a minority of cases, it is simply more powerful cultures engaged in power plays, see India and Israel. I am sympathetic to the arguments that the meddling of the United States is the driver of many problems in the muslim world but it can’t explain everything. It is too tempting to resort to victimhood narratives
Even in the rich Gulf Arab states where a group of muslim men have dictated the terms of the global oil market, literally the most important commodity to civilisation, there are scant achievements to be proud of. The Gulf Arabs have created shoddy replicas of Western cities. By emulating the buildings and material wealth of the West, they hoped to gain membership to that club. But the underlying culture has not changed massively. There are no world class universities, there is no export of culture to the rest of the world. The Gulf Arabs are (hopefully) slowly learning that the West has not achieved its advantages because they figured out how to build skyscrapers, they are ahead because they have a culture that values advances in science, technology and arts.
Brutalised, degraded, beaten. Men and women from Muslim majority countries suffer humiliation all the time. Abu grain twenty years ago. Israeli internment camps today. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The humiliation from westerners pales in comparison to what the illiterate generals and mullahs who run these countries do to their own people
What is not the root cause of the problems
It is tempting to blame racism since, many of us, wear the face “the other”. We can be easily identified in a crowd. But that has not held back South Indians who have embraced capitalism and excelled among the managerial classes in the West. It has not held back Chinese. Both communities earn salaries in the US that are almost double the average white American.
It is tempting to blame colonialism but South Korea and Ireland are now richer than the nations that colonised them. India is on the hockey stick curve when it comes to GDP per person.
It is tempting to romanticise the old-world culture, to say that, yes we may have problems but we have superior family values that transcend those of the West. That we have superior moral values and we should simply stick to our guns and eventually, we’ll become rich. As a religious Muslim at a wedding recently told me, “our problem is that we don’t have enough belief in Islam”. Many Muslims will put a spin on the old George Dubya Bush line that “they hate is because of our freedom”, which instead becomes “they hate us because we are the righteous ones”. This is the LARP that so many western leftist Muslims love to engage in.
These are fantasies, pure and simple. The root causes go much deeper. There is no nobility in staying impoverished.
So where does the blame lie?
Let’s start at the top, It is tempting also to put all the blame on the weak and dogmatic leadership in the East, and here I do have some sympathy for the arguments. Muslim countries are stuck with some leaders who are wordcel fanatics in the mold of Khamenei who, in a desperate attempt to win an asymmetric war, condoned suicide bombing which lead to a wave of horrific death and destruction across the Muslim world, which continues today. There are other leaders who come in the mold of illiterate rent-seeking strongmen who are their to keep the backward masses in check and earn rental payments. Think Sisi in Egypt or anyone who has run Pakistan. Then there are the Islamic idealists like Gaddafi, or on the moderate end, Erdogan. They attempt to make themselves the defacto leaders of the “ummah” or Islamic world and pursue Islamist policies to some extent. Leadership is a big problem, but it’s not the root cause.
It is tempting still to use a variation of the aforementioned George W Bush “They hate us because our freedom” argument. This is often heard from leftists who claim that Islam being the greatest religion is of course a target of those who are not as righteous. This is the “They hate us because we are the righteous ones”. Of course, we’re targets, it’s because we’re right about everything. This has to be the dumbest argument of the bunch. I have absolutely no time for this nonsense.
Political Islam as Communism
To get at the root problem, it is helpful to compare political Islam to communism
The great Czech leader Vaclav Havel asked his readers in his essays why it is that a butcher feels the need to display a pro communism banner in his shop front. Is he a genuine supporter of the cause? Was he inspired by reading the German Ideology by Marx and Engels? Not at all. It is the difference between, what Timur Kuran calls private truths and public lies. In public the butcher is a communist, a card carrying member. But in private he may express different opinions. In public, he believes the Soviet Union is the greatest country on earth. In private, he wants his children to move to the United States. In public the young man in Czechia might wear something that meets the approval of his elders, in private he wants the blue jeans from America. Something similar can be said about political Islam. Does the shop owner in Karachi really believe in transforming Pakistan into a medieval Islamic emirate? Or does he just say this publicly and believe something else in private?
Both political Islam and communism require people to hide their true beliefs, it requires preference falsification, the idea that people won’t share their true preference in public.
The Root Cause
Everything is downstream of culture. There are two elements of modern living that are here to stay and that the culture must accommodate, that is capitalism and the internet. Any culture that cannot live alongside capitalism and the internet is doomed to failure
The culture suffers from four key defects that make it incompatible with capitalism and the internet; no respect for individual expression, the oppression of minorities, the oppression of women and no culture of excellence. To make progress, Muslim countries must create a culture that respects individual freedom, respects the rights of women and minorities and creates a culture of excellence.
Tradition imprisons us all. Tradition is a prison that prevents us from being a part of the mainstream international culture. We must do away with many traditions or adapt them to capitalism and the internet. The traditional culture is the problem.
How do we get out?
As Monmohan Singh addressed the Indian parliament in 1991, he looked on at the growth in Taiwan, South Korea and China and quoted victor Hugo “no power on earth can resist an idea whose time has come”. The time for cultural reform is upon us and we must seize it. We must demand that leaders make the necessary reforms. As individuals, we should shame others who do not live up to the ideals of individual expression and excellence. We cannot wait, there is no time like the present.