Dr. Steven Everts, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for European Reform in London, writing in Arab News (thanks to Ali Dashti), has noticed something:
In the past few years, something has gone wrong in the broader relationship between the so-called West and the countries of the Arab and Muslim world. Distrust, recriminations and resentment have mounted. Minor misunderstandings or disagreements have taken on highly symbolic importance and fed the cycle of suspicion.
His remedy? Let's all get to know each other better:
Arguably the biggest problem is that we know so little about each other. Most people get their information from the media. And when Western media do stories or films about the Muslim world, they tend to use the familiar templates of “the war on terror”. The same is true for most Arab media: They too prefer to stick to the mental maps of Western hostility, exploitation and moral decadence. Despite the Internet and the “death of distance”, few people actually travel from the West to the wider Middle East and vice versa. Even from Cairo, a political, commercial and social hub in the Arab world, only a handful of flights depart every day to European destinations. To compare: Literally hundreds of flights depart for destinations in the West from Heathrow alone, which is just one out of five London airports.More dialogue per se may not guarantee better relations, but it can help and would at least reduce the barriers of ignorance. Thus we need a dramatic expansion of scholarship programs and workplace exchange schemes so that more people know about life on the other side. Europe has been transformed through political and market integration, driven by supranational institutions. But the most successful EU program has been the Erasmus scheme, which gives tens of thousands of students the chance to do part of their university degree in another EU country. Similar schemes also operate for professors and other categories of workers. Together with low-cost airlines, they have probably done more for European unity than the deadweight of the common agricultural policy.
We need a similar scheme to link educational establishments in the West to those of the Arab and Muslim world. And, why not, we must also explore the possibilities of introducing low cost air travel on routes to and from the Middle East. There is no reason, other than politically inspired protectionism, why a ticket from London to Beirut or Jeddah should cost twice as much as one to New York. The overwhelming evidence suggests that if people are exposed to more factual information and different experiences, they moderate their views and factor in greater complexity. We may still differ on many things, but at least we should get the facts straight.
This is all just swell, Dr. Everts. I'm all for getting the facts straight. Why don't we start with an honest public debate about jihad ideology and its incompatibility with Western secularism? Why don't we discuss the ideological and religious roots of the idea that murdering children is a holy thing? If we could get all that out in the open and thoroughly repudiated in the Islamic world, we might really be getting somewhere.
http://www.metimes.com/2K4/issue2004-39/eg/ruling_party_outlines.htm
Egypt’s ruling party, the National Democratic Party (NDP), concluded its annual conference on Thursday, bringing in more than 2,000 party faithful. A star performer was President Hosni Mubarak’s son, Gamal, who heads the party’s ‘higher political committee,’ a policymaking post that many have predicted will serve as his springboard for the presidency.
While at university, I was bamboozled by how these middle eastern students exhorted (in left wing/feminist newspapers!!!)how superior their theocracies and governments were to the west, how islamist government and sharia back home was the ultimate feminism (yes...feminism). Wearing the all encompasing burka and being seperated from men was somehow a more pure (actually "perfect") feminism than the western version. In one go I saw that not only where the middle eastern student contributers to these mags lunatics but so were their western leftist student supporters.
I feel that most muslims (at first at least)don't like the atheist, non-religious secular atmosphere at uni and the the uncovered women and inter-sex mixing.
For example, I had muslim immigrants in my class, and whenever western social problems came up these muslims would just shake their heads. When I talked to them about these social problems they would often say that these problems would never occur in their society and that this is what you got when you strayed away from Allah. I tried not to wack them on the head in frustration at this. I didn't have the guts to tell them their society had a heap of problems, or to talk to them about their cultures theology. By then I had already read the Koran and thought it was, in total, the most horrible religious text I had ever read.
So allover, I am not sure how you can change a persons outlook on another foreign civilisation in a semester or two. Frankly, I feel if you have been raised in an islamic culture it would take years of exposure to change ones mind if at all.
If one is going to take these muslim kids/students to the west, and get them to go through a education/course about the political, social and economic aspects and problems of their culture (and comparing these to their western equivalents) for a few years we might get somewhere. These muslim students MIGHT change their opinion of the west. Yet I am not sure if many students from the middle east are really there to learn such stuff as I suspect their native governemnts would just lock them up if they appled this knowledge back home. Would their governemnts want them to learn such things at all?
Also, at uni the west is the only culture, in general, that is bashed, analysed and critisised. Islamic societies problems are never discussed, except maybe in some esoteric course I don't know about. The only time islam came up in my degree was when I was told all cultures (e.g. islamic ones) are equal(i.e. to western ones), and that there is no such thing as evil in a culture, just mechanisms/practices and beleifs that are equally valid in the survival of each culture. I did mention to my tutor that I disagreed with this but I would not get any marks for that at test time. Such anthropological concepts are interesting in theory, but often horrible in practice (I hate having to accept as ok human sacrifice, stoning to death etc etc. Equal to humanism it isn't!!!!)
So, after such a uni experience where the west is made to look bad most of the time and Islamic cultures are almost never analysed or critiscised I think many muslims will just come back home thinking the west is as bad as they thought it was before they came here, if not worse!!
I love the west. I love our western civilisation. The fact that we can criticise aspects that we don't like, PROVES how superior our culture is.
You can't criticise Saudi Arabian society.
In fact we know each other very well. There are many students from Muslim countries that have studied here as well a travellers from both sides that have come and gone.
We are now engaged in a power struggle, for supremacy over the earth. One fifth (or less) of the world's population demands to be in charge of not only the world's wealth and resources, but of the world's human capital as their divine right . From recent events - beheadings, incineration and dismemberment of children, multilations of non-Muslims in Africa and elsewhere, constant terror, taqiyy and kitman tactics in stealth operations that don't involve terror...
if we don't want to become their slaves, dhimmis, or dead, we better do something VERY soon!
Frankly, I don't mind that the Muslim world is incapable of learning about the West. We are certainly capable of learning about them, and that assymetric information flow has for centuries allowed the West to retain the upper hand on the Muslim world's efforts to impose their bankrupt ideology on us by force. The recent UNDP report on Arab development (researched and compiled by Arab scholars) reveals that since 1000 A.D., fewer books from other languages have been translated into Arabic than are translated in Spain each year. So while the jihadis are mired in the matrix of their medieval Islamic playbooks, Western military leaders study Sun Tsu and Carl von Clausewitz and optimize the conduct of battle with Ph.D. level game theory, operations research, stochastic mathematics, and chaos theory. Suits me just fine.
Maybe it's a great help that the Old and New Testaments were written in Hebrew and Greek rather than Latin and English. This probably forced the West, at least since the Northern Renaissance, acutely aware of its lack of cultural self-sufficiency.
Maybe it's a great help that the Old and New Testaments were written in Hebrew and Greek rather than Latin and English. This probably forced the West, at least since the Northern Renaissance, acutely aware of its lack of cultural self-sufficiency.
regarding the author's statement "There is no reason, other than politically inspired protectionism, why a ticket from London to Beirut or Jeddah should cost twice as much as one to New York."
i'd like to see evidence of this charge. since the airline industry is and has been in straights for quite some time, yet pricing power eludes them, it would seem that the fares reflect market realities