Why Islam Can't Change Soon

Even "liberal" Muslims are absolutist

Even relatively liberal-minded Muslims in Islamia are fairly absolutist about the truth of the Quran and Islam. I read an article in the Feb. 11 edition of Business Week that reinforced that point. (It also agreed with my earlier post's point that Islam is not inherently more accommodating of terrorism than other religions: "The roots of Islamic extremism lie not so much in religion but in repressive societies with economies too anemic to provide livelihoods for their fast-growing populations.")

A few Islamic voices have called for critical self-examination:

"It is up to the Islamic world to return to its senses and assess the damage [Osama bin Laden] has caused," wrote Khalil Ali Haider, a specialist on Islamic groups, in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Watan [quoted in the Business Week article].

But the number and influence of such voices is small. The odds of widespread, systematic, serious, self-critical thinking in Islamia is even smaller:

Despite much talk of reform, most Arab countries remain museums of state capitalism. There's no sign of a leader who could shake things to the core. "Those who expect a new, reformed Islam are asking the wrong questions. We don't have a Luther. We don't have a Calvin," says Tahseen Bashir, a former Egyptian presidential spokesman and diplomat. Instead, they have suicide bombers. . . .

It is also unlikely for Islamic reformers of the caliber of Luther or Calvin to arise because Islamia's economic systems are not robust to grow them. By the 16th century in Europe, the time of the Christian reformers, feudalism had long disappeared. The basic economy of Europe had been transformed from manorial farming into a manufacturing and trade economy, primarily of textiles made from wool. The economy of Europe became a proto-factory one.

With the subsequent rise of capitalist systems, wealthy business owners and merchants became power centers in their own right, further serving to limit the power of the state. Capitalism began as simply the search for maximum efficiency of using resources in societies mostly ordered for personal freedom with property protections, and this it basically remains. There is no single political or economic center in capitalist societies, meaning that both errors in efficiency and their corrections are continuous and multitudinous. It also means that the article's characterization of Arab countries' economies as "state capitalism" is an oxymoron. Command economies may have some capitalist features, but free markets are a sine qua non of capitalism.

Yet Islamia generally (and the Third World generally), does not enjoy property protections near what Americans take for granted. Without property protections, capitalism is not possible. According to Hernando de Soto, founder of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru:

Capitalism requires the bedrock of property and other legal institutions, yet most people outside the West have no solid property rights. This means they are excluded from capitalism, because without property no one can really be certain who owns what; addresses cannot be systematically verified, descriptions of assets are not standardized to facilitate transactions, people cannot be made accountable for their debts. As a result, buildings and land cannot be used to guarantee credit, and businesses cannot be divided and represented in salable shares. In fact, without property law, the instruments that store and transfer capital, such as home titles, shares, patent rights and bonds, cannot be created. (Washington Post, Jan. 6, 2002, p. B02)

It's not a precise fit to say that the economies of Islamia are feudal in nature, but it's not a bad fit, either. The basic social structure of most of these lands are of a tribal nature. Relationships among clans or tribes are the overwhelmingly important factor in social, religious, business and family matters. Exclusive of oil, the GDP of Arab countries is extremely low. The oil and its wealth are basically the private property of a few families: the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, the Emir of Kuwait in that country, for example. In fact, Saudi Arabia is much more a family-run business than a true nation-state (and it's a Corleone-like family at that).

The vertical arrangement of political power, flowing from the top to the bottom, is not to be challenged by the masses because the masses have no economic freedom. The concentration of wealth and the concentration of political power are in the same hands, unlike the late medieval West, where wealth was increasingly concentrated in the hands of those who had no inherited political position.

There are no economic centers to challenge the ruling despots because the despots are the economic centers. The Muslim clergy depend on the despots for sustenance; after all, state religions are the norm in Arabislamia, and the civil codes are sometimes indistinguishable from religious law. Separation of mosque and state is a concept that most of Islamia doesn't even understand. (In fairness, though, the religious law, Sharia, is not applied with equal force or fervor everywhere throughout Islamia.) So the near-term chances of internationally significant self criticism of Islam, by Muslims, is pretty much nil.