Fitzgerald: The “root causes” of Islamic disarray

To what we owe the Arabs:

Highest civilization on the planet. We were still living in caves when Arab Muslims invented the wheel…

Arabs and Muslims, it has been said, cling to their past. And it’s true: they do cling to “their” past, as long as that past is the past that came after the pre-Islamic past that went before, which is merely one long Jahiliyya, or Time of Ignorance. There is no real interest in that past, though one will find the Iraqi peacock-proud that “civilization started here” — but he won’t know about that “civilization.” He won’t have been part of the discovery and recovery and study of that “civilization” — Ur and Babylon and Assyria. For that was a Western thing, a thing that Western Infidels, from Henry Austen Layard to Leonard Woolley, undertook. Copts in Egypt are a very different matter, because they know, even if they do not always say aloud, that they are the true inheritors of Egypt’s civilization. They are the ones linked continuously back to Egypt’s pre-Islamic civilization, including the language that existed before the Arabs arrived and came, in fits and starts, to reduce the Coptic percentage of the population. Massed forcible conversions were not unknown, especially in certain centuries when a ruler would be particularly aggressive in “spreading” the “truth” of Islam.

* News from BBC’s Absurdistan: Is English law related to Muslim law?

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