Islam in the big picture

Tony Abbott's call for a reformation within Islam demonstrates his lack of historical comprehension. And history is vital to understanding the terrorism problem.

To make sense of the current turmoil within most Muslim nations and between Islam and the west by reading the Koran makes as much sense as trying to understand Christian terrorists, from 16^th century Holland to 20^th century Ireland, by reading the bible. Religious difference is just one aspect of a clash within a culture.

The Christian Reformation was basically a split between those who wanted to maintain a high degree of clerical control of society, and those who wanted national governments and individuals to take some of the power and money away from the Church. The process has taken several hundred years and Australia is now a leader in the creation of secular society. All religions have lost most of their power and their money flows from old investments and government handouts, rather than from devoted followers.

The problem with Islam is that, for historical reasons, there are millions of people who still take it seriously as a religion and strongly oppose the trend towards the secularisation of Muslims who want to be part of the wider world.

The Islamic 'reformation,' or secularisation, started long ago. What we are seeing now is the counter-reformation, or brutal fight to re-establish old forms of control.

Islam was established in the 600s and rapidly became a huge empire. It also became the intellectual powerhouse of the world, saving the cultures of classical Greece and Rome for later generations, integrating Indian mathematics and conducting research in fields as diverse as medicine and astronomy. The only institutions anywhere on earth seriously dedicated to preserving and expanding knowledge were Islamic.

Books became possible when paper was introduced to Europe by Muslims who learnt how to make it from Chinese captives after a battle in what is now Kazakhstan.

Military forces of the Caliph were a match for the combined forces of Christian Europe.

Then came the European Renaissance, inspired in part by fear of Islam, and based on ancient texts that had been preserved in Islamic societies.

The critical decision that led to the disastrous state of Islam today was the banning of the printing and the importation of virtually all printed books in the mid 1500s. In Europe knowledge expanded while in the Turkish Caliphate it froze, leading eventually to economic and military failure.

In the 16th and 17^th centuries massive and brutal wars were fought in Europe between Protestant and Catholic Christianity. Many people were tortured and murdered, including by burning to death and disembowelling.

The real basis for these wars was the clash between the old culture of religious obedience and the new ideas of freedom and individual endeavour. Freedom won.

The turmoil within most Islamic nations has the same basis. As with the Christian example the most extreme, brutal but clever people are fighting to maintain strict control of broad populations in the name of religion. The idea of self-sacrifice for a higher cause has the allure for some young people that it has always had.

The most important failure is in education. The Islamic Arab culture that once led the world has declined to abysmal levels. In the list of 500 top tertiary institutions in the world, prepared in China, none are in Arab nations. In science, the publication and translation of books, and in GDP per person, the Arab world has sunk to a similar state as Sub-Saharan Africa.

The exclusion of women has huge economic and social consequences making relative failure inevitable.

Only oil money has kept the entire culture going, but bringing with it the problems of national income based on one natural resource that provides very few jobs and no competitive drive, while pushing up the currency and making other industries uncompetitive.

The task of transition is made even harder for Islamic nations because they nearly all have unmanageable population problems after decades of very high growth, making the useful employment of their young men impossible. Palestinian birth rates have been among the highest is the world, along with Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia, in 2004, had half its population under 20 years of age.

Even worse, Islamic nations that look to sign on as a subset of the liberal/capitalist world are doing so just as that world is making its own huge and painful transitions.

Apologists for Islamist extremism claim the current economic and cultural failure is the fault of western colonialism. That is nonsense. The impact of internal demographic, cultural and economic factors is quite clear.

One core aim of the terrorists is to encourage persecution of Muslims so they feel forced to join the extremists. But the other choice is to abandon the religion altogether, or to treat it as a social club, in the manner of Christians, Jews and others.

The Islamic counter-reformation will have to be defeated in violent conflict, just as the Christian version was. It will not happen quickly. Correctly analysing the problem, rather than analysing the Koran, will make the process easier.