Islam in the big picture

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.