The Constant Feud

The East

This chapter provides explanation to entries under East in Appendix II, Patterns of Behavior. There is an important point that should be clarified here. Most of the sources on which the proofs for this chapter are based are from comparatively modern times, so they refer to Islam and to Muslims. They are applicable therefore to the current situation in the area.

This study sees in Islam the current, and admittedly the most representative champion of that physical area we call the Middle East. It is only natural that Islam should be the most prominent subject of the sources. However, Islam is a religion and a complete system of laws, combining the beliefs, customs and habits of the Middle East. Accordingly, Islam is the natural follower of all civilizations that preceded it in the area in which it holds sway. Whatever is happening today is the present act of a play that started about 6 - 8,000 years ago. A physical area correlate with its civilization. The names might change the substance remains.

Despite the gap of nearly 5,000 years, there is no difference in the motives of the crowd cheering Saddam Hussein in our times and those who cheered Sargon, 4,500 years ago. The motives are the same, so are the behavioral patterns. The present ruler is to be cheered under all circumstances. Tomorrow, there might be another ruler. Well, he will be cheered too.

Appendix II presents two types of behavioral patterns. One, which was caused directly by the environment, the second by the social systems, as developed in early civilizations. These systems are called the 'hydraulic systems', meaning a civilization based upon large irrigation projects which could be created and maintained only by some central authority. Of course, the reason for the emergence of such civilizations was purely environmental; the need to provide more food in areas of limited water supply, but the consequences of these social organizations, slave societies really, are far from being directly caused by the environment alone.

The explanations here do not always follow the headings in Appendix II. However, the following explanations cover all the relevant entries there.

Results of Climatic Changes

When one thinks about the Middle East in modern times, it usually centers upon the wealth of oil, the huge distances, the mythical stories of the Thousand and One Nights, and possibly the veiled threat that area poses to the rest of the world. As the oil wealth is represented also by the ostentatious living of the area's representatives in the West, there is one important point which is usually disregarded: it is the extreme poverty of the whole area. This means not only the desert, but also the bulk of the area, which is on the periphery of the desert. The settled areas of North Africa and Western Asia are all on the edge of the encroaching desert, and the latter is winning.

It should be pointed out here that it was probably the extreme poverty of the area, which shaped the people. One can disregard the desert, but even beyond the desert the poverty is beyond the imagination of an opulent West.

From the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the Indian sub-continent, there is an endless string of villages and cities, built uniformly of clay bricks, the only building material available, eking out a very precarious existence out of poor soil, without much water.¹ Poverty brought frugality. It is no wonder that even rich people in the Middle East led frugal lives, so much so as to cause comments from occasional Western travelers.²

One can relate to the people in that part of the world in a romantic way, as did Edward Gibbon from the comfort of his Swiss villa³ or in a more realistic way, as did Ibn Khaldun from his personal experience of the depredations of the Bedouin in North Africa.⁴

Two results have emerged from the exposure of the peoples of the Middle East to the changed environment that took place in the transition to settled life. The first change was that people realized that one cannot be individualistic, one can survive only as a member of a family, a clan or a tribe. The reason for it is simple enough.

If one stands on an exposed hill, with no trees, shrubs or any other cover in the neighborhood, he is exposed to anyone and everyone. In a world, where Cain had to receive the 'Mark of Cain' to be safe from persecution, as did the descendants of Tubal-Cain, the early metal workers, anyone without a sacred protecting mark was legitimate prey to all who saw him. Judging, from the principle of the 'Mark of Cain' anybody unknown was a potential enemy, to be disposed of on sight.

In richer areas one could hide behind trees, or even climb a tree, but where could one hide where there are no trees and no hiding places? Probably the only protection consisted of belonging to a group, which would avenge him, if he was hurt. The best safety in those times, was the existence of the blood feud, the knowledge that the clan will avenge a wrong against anyone from a clan the victim belonged to. To avenge became a sacred duty, and it was so treated.

The defense of belonging to a clan had its price. If one belonged and expected its protection, one had to accept all that the clan accepted, and reject all that the clan rejected. No individualism is possible here. It is not surprising that one of the most important proverbs in the Middle East is:

"I and my brothers against my cousins; I and my cousins against the stranger (or against the world)".⁵

The center of Middle Eastern life is the family. It is central in all social organizations. It has primacy in personal loyalty and supremacy over individual life. The typical Middle Eastern, Muslim but not necessarily Arab family is extended, patriarchal, patrilinear, patrilocal , endogamous and occasionally polyginous. Any organization with such traits must be central and supreme.⁶

The poverty of the region and the centrality of family in all social life brought a number of developments. In Middle Eastern life there are three special syndromes, all three are pre-Islamic in origin⁷.The syndromes are:

          courage         - bravery

          hospitality     - generosity

          honor            - dignity

These syndromes are suitable to life centered on extended families, with frequent blood feuds, inter-tribal warfare and contention for honor and dignity. These are the traits that for most people in the Middle East are the most common and also the most desirable. It must be pointed out too that none of them are those recommended by the Qu'ran.

Western literature is full of stories of young men leaving the family nest, trying their luck and succeeding in making their way in the world. Like d'Artagnan in the novels by Dumas. All d'Artagnan had was a letter from his father to an old acquaintance. No relations, no family. In the Middle East, such a story would be unthinkable.

What happened to people who were different, who were unable to accept the uniformity of the family? There must have been many of these; after all human nature did not change in the Middle East. There is a well-documented case of such a case, and it is Joseph and his brothers.

The story is well known. Joseph behaved like a spoiled boy, and his brothers decided to get rid of him. He was cast out, sold into slavery, reached Egypt and made a career. Not as a free man but as a slave. Eventually, fate reunited the family, Joseph helps the family, but first he frightens them a little, to show that he has not changed much. It looks like a success story, but it is not. It is probably significant that of all the sons of Jacob, Joseph is the only one who is not an eponymous founder of a tribe. His sons yes, Joseph no. His two sons, Ephraim and Manassah have their tribe, not their father.⁸

The second most important point about the Middle East is the centrality of religion, which is more than a religion in the ordinary sense of the word. It is religion, social system and set of laws together. In the chapter about religion, it was explained why the monotheistic religions developed in the desert . Here, when the overriding poverty of the area is encountered, one realizes, that to the Eastern poor, those who toil from dawn to dusk, as virtual slaves, some kind of promise had to be provided to give them hope.

The Middle East saw the first and original hydraulic societies in the valleys of the Nile, Mesopotamia and Indus. These were the first slave societies. The religions of the Mother were those of agriculture, that of the Father were of husbandry. The teeming millions of the Middle East had no part in either of them. They would be rewarded only in the hereafter. All monotheistic religions, including Islam, promised exactly that.⁹

Religion in the Middle East means, and always meant, belonging not just to a particular religion, as is common in the West, but to a civilization. Observing the tenets is not only a religious duty, it is also a question of civil obedience. This is so today, that is how it was in earliest times. Belonging to a religion/civilization had its outward signs too, in dress, in hair covering and in dietary laws. These outward signs are common today to the whole Middle East, where Islam is dominant. In ancient times, each religion was dominant in its own area, and excluded those who were strangers.¹⁰

Results of Cultural Transmission

Cultural transmission means a transfer of information, important for the well being of an individual, not genetically, but as a tradition or collective memory. In the context of this study, it means that the impressions of the earliest civilizational times became deeply imprinted in human consciousness. This is equally true for those of the West and of the East. In the East the earliest civilizations were 'hydraulic civilizations'. They left such a strong and lasting imprint that their effects, transmitted from father to son, still shape the political and social life of the Middle East. It is certainly a form of brainwashing and judging from its results it is extremely effective.

This chapter examines three subjects, appearing In Appendix II, as results of cultural transmission. They are:

                    - Nature of rule

                    - Role of family within society

                    - Value of work and study

Nature of Rule

This study assumes that our psychological makeup is the sum total of the imprints of all past experiences, strong enough to be transmitted between generations. They are not handed down by genetic transfers, they are not mutations, but remembered through proverbs, folk tales, myths, plays, nursery rhymes, etc., so when a child reaches the age of formal entry into society, the elements which were transmitted are safely ensconced in the consciousness, waiting to be transmitted in their turn.

This sounds very mechanical, but of course it is not. Our life is full of symbols, teaching us important lessons, as far as our life is concerned. Every society has a set of codes, which everyone in that society must accept, if he wishes to belong. Not many people have the opportunity to make a choice; indeed most people do not. There are lessons that must be learned. If a child receives the wrong set of cultural transmissions, he might suffer just as he would from a defective set of genes.

People in the Middle East have a famous proverb : "Better sixty years of tyranny than one day of anarchy". This proverb appears in many variations in every country of the region. There is another proverb, saying, "Better the Sultan you know than the one you don't".¹¹

The meaning of the proverbs is obvious. Every rule is a tyrannical rule. The alternative to tyrannical rule is anarchy, which in a hydraulic society is suicidal, therefore any tyranny is preferred. There is not much point in wishing to replace the present ruler, as no one can know the alternative.

A child who hears these proverbs many times and internalizes their meanings, may reach the age to transmit these values to the next generation. If not, then he might not be among those whose cultural values will be transmitted.

The previous chapters about the earliest urban civilizations which have arisen in the Middle East, painted a dark picture of a road, which took people from the comparatively egalitarian life of bands of hunter-gatherers, through early agricultural settlements, with possible quasi-democratic systems, until they reached the slave-pens of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the towns of the Indus Valley. The causes were always the same, so were the results. There might have been slight differences in the developments, but in the end those small differences disappeared.

In Mesopotamia the transition was gradual. The first rulers were mostly called Ishaku - tenant farmers of the gods, rarely Lugal - king or lord. In theory , the ishaku was just as much a servant of the gods as the other citizens, but very soon the tenant farmers became 'earthly manifestation' and as such they became lords of life and death. They controlled everybody and everything; any resistance was a sacrilege against the gods.¹²

In Egypt, the early period of the development of divine kingship was probably in the pre-Dynastic period. There don't appear to be any written remainders. When the Dynastic periods started, the Pharaohs were already the earthly manifestation of the god. There was no limit to their power; they could do as they liked, and they did. The surplus of the country went on unproductive luxuries, huge building projects such as pyramids. It is difficult to estimate the waste, but Egypt was a very rich country. In later times it was the granary of Rome. The great majority of the people were serfs, or outright slaves, kept alive on a protein-deficient vegetarian diet, barely above the necessary minimum.¹³

Everywhere in early civilizations, the manufacture and use of weapons was the monopoly of the rulers. They controlled the raw materials and the craftsmen too. Still, instead of advancing the development of new weapons, like chariots or swords, or even improving existing weapons, they hindered them as much as possible, as a conscious act of policy. They had good reason. They ruled without control over their power, without opposition or responsibility. They had the best of all worlds. Change could only create dangers, so they were against change, and they succeeded in preventing it. It seems that they were perfectly aware that any technological advance requires knowledge, rational thinking and design. Once people under their control start asking questions, who knows where it may lead?

The fear of the Middle Eastern civilizations of scientific developments, including that of weapons, had unexpected developments. When Eastern armies first came up against Western armed men, they had nothing to counter the Greek hoplites. The Western weapons and tactical organizations were the results of a social system which was based on individual farmers, who provide their own weapons and serve their polis in times of need, and on technology which succeeded in providing weapons and armor to those farmers. ¹⁴ The Middle Eastern states had nothing to counter them, so Greek mercenaries became the arbiters of Middle Eastern politics, until Alexander the Great took over the whole region.

The rulers in each civilization could accept research for some practical purpose, under their control of course, but not research for the sake of enlarging human knowledge.¹⁵ That was left to the Greeks on the European mainland, happily distanced from the Middle East. The rulers of the 'hydraulic civilizations' were well aware that their well-being was based eventually on the success of agriculture, so they were interested in the advance of geometry, for the design of new waterworks, and astronomy for predicting the movements of the heavenly bodies on which the religious festivals were based.

The ancient rulers of the Middle East had no responsibility towards anyone, no possible opposition and no secondary centers of power; they were tyrannies, pure and simple, without bounds and limits. Even the perspective of a few thousand years cannot dull the picture. This was the foundation in the past on which the present is built.

What happens if we examine matters since the early civilizations. At whatever stage we stop, the picture is always the same. There is not now, and it seems that that never was a responsible government in the Middle East. Until the most recent times, there were many names appended to rulers, Caliphs Sultans, Emirs, etc. but the rule was always the same: that of a single man or a single clan. Succession was sometimes from father to son, but often it was done by violent means.

In a constitutional democracy, those who are elected to office are as prone to make mistakes as anyone else. They are also capable of miscalculation, mismanagement and self-serving errors. There are, and always were, bribery and embezzlement. However, elected officials in democratic regimes are usually under watchful eyes, if not from anyone else, then from the opposition, and even if they succeed in evading legal prosecution, they are responsible to the highest authority in a democracy: the voters.¹⁶

Lately, there have been election procedures in most Middle Eastern states. However, it is difficult to accept with any seriousness elections with victorious results of 99.996% of the vote. This sentence does not mean to imply that the elections were rigged. They might have been, but there certainly was no need for it. It is entirely possible that genuine, non-rigged elections could return such majorities. There are a number of possible reasons:

- The proverb "Better the Sultan we know" means that most of the people always love the present Sultan, lest he be replaced by someone worse. It is neither forced, nor is it fear, but a result of millennia-long brainwashing. They love the present ruler and they are proud of the ruler's achievements. Of course, achievement is something that may have a relative meaning.

George Orwell was probably aware of the fact that there were political systems, which realized the gruesome advice given by the party Inquisitor O'Brien to Winston Smith :

"You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him. You must love him."¹⁷

This is exactly what is happening in the East, from the earliest urban civilizations until today.

- As no real opposition is allowed, the elections usually involve one candidate only. People do know that contested elections are usually finished on the streets, with rifles and guns. See the elections in Algeria, and their aftermath.

- Changing the ruler is not done by ballots but by bullets. People do know this fact, so they well know that it is not their ballot that will decide.

So a ruler, whatever his policy, can put himself up for re-election. He can be sure of a majority of over 99 %. Even Communist regimes failed to produce such results.

It must be taken into consideration, that the voters, who should be the chief arbiters in an electoral system, are not so sensitive about possible misbehavior on the part of the ruler and his family. The people, who lived in kleptocracies for so long, know well that to the victors the spoils and nothing can be done about it. They also know that any mistake that the ruler might make will be carried to the bitter end, even when it is obvious to everyone that a huge mistake was made. The occupation of Kuwait by Iraq, which caused the Gulf War, might be a good example.

The honor-shame syndrome cannot allow anyone to admit errors, and accept responsibility for them. That is the reason why rectifying a situation caused by error can only be done by removing the ruler. This is called tyranny mitigated by assassination.

During the whole existence of the conflict, at least for three millennia, the Middle East was, and still is, under dictatorial rule. Until recent times, it was always in some form of monarchy, under Turkish overlordship since late medieval times. After the Second World War, some of the Middle Eastern states became Republics, although some conservative and oil-rich countries retained the monarchical form. However, there are three elements that are common to all type of rule, and at all times,

1. The power of the ruler is always absolute, and there are no competing centers of authority.

"There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law."¹⁸

There are institutions in the Middle East, like Parliaments or Councils, or any other, which in form may, indeed resemble democratic institutions in the West, but in form only. In reality they are sham, political Potemkin villages, or wishful thinking.¹⁹ Western names or forms cannot undo the conditioning of five millennia.

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Since rule in the Middle East always has been autocratic and absolute at all times, the corruption was always absolute. It is no different today. Belonging to the ruling clan is a license to riches.

2. Religion has a role in the East that would be inconceivable in the West. It is even different from the status of religion in the countries of Orthodox civilization, where religious ties are much stronger than in the West.

It did not start with Islam. The conflicts with the West, first against Hellenism, than against Rome and finally against Christian Europe, were always fought in the name of religion, Judaism and Mazdaism first, Islam after that. Even the communal fights between Greeks and Jews in Alexandria were in the name of religion.

Islam collected the beliefs of the Semites, plus the customs, habits and rites of the Middle East into one religious and legal system. It based that collection upon a strong belief in one God, which was acceptable to all in the Middle East. Pagan Arabs, Jews, Zoroastrian Persians, Monophysite Christians could accept that tenet without it offending their previous beliefs. It incorporated in the new religion the rites of the Middle East, the dietary laws, the circumcision, the annual pilgrimage to the Ka'aba. It did exactly what Christianity did in Europe.

In addition, Islam provided a complete set of laws for its believers. Acceptable religious tenets, incorporation of all known customs, a complete framework for civilized life and lack of an organized church ensured that Islam spread like wildfire in the Middle East. In providing a set of codes to govern daily life, Islam followed in the footsteps of Judaism and Mazdaism. Christianity was different. It started as a Jewish reform movement, it had no need for its own set of laws. Later, when the main body of Christianity left the Middle East and became a European religion, it had no need for a uniform set of civic law. The state looked after civic law.

It is said that in the Roman Empire Caesar was God, in the western Christian world there was a separation between God and Caesar, in Orthodox civilization God was Caesar's junior partner. In Islam God is Caesar.²⁰

The role of Islam as a tool of government was always near absolute and not only in the so-called 'fundamentalist' states. First, all public life was managed, by the laws of the sharia, Qu'ranic law. Second, as the state was always an Islamic state, based upon Holy Law, disobedience to authority was not only a crime against the state, but a sin against God.²¹ Third and last, the hold of Islam over the people in those countries where Islam governs, did not diminish with modernity. In some ways it has been strengthened. The process in Islamic countries was the same as in Europe in the 1930's. There, those states which were threatened by modernization, turned to fascism. In the Middle East they turned to religion, which meant the strengthening of the state.

In contrast to religion in the West, where it has some hold on the elderly, the deprived and people in remote communities, modern Islam has spread mainly among the cultural elite.²² It should be a sobering thought for Westerners to realize that most of those who received technical education in the West, returned home strengthened in their Islamic beliefs, with all that it implies.

Returning to the values of religion in the East is not only a religious statement of religious adherence, it is first of all a step toward Eastern nationalism. This might explain why Eastern countries, which were counted as most advanced and secular, like Iraq, returned to the Islamic fold when they came into conflict with the West.

3. The hatred of the West is the third element on which Eastern rule is based. It would be an oversimplification to assume that hatred of the West serves the need of a totalitarian system for external enemies to justify its excesses. The hatred of the West does not necessarily fall into this category, although it is so used when necessary. The hatred of the West is so universal and deep-seated, that it does not need any encouragement from above. On the contrary, it is the people who keep a watchful eye upon their rulers not to fall into the error of coming to terms with the unbelievers.

Ernest Gellner wrote in Conditions of Liberty²³ :

"If the ruled judged their rulers, they did so by applying the religious norms of sacred law, rather than the secular principles of a Civil Society. Severe and fastidious about the implementation of the sacred prescriptions, they are not otherwise over-sensitive about the internal organizations of political authority, nor greatly disturbed by its clientelist structure and its unfastidious methods and partiality. Nothing else is expected of politics. Authority is accountable to God for implementation of religious-legal rules, but not to man for the practice of some civic ideal"

The hatred of the peoples of the East against the others seems to be spontaneous, although it is possible that it was once actively promoted by the rulers of the original hydraulic societies.

Even totalitarian regimes need to have some measure of popular support. Being mostly kleptocracies, they cannot offer positive aims to create support. Promises of better life in the hereafter or in some future generation are insufficient for much support so they must have some external enemy²⁴ to rally round the regime. Thus, Hitler had the 'Jews' and the 'plutocracies', Stalin had the 'kulaks' and the 'Trotskyists' and the peoples of the Middle East have the 'infidels'. It is also possible that the dietary laws of the East were also designed to separate the people into us and them.

Thus, hatred of the West is popular and all embracing. It was present during the whole existence of the conflict, at least for the last three millennia, but it became much more virulent in the last two centuries. It was a reaction to the changing of the balance of power in favor of the West. It is an extreme form of nationalist sentiment, not of a single nation but of an entire civilization.²⁵

There are many Muslim commentaries on the cause of the Muslim malaise. The writings fall into two groups.

Some of the analysts ask :" What did we do wrong?", while others want to know: "Who did this to us ?". The second category is the great majority.²⁶ In some ways it has been strengthened with modernity.

Indeed the thinkers, analysts and poets of the East see in the conflict a mythical clash, between the righteous and spiritual East and the cruel and materialistic West. ²⁷

There is a deep populist hatred towards the West that has no contemporary equivalent in any of the other inter-civilizational relations. Japan has certainly more than sufficient reasons to be anti-Western, so have the ex-colonial African states and India too. Despite that, their attitude to the West is much more balanced than that of the Middle East. This shows that the reasons should be searched for on a different level.

One of the signs of the atavistic sense of hatred is the feeling of deprivation, many times over, and the second is the shame felt at the degrading attitude of the West toward them. For a society where the honor-shame syndrome is one of the basic building blocks, it is a deadly affront.

The sense of deprivation comes from many sources, starting from the primeval change of climate that shortchanged them, followed by continuing and constant losses in all their relations with the West. It started when the West blocked their efforts to colonize the Western Mediterranean, then the millenium-long occupation of the Middle East by the West before Islam. Even the eruption of Islam at the time when Western power was probably at its nadir, after the barbarisation of Western Europe, and the exhaustion of Byzantium in its age-long struggle with Persia, was contained and eventually repulsed by the renewed West.

The drafting of new players to their side, first the Seljuks and later the Ottoman Turks, gave only temporary hope. When Turkey became the sick man of Europe, even that hope was extinguished. The unexpected emergence of oil as an inter-civilizational weapon did not change anything basic. The internal rot in the East was so deep-seated that the financial windfall of the oil income became the problem of Western banks. How to recycle the huge amounts of petrodollars and not that of Western armies how to counter the threat. (Unless it was a threat to oil supplies as happened with Kuwait.)

Educated people in the Middle East realize that there was a time when their civilization had all the advantages, in science, in manpower and in religious motivation. All those advantages came to very little. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, when a young Middle Eastern sees that his best prospect is the road to a dark and depressing suburb around great Western cities, then the real question should be "Where do we go from here?" and not the questions asked above: "Who did this to us?".

This question is certainly asked and it remains unanswered. Until it is answered in some meaningful way, the existence of the abysmal hatred is expected to continue, and will be one of the factors in the decisions of Middle Eastern regimes.

Role of Family within Society

When the results of the climatic changes were analyzed, it was found that the desiccation and the deforestation of the South caused the strengthening of family ties, as a defense against possible enemies. It was assumed that because a denuded open territory could not provide defense against strangers in a world where everybody unknown was a potential enemy, the only possible defense was the existence of the blood feud, e.g. the possibility of a strong retaliation against any injury.

It was found that there is a proverb which illustrates the mentality behind kinship protection.²⁸ The existence of strong kinship ties is very common in the Middle East. The family unit, which it represents, is the smallest building block of society. Without its existence and defense, no individual would be able to exist in the rough and tumble of the Middle East.²⁹

That the concept of strong kinship goes back to earliest times, i.e. to the start of the desiccation, is obvious because there is a specific condemnation against it in the Qu'ran. It seems that the excesses of the system were obvious already in Muhammed's times. It says in Qu'ran 60.3 :

"Neither your blood relatives nor your children will be of use to you (on the Day of Resurrection)".

Ibn Khaldun explains that the condemnation was directed only against group feelings that make the person proud and superior. On the other hand, a group feeling that is working for the truth and for fulfillment of divine commands is something desirable. In plain words, it seems to have been such a widespread practice, that it was better to give an interpretation allowing it, rather than attempting to suppress it.³⁰

It should be interpolated here, that families, with their loyalties and affections, are the same the world over. That people should help others of their family is not strange to anyone. It is known well beyond the Middle East. It does exist as a natural thing. However, modern communities outside the Middle East, generate larger loyalties and affections that supersede family affections and loyalties. Social organizations, political parties, etc. are all extra-family organizations. This is missing in the Middle East, or if they exist then is taken over by families.

Pierre Bourdieu wrote in the "Algerians", (Beacon Press, Boston, 1962):

"The family is the alpha and omega of the whole system; the primary group and the structural model for any possible grouping, it is an indissoluble atom of society which assigns and assumes to each its members his place, his very reason of existence and, to a certain degree, his existence itself."³¹

The extended family, the clan, became the center of social and political life in the Middle East. It was so in pre-Islamic times³² as well as in early Islamic times, when Yahya bin Khalid, the Persian Vizier of Harun ar-Rashid had twenty-five of his children in high military and civilian offices. They crowded out even the family of the Caliph himself.³³

In the modern Middle East the same kinship system is active. It has a ruthlessly clientelist, winner-takes-all attitude in politics. It all goes to family and kinship connections. But it makes itself known outside of politics too. Edward Said quotes in Orientalism an American article, in turn quoting an Egyptian paper, according to which in 1970 there were in Egypt 1070 murder cases, where the perpetrators were apprehended.

20 % of the cases were based upon desire to wipe out shame, 30 % on the desire to satisfy real or imaginary wrongs, and 31 % on the desire for blood revenge. Altogether 81 % of the cases were connected to the kinship system, and all that it implies.³⁴

If the kinship system dominates private and social life, it is even stronger in politics. Ibn Khaldun reported on it in early times, and it did not seem to have changed since then. Modern Middle Eastern politics is a game of musical chairs but all the players are family members.

In Syria, between 1946 and 1958, 90 individuals filled 208 ministerial posts. In Iraq, a group of 175 men and 2 women were the entire ruling elite between 1958 and 1975 . In Lebanon, in 50 years of parliamentary life, there were only 359 deputies representing 210 families.³⁵ In Syria and Iraq, the subsequent transition to open dictatorial rule has further reduced the base of the ruling elite.

The Gulf War and its aftermath allowed a special opportunity to see the kinship system in action. The publicity given to the Iraqi leadership showed an amazing maze of sons, sons-in-law, half-brothers, cousins, etc. forming the ruling elite, plus the wider circle of the tribe from Takrit, the home town of the dictator, to form the praetorian guard of the regime.

Value of Work and Study

The title of this section probably gives away the most important facet of the difference between the East and the rest of the world, the West included. It is whether work and study has any value at all, or are family connections the only requisite to fill positions? Even this factor would not be so important, if apart from family connections, professional qualifications and capabilities would be considered too.

Human nature is the same the world over. Family ties are important in every civilization. Protectionism and preferences in allocating jobs, tenders, etc. are rampant the world over, East, West, South and North. As far as it goes, it is so all over with this proviso.

In most parts of the modern world, there is a known process if one decides to hire a professional. If one is looking for an engineer, one advertises for one, stating requirements, evaluates the candidates, and at the end hires the most suitable candidate. In the evaluation of the candidates there are many considerations. Professional qualifications are amongst them. If in the end, one decides to hire the nephew of a second cousin, this will be done, but in most parts of the world the hirer will make sure that the nephew is an engineer, and capable of doing the job. He might not be the best, but he must be at least capable enough.

What happens when the nephew of the second cousin is not an engineer at all? Indeed, he has no profession whatsoever. He started his career as an assistant goatherd, but now the second cousin feels that his son deserves advancement in life.

If it would be a comic story, it would probably be very amusing. However, there are cases that were less than amusing. In the early sixties, when the colonies were 'liberated' one large city was without electricity for two months because the newly appointed Chief Engineer of the generating plant decided that sea water is just as suitable to cool the turbines as distilled water. The result was that the whole cooling system had to be replaced. It was a bad joke. There were thousands or tens of thousands of people who relied on refrigerated vaccines and medicines to survive. They failed to see the joke.

There are examples like that from many part of the world; it is a well-known problem. It brings us back to the basic question. Is it important for the nephew of my second cousin to be an engineer first, a real one, and capitalize on his family connection after, or can he save himself the trouble of long study followed by necessary work experience?

Judging from innumerable examples, it seems that in the East the second option is the rule, not the exception.

David Pryce-Jones reported in his book, The Closed Circle³⁶ about a young English doctor, who served in the early 1970s as a gynecologist in a hospital in Algeria. The conditions in the hospital were degrading and murderous. The English doctor came into conflict with the director of the hospital because of the sanitary conditions. The qualification of the director of the hospital was his being an officer in the Algerian Liberation Army, no medical qualification at all. At the end of the story, the English doctor is expelled from the country, and the local staff continues to act unhindered by nosy professionals from abroad.

The next example is in a much lighter vein. The poet, Robert Graves, was appointed after the First World War to be Professor of English Literature at the Royal Egyptian University. Among his duties was to be examiner of a diploma class, which provided English teachers for primary and secondary schools. Robert Graves reproduces three diploma essays in toto in his book. The diploma essays were bad jokes, suitable for students from elementary schools. They were all approved. Then he wrote:

"I decided to resign. So did the Professor of Latin, my only English colleague. And the one-legged Professor of French Literature, who was an honest man. The others stayed on."³⁷

The question posed by these examples is really, whether there is a need for educated people, or instead of knowledge there is a need for family connections alone. The same question can be put in a different way. There was a time when the East was more advanced than the West in scientific matters. Despite that, there is a chasm between the two civilizations today.

There is a deep contradiction in these assertions. Indeed, there are two contradictions. The first contradiction is that of history. It was shown in the chapter The Civilization of the Poor, that early Middle Eastern civilizations neglected all new developments, and relied on supplies and new inventions from the barbarians of the North, e.g. from the Ionian islanders and mainland Greeks. If we accept that there are cultural transmissions for behavioral patterns then the present behavior of the people in the East does fit their origins.

Therefore, if we look upon the history of the area for its attitude to science and technology, then for the first three millennia there was a failure of scientific research, apart from a few specific subjects, such as geometry and astronomy, then there was a foreign occupation for a millenium, followed by a sudden scientific flowering for a few centuries, and finally a return to the previous situation.

The second contradiction is that if a society accepts that knowledge is power, and such society places value on knowledge at some point in its existence, then that society will make sure that only the knowledgeable will fill posts requiring any specific expertise.

The Confucian civilization of the Far East might not have put the same premium on scientific curiosity as Western civilization, but demanded a strict system of passing examinations to fill posts in the civil Size="3"by suitably knowledgeable candidates. Confucian civilization might not be the best breeding place for experts on the mating habits of the spotted owl, or Sanskrit linguistics, but it certainly would not have put up with an educational system like that referred to by Robert Graves.

As there are seemingly obvious contradictions, this chapter evaluates the particular problems of the attitudes toward science and education. The evaluation is done according to periods, from the early urban civilizations until today.

Early Civilizations

The subject was discussed in detail in Civilization of the Poor. Here, only a short summary is repeated.

The early civilizations of the Middle East, the first urban civilizations of mankind, came into being to solve a critical problem that was caused by an upward spiraling demographic explosion. The introduction of agriculture caused many problems, demographic explosion and constant malnutrition amongst them. The only possible solution was to increase the food production, which in the environment of the arid Middle East could be done only by intense irrigation.

So, the first hydraulic civilizations came into being. The price for a more or less assured supply of food was slavery for many as opposed to the ruling few. It would be futile to speculate how some became rulers and other slaves; it would also be irrelevant. There are always some that come out on top.

What happened next is human history in a nutshell. Those who succeeded in grasping power used it without restraint. The rulers and their supporting elite enjoyed the bounty of the land, the rest were condemned to forced labor, with barely sufficient food. This was the picture of life in the areas of the hydraulic civilizations since the beginning until now.

The rulers of the hydraulic civilizations were not interested in promoting science and education. They might have been interested in developing better weapons, but even in that field they were not successful. It could have been a deliberate policy, but it is not certain. New inventions come to satisfy new needs. If a small percentage of the population had everything and the rest only a basic minimum, there could not be fresh needs. One of the most interesting aspects of early urban civilizations, is that nothing really has changed in two or three millennia, and if there were changes, things went from bad to worse.

In these civilizations one cannot speak of scientific curiosity as with the Greeks, not even with keeping up with existing knowledge. There were fields, like geometry and astronomy, both needed for irrigation and religious needs. The ruling castes of the Middle East were not interested in pure science, neither did they speculate on the order of things.³⁸

Having no need for science, they had not much need for education. It was a society with a rigid structure. The children of scribes became scribes, the children of the elite remained the elite. Only a change of dynasty or a lost war could replace the existing elite with a new one. It was a kleptocracy then, just as it remained since then. One can blame the rulers for neglecting progress and oppressing people, but they only answered basic human urges in a specific environment. They were neither good nor bad; they were lucky to be in a winning position in a difficult world.³⁹ They were certainly not different from any other elite anywhere anytime. Their spirit and practice are certainly alive and well in the modern Middle East.

Classical Period

Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and Western Asia in the fourth century BC, thereby establishing western dominance over the western part of the Middle East for nearly a millenium. Although, his armies reached Bactria, Afghanistan and the Punjab, it was a short-lived visit. According to contemporary chroniclers he organized a mass wedding between his Macedonian soldiers and Persian girls, to symbolize the unity between the two peoples. He might have taken it seriously, but it seems that the brides' families were less enthusiastic about the symbolic union of the two peoples. After his death, the Empire crumbled into personal fiefdoms, seized by his family and his generals. The eastern part of the conquest was lost after a comparatively short period as a result of a revolt by an Iranian tribe, the Parthians, who recovered their country's independence.⁴⁰

Alexander's conquests in Egypt and western Asia proved to be more durable. They became parts of the Hellenistic world, with the Ptolemaic dynasty, the descendants of Ptolemy, holding Egypt which included Libya and Cyprus, and the descendants of Seleucos , another of Alexander's generals, ruling in Syria, Lebanon and parts of Asia Minor. Palestine was a bone of contention between them, with both ruling it in turn.

The area had a stormy life in Hellenistic times, with constant conflicts between the Greek cities and their native subjects. The Egyptians probably accepted Greek rule better, after all the latter liberated them from Persian occupation, but in Western Asia, neither the Jews nor the Syrians preferred the Greeks to the Persians.

Eventually Rome took over the whole area, inheriting the communal conflicts in the divided cities, for example Alexandria, and the permanent fights with the native subjects of the Greek cities. As the revolts and the communal fights were either actually backed by the Parthians, or such a backing was anticipated, Rome inherited an 'Eastern problem' which required constant attention. The Eastern Roman Empire inherited the 'Eastern problem' and the perennial wars on the eastern border. Except for a period between 384 - 502 AD, until the Islamic takeover, there was nearly constant warfare between the West and the East on a long front, from Armenia in the North to Yemen in the South.

On another level, Alexander's eastern conquests created one of the most important centers of classical science. Demetrios, the exiled ruler of Athens, founded the Museum in Alexandria, under the patronage of Ptolemy I, the founder of the dynasty. Ptolemy II, in 283 B.C founded the Library in Alexandria. These two institutions, together with the Lyceum in Athens, founded by Aristotle, and Plato's Academy in Athens, became the scientific and cultural centers of the classical world.

The Museum at Alexandria, which was a shrine dedicated to the nine Muses, had more than a hundred scholars resident at all times, carrying on scientific research, giving lectures and publishing manuscripts. The library was part of the Museum which functioned as a modern research institute In addition to the research and study of classical Greek literature and science, it also gathered translations of Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian, Jewish and Indian literature and scientific treatises. Over a million copies were collected, so that an additional library had to be built, the Serapeum, dedicated to the god Serapis.

The turbulent history of the region affected these scientific institutions too, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. When the Pontian king Mithridates Eupator, occupied Athens in the 80's of the first century BC, many Greek scholars fled to Alexandria and remained there never to leave, thus strengthening the Museum When Julius Caesar was helping Cleopatra in her struggle against her brother Ptolemy XIV, he was besieged in the Museum and part of the library was burnt during the siege. Luckily for Julius Caesar, there were copies of the manuscripts, so that when he reformed the Roman calendar, he could copy the Aristarchus Calendar of 239 BC, which was stored in the Library.

It was an extraordinary cultural and scientific center. It housed scholars from all over the Middle East. The scholars of the Museum did the famous translation of the Old Testament, which was called the Septuagint. It also served as an example to the rest of the classical world. All over the Roman Empire, but especially in its Eastern parts, similar libraries were established. One such was the famous Library at Pergamum.

When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire the inevitable decline of the cultural institute began. Christianity in Alexandria added a new dimension to the ethnic conflicts common in the city . Disturbances between Greeks and Jews, Egyptians and Greeks and Romans were the order of the day. When the Egyptians accepted Christianity in the Monophysite format, the Egyptian vs. Greek conflicts turned into Christians vs. Pagans. The Egyptians, neither as Pagans nor as Christians, did not want to have the Museum in their midst. It was the symbol of the hated Greek civilization.

When the Arabs occupied Alexandria in 636 AD, the Museum and the associated Library and Serapeum had been empty shells for a long time. The soldiers of the Caliph Omar used the last of the books as fuel to heat the bath-houses of the city.⁴¹

When the cultural center at Alexandria was destroyed by Christian obscurity, its contents were already spread all over the Middle East. The scholars who were educated in Alexandria and who took part in the work of the center, were not Greeks alone. They were from all the peoples of the Middle East, Egyptians, Jews, Syrians, Persians, Indians, Lydians and Cappadocians.

It wasn't just the early Christians who were against the Museum at Alexandria and all that it implied. It was a western cultural outpost in the heart of the Middle East, and all who saw in western culture a threat to their way of life were against it, including Jews,⁴² and all others who wanted to preserve their own way of life, and not accept something alien and hated,

Anti-Western feeling was always strong in the Middle East, and there was always the hope that Persian power would support this prejudice. The millenium of Western rule in the Middle East was always a cauldron of seething anti-Western passions, occasionally breaking out into open revolt, but more often appearing as local ethnic conflicts between the natives and the Grecianised minority. However, from the conquest of Alexander, until the Islamic takeover, the rule was always Greek or Roman in Greek format.

In the last century of Greek rule in the Middle East, there was a common interest between the central authority, which was Greek and Christian, and the population, who were Monophysite Christians and natives. Both sides opposed the remainders of Classical science and culture. Luckily, this rare agreement between the regime and its subjects came too late because by then Greek culture had flourished in the area for at least 800 years. The whole area was permeated with classical culture, perhaps not amongst the lower level of society, but certainly amongst educated people. That was the classical heritage Islam was to receive.

The Golden Age

Islam spread over the Middle East in a relatively short time. The reason for its success was that even those who did not accept the religion welcomed the change of rule. In North Africa the conquest of Egypt was followed by a fierce struggle with the Berbers of North Africa. Having accepted Islam, the Berbers joined the Arabs to spread Islam into Spain and sub-Saharan Africa.

In Western Asia, the Persians whose empire was destroyed at Kadishiyah, joined Islam and became the flagbearers of continuing expansion to the North, to Central Asia, and to the East, Afghanistan and the Indian sub-continent.

In the center, in the Near East, the predominantly Christian Aramaic-speaking peoples of the Fertile Crescent accepted Islamic overlordship, thereby exchanging one imperial power for another. The Monophysite Copts of Egypt and the Nestorians of Syria and Mesopotamia preferred Islamic rule to that of the Greeks.

The new Empire was popular not only in the Near East. The policy of Islam to provide a third choice to conversion or the sword, to become a dhimmi, to have a protected status for a special tax, was very popular. This option was open to everyone belonging to one of the religions of the Book, Jews and Christians, as well as Zoroastrians. As most of the Middle East belonged to one of those religions, in practice the offer was open to everyone.

Of course, people could convert to Islam, but were not encouraged to do so. First, the conquering Arabs had no intention of granting equal status to all and sundry, as they were bound to give to Muslims, and second, they needed the revenue from the tax. The Middle East did eventually convert to Islam, but the process of conversion took a few centuries.

There was one more development caused by the spread of Islam, which was utterly unpredictable. The period after the Islamic conquest was the golden age of science in the Middle East, and in Islamic lands in general. This period was so much in contrast to what occurred before Islam, and to what happened in Islamic lands after the late Medieval period, that it needs a detailed explanation and analysis.

First, it must be pointed out that the cultural and scientific flowering, which was centered around the Museum at Alexandria and other similar institutes, did not represent the Middle East. It was a flowering of Greek science and culture. The scholars who carried out research in the Museum were Greeks or Graecised natives. In the last century or two, they suffered persecution from the Orthodox establishment and those who remained made themselves inconspicuous, sometimes actually hiding. There were still schools, groups of scholars, quite a bit of dissimulation, etc. No black-clad monks could easily destroy a millennial tradition.

With Islamic rule, these scholars flowered and, indeed, performed a veritable scientific and cultural revival, not seen since the early Hellenistic period: "In this world...there was Greek philosophy, Roman ideas of law and government, Byzantine and Persian art, Christian theology and Jewish tradition. Arab civilization was a product of all these factors. Among the men who fashioned it and produced its masterpieces in the various fields, many (often the majority) were not Arabs, but Byzantine Syrians, Persians, Jews and men of other races."⁴³

All this happened in the Middle East, after liberation from a millenium-long foreign occupation. It is even more surprising if one considers that the scientific and cultural basis of the flowering was the creation of the hated foreign occupier. Local intellectual tradition saw in Greek science anathema and abomination; they saw occupation in anything but in study of theological subjects a waste of time.⁴⁴ This was the approach of the old 'hydraulic civilizations' whose spirit continued to rule the Middle East. But the early Islamic civilization was certainly not behaving in that spirit.

The scientific revival of early Islam seems to be a riddle. There might be a number of explanations to solve the riddle. One of the explanations is that the scholars who were engaged in the scientific revival were dhimmis, - protected minorities, so the Islamic establishment had no reason to intervene in their work. At least, not then.

Another possible explanation is that the Arabs, who were living in the desert, had no experience with 'hydraulic civilizations'. There was no water to speak of, there was nothing to organize. As creatures of the desert, they were past experts in the meaning of extended families, with all that it implied, but luckily they had no part in or experience with tyranny. Pre-Islamic Arab traditions do not have a good opinion of monarchy. Even in pre-Islamic Mecca, probably the most advanced of Arab trading towns, they preferred to be led by elected chiefs, rather than by monarchs. The mistrust of monarchs is reflected in the Qu'ran too.

The Arabs had no experience of living in tyranny, they were unaware of the value of culture, and the strength of ideas. It is probable that most Arab soldiers were illiterate nomads. It is possible that the Caliph Omar did, indeed, say that everything worth knowing is in the Qu'ran, and what is not in the Qu'ran is not worth knowing, a sentiment very similar to that of the learned Rabbi quoted by Ernest Renan. (See note 44)

There are those who blame the Arabs for burning the last books in the Library at Alexandria, there are others who claim that it is a spurious story to blacken Islam.⁴⁵ Judging by what is known of the cultural level and literacy of the Arabs who erupted from the peninsula, bringing Islam with them, we can be nearly certain that if they were indeed Arab soldiers who burnt the books of the Library they did so because they needed hot water and not because of the contents of the books.

The first few centuries of Islamic rule saw an unprecedented flowering of scholarship in the Middle East. Scholars, many of them from the protected religions, translated classical works into Arabic. From the end of the seventh century A.D. to late medieval times, the flow of scientific information was from the East to the West.⁴⁶ The remaining books of the Classical period were forbidden in the Christian West. They were studied in the East and translated into Arabic. Whenever Christian obscurantism allowed, those books reached Europe from the East, in Arabic translations. Some of the scientific advances were of local origin, mainly in the fields of astronomy and geometry, as these disciplines were essential in establishing the times of prayer and the direction of Mecca.⁴⁷

In astronomy and cosmology the Islamic scholars were far ahead of anything in the West. They made successful use of Chaldean knowledge in astronomy. Diodorus Siculus (II.31) wrote that the Chaldeans had a planetary system with the Sun in its center, that each planet has its course and velocity, and that the Moon's light is reflected and eclipses are caused by the shadow of the earth.⁴⁸ So they were aware of a cosmology while those in the West had to wait for Copernicus to rediscover the ancient knowledge.

Islam's advantage was not only in astronomy and cosmology, it was prominent in medicine too. In all fields of medicine, Muslim scholars made astonishing developments, far ahead of anything the West could demonstrate. An Arab doctor in the 13th century AD described the internal working of the heart and the capillary system, which was arrived at four centuries later by an Italian anatomist with the aid of the microscope. At about the same time another Muslim doctor described the pulmonary system, which William Harvey only arrived at in the seventeenth century.⁴⁹

It was an extraordinary, fruitful period of scientific advancement. In addition to its own achievements, which were considerable indeed, Islam performed two other vital transfers. It transferred the values of the past, at least a part of them, to the present, and it transferred the scientific knowledge of the East, India and China, to the West. It started unexpectedly, its course was brilliant, and then it stopped just as unexpectedly.

The question why occupied contemporary scholars as well as scholars in our time. Ibn Khaldun wrote the following in the middle of the fourteenth century A.D.:

"Where are the sciences of the Persians that Umar ordered to be wiped out at the time of the conquest? Where are the sciences of the Chaldeans, the Syrians and the Babylonians, and the scholarly products and results that were theirs? Where are the sciences of the Copts, their predecessors? The sciences of only one nation, the Greeks, have come down to us, because they were translated through al-Ma'mun's efforts."⁵⁰

The question occupies modern scholars too. The abrupt ending of such a flowering needs explanation and analysis.⁵¹ The next chapter will attempt to summarize the opinions on this subject, and make an effort towards an independent analysis.

The Decline

At the beginning of the seventh century AD a revolution occurred in the Middle East. A new religion appeared out of the Arabic peninsula, the last of the monotheistic religions. In a very short time a new Empire was created, with a single language, a unified culture and a dominant religion, which eventually received the allegiance of most of the peoples of the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and parts of the Indian sub-continent.

One can look at this unprecedented expansion as a creation of a new Empire; one can also look at it as a liberation of the area from the hated Western occupation. Politically, the new Empire was the continuation of all past Empires of the region. It undid western conquests, starting with those of Alexander the Great and ending with Rome and Byzantium. It restored the Carthaginian territories in Spain and the islands of the Western Mediterranean, thereby undoing the results of the three Punic wars. In Asia Minor, it reached the borders of the Persian advance in the 5th Century B.C. Eventually it succeeded where Darius failed, by conquering the Balkans and encircling the Black Sea. It restored to the East the extents of the Mithridatic alliance from the 1st Century BC

As a political revolution, it was a tremendous success, achieving a territorial expansion probably greater than any in history. The reason for its success, and the durability of its results, was that it did not appear as a conqueror but as a liberator. It brought a new religion and a unifying language, but first of all it brought liberation from the hated Western occupation. It is true that the success was aided and abetted by the exceptional weakness of the West, after the barbarisation of the Western Empire, and by the mutual exhaustion of the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires after a long and difficult war. These were fortunate circumstances, but they only facilitated what would happen anyway.

There was an extraordinary adjunct to the spread of Islam. It caused an unprecedented flowering of cultural and scientific life. As it occurred in an area where cultural stagnation was the order of the day, indeed as it is today, when intellectual activities were part of the western ethos, this flowering was entirely unpredictable, short of miraculous. The previous chapter gave a short description of the scientific achievement, and attempted to give some reasonable explanation for it happening.

Then, just as unexpectedly as it started, the Islamic scientific revolution came to an end. It did not merely stop to remain at that level; it regressed. At the beginning, Islamic cultural flowering was unprecedented, so was its end. Since then, the question why and how it happened has remained unanswered.

Babak Nahid, reviewing a book by Toby E.Huff: The Rise of Early Modern Science, wrote:

"..makes yet one more attempt at explaining a tricky and recurring problem: Why a putatively more 'advanced' society begins to stagnate and decline, only to be overtaken by an emergent, yet more primitive civilization".⁵²

There are many explanations for this decline, although most of them deal with the symptoms, rather than with the causes.

In Guns, Germs and Steel, Prof. Diamond⁵³ explained that the Middle East failed to keep its original advantage because of environmental causes, but the book does not give any explanation why the cultural flowering got under way and why it terminated . There is no doubt that the 'Fertile Crescent' is no longer as fertile as it was before the desiccation, and there are serious reasons why the Middle East has lost its primacy, but it does not give any answer to this particular question: Why the cultural flowering started with Islam and why it terminated a few centuries later?

Other explanation are all in the same vein; they examine the symptoms and not the basic problems. It is true that eastern civilizations never had corporate personalities, e.g.the legal idea of treating a corporate body of people as a unit, a whole body or corporation. That the eastern 'madrasas' did not have standardisation in studies and examinations is also correct. It is also true that in general all cultural activities had religious supervision.⁵⁴ It was the same when Islam spread over the Middle East and so it was a few centuries later.

It is known that Eastern civilizations never had, and do not have now, corporate bodies, i.e. authorities independent of central rule. There are no elected municipalities, no University senates. Religious control is also a fact of life in the Middle East. So it was at the beginning of Islamic rule and so it is today. Still, there was a cultural and scientific flowering for a few centuries without changes in the basic civilizational parameters.

When one turns to Ibn Khaldun, who after all was a contemporary and a keen historical observer, one receives an answer that is probably nearest the truth. According to Ibn Khaldun, science was unknown to Arabs, a nomadic people, because it was only suitable to sedentary peoples.⁵⁵ The flowering of the sciences was the achievement of non-Arabs. In his opinion, the leading scholars of their Golden Age were Persians who were active in the 9th and 10th Centuries in the eastern provinces of Iraq, Khorasan and Transoxania. When these centers fell into ruin, scientific activities ceased too.

Ibn Khaldun had the intellectual honesty to write that the decline of the fortunes of the Islamic Empire, in the West with the Reconquista in Spain, and in the East where the Mongols overran Iraq , the Mameluke rulers in Egypt and the Seljuk in Asia Minor, caused the curtailment of scientific activities. However, there is a point that shows that the trend was deeper than the reversal of the fortunes of war. Ibn Khaldun, writing of Western science, says:

"We further hear that the philosophical sciences are greatly cultivated in the land of Rome and along the adjacent northern shore of the country of European Christians. They are said to be studied there again and to be taught in numerous classes. Existing systematic expositions of them are said to be comprehensive, the people who know them are numerous, and the students of them very many. God knows better what exists there."⁵⁶

If Ibn Khaldun reached the stage in which he had no interest in what is happening on the other side of the sea, then the intellectual rot must have been very deep, indeed. He lived in Tunis, far from the troubles in the West, and even farther from the troubles in the East. If he wanted to, he could have found out easily enough what they are teaching in Western Universities beyond the sea. He simply had no curiosity or interest in the matter. But Ibn Khaldun was not alone. Arab historiography of the Crusades was incomparably greater than that of the Christians.There was many writers of histories, and there were many books.

However, even when writing about a subject that touched everybody in the East, they showed an amazing limitation. They never used the word Crusade or Crusaders, they always used the word 'Franks' or 'Trinitarians'. They were not interested who they were, where they came from and why. They reported their arrival and departure, the battles, etc., but with a lack of curiosity. It is interesting to contrast some of the Arab histories with that of Joinville or other Western chroniclers.⁵⁷

The Arab Empire was short-lived After the first four Caliphs, of whom three were assassinated, the Caliphate of the Umayyads was established in Damascus, and after its overthrow it moved to Bagdad which was already within the Persian sphere of influence. With the decline of the Abbasids, Muslim culture declined too. The Seljuks , the Mongols, the Mamelukes and the Ottomans who came after the Abbasids, were no patrons of culture and scholarship.⁵⁸

From the zenith of the scientific flowering of Islam, which was probably during the early Abbasid Caliphate, the direction was downward. There might have been independent scholars, like Ibn Khaldun, Maimonides or Averroes, but the short period of Eastern ascendancy in science was over. Not much was left of that flowering, apart from the constant refrain of the Golden Age of Arab science, as a mantra to bring it back to life. Rarely, some Islamic thinkers dared to speak the truth:

"This talk of Oriental culture, Islamic civilization, the sciences of the Arabs was repeated constantly in every writing, and in all occasions in order to anaesthetize the nation, in order to prevent it from joining the stream of life of the West passing us near by. In addition to the thick and black shroud of ignorance laid upon the nation, we had the twofold ignorance to boast of our condition and despise Europe. It was impossible for anyone who could more or less sense the situation and who loved his country, not to be tormented by such a spectacle."⁵⁹

The desperation of this Turkish writer is understandable. Otherwise, most of the writings that deal in Eastern cultural affairs, touch on a yearning for the past, thoughts of make-believe and not much else.

It has to be understood that all scientific preoccupation is studied through religious prisms. The religions of the Middle East, Islam Judaism and Monophysite or Nestorian Christianity, are all against science in the Western understanding of the word . They are all against allowing open access to knowledge by the masses. They are the remains..of 'hydraulic civilizations' and they act in the spirit of those civilizations, to prevent unnecessary knowledge. Original thinkers of the Golden Age, like Maimonides in his Guide to the Perplexed, had to carefully mask forbidden topics, just as did Averroes, another medieval Arab philosopher.⁶⁰

The yearning for the lost riches of Islamic civilization and Arab science does not sit well with present-day attitudes to science .The contrast with the attitude of Europe is astonishing. It is true that Western preoccupation with abstract and theoretical science is unique, ⁶¹ but even the attitude of other, non-Western peoples to science stands in stark contrast to that of the East.

Edward Said, Professor of Comparative Literature, of Palestinian origin himself, wrote a book called "Orientalism". In that book he denounced the Western habit of observing the East. In fact, he came out against the existence of a scientific discipline called Orientalism, which is a legitimate field of study in the West, together with many other similar disciplines.

According to Said, Orientalism is obtrusive and full of ulterior motives. However, in his vehement denunciation of the discipline, he committed a few errors.

If someone thinks that a scientific inquiry into the habits of his people, civilization or religion is obtrusive, the rejoinder should have been: See how it should have been done. When we study you, we do it in the proper way.

Instead of this, Prof. Said had to admit that in the East there is no discipline called Occidentalism. Not only is there no study in the East about the West, obtrusive or not, there is no study about the East itself either.⁶² It is certainly curious. Every people, every civilization wishes to know about itself, before everybody and everything else. But then this attitude is not new⁶³ and is not restricted to an interest in other peoples and civilizations. Middle Eastern civilization is not interested now, and it seems that apart from the comparatively short period of the Golden Age, it never was interested in any scientific subject, apart maybe from its own theology.⁶⁴

One can look at science in an abstract way, like Prof. Said did, and claim that the Western practice of looking at other people's life is obtrusive. However, science has more practical applications, and there the picture is dismal indeed. One can look at the whole picture in the Middle East and one can only wonder how a civilization, which only a few centuries ago was the cutting edge of human achievement, could descend so fast and so much.

Probably the biggest problem of the Middle East is that even those thinkers who saw the backwardness and were not afraid to say so, did it as a call for revenge, and their pain was not because of the suffering caused by the backwardness, but because it prevented the Muslims having better weapons against the hated West.⁶⁵ Even an intelligent thinker like Afghani, who certainly was no religious fanatic, did not realize that inventions such as cannon and the machine gun require a basic infrastructure of study, research, laboratories and factories. And this is exactly what is missing in the Middle East. One cannot have advancement because one cannot have the infrastructure, which cannot be had without education, which is prevented by religion. If the standard of education in the Middle East at the end of the twentieth century has reached the level of the West in the first half of the 19th century, then there is still a long road ahead for it.⁶⁶

Printing reached the Middle East only in the 19th century. Until then, there was a religious ruling against printing, as printing God's name was deemed to be a sacrilege. Judging from earlier experiences, there was no need for the ruling, as printing books presupposes that there are people to read those books. In Constantinople there was a printing shop since the 16th century, opened by exiled Spanish Jews, but it printed only books in Hebrew letters. In 1729, the Turkish authorities allowed a Turkish printing press, managed by a Hungarian convert to Islam, one Mustafa Muteferrika. The printing press operated until 1742 when it closed down because lack of interest in its products. It printed 17 books altogether, with 500 - 1,000 copies per book. ⁶⁷ But even in the 20th Century, the demand for books in the Middle East is still meager. ⁶⁸

One could come to the conclusion that there is a basic incompatibility between the ethos of the Middle East and that of modern science. Modern science demands education, rationality, suitable infrastructure and logical thought. All these seem to be absent from the Middle East. Until a basic change occurs in all basic parameters, there seems to be no possibility that the Middle East can be part of the modern world of science and technology. This was the conclusion of Paul Kennedy and detailed analysis on the subject bears him out. Until that part of the world stops claiming that it knows all the answers, and the West, the hated enemy might have the technology and the know-how necessary to it, but its lack of spirituality eventually condemns it to suicide, one cannot anticipate changes.⁶⁹

The real problem is not theoretical but very practical. The Turkish forces succeeded in reaching Vienna in 1529. Theirs were powerful forces, poised to break into Central Europe. Turkey could call upon the combined resources of the East and throw them against one city. It failed to take the city. In the battle the two sides were evenly matched but the siege failed because of the long supply lines from Constantinople to Vienna that had to be maintained.

After a century and half of near continuous warfare, mainly in Hungary, the tide turned and Turkish power diminished, while that of its enemy increased. The reason for the growing inequality was the inability of the Turks to keep pace with the rapid advance of the West in science and military technology. The Turkish leaders were aware of their shortcomings but had no power to change it. Turkish power in Europe was broken not so much by the Hapsburgs as by the weight of its own tradition and religion.⁷⁰ It needed another two centuries of defeat after defeat, until Kemal Ataturk attempted to stop the slide. It is an open question even now, whether his operation will be successful or not. Judging from so many disturbing signs, the efforts of Kemal Ataturk might yet prove ephemeral.

Arnold Toynbee mentions two episodes from the Turkish wars of the 18th Century. The first was in 1768, when a foreign envoy told the Turkish authorities that the Russians intended to send the Baltic fleet through the straits of Gibraltar to attack Constantinople from the west. The Turks refused to believe that it was possible Thirty years later there was a similar case, when a Venetian businessman warned Murad Bey, the Mameluke warlord of Egypt that Napoleon seized Malta on the way to attack Egypt. Murad Bey burst out laughing at the absurdity of the idea.⁷¹

Those were leaders who were supposed to have experts at their disposal, and they still acted in an irrational way. It is something difficult to understand. It seems certain that in Constantinople and Cairo, there were maps at that time, there were probably people too who knew how to read maps. Missing was rational thinking. There was the same irrational thinking which guided those inspired men who, at the commencement of the French occupation of Algeria in 1830, declared themselves invulnerable, sent by God to drive away the infidel. Having found inevitable death, they were forgotten and the following year a new invulnerable prophet rose with the same message and the same fate.⁷²

V. S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born Indian writer, wrote in "Among the Believers",⁷³ about the patron saint of Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan, Maulana Maudoodi. Naipaul wanted to meet the man in Pakistan, but could not. The Maulana fell ill and against all his higher principles he had gone to a Boston hospital to seek a cure. Some said that he went to reap where he did not want his people to sow. He died in the hospital in Boston. V.S. Naipaul concluded the chapter:

"Of the Maulana it might be said that he had gone to his well-deserved place in heaven by way of Boston; and that he went at least part of the way by Boeing."

This last quotation by V. S. Naipaul puts a different focus on the East's attitude to science, culture and modern life in general. The Middle East is the direct inheritor of the world's original hydraulic civilizations, e.g. it is based on oppression, slavery and exploitation. It was so 5,500 years ago, and not much has changed since then. That the exploitation was always done under the aegis of some religious dogma is not new either. Believing in some unattainable and unprovable goal was always the trademark of human servitude, since the first Pharaoh built his tomb right until Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square.

To have an external enemy is also one of the trademarks of those civilizations. Goldstein for Orwell's Big Brother, Trotsky for Stalin, the Jews for Hitler and the West for the Middle East. Altogether, the Middle East lives today in a parasitic relationship with the West. There are nearly 300 million people living in countries listed in Appendix I. They have a very low standard of life, thanks to the kleptocracy which is also one of the gifts of the 'hydraulic societies', but even so, the greater part of their daily food and most everything else comes mainly from the West, as V. S. Naipaul pointed out. It all comes in exchange for that non-renewable commodity - oil.

This is a paradoxical situation. The Middle East rejects modernization. Without modernization and rationalism, there is no chance of escaping its predicaments. Its own ideology prevents this. It is similar to what has happened in the Soviet Union. There was a basic conflict between ideology and the needs, or at least the wishes of the people. This conflict caused the collapse of the Soviet regime. It was not destroyed, it just imploded.

There is a difference between the two. The ideology of the Soviet Union was so discredited that no one was really willing to die for it. In the Middle East, the situation is different. There the ideology is not discredited, indeed most of the people there do believe in it and are willing to make sacrifices to sustain it.

The situation is not merely paradoxical, but also extremely precarious. The Middle East needs the West, as a customer for oil and as a provider of food, medicine and practically everything else. On the other hand it attempts to hurt the West, as much as it possibly can, having been conditioned by its ideology and age-old hatred. It is all like the old tale of the Scorpion and the Frog..

"The Scorpion wanted to cross the river and asked the Frog to help him across.

The Frog claimed to be afraid that the Scorpion will sting him halfway and he will drown.

- If I shall sting you, you will drown and I shall drown with you - said the Scorpion.

So the Frog agreed let the Scorpion sit on his back and started swimming across the river. In mid-river the Scorpion stung him. As the Frog was drowning, together with the Scorpion, he asked with his last strength:

- Why did you do it. Now we shall both die.

- I cannot help it, this is my nature - answered the Scorpion".

Social Attitudes

Paragraph III of Appendix II shows the following social preferences in Eastern civilization:

Individual to

Individual          not important

family/clan        important

nation               not important

civilization         important

The primacy and importance of the family/clan over the individual was discussed in chapter,: Role of Family within Society, so it is clear that in an Eastern society there are no individual rights, apart from those which accrue by virtue of belonging to a clan. The question of nation versus civilization is not so clear and should be analyzed. In the 15th century, Nicolo Macchiavelli wrote that to invade a European country is easy, because the states are so fragmented, that one can always find some fragment to help with the invasion. However, once the invasion succeeded, the very fragmentation turns against the invader, as he has to deal with each fragment individually. According to Macchiavelli, it is easier to conquer an Oriental state. It might put up a greater defense, being centralized, but once defeated there are no alternate centers of power.

Macchiavelli had before his eyes the fragmented map of Europe with the crazy quilt of Italy and Germany on one hand, and the monolithic power of the Ottoman Empire on the other. His examples were the French invasion of Italy at the end of the 15th century and the conquest of the East by Alexander the Great.

Four centuries after Macchiavelli, another keen observer and theoretician saw an invasion of an Oriental country. The observer was Alexis de Tocqueville and the invasion was of Algeria by the French in 1830. In the beginning he found that Macchiavelli was right. The French defeated the Ottoman garrison, declined their offer to serve under French command, put them on ships and sent them back to Constantinople.

Then, to their consternation, the French found that there is no such state as Algeria, apart from being a name on the map. There was a conglomeration of clans and tribes, some in cooperation with others, some in opposition. There was a constantly moving kaleidoscope of fragments, not to be defined as a unified state.⁷⁴

When one examines modern Middle Eastern states the same situation is found. One can look at Iraq to find that a clan from Takrit rules the country. Members of the clan have most of the power and distribute the wealth amongst them. Selected members of other clans from the Takrit area form the Praetorian Guard of the regime. Other tribes of the minority Sunnis support the regime. The clans of the Kurds in the North and the Shia in the South are the majority, but they are so divided that the unified Sunnis are able to exercise all the power. The same applies to every Middle Eastern country. Names are for maps, for the seat in the United Nations, and gullible western journalists and politicians.

The Western idea of an ethnic and territorial nation is entirely foreign to the Middle East.⁷⁵ One cannot speak of a Syrian or Iraqi nation in the same sense as one speaks of a French or German nation. Even in Europe, where people may see themselves as members of smaller territorial units, even then they see themselves as part of a nation state. When a German says that he is from Saxonia, he means a smaller territorial unit, and not a tribe. Not so in the Middle East.

In the Middle East, the overall framework of the area, what is called civilization, is more important than the artificial creation of the nation state. The expression 'hijra' refers to the flight of the Prophet Muhammed and his supporters from Mecca to Medinah. The Muslim calendar counts the years from the 'hijra'. This expression is the origin of another political term, 'muhajir'. This term was first used for those who had to leave the lost provinces of formerly Islamic territories for Islamic states. So, the Algerians fleeing French occupation were 'muhajir, so were the Circassians fleeing the Russians, Bosnians fleeing the Serbs, Pakistanis fleeing Indians, Palestinians fleeing Israelis, etc. ⁷⁶

The Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire said in 1917 in a debate about the concept of the new-style patriotism:

"The Fatherland of the Muslims is wherever the Holy Law of Islam prevails."⁷⁷

This answer is very similar to the comment made by the Hapsburg Francis I, another supranational ruler, who during the Napoleonic wars, remarked on the praise heaped on one of his citizens as being a good Austrian patriot :

"But is he a patriot for me?"

Notes:

.

1.	Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean,op. cit. pp. Vol.I., .174 - 175, 241
2.	Idem, ibid quotes Bubecq about the frugal life of the Turks
3.	Edward Gibbon, op. cit.Vol.III,pp.59 - 73 - gives an idealized picture of the life of the Bedouin. So does Fernanad Braudel :A History of civilization, op. cit.,p.60
4.	Ibn Khaldun, op. cit. pp. 118 - 122 wrote a less flattering description of the Bedouin
5.	Raphael Patai, op. cit. p. 21
6.	Idem, p.282 David Pryce-Jones,op. cit. p.26 - 27
7.	Raphael Patai, op .cit. pp. 97 - 98
8.	Genesis 37
9.	Raphael Patai, op cit. pp. 152 - 153
10.	Idem, p.130 Genesis 45:32 : "because the Egyptians might not eat bread with the Hebrews; for that is an abomination unto the Egyptians."
11.	Fouad Ajami, op. cit. p.26
12.	Gordon Childe, Prehistory, op .cit. pp. 90 - 93
13.	Idem , pp. 83, 116
14.	William H. McNeill, "The Rise of the West", (The University of Chicago, Chicago, 1991), pp. 258 - 261
15.	Gordon Childe, Prehistory,op .cit. pp. 125 - 128
16.	David Pryce-Jones, op. cit. p.25 Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty, op. cit. p.22
17.	George Orwell, "Nineteen Eghty-four" , (Penguin Books, 1965), p.227
18.	David Pryce-Jones, op .cit. p.29 - quotes Bernard Lewis, Toby E. Huff. op. cit. p.215 - adds that there are no corporate bodies. Lacking any power of adjudication and jurisdiction, anything was legally up for grab.
19.	Benjamin R. Barber, op. cit.,pp.207 - 208 quotes Hilal Khashan : "The Limits of Arab Democracy", (World Affairs, Vol.153, No.4, Spring 1991, pp. 127 - 135) : "All of the....democratic prerequisites are lacking in the Arab World. Arab democracy along Western terms is wishful thinking". Fouad Ajami, op. cit. p.7
20.	Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West, op. cit. p.181 Bernard Lewis, The Middle East, op. cit. p.245 Philip K. Hitti, op .cit. p.4 Oswald Spengler, op. cit. pp. 268 - 269
21.	Ibn Khaldun, op. cit. pp. 171 - 175 Toby E. Huff, op. cit. pp. 121 , 139, 215 Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West, op. cit. p.45
22.	Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty, op. cit. p.15
23.	Idem, p.22
24.	Friedrich A. Hayek "The Road to Serfdom", (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994), pp. 152 - 153
25.	Henry Paolucci, op. cit. pp. 52 - 57
26.	Judith Miller, "God has ninety-nine names", (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1997), pp. 475 - 476
27.	David Pryce-Jones, op. cit.,p.75 quotes an Algerian poet who wrote at the time of the French occupation in 1830 that with God's help : "...the Christians will be extinguished, and he will put to flight our corrupters." Raphael Patai, op. cit. p.269, quotes another Algerian poem from about 1900, in which the West is depicted as a huge ghoul, prodigious in size and exceedingly ugly.:
28.	Raphael Patai, op. cit. p.21 "I and my brothers against my cousins, I and my cousins against the stranger." a variation of the same proverb, seemingly more fitting, p.42 "I against my brothers, I and my brothers against my cousins, I and my cousins against the world."
29.	Idem,p.75 Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty, op.cit. pp. 26 - 27
30.	Ibn Khaldun, op. cit. p.161
31.	quoted by David Pryce-Jones,op. cit.,pp.26 - 27
32.	Raphael Patai, op. cit.,p.119, 282
33.	Ibn Khaldun, op. cit. p.19, other examples of kinship, p.97, 246
34.	Edward Said, op. cit. pp. 48 - 49, quotes an essay written by Harold W. Glidden "The Arab World", which appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry, February 1972
35.	David Pryce-Jones, op. cit. p. 39
36.	Idem, pp. 53 - 54
37.	Robert Graves, "Goodbye to All That", (Penguin Book, 1988), p.274
38.	Gordon Childe, What Happened ,op. cit. pp. 125 - 128
39.	Gordon Childe, Prehistory ,op .cit. pp. 95-96 .
40.	Bernard Lewis, The Middle East, op. cit. p.29
41.	Ellen N. Brundige, "The Decline of the Library and Museum of Alexandria" (University of California, Irvine, December 10, 1991),p. 1ff
42.	Ernest Renan, op. cit. p.42 about the enmity of the Jews against Greek studies in Jesus' times. Bernard Lewis, The Middle East, op. cit. p.31
43.	Edward Atiyah, "The Arabs", (Penguin Book, 1955), p.40 Ibn Khaldun, op. cit., p.317 Bernard Lewis,Islam and the West, op .cit.,p.8
44.	Ernest Renan, op .cit.,p.42 quoted a learned Rabbi from Jesus' time as to the time when it would be proper to teach children 'Greek wisdom'. The Rabbi has answered :"At the time when it is neither day nor night; since it is written of the Law, thou shalt study it day and night."
45.	Edward Atiyah, op. cit. p.37
46.	Jared Diamond, op. cit. pp.409 - 410
47.	Toby E. Huff, op. cit. pp. 51, 70
48.	Idem, p.212 D.S.Allan & J.P. Delair, op .cit.,p.215
49.	Toby E. Huff, op .cit. pp. 176 - 179
50.	Ibn Khaldun, op. cit. p.39 p.374 - explains how el-Ma'mun acquired Greek manuscripts and let them to be translated into Arabic.
51.	Babak Nahid, "Review of Toby E. Huff: The rise of early modern science" (University of California, Los Angeles, 1996), p.1ff
52.	Idem , ibid
53.	Jared Diamond, op .cit. pp. 253 - 254 -Eastern cultural flowering pp.409 - 412 - Loss of primacy because of environmental reasons
54.	Toby E. Huff, op. cit. Religious supervision - p. 67, 81, 111, 155 , 203 No corporate bodies - p. 80 , 89 - 90 No standartised education - p. 167 , 169, 340
55.	Ibn Khaldun, op. cit. pp. 428 - 429
56.	Idem, pp. 373 - 375 David Pryce-Jones, op cit. p.59
57.	Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West, op. cit. pp. 12 - 13 Joinville, "The life of St. Louis", (Penguin Classics, 1963) see especially the chapter :The Old Man of the Mountain, p.277ff Francesco Gabrieli, op. cit. see the Introduction for the attitude of Islamic historians about the Franks.
58.	Bernard Lewis, The Middle East, op. cit. pp.165 - 166
59.	David Pryce-Jones, op .cit. p. 90 quoting Huseyin Cahit, a Turkish writer who wrote an essay in 1935 :"Looking back".
60.	Toby E. Huff, op .cit. pp. 222 - 223 science is un-Islamic ,p.360 anyone who was an expert on Greek science was in danger of condemnation - p. 157
61.	Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West, op. cit. pp.123 - 125
62.	Edward Said, op .cit. p. 204 - from 1800 to 1950 about 60,000 books appeared in the West dealing with the Near East. There is no remotely comparable figure for oriental books about the West. p. 324 - In the United States there are dozens of organizations studying the Arab and Islamic Orient. There are none in the Orient for studying the United States - there are scarcely any institutes of even modest status in the Orient devoted studying the Orient.
63.	Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West, op. cit. p. 26 In the eighteenth century a six-volume book appeared in Constantinople about Ottoman history covering the period from 1590 to 1660. (One of the books printed by Mustafa Muteferrika). It discussed the Ottoman - Hapsburg wars in great detail, but without mentioning the Thirty Year War or any other European event, not directly involving Turkey. This shows that the attitude of the Arab historians of the Crusades was not accidental.
64.	Toby E. Huff, op. cit.,p.235 David Pryce-Jones, op.cit. p.13 - the whole of the Middle East has so far made no invention or discoveries in the sciences or the arts, or or contribution to medicine and philosophy.(Since the Golden Age )
65.	David Pryce-Jones, op. cit.,pp.87 - 88 cites Afghani from 1884: "It is amazing that it was precisely the Christians who invented Krupp's canons and the machine gun before the Muslims."
66.	Raphael Patai, op. cit. pp. 325 - 326 David Pryce-Jones, op. cit. p.55 quotes Charles Issawi :"An Economic History of the Middle East", (London, Methuen, 1982), p.114
67.	Toby E. Huff, op. cit. p.46, 225 Bernard Lewis, The Middle East, op .cit.,p.206
88.	Edward Atiyah, op. cit. p. 233
69.	Raphael Patai, op. cit. pp. 147, 272 Fouad Ajami, op .cit. pp. 19 - 20, 44
70.	Bernard Lewis, The Middle East, op .cit.,p.289
71.	Arnold J. Toynbee, op. cit. Vol.II, p.190
72.	Ernest Renan, op. cit. p.55
73.	V.S. Naipaul, "Among the believers", (Vintage Books, New York, 1982),p.168
74.	Ernest Gellner, Conditons of Liberty, op. cit. p. 81ff
75.	David Pryce-Jones,op. cit.p.21 Edward Gibbon,op. cit.Vol.III,p.66 Fouad Ajami,op. cit. p.40 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash,op. cit.p.175
76.	Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West,op. cit.p.52 Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth,op. cit. p.327 wrote that Indian Muslims who fled from India to Pakistan during the time of the partition in 1948 are called 'mohajirs' by the native Pakistanis.
77.	Bernard Lewis,Islam and the West,op. cit., p.136

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