Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Hey, you're the one who dropped this whopper:
So the pre-eminence of the Ottoman Empire, which encompassed modern-day Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, and Turkey (not to mention most of the Balkans) was ended by foreign military aggression? You're joking, right? North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia lapsed into economic and technological decline long before any Europeans showed up to spoil the party.
And the collapse of the Ottomans after WW1 didn't galvanise the religious/ethnic into a mono-religious resistance. It led to fractious nationalism riven with tribal, ethnic, and religious antagonism.
The common thread is religion. You know, the thing that inspires ISIS adherents to carry out atrocities against helpless civilians. Not incidentally, the same thing that has hamstrung every effort to lift countries in the region out of backwardness and poverty.
The intellectual contortions people will go through in order to not acknowledge the religious motivations of a self-professed religious movement are extraordinary.
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I'd argue that the Fundamentalist streams of Islam being practiced today have more in common with political movements than religious ones. They advocate systems of government, codes of conduct, tax systems, etc... and actually ignore large parts of Islam and many of the religious philosophies.
You could argue that all religion has some form of social control, and thereby takes on a government like structure. However, the fundamentalists are definitely pushing more towards the political than the philosophical.