THE MUSLIM WORLD vs. COOL CLIMATES, MULTIPLE RELIGIONS, and MODERNITY

Reading and seeing the news pertaining to the countries of the Muslim world as it is happening doesn’t appear to make sense to non-Muslims. News, generally of bad events, appears to be drawn more from the Arab world, the Muslim world, the world of Islam, than from the Western or modern world. The undeveloped nations that are not predominantly Muslim but rather warm-climate, jungle worlds, do not dominate the inches of the daily news columns as do the events of the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world.

First, what are the apparent changeable differences that distinguish the world of Islam, the Arab world, from the rest of the Peoples of the earth? Warm and hot climates, singularity of religion, primitive cultures and life styles, all are in evidence in non-Muslim countries. Except for natural devastating events; typhoons, earthquakes, parched-earth famines, uncontrollable epidemic illness, tsunamis; those countries do not merit newspaper column inches on a daily basis.

Are the hot sands and burning sun responsible for the elemental savagery and the vicissitudes of pain and suffering inflicted and experienced in the World of Allah? It is true that there are fewer cell phones, television sets, automobiles, power generation and distribution networks, in that world. But they are not alone in that condition.

Power struggles with their attendant blood-letting savagery are not unique to the Muslim world. It is demonstrably more prevalent and of greater magnitude in many Arab countries but the differences are not self explanatory. Stoning and beheading and dismemberment are more prevalent, more common, and more commonly accepted in that world than even in the savage backwater expanses of the Amazon or in the wretched jungle conflicts in the backwaters of Africa. They certainly are not every-day occurrences even in the most backward areas of uncivilized countries.

Over the centuries, tribalism in most countries was replaced with larger communal structures. With that growth, came a reduction in savagery regardless of climate, religion, or the development of industry replacing farming as the main source of wealth and stability. More to the point, this modernity spread geographically latitudinally across the globe. Even at the expense of decimation of native populations, modernity took over and replaced savagery. What happened in the Muslim world? No multiplicity of religions, no climate changes of significance, and very little in the way of modernity.

One common thread through time, place, and custom, held true and holds true today; “Wealth equals power and Power equals wealth.” Whatever worked, wherever it worked, and however it worked, that truism explains the world, its history, and the world as we know it today. Regardless of locale, regardless of geography or population, power controlled wealth and wealth controlled power. And, because the essence of religion is power over the minds of people, religion and wealth and power were always partners in whatever world they lived. They used and exploited each other to maintain wealth and power. And so it is in the Muslim world, less hidden, more clearly established and connected, and more developed and exposed in its usages than in the modern Western world. No matter the climate, no matter the modernity surrounding it, the Muslim world has its foundational pillar in the religion of Islam to the exclusion of all other religions - and explains its goals to the worlds of the “non-believers.”