LogFAQs > #883388915

It is not very much different. The Islamic world is simply at a different point in its social development than the Western world is.

Unfortunately, the Islamic world has backslid in its social development over the last fifty years due to outside forces competing for power. The Soviet Union's military invasion of Afghanistan, followed by America's support for ultra-conservative Mujahadeen, tore that country apart and turned it into a backwards-thinking hellhole. The same can be said for places like Syria and Iraq.

People are shaped by their realities. Unfortunately, we usually do the *easy* thing and dismiss certain behavior as "religious" or "cultural," full stop. By essentializing it we're relieved from the task of truly explaining its origins.

It's a lazy thing to ascribe anything we don't want to unpack as "cultural." Culture is fluid; it changes as the contexts around it change. But we in the West keep barking at the effects instead of tackling causes.

For example, are revenge killings "culture," or are they what becomes normalized in societies with no faith in due process of law?

Is sectarianism "culture," or is it what happens in countries whose borders were drawn arbitrarily after WW1, and a century later, stick lack for citizenship and cohesive national identity?

It isn't the truth that Islam is a uniquely barbaric religion, or that it's substantially different than Christianity. Rather, the gatekeeprs of Islam -- the Islamic equivalent to the Catholic Church -- are all themselves dictators, who rule in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran and keep the people well-fed on a steady diet of perverse interpretations, in order to control them, and to keep them in line. What the Middle East needs isn't more war, it's peace, education, democracy, and time. Cure the Middle East of dictatorship and you will cure what's wrong with the Islamic world.

@-Gavirulax-