The Forgotten Muslim world
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I have noticed there have been major changes in the Middle East affecting the Muslim population. I have spoken to several professors and sources and they claim the Middle East wasn’t always a region that harboured terrorism.
If you look at the Middle East during the cold war, it was different. During those time era, the Muslim population were more westernised and some of them even embraced socialism and communism.
Several months ago, I interviewed a professor at Boston University. He claims to been born in Afghanistan in the 1950s and left in the late 1980’s. He said Afghanistan during the 1960’s and 70’s was prosperous, people were allowed to have freedom of speech and excise their freedom of expression. He even claimed when Afghanistan became a Socialist state, it was much more prosperous compare to now.
He said when he left Afghanistan, the fundamentalist Muslims were butchering everyone they were against (Communist, feminist, socialist, liberals, conservatives). They would persecute people they viewed were against Islam.
Iran during the era of Reza Shah Pahlavi was another prosperous Middle Eastern country. My former professor was born in Iran and left during the Iranian Revolution. He claimed when the fundamentalist Muslims would see random pedestrian dress as westerners in Tehran during the 1960’s; they would get upset and sometimes use violence.
He said most Iranians during the Shah era were westernised. They listen to the Beatles and other western music, they used to dress western and they embraced western ideas. What went wrong with the Middle East?
The religious sector of Islam has always been anti westerner, equality, freedom, progression and intelligence.
During the Iranian Shah era, the Saudi King told him “You are not the Shah of Paris; you are the ruler of a Muslim Nation.”
These were the same religious fundamentalist who overthrew the socialist movement in Afghanistan, Yemen and other regions of Northern Africa and the Middle East.
Iran could have become a democratic nation, Before Saddam Invaded that country some Iranian were against the Ayatollah theocratic believes and even attempted to start a revolution in overthrowing him. Eventually that movement was crushed by the religious fundamentalist and the war that erupted.
The rise of Wahhabism and Islam has damaged the Middle East and in many ways destroyed the Muslim population. The Iranian Shah predicted in the year 1999, Iran would become one of the five prosperous nations in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNAIe1S_kYE
Eventually that prediction was crushed because of these religious fundamentalist regressing their local population and having them bow down to their religious faith.
What you say is true. Iraq used to be secular, with a relatively well educated population and it allowed more freedom for women than what is the case today. Aljazeera reports on Iraq’s academies:“These professors tell the story of an underreported tragedy – the destruction of Iraq's once proud academia through 30 years of war, sanctions, and occupation. The intelligentsia has been sucked into the whirlwind of Iraq's recent experience. It is still in chaos. Once the envy of the Middle East, Iraq's academies today are hollow memories of a proud past. Conflict, assassinations, diaspora, and suppressed freedom of speech have handicapped centres of higher education, gutted research facilities, and silenced the academics staffing them.”http://www.aljazeera.com/humanrights/2013/10/destruction-iraqs-intellectuals-2013101114937748151.htmlThis article from the Guardian talks about how secular the country used to be:“Until the 1970s nearly all Iraq's political organisations were secular, attracting people from all religions and none. The dividing lines were sharply political, mostly based on social class and political orientation. The growth of religious parties followed Saddam's ruthless elimination of all political entities other than the Ba'ath party. Places of worship became centres of political agitation and organisation.”“The most serious sectarian and ethnic tensions in Iraq's modern history followed the 2003 US-led occupation, which faced massive popular opposition and resistance. The US had its own divide-and-rule policy, promoting Iraqi organisations founded on religion, ethnicity, nationality or sect rather than politics. Many senior officers in the newly formed Iraqi army came from these organisations and Saddam's army. This was exacerbated three years ago, when sectarian groups in Syria were backed by the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.”http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/16/sectarian-myth-of-iraqIn the 1970’es, women’s situation in Iraq was far better than it is today:“Many people feel it is due to the ongoing terror wrought in this land that brings so much oppression to women. Prior to the arrival of forces in Iraq in 1991, Iraqi women were free to wear whatever they liked and go wherever they chose. The Iraqi constitution of 1970 gave women equality and liberty in the Muslim world, but since the invasion, women’s rights have fallen to the lowest in Iraqi history .”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_IraqAnd believe it or not, mini-skirts were popular across the region:“This relatively recent resurgence of conservative Islam, and the subsequent multitude of ladies covering up their bodies, has not always gripped the Middle East. Forty years ago, a radically different picture prettied the veiled vistas of today. If you have Arab grandparents, no doubt you have been regaled with stories of a more risque time and the Islamic backlash that followed in a 'dark age' of fashion.Before the spread of conservative rule in countries such as Iran, the miniskirt, that Western cultural cornerstone, could be seen riding up many a leg across the Middle East. Miniskirts were bang on trend and you couldn't walk round a street corner or curve in the region without spying a pair of bare thighs. The popularity of this naughty apparel – that like hot-pants would now be anathema for the ME – was unmistakable across the Arabian Gulf to the Levant.Why was it acceptable for Middle Eastern women to wear miniskirts in the 1960s but not now? Not simply because the now retro party-piece has been consigned to fancy-dress attire. Fashionable heels and glamourous hair dominated the urban scene that is now populated by scores of burqas. Unlike most fashion revolutions, this one was caused by politics, not pop culture.”http://www.albawaba.com/slideshow/retro-mini-fashion-middle-east–514288What an absolute disaster the combination of Western interference and religious fundamentalists have been for the Middle East.
Yes, these developments are disturbing and show that history doesn't proceed steadily in a progressive direction but that setbacks and regressions are possible. It might have been expected that there would be a progression from backward-looking dynastic regimes to modernising secular dictatorships to capitalist secular political democracy. But this has not happened. Instead we've seen the rise/return of religious obscurantism in the Arab world. (But also in Turkey where the Erdogan regime is whittling away at Ataturk's progressive reforms).There will be a number of reasons for this, including the inability of the secular dictatorships to improve the material condition of the mass of the population despite their success in the field of education and fighting religious obscurantism. Another will be the accident of history that the world's biggest oil reserves should have happened to be within the territory of a Bedoiun tribe adhering to a particularly obscurantistand obnoxious version of Islam. Their riches have enabled them to propagate this throughout the whole muslim world and before whom the Western capitalist powers have bowed and scraped for geopolitical/strategic reasons as well as to get their oil supplies. But this accident of history might have a sting in the tail: the Saudi royal family's oil resources are situated in a part of their territory inhabited by Shia muslims who could, at some point perhaps with Iran's support, rise up and give the corrupt and hypocritical Saudi ruling family their come uppance and maybe a taste of their own medicine.
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