What went wrong with the Arab World?

Gulf News | 8/22/03 | Dr Fatma Al Sayegh

[angkor]

Which country? Which "victory"?

[Jmouse007]

What went wrong with the Arab World? =

ISLAM

[ImpBill]

"What went wrong with the Arab World?"

ISLAM!!!

The "religion of peace" seeks only turmoil, misery, and death for all it comes in contact with; most especially its practitioners.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

We can only hope that Japan's model is copied by Arabs.

You mean you hope the Arabs try to win a war with suicide attacks?
You want Arab armies to engage an enemy which has air supremacy?

Right on track, so far . . .

[Jimmy Valentine]

Good point. The societies where there is no state sponsored religion do pretty well. Examples: Tunisia and Turkey.

[angkor]

Look at the countries in East Asia. They don't spend their time and resources carping about the "unity" of Asians or obsessing about the perceived injustices of history. Nor do they generally blame "the West" for their current state of affairs, or pine for the resurrection of some imagined state of past glories.

From the Phillipines to India, these countries and their people have taken the resources at hand and moved-on to join modern civilization.

It is only among "the Arabs" that we see this stagnation of thought, total repression of freedom, obsession with "the Jews", and hatred for modernity.

The only common denominator among them is the Koran (noting that Indonesia and Malaysia were advantageously influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism prior to Islam).

[bethelgrad]

When Arabs work together they are praised. When whites work together it's called racism.

[Jumper]

What went wrong... is that these people(s) suffer from childish mannerisms and lack any logical thought process. Arabs by and large operate on emotion and cannot formulate any coherent long term plan. The Arab aversion to Classic Western Mind/Thought Process is the root of their problem.

[bitcon]

Mohammed, Islam, Allah and the attitude of "Who did this to us?"

Life is 10% what your given and 90% what you make of it. Looking for someone to blame your problems on wont get you anywhere. Look at South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, they had little or nothing and in the last 50 or so years, through hard work, they've made highly advanced and civilized nations.

[TheBattman]

What went wrong with the Arab World?

Oh - well, many years ago, the Arabs allowed themselves to be completely deceived by Satan in the form of Mohamed (and even before that by Ishmael)

[Tom Bombadil]

The reason for this domination is clear: the absence of a collective policy which unites the Arabs rather than separates them.

Missing a collective policy?

If respect for the rule of law and basic human rights can be considered a collective policy then maybe this author has a clue......The Arabs are their own worst enemies....... willufully embracing abusive and autocratic rulers, and in the case of the Palestinians, teaching their chidren to hate.

[America's Resolve]

It seems to me that most of the replies on this thread all eat around the edges of what went wrong with Arabs but don't strike at the heart of things.

The problem with the Arab world can be summed up in one word: KORAN.

To Muslims, the Koran is the 'perfect' book. It is the word of Allah straight from the lips of his prophet, therefore it isn't open to interpretation or change. It's literally written in stone.

And yet an enormous amount of the backward precepts that govern Islam are inherent in it.

Somebody above mentioned killing all the terrorists. That won't do any good. In another generation you'll have a whole new bunch of terrorists and murderers. Because they get their marching orders straight from the Koran such as my tagline.

They get their dependency on the moon cycle, no interest that capitalism rests upon, their hatred of the infidel, the Haj to Mecca, their treatment of women, their 72 virgins (and 28 young boys), polygamy; all of it finds its wellspring in the Koran and until its changed, Islam won't be changed. Yet it can't be changed because its the perfect book.

That leads them down a slippery slope where any advancement or change is virtually impossible. They can't change until the Koran changes and the Koran can't change. They're in a catch-22 that they'll never be able to get out of. Islam is a backward religion and as far as the eye can see it WILL be a backward religion.

The only thing that has made it a "Great" religion is that it could field as many soldiers as needed to crush the people around it. Those days have passed though. We can kill 10 of them for every one of us that they kill with our technology.

Islam is in a box of its own making and theres not a thing they can do about it.

Godspeed

[John O]

To regain their former greatness, the Arab regimes should adopt the authentic teachings of Islam and know the pulse of their people. They should also level up their policies vis-à-vis international and regional players.

Seems that they tried this in Afghanistan and the taliban found out how well that turned out.

The arab world will only prosper when then get converted to Christianity. Islam is the reason they continually fail