Islam and Modernization
Hoffer, Eric
"Islam and Modernization" Eric Hoffer Muhammad, messenger of plod. There is a fact that stares us in the face yet is rarely mentioned: No Islamic country has so far been modernized. No...
...The answer is no, for the simple reason that Soviet Central Asia has a large number of Russians and Ukrainians concentrated in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan where modernization has gone farthest...
...When in the early 1920s Kemal Atatilrk set out to modernize Turkey, he deliberately tried to uproot Islam by laicizing everyday life and banishing Arab influences...
...The fact is that practically all the outstanding personalities of Islam's brief golden age were non-Arabs and many of them non-Moslems...
...In countries where Moslems live side by side, either as a majority or a minority, with members of other creeds, the Moslems remain as a rule backward while the non-Moslems usually display some facility for modernization...
...He is not under a pressing need to prove his worth day in, day out...
...The Portuguese were as zealous as the Arabs, but today Indonesia is largely Islamic...
...flies, critics who cannot abide any residual trace of that special moral validation that once characterized the American political experiment...
...I t is not without cause that mental tests have become one of the most hotly debated social issues of the past decade, for, along with other closely related measures of academic achievement, they guard the gates to academic advancement in the current scheme of things, and hence play an important role in determining who gets ahead...
...The Moslem population is shy of factories and sticks to the countryside...
...It is also worth noting that although Islam proclaimed itself a religion of the sword it won adherents wherever it competed peacefully with other religions...
...But in Islamic Iran the failure of modernization is resulting in a triumphant return to Islam...
...And while the data are not yet available, it is likely that the median of West Indian blacks and Cubans in this country will be at 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980...
...some inequalities in income, prestige, and, yes, access to writing opportunities could then be said to be deserved...
...It displayed a remarkable ingenuity in putting to practical use theories and processes borrowed from near and far...
...There is no instance of a country being de-Islamized the way the Middle East and North Africa were totally de-Christianized...
...Certainly, vast numbers of blacks, and newly-immigrant Jews, Asians, and Slavs thus got the chance to become "gentlemen" long before they routinely started being born that way...
...He knew of the incompatibility between Islam and the modern spirit and persecuted Islam with a personal passion...
...Even when, as in Spain, the Balkans, and Russia, Islam was driven out by force, its imprint has endured...
...The reason for the ensuing stagnation was the hardening of orthodoxy...
...Through most of its history Islam has acted as a tranquilizer...
...Actually, despite the forbiddance of alcohol, Islam caters to the appetites and is the least ascetic of religions...
...One hardly ever hears of a Moslem abandoning Islam for another faith...
...Egypt began to modernize itself in the wake of the Napoleonic invasion, almost 50 years before Japan, yet Egypt is still a backward country...
...In Christian Britain the present economic breakdown caused by the lethargy of workers and managers is seen as an aspect of Britain's decline from greatness...
...This has been true in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and Nigeria...
...ure of modernization in an Islamic country not as a demonstration of inferiority but as a reassertion of a superior way of life against corrupt views and practices introduced by outsiders...
...As things are now it seems that the Communist ability to modernize an Islamic society may eventually be tested in Afghanistan and Southern Yemen, under the eyes of fanatical Islamic neighbors...
...Historically, the introduction of standardized mental tests was a liberating revolution relative to what went before, and they were successful in displacing the old ways largely because they made it easy to show that the then-usual means of distributing access to educational opportunities-in the South, by means of race, and in the rest of the country, by means of having attended the right prep schools, having recommendations from the right kinds of Protestant family ministers, and having alumni as relatives--were systematically overlooking many academically superior students...
...Even under Communism, Tartar khans are ensconced in the Kremlin...
...Too, the central tendency of higher socio-economic groups is above that of lower socio-economic groups, that of Southern whites below that of Northern whites, and that of California Hispanics between those of whites and blacks...
...For the first time there was a systematic employment of the water wheel and the windmill...
...It is a most congenial religion, without contradictions between state and church, profession and practice, the spirit and the flesh...
...The magnetic compass, the astrolabe, and Indian arithmetic were put to practical use...
...The impressive mass calisthenics at prayer in spacious, carpeted mosques give the Moslem a profound sense of egality...
...The lesson coming out of that old and noble battle was that we should assess individuals and let the group ratios fall where they may, even when this results, as it puzzlingly did, in a worrisome under-representation of white Protestants, upon whom these new measures had largely been validated...
...No Islamic country has mastered industrial production or achieved anything remotely comparable to what was accomplished in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and India...
...Just being a Moslem is enough...
...Artesian wells were bored in North Africa and other semi-arid regions and vast irrigation projects developed...
...The received wisdom has been that the allocation of academic opportunities over the last decades has been made largely on the basis of demonstrated talent and competence, and that mental tests are a superior tool, indeed the best single one we have, for ferreting beneath the veneer of social class, race, and ethnicity to reveal occluded capabilities...
...Predictably, this component of the "merit system" has drawn critics the way ripe meat draws William R. Havender is a research biochemist at the University of California at Berkeley and a contributing editor to Regulation magazine...
...Finally, it is curious that Christianity, a champion of the meek, o f " the weak things of the world," made its greatest headway among the warrior tribes of Europe while Islam appeals to victors and victims alike...
...In the Islamic world an individual is a Moslem before he is anything else...
...Paper factories, sugar refineries, manufactories of textiles, leather, glazed tile, steel, and chemicals dotted the Moslem world from Spain to Central Asia...
...It is natural for a Moslem to see the failEric Hoffer, a retired longshoreman, is the author of nine books, including The True Believer and his latest, Before the Sabbath...
...It was precisely the availability of this alternative means of demonstrating academic capability that gave both compelling plausibility and moral force to the movement to base admissions on objectively measured merit...
...Yet 40 years after Atatfirk's death it is obvious that his attempt to de-Islamize Turkey has failed...
...William R. Havender WHEN INTELLIGENCE PASSES THE TEST The bias in mental tests is all in the criticizing of them...
...Csan Communism modernize an Islamic country...
...All crafts were in a flourishing state...
...The deep conviction that Islam is the only true faith, superior to all religions past, present, and future, gives the Moslem an unequaled sense of certitude and pride...
...Now it is true that in its early phase, lasting about three centuries, Islamic civilization was in the vanguard of mankind...
...Even without a pilgrimage to Mecca he is aware of being one of a vast brotherhood...
...Islam is regaining ground, and Turkey has not joined the advanced countries...
...That Islam did not recover after the ruinous Mongol invasions the way Japan and Germany recovered after their ruinous defeat in the Second World War is obviously due to the fact that in the Islamic world energies and skills were not widely diffused, that the creative impulse originated in a relatively small group of outsiders...
...The result of this lack of inner contradictions and tensions has been intellectual and economic stagnation...
...Although the Communists have broken the power of the Ulema, Islam's caste of scholars and priests, and are modernizing industry and agriculture at breakneck speed, the vigor of Islam has remained undiminished...
...Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, and Alma Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, are "Russian towns set down in the center of Asia...
...No other religion can rival Islam's lasting hold on its adherTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980 11 ents...
...Thus, a plunge into the hectic atmosphere of rapid modernization is experienced by a Moslem as an expulsion from Eden...
...But if true, this lends a measure of desert to the way rewards are distributed in American society...
...Islam is also winning Negro adherents not only in Africa but in Christian America despite the fact that the slave trade in Africa was for a long time an Islamic monopoly...
...A t a t i i r k did not know what he was up against...
...Then, almost abruptly, Islam's golden age came to an end...
...This is the recurrent finding that, though members of all ethnic, religious, and socio-economic groups are found throughout the grade distribution when such tests are given to large, representative samples of the citizenry, they are not found in constant proportions at all levels...
...The mosques and shrines are packed with worshipers and the Islamic way of life persists...
...He cannot become inured to the ceaseless striving and vying which fuel advanced societies...
...An Iran that tried and failed to achieve material plenty by mastering modern means of production is supposedly contrasting the naked materialism of the West with the spirituality of Islam...
...Specifically, the central tendency of both Asians and Jews is above that of gentile whites, and that of the latter above that of blacks...
...It is a trick of pride to put up defenses against something we want and cannot have...
...In the Balkans several cities retain an Islamic way of life long after Turkey's withdrawal...
...There are about 70 million Moslems in Soviet Central Asia...
...Seven centuries after its expulsion from Spain the flavor of Islam is tangible in Spanish life...
...Would it be legitimate to predict that once Communism loses its ruthlessness the incompatibility between Islam and modernization would make itself felt, and some religious leader would recapitulate in Samarkand, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan, what the Ayatollah Khomeini has done in Teheran...
...In Russia, the continuity with the Tartar khanate is evident in every department of life...
...Despite this laudable history, there remained a detail that gives nourishment to the current attack on mental tests...
...His spectacular reforms seemed to modernize Turkey overnight...
...Christianity and Islam arrived simultaneously in Indonesia...
...Hence, as orthodoxy asserted itself it became more difficult for outsiders to play the role of culture bearers...
...He was not aware of the paradox that although Islam cannot generate the social vigor requisite for effective industrial production, it is singularly vigorous as a religion and a way of life...
...They were Persians, Greeks, Jews, Berbers, Turks, and Spaniards, and so notoriously impious that orthodox Moslems refused to break bread with them...
...The Mongol invasion in the East during the thirteenth century made the decline seem cataclysmic...
...Eric Hoffer ISLAM AND MODERNIZATION Muhammad, messenger of plod...
Vol. 13 • June 1980 • No. 6
