Niall Ferguson Quotes
Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's "Imagine." What you end up with is civil war, anarchy.
Kreisler, Harry. "Empire: Conversation with Niall Ferguson." Conversations with History, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, 2004.
This is a very important quotation. It explains in great part, why there have been so few internal revolutions in Muslim countries. Al-Ghazi’s interpretation of Islamic Law and Theology concluded that even if the ruler is incompetent, corrupt, or destructive he should be supported and obeyed by all good Muslim citizens. The reason was that anarchy and/or chaos was an evil much worse for the Islamic community. There was one exception in the case of a ruler who was blasphemous or did not follow Islam. Then it was the duty of good Muslims. Since then, the ruler of an Islamic state, first seeks to ingratiated himself with the clergy. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the Royal Family gives enormous sums to all the clerics. They then urge dissidents and would be revolutionaries to accept the Royal Family with its flaws and shortcomings and accept their lack of freedom and human rights. And they tell all that the King and his family are all religious and support Islam. Therefore any revolt would be a tantamount to a sin. The Christian world had a different technique for inhibiting Revolution. Christian rulers claimed the Devine Right of Kings—that God had selected and ordained the king to lead. Regime change was contrary to the word of God. In a sense, the Islamic approach is more intellectually honest and seems to have worked much better than the Christians who have had so many revolutions. Better that is from the rulers point of view. From a democratic, Jeffersonian point of view revolting against an evil ruler was almost a moral obligation, and Al-Ghazali’s principle is all wrong and is keeping the Muslim countries from reaching democracy.
1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor. England had occupied Iraq, expecting to be welcomed by the natives, but like the George W. Bush ill-fated invasion almost a century afterward calls for withdrawal were met by the same rationale for maintaining the occupation. The English policy makers like the Bush administration were expecting a more welcoming reaction. See {585250}.
Niall Campbell Ferguson is a Scottish historian and the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard University, the London School of Economics and New York University, visiting professor at New College of the Humanities and senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford.
