Steven Schlosstein Quotes
The most pressing challenge that the Arabs have yet to confront is the reform of Islam. If the Arab world can’t or won’t accept the concept of the secular state as being consistent with Islam, then neither high-speed economic growth, nor liberal democracy have much chance in the Middle East.
Steven Schlosstein, International Economist & Strategist and Writer, Endangered Species: Why Muslim Economies Fail
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10 centuries ago was a time when the Arabs were far more advanced and modern than other cultures including the Christian West that was in the Dark Ages. However, in the 12th century there was a “closing”—a narrowing of allowable Islamic thinking, and since then, Islamic people have had great difficulty with change or modernity. Not all Muslim nations are equally rigid but the Arabs are at the extreme among Islamic counties.
At the time, Muslim clerics had a great deal of influence and in many cases legal control over all facets of Turkish society much as exists in other Islamic societies today. They even controlled what was taught in the schools. Remarkably, without bloodshed, Ataturk broke both the power and the influence of the clerics on all official and public activities. Many Turkish Muslims even developed a type of reformed Islam with the relationship between the individual and the clerics one of parity much like Protestant churches in the West. At the same time there was a more orthodox part of the population and while they sent their children to religious schools, they also attended public schools so even the orthodox Muslims in Turkey learned science and modern subjects which are still not taught in most Islamic schools and madrassas.
The Israeli Arabs have a much higher standard of living than their coreligionists in the Arab controlled parts of Palestine and even Eqypt.See {588743} for more information that is related.
Traditional Islamic education of the time only dealt with the Koran but the skills of modern life, medicine, law, science were taught in the British secular schools, which Muslims generally would not attend. Kahn urged all is fellow Muslims to benefit from all forms of education.
