The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [28]
The Koran prescribes the ideal ordering of society with rules primarily designed to bring under control the tribal anarchy of the time, with its extremely violent fights against and among clans and tribes. In The Closed Circle, David Pryce-Jones describes how this tribal system functioned. In a vicious cycle of violence, one tribe tried to dominate another, which meant that there was a permanent struggle for power within the tribe, the clan, and the family. At the top of every family, clan, or tribe stood one man. Often this captain had acquired his position through cunning and violence. For instance, Muhammad had managed to get a number of tribes to accept important political and social (and eventually also economic) regulations that supported values central to the tribal way of life, such as maintaining the tribe’s honor and the redistribution of property. These laws brought a lasting solution to the problems between rival tribes and forced them to become allies. The fighting continued, but only against tribes outside the Islamic circle.
Not surprisingly, many of the laws laid down by the Koran put the social peace of the group first, within which there is a high degree of social control. Many of these laws are related to the honor of a man, his family, or his clan. The opposite of honor is disgrace, so a man is as passionate about guarding his honor as he is about avoiding shame and disgrace. Lies and evasion play an important part in this culture of honor and shame; ignoring or simply denying what has really happened is normal. The tribal culture has a strongly developed sense of mistrust, not only of outsiders, but also of the members of one’s own family or clan.
RISE AND FALL OF ISLAM
Islam united ignorant Arabic tribes that had been deeply immersed in anarchy into a world civilization. In the seventh century, Muslims conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and the rest of North Africa and began to move into the Iberian Peninsula. Nothing seemed to stop the new faith from spreading. During the rise of Islam, the only other civilization of a comparable standard and size was China. But Bernard Lewis distinguishes the Chinese civilization from Islam because it was restricted to a single region and one racial group. The Muslims created a multiethnic, multiracial, and universal world civilization. Yet today, compared with the Christian West, the Muslim world has become poor, weak, fractious, and ignorant.
According to Lewis, the question “What went wrong?” is commonly tackled from either a secular or sociopsychological point of view. Secularists put the role of religion in Islamic society at the center of the discussion and argue that the West’s economic and cultural primacy is the result of the separation of church and state and of the institution of a civil society that follows secular legislation. The others, especially feminists, focus on sexism and the inferior position of women in Islamic society. Not only do these problems deprive the Islamic world of half their population’s talents and energy, they disadvantage their own children by leaving them in the care of illiterate, downtrodden mothers.
“The products of such an education…are likely to grow up arrogant or submissive, and unfit for a free, open society,” says Lewis. Indeed a growing number of Muslims claim the answer to