The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [30]
In July 2002 the United Nations Development Program published the Arab Human Development Report, an analytical survey of the average life expectancy, the level of education, and the standard of life of the inhabitants of twenty-two Islamic countries. The report confirms the theory put forward by Pryce-Jones and Lewis: deep-rooted institutional shortcomings stand in the way of human development. According to the report, the region is plagued by “three key deficits that can be considered defining features”:
a lack of freedom
disempowerment of women
a lack of capabilities or knowledge.
THE FATE OF THE PEOPLE
How do people live in this kind of premodern lack of development? The “mass triangle” represents their response. There is also a “power” or “elite triangle,” which will be explained in a moment. Reality, of course, is more complex; categories overlap.
In accordance with tribal culture, the power in the home countries of Muslim immigrants (with the important exception of Turkey) is concentrated in a triangle, consisting of a political leader at the top (either a president or a king), followed by the army, and then the official clergy (’ulema). These three sectors (just about) reinforce each other. Its members often come from the same family, clan, or tribe and are related by marriage. Their power is partly based on these relationships. To these people at the top, Islam is an instrument, a means to consolidate the existing balance of power. In states such as Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, the secular government monitors religious leaders, and there is a state religion. The political and army leaders have complete control over the official instruments of force (in the absence of an independent judiciary), all sources of government income (tax and trade), the media (radio, television, newspapers), and the economy. The result is a general stagnation in society.
The mass triangle represents the various ways in which the people respond to this stagnation.
There is corruption and apathy. Only a section of the population has access to public services through the clan or tribe, and these people take advantage of the endemic corruption within the civil service and the business community. A proportion of the financial aid from Western counties and international organizations is taken by this dominant group, which is out to enrich itself and often resorts to bribery and blackmail. The rest of the population tends to accept the situation as it is, because that is all they have ever known.
There is a rise in fundamentalism. This rapidly expanding section of the population does not accept the existing balance of power. Fundamentalists are on the rise everywhere, even among professionals with a high level of education (lawyers, doctors, and others). They are disappointed by secular ideologies such as liberal democracy, nationalism, and communism. Fundamentalists believe that all the social and economic miseries—“What went wrong”—are due to the widespread neglect of Islamic values and standards. The Islamic Brotherhood, Bin Laden’s al Qaeda, and Erbakan’s Milli Görüs in Turkey accuse the United States, in particular, of supporting tyranny in their countries. In some countries, the fundamentalists are described as the only authentic opposition group in the Islamic world, but of course many countries do also have democratic and/or secular opposition parties. Fundamentalist power depends on zealous missionary work, an antipathy toward government-supported clerics, desperate force (terrorism and martyrdom), and their own religious centers, such as the Al-Azhar University in Egypt.
There is significant internal and external emigration. The biggest victims