Why US democracy model hard to impose in Muslim countries

The problem can be laid at the feet of religion. As long as religion rules government functions no change is possible.

Read Noah Feldman's book After Jihad: Islam and Democracy , Oxford, 2002, and L. Carl Brown's book Religion and State: The Muslim Approach to Politics. Columbia, 2001. They may offer some insight.
AS far as the status of women in the Middle East, this is more due to pseudo-Bedouin tradition than to Islam itself, which actually advocates some rights for women, including the right to divorce, to testify in civil and criminal cases,and to own property.

Hobitbob

Your comment about Bedouin tradition influencing Islam was most interesting.

My perceptions of Islam are probably wrong but am I correct in saying that in the first four or five centuries of Islam people flouished, prospered and contributed significant technology to the world. If I am correct in that statement, my next perception is that now Islam is the religion of darkness and poverty for it's people. If that perception is correct then my question to you is ---how did that happen and why? My current impression of Islam is that a very fine religion has been hi-jacked by the Wahhabis----I'm probably wrong here also.

I have no ulterior motives for asking the question except honest curiosity.

The overwhelming ignorance of Westerners to the history of the Islamic world is startling and is the basis for such noxious comments that the West has caused the troubles in the area, as if the entire area and its inherent problems between peoples, tribes and religious sects, viz., Shiite, Sunni, Kharijites, Ismalis, Qarmatians, Druze, Matawila, Zaydis was instigated by and created by some sort of Western or Jewish cabal.

These folks have been fighting, and killing each other for Allah, or gold for 40 centuries, the West is a new player in the game and to insist, as have some, that the West caused this mess is completely a sign of ignorance of history.

Let's face it, Islam, in the 12th century had extruded from it any line of heterodoxy. And it is the presence of such heterodoxy in the West that has lifted it beyond the Islamic world in economic strength. This Western heterodoxy is called rationalism

While it is true that a summation of some of the glorious things brought to the world by Muslims and Islam would fill volumes. Yet with all that this civilization, one that spanned the Eurasian continent for over a millennium, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, it declined intellectually, philosophically, economically, and scientifically.

The evolution of a fierce orthodoxy in Islam after the time of Ibn Rushd throttled the brightest intellectual and scientific culture the world ever saw up to that time. The manner of distrusting human reason and towards mysticism in al-Ghazali's "the Destruction of the Philosophy" served as a standard for later Islamic theology and served as a cudgel in the hand of those who swayed the Ulema against rationalism.

The stress brought about by this roll back of rationalism in Islam was not overnight, there were still magnificent achievements by Muslims across a wide range of arts, sciences, architecture, and medicine, but the damage was done. The stifling of rationalism played as major a part in the decline of intellectual thought in the Islamic world as did the Mongol invasions in the 13th century to their physical empires.

The West has had the dynamic tensions of the Cities of Man and of God in conflict, viz., the Greek Paganism and Rationality versus Judeo-Christian Morality and religious iconography. Islam snuffed out this conflict long ago.

I am sore put to believe a scientific renaissance from Islam if each new scientific fact discovered is merely defined as mystical revelation of Allah, and any disputes about the features of such discoveries considered within the realm of discourse for definitive truth by a council of mullahs.

Any such efforts of theology into a field requiring rationalism like science smacks of Lysenkoism

Not withstanding his own influences by Western rationality, I would recommend Muhammad Iqbal's "Six lectures on the reconstruction of religious thought in Islam," you will find that he thought that, as the West has come to see in their religious icons, that Islam, its sacred tenets and texts must be rethought and reinterpreted allegorically.

So must all religions.

Kuvasz

Very interesting but you didn't address my contention that Islam has been perverted by the Wahhabi sect which I believe resides mostly in Saudi Arabia.

kuvasc
Kuvasc, excellent! excellent!

I've oftened wondered when Islam will produce an equivalent of Martin Luther to effect a desperately needed Islamic Reformation---as a first step.

---BumbleBeeBoogie

i did not address your postulation because wahhabism is merely a branch on the tree of Islamic mysticism. I was discussing the roots of the tree itself.

it is a personal idiosyncrasy of mine to prefer to address the causes, not the symptoms.