>The larger point -- an incompatibility of materialism in science with
>Islam and Islamism
Not that one. This one: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Elberg/Ali/ali-con4.html
>So in the end, is it really this inability to separate religion from
>the state in the Islamic world that is the key problem? Or is the
>problem of the Muslim world's relation to the Western empire more important?
>
>It's a combination of both. The critique, therefore, has to be a
>dual critique, both of the empire, but also of the failure of these
>regimes in [the Islamic] world to sort out their own problems. You
>can't blame everything, after all, on Western intervention. There's
>a whole period in that world where they could have gone on their
>own. It's true the empire intervened to stop them, but if they had
>behaved in a different way, they would have won. I'll give you one
>concrete example.
>
>In the late fifties, there was a wave of nationalist revolutions in
>the Arab world -- Egypt, Iraq -- and there was a real possibility of
>creating a single Arab entity, or a dominant Arab entity, the "Arab
>Nation," which was the dream of the all the Arabs and their poets.
>There was first a union between Egypt and Syria in which the
>Egyptians should have shared more power with the Syrians instead of
>treating them as they did, seeing themselves as the dominant nation.
>Then you had a revolution in Iraq in 1958, and the new ruler of
>Iraq, Abdel Kerim Kassem, was a nationalist. Radio Cairo, Baghdad,
>and Damascus were [all] preaching nationalist revolutions. The Saudi
>regime was trembling. The Iraqis proposed one Arab nation with three
>concurrent capitals -- Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus -- run as one
>entity, to be funded by Iraqi oil. Now, to my mind, if that had
>happened, it would have taken that world onto a different level
>altogether in terms of modernization, education of the population, etc., etc.
>
>Why didn't it happen? People say, "Ah, the Americans used Israel to
>hit the nations in '67." That is true, but that was already when the
>attempt to create a single Arab entity had been defeated. So between
>'58 and '67, there were real possibilities in that world which they
>didn't take for foolish reasons, for reasons of political pride,
>narcissism, factionalism, stupidity. And we now pay the price for that.