http://www.cracked.com/article_18510_6-supposedly-ancient-traditions-that-totally-arent.html
QuoteActually, the Middle East's clock stopped around the same time as the one at Marty McFly's high school in the 1950s. If the Arab world was really still stuck in the Middle Ages, everyone would be a lot better off.
Who Made It Up?
During the period the the Western world thinks of as the Dark Ages, when Europeans were busy murdering each other over matters of religion and superstition, Islam was cool as a cucumber. At the time, Islamic regions were actually more accepting of Judaism and Christianity than most of the Christian world was of Judaism and other types of Christianity. Long before the Italian Renaissance, the Islamic Empire realized the Greeks and Romans had been on to something with this book learning stuff, and used this realization to revolutionize astronomy, literature, physics, philosophy and architecture. Still bored, they went ahead and invented algebra and modern medicine too.
The antiquated practices many Westerners associate with modern Islam are actually a relatively recent development. Reporting from Saudi Arabia for The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright interviewed an older Saudi man who reminisced about the good old days when men and women used to be able to celebrate weddings together. While it might seem weird to Westerners used to hearing stories of ankle length hemlines following the words "Back in my day... ," in the Middle East, when grandparents miss the good old days, they're often talking about a place that was far less up its own ass.
It wasn't until the 1950s that fundamentalist Islam started gaining influence, and outdated, dying traditions like the veil saw a spike in popularity. That's when followers of a fringe 18th century scholar Mohammed Al Wahab began to take Islam back to basics, which in this case meant an imaginary past where women were treated like shit and all the pesky "progress" of the last 1400 years never happened. During his lifetime, Wahab was taken about as seriously as Pat Robertson is taken today in the West. But in the 1950s, Wahabi Muslim thinkers like Sayyid Qutb started to urge total separation between Islam and the West, arguing that the outside world had "nothing else to give humanity."
Qutb and his fundamentalist contemporaries inspired a new generation of radical thinkers, who took this "fuck the West" mentality a few steps further, resulting in a Middle East that is far less progressive than the Dark Ages they're supposedly stuck in.
See, as tempting as it might be to divide history into the bad guys and the good guys, civilizations tend to evolve more like the Batman franchise, kicking ass part of the time, and reaching unspeakable, ass backwards lows that would embarrass their ancestors at others. Muslim people were doing algebra while we were burning women for having funny birthmarks on their face. They just happen to be going through their Batman and Robin phase.
Anyone know if there's any truth to this? I'm curious to know.
Some of it is true. Qutb was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and is certainly the source of the Western enmity that characterizes modern Islamo-fascism. Qutb attended college in the United States and, supposedly, was appalled at the decadence of American/Western culture. This got tied deeply into his nationalism as Egypt was busy trying to assert itself as a free and independent nation, and the Middle East as a whole was gripped with post-colonial fervor. What you end up with is fundamentalist religion tied in with rabid nationalism to create Islamic Fascism. Sharia law as it's currently practiced owes a great deal to these stunted thinkers. For instance, the notion that a woman must dress like a cross between a ninja and a potato sack is not Quranically based. All the Quran suggests is that women dress modestly along the same lines that you see in the Bible, head covered, etc. Essentially what Qutb did was exactly what Hitler and Mussolini died, attempt to create a fascist third way alternative to capitalism and socialism. But to say that this is ALL due to Qutb and Wahabi is a bit of a stretch. Islam is by its very nature a political religion, Mohammed wasn't just a prophet, he was the head of an Empire, and each caliph or Sultan since Mohammed has claimed some kind of either direct or political descent from him. The main break between Sunni and Shi'a Islam is who gets to rule the roost after Big Mo died. As both Hitchens and Dawkins have pointed out, the calls to kill or convert infidels are in the book. If Qutb hadn't articulated ties between Islam and state power, someone else would have.
Islam is no less stupid, regardless.
And they don't even know how much wood a woodchuck would chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.