(Continued from part 1.)
If you are a believing Muslim with no intention of actually evaluating the veracity of your beliefs against the evidence, then there is probably nothing I can say to convince you that Islam is not true. But that is not the purpose of this series of posts.
There are plenty of places on the Internet where many people have written extensively about their reasons for rejecting the claims of Islam, which you can easily find for yourself. You may be aware that almost all educated non-Muslims who have studied your religion do not convert into it, and perhaps you think that this is only because they are prejudiced, ignorant, or obstinate.
But whether these people are wrong or not is beside the point. Even if they are, you must still concede the fact that large numbers of people have studied your religion, and made the conscientious decision to reject it.
You must be familiar with at least some of the reasons non-Muslims give for not converting to Islam, such as the (perceived) conflict of Muslim customs and Islamic law with Western conceptions of governance and individual liberties, or the (alleged) propensity of Muslims for violence. You probably know that there is a great deal of debate over whether modern scientific theories are incompatible with a belief in God. You may be aware that many non-Muslims have serious reservations about the character and conduct of Muhammad, even if you think that these can be adequately addressed. You may not know that many of the claims of Islam which touch upon history are contradicted by the historical evidence, or perhaps you believe that Muslim scholars are a more reliable source of information on the history of Islam than (non-Muslim) professional historians, and have never questioned this belief.
These are not the issues I wish to address here, since they have already been written about at length elsewhere. What I wish to point out is that Muslim apologists claim not only that the religion is true, but that certain consequences follow from its implementation and practice, both for individuals and for societies. Because critics of Islam have typically focused on arguing that the claims of the religion contradict the evidence, they have usually left the assertions of Muslim apologists about the consequences of following Islam unchallenged.
Many of these assertions deal with the material aspects of Islamic societies, and they can be examined independently of the religious or spiritual claims of Islam. Proponents of Islam take it for granted that a society’s adherence to Islamic principles and law determines its success, and that a civilisation based upon and organised around the shari`ah would naturally be materially successful, economically prosperous, and scientifically advanced.
But suppose that these assumptions are wrong. What if a society’s adherence to the Islamic shari`ah guarantees that it would be a perpetuator of ignorance, headed for economic bankruptcy, and be militarily weak? In the following posts, I will argue that the sad state of most Muslim-majority countries today is due primarily not to external factors, but to internal and specifically Islamic ones.
(To be continued.)
– davinci
0 Responses to “Islamic societies and the economics of ignorance, part 2”