- (november 2010)
Religious cleansing and the decline of Islamic civilization.
The Islamic civilization peaked between the 8th and the 15th century. Three
factors accounted for its sudden glory: 1. They created the first globalized
economy, extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean; 2. They
unified ancient civilizations that had never been unified before (Roman, Greek,
Egyptian, Persian, Jewish and Hindu); 3. Muslims were a tiny minority of the empire (even
many of the administrative posts were held by non-Muslims).
Fast forward to the 16th-17th centuries: 1. The Islamic trade region has
disintegrated into several warring states and the Europeans have bypassed its
lands by sea; 2. The Greek-Persian-Jewish influence has been replaced by the
civilization of the new rulers, the Turkic people who came from Central Asia;
3. Muslims have become the majority in their lands.
During the 20th century the exodus of non-Muslims accelerated. Muslims like to
talk about the Jews who migrated to Israel, but rarely mention the millions of
Jews who were expelled (directly or indirectly) from the Islamic lands.
Countries like Morocco and Iran that used to have huge Jewish populations now
have only a few thousand left. Christians left in even higher numbers after the
various countries of north Africa and the Middle East gained independence from
Britain, France, Italy and Spain.
Civil war after civil war the non-Muslim minorities have been shrinking ever
more. Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine and now Iraq have lost millions of skilled
and educated non-Muslims during their civil wars. Christians become easy targets
of Islamic fundamentalists whenever there is a power vacuum.
Iraq used to have several millions of Christians. Now only 1.5 million
Christians are left in Iraq. Zoroastrians have been exterminated throughout the
Islamic world. Buddhists have been expelled from Afghanistan (where Muslims
committed the worst religious atrocity of recent times by destroying the great
Buddha statues of Bamiya) and Hindus have been reduced to less than 1% of the
population in Pakistan. The Hindus of Bali have been targeted by Islamic
fundamentalists. And so forth.
When (in october 2010) Islamic fundamentalists took 100 hostages in a Christian church of Baghdad,
they simply continued a trend that started centuries ago, and that is one of
the key factors explaining the continuing decline of the Islamic civilization:
it was ot Islamic at all, it was instead one of the greatest melting pots of all
times.
P.S. In december 2010 a car bomb killed seven Christians at a church in Alexandria, Egypt.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2009 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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