Dear Mr. Tovey

Submitted by Debanjan Banerjee (India), Jul 13, 2013 at 14:23

Greetings we come back again to continue our discussion.

Murderous regimes "inspired by the Western concepts of nation-state and language based ethnic nationalism" does little to explain the full implosion of societies that lost their ability to function under the rule of law and provide for the common welfare of the inhabitants

My Answer >> Dear Mr. Tovey you need to understand that Christians and Jews have been as much part of the West Asian and North African landscape as fish in the water ever since the death of the Prophet(PBUH). The West needs to ask itself why that at the beginning of the 20-th century Christians consisted of about 30 percent of the region's populations , (there were many centuries when even countries like Iraq and Syria Jews and Christians were sound majorities under a Muslim caliph) and then now Christianity is not even 5 per cent of the population of the region ?

Now we did not have these alien ideologies like Kemalism , the Saur revolution , Baathism or Wahabism as we see today during the times of the Ottomans , Safavids or the Mamlukes or Ayubid or Caliphate periods. So clearly the growth of these ideologies must be considered as the result of the contact between the West and the Muslim world.

Do you really believe had Kemal Mustafa nor trained by German officers there would be anything called Kemalism ? Do you believe there would be any Shah of Iran without CIA ? Do you accept there would be any Saddam Hussain or Bashar ul Assad without the Psykes-Picot agreement ? Do you believe there would be any Muammar Qaddafi without his British superior officers ?

Even now do you believe without the blessings of the West , the Wahabbies would be able to wreak as much havoc as they are currently doing in Syria ?

"Saddam Hussein would not have been able to pit the Sunni's against the Shi'ites were it not for their innate antipathies."

Please read Robert Fisk carefully. Saddam Hussain managed to bring both the Sunnis and Shias and Christians together in his war against Iran. He was a secular Arab nationalist and not a sectarian guy. There was a reason that the Shias in Iraq did not defect to the Iranian side during the war since they too considered it as a battle between Iraq and Iran and not a Sunni-Shia battle.

Were contentment the most sought after state of being for Muslims, why would there not be a greater desire for peace within places like, say, that great bastion of Islam, Iran, where shari'a is as entrenched as any place claiming such things; yet there is anything but contentment there.

My Answer >>> Stange that you choose the example of Iran to prove your point. How do you know people in the Iran is not content ? Then why did they vote in overwhelming numbers in the last two elections when the percentage of voters in the West has dropped sharply over the last 2-3 decades.

If you go by the amount of political dissent , most of the so-called dissenters are lured by money and not conviction. And talking about dissenters it seems the West also has a fare share of them thanks to Mr. Assange , Mr. Manning and last but not least Mr. Snowden. Now these people are ruled by their convictions and not money as some of the Iranian dissenters or even people like Nonie Darwish , Ayan Hirsi Ali , Salman Rushdie , Taslima Nasrin or Walid Shoebat has been.

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