I would add another effect of Islam: Islam discourages Western influence. Therefore it would be less prestigious to adopt Western norms.
I predict we may see African Christians attempt to break away from their Muslim regions. This will happen as Christians realize their small family sizes make them have smaller populations. Therefore, they run the risk of being ruled by an emerging Muslim majority.
Nigeria in particular may go through something like the partition of India.
Not a word about European colonialism. British and French imperialists dominated sub-Saharan Africa, north and south, through vastly superior technology. To administer their states they favored Christians and non-white South Asians. European and American missionaries provided education and health care to Christian populations. For commerce, the Europeans, especially the British brought in non-western, non-Christian, non-Islamic, store keepers to act as financial intermediaries, who, despite being non-white assisted the empire by organizing finances and administration. Gandhi is a famous example having earned his reputation by mastering European law and using it to better the lot of his fellow South Asians, but not Black South Africans.
well explained and where do we go from here? Ethiopia is a best model on the continent of persistent development strategy that started under TPLF initiating material processing prior to export and prioritizing the inputs this needs: energy and transport infrastructure, and continued by Abiy and adding required dimensions as growth advances: Medemer political union and security, suppression of armed separatists and more secure ports. The Sahel must also develop export material processing, but has extremely small base and decades of non investment by France, and security is front and center now in the face of jihadi revolt.
strategic perspectives: countries should prioritize security of people and commerce and military pressure on jihadi organization, civil forces uniting with the military governments and foreign countries with tangible and no/few strings assistance. while plagued with terror, supremacism and pre industrial paternalism and violence, other characteristics of the jihadi revolt gray their allegiance such as the actual neglect and conceptual vacuum of the establishment and belief in Fiqh scholarship which while negative also has potential for inversion with modernization interpretation. the government thrust while uncompromising on violence must not be unending schism like north africa but rather the objective integration of jihadis into army, administration, society and their families. government amplification of the wide range of critical voices of islam and fiqh modernizers seems small now but will be decisive to future reunification and building sovereign state capacity. Ties with Turkiye and Iran may help. The disintegration of passive and worthless French liberalism frees up civil society to rethink their position, to shift from anti tradition pro foreign dividers to modernizing patriotic unifiers.
Why Should Non-Muslims Try to Understand Islam? Because It Does Not Wait For You To Decide.
I want to tell you something that almost nobody in a position to say it publicly will say plainly.
Not because it is controversial among people who have actually read the texts. It is not. It is so well established that the tradition's own greatest scholars said it first, said it clearly, and built a legal architecture around it that has been standing for over a thousand years.
They just don't say it on CNN.
Here it is.
Islam is the only major religion on earth whose authoritative legal tradition contains a framework for governing people who never chose it.
Not a fringe interpretation. Not a radical deviation. The mainstream position of classical Sunni jurisprudence. Ibn Kathir said it. Al-Suyuti said it. Al-Shafi'i said it. These are not angry men on the internet. These are the tradition's own most revered voices, the ones whose opinions still govern Islamic law today, and what they said is this: the world is divided into the house of Islam and the house of war, and the legal obligation to bring the second into the first does not expire, does not pause, and does not require your permission.
Every other major religion exists to transform the lives of people who walk through the door voluntarily. Islam does that too. But Islam also contains something none of the others do. A legal obligation toward the people who never walked through the door. And a specified set of conditions under which those people may be permitted to keep living. Under Islamic authority. Paying a tax for the privilege. Subject to restrictions. Subject to a formal, legally codified ritual of humiliation.
This is not a secret buried in a dusty manuscript. This is the tradition's own self-description. And it is sitting there in the sources, in plain Arabic, waiting for anyone willing to read it.
This is why Shariah law does not stay in Muslim-majority countries. It was never designed to.
Now. The other thing you need to understand is abrogation.
The Quran has peaceful verses. Tolerance, coexistence, patience. It also has verses commanding perpetual warfare against unbelievers until Islam is the last thing standing. If you are expecting me to tell you these two things somehow harmonize, I am going to disappoint you.
The Islamic legal tradition has a formal mechanism for resolving this problem. It is called naskh. We say abrogation. Think of it as a software update. The most recent instruction overrides everything before it. The Quran was not delivered all at once. It came over roughly twenty-three years, piece by piece, and in Islamic jurisprudence the later material governs the earlier material when they conflict.
Al-Suyuti. One of the tradition's greatest scholars. Counted more than one hundred peaceful verses cancelled out by a single later verse.
One verse.
The peaceful Quran that gets quoted at interfaith dinners and on the floor of Western parliaments is almost entirely early material. The Quran itself is not arranged chronologically. It is arranged by chapter length, largest first, which means you cannot tell from reading it which verses came first and which came last and therefore which ones actually govern. That arrangement is not an accident. It is not a conspiracy either. It is just a fact that changes everything about how the book should be read and almost nobody in the West knows it.
And then there is taqiyya.
The doctrine that grants permission, under conditions judged by the person doing the deceiving, to deceive. An enemy. A spouse. Anyone, when the cause requires it. Not a conspiracy theory invented by critics. A documented feature of Islamic jurisprudence. Debated, defined, agreed upon across the major schools. In the tradition's own literature.
I need to stop here and say the thing I always have to say, because if I don't someone will say it for me and pretend it refutes everything above.
None of this means every Muslim is your enemy. I have known Muslims I would trust with my life. One of them I called a brother for ten years. The investigation that produced everything I write cost me that friendship and I have not stopped thinking about what that cost him. He was not my enemy. He was the reason I did the reading.
But here is what I need you to understand.
You are already inside this argument. You did not choose to be. The terms were set by texts written fourteen centuries ago, the mechanisms were established by jurists whose names you do not know, and the outcome is moving whether or not you are paying attention.
Understanding Islam from its own authoritative sources, not from its most marketable presentations, is not optional.It is not Islamophobia. It is literacy.
I have no degree. What I have is a nail gun, ten trades, and 1,346 audiobooks consumed while I was building other people's houses. I came to this the same way I come to everything. Primary sources first. Load-bearing joints before anything else. Nothing on ice.
Some questions are too important to leave only to people with the right letters before their names.
This argument run into the problem that if you read mediaeval Christian texts, they aren’t exactly more tolerant in general. Your problem is your analysing a religion through the lens of religious teaching and scripture instead of as a social practice in practice if the followers of a religion, want to believe something, the religion will be reinterpreted to permitted that’s just how humans work. It’s not hard to find ancient respected Christian scholars saying bad things about non-Christians and women, but it would be pretty stupid to use that to predict the behaviour of actual Christians nowadays. Ancient Confucian writing is pretty hostile to merchants, but I think it’s obvious that you can’t use that to predict modern Chinese attitude towards businessmen without additional context. It would be like trying to use Martin Luther’s views on Jews to predict modern Lutheran attitudes, a pointless exercise that would ignore a lot of relevant context.
This is an interesting post, but I'm not upvoting it because it's very long and it is not a direct response to the actual post where you have left it as a comment.
Interesting article. I assume Bauer, Platas, and Weinstein corrected for geography not just by norming by country but by considering the effect of the Nile's cataracts being much less of a civilization building obstacle than the Niger's or the Congo's?
What about the role of the Libyan collapse of 2011?
I feel like we also have to talk about sailing. Sub Saharan Africa does not get as much benefit from sailing, thus it has to skip from agrarian feudalism to road based trade, a harsher hurdle to development than say eastern china or southern Italy, or riverside Egypt.
I would add another effect of Islam: Islam discourages Western influence. Therefore it would be less prestigious to adopt Western norms.
I predict we may see African Christians attempt to break away from their Muslim regions. This will happen as Christians realize their small family sizes make them have smaller populations. Therefore, they run the risk of being ruled by an emerging Muslim majority.
Nigeria in particular may go through something like the partition of India.
Not a word about European colonialism. British and French imperialists dominated sub-Saharan Africa, north and south, through vastly superior technology. To administer their states they favored Christians and non-white South Asians. European and American missionaries provided education and health care to Christian populations. For commerce, the Europeans, especially the British brought in non-western, non-Christian, non-Islamic, store keepers to act as financial intermediaries, who, despite being non-white assisted the empire by organizing finances and administration. Gandhi is a famous example having earned his reputation by mastering European law and using it to better the lot of his fellow South Asians, but not Black South Africans.
well explained and where do we go from here? Ethiopia is a best model on the continent of persistent development strategy that started under TPLF initiating material processing prior to export and prioritizing the inputs this needs: energy and transport infrastructure, and continued by Abiy and adding required dimensions as growth advances: Medemer political union and security, suppression of armed separatists and more secure ports. The Sahel must also develop export material processing, but has extremely small base and decades of non investment by France, and security is front and center now in the face of jihadi revolt.
strategic perspectives: countries should prioritize security of people and commerce and military pressure on jihadi organization, civil forces uniting with the military governments and foreign countries with tangible and no/few strings assistance. while plagued with terror, supremacism and pre industrial paternalism and violence, other characteristics of the jihadi revolt gray their allegiance such as the actual neglect and conceptual vacuum of the establishment and belief in Fiqh scholarship which while negative also has potential for inversion with modernization interpretation. the government thrust while uncompromising on violence must not be unending schism like north africa but rather the objective integration of jihadis into army, administration, society and their families. government amplification of the wide range of critical voices of islam and fiqh modernizers seems small now but will be decisive to future reunification and building sovereign state capacity. Ties with Turkiye and Iran may help. The disintegration of passive and worthless French liberalism frees up civil society to rethink their position, to shift from anti tradition pro foreign dividers to modernizing patriotic unifiers.
Why Should Non-Muslims Try to Understand Islam? Because It Does Not Wait For You To Decide.
I want to tell you something that almost nobody in a position to say it publicly will say plainly.
Not because it is controversial among people who have actually read the texts. It is not. It is so well established that the tradition's own greatest scholars said it first, said it clearly, and built a legal architecture around it that has been standing for over a thousand years.
They just don't say it on CNN.
Here it is.
Islam is the only major religion on earth whose authoritative legal tradition contains a framework for governing people who never chose it.
Not a fringe interpretation. Not a radical deviation. The mainstream position of classical Sunni jurisprudence. Ibn Kathir said it. Al-Suyuti said it. Al-Shafi'i said it. These are not angry men on the internet. These are the tradition's own most revered voices, the ones whose opinions still govern Islamic law today, and what they said is this: the world is divided into the house of Islam and the house of war, and the legal obligation to bring the second into the first does not expire, does not pause, and does not require your permission.
Every other major religion exists to transform the lives of people who walk through the door voluntarily. Islam does that too. But Islam also contains something none of the others do. A legal obligation toward the people who never walked through the door. And a specified set of conditions under which those people may be permitted to keep living. Under Islamic authority. Paying a tax for the privilege. Subject to restrictions. Subject to a formal, legally codified ritual of humiliation.
This is not a secret buried in a dusty manuscript. This is the tradition's own self-description. And it is sitting there in the sources, in plain Arabic, waiting for anyone willing to read it.
This is why Shariah law does not stay in Muslim-majority countries. It was never designed to.
Now. The other thing you need to understand is abrogation.
The Quran has peaceful verses. Tolerance, coexistence, patience. It also has verses commanding perpetual warfare against unbelievers until Islam is the last thing standing. If you are expecting me to tell you these two things somehow harmonize, I am going to disappoint you.
The Islamic legal tradition has a formal mechanism for resolving this problem. It is called naskh. We say abrogation. Think of it as a software update. The most recent instruction overrides everything before it. The Quran was not delivered all at once. It came over roughly twenty-three years, piece by piece, and in Islamic jurisprudence the later material governs the earlier material when they conflict.
Al-Suyuti. One of the tradition's greatest scholars. Counted more than one hundred peaceful verses cancelled out by a single later verse.
One verse.
The peaceful Quran that gets quoted at interfaith dinners and on the floor of Western parliaments is almost entirely early material. The Quran itself is not arranged chronologically. It is arranged by chapter length, largest first, which means you cannot tell from reading it which verses came first and which came last and therefore which ones actually govern. That arrangement is not an accident. It is not a conspiracy either. It is just a fact that changes everything about how the book should be read and almost nobody in the West knows it.
And then there is taqiyya.
The doctrine that grants permission, under conditions judged by the person doing the deceiving, to deceive. An enemy. A spouse. Anyone, when the cause requires it. Not a conspiracy theory invented by critics. A documented feature of Islamic jurisprudence. Debated, defined, agreed upon across the major schools. In the tradition's own literature.
I need to stop here and say the thing I always have to say, because if I don't someone will say it for me and pretend it refutes everything above.
None of this means every Muslim is your enemy. I have known Muslims I would trust with my life. One of them I called a brother for ten years. The investigation that produced everything I write cost me that friendship and I have not stopped thinking about what that cost him. He was not my enemy. He was the reason I did the reading.
But here is what I need you to understand.
You are already inside this argument. You did not choose to be. The terms were set by texts written fourteen centuries ago, the mechanisms were established by jurists whose names you do not know, and the outcome is moving whether or not you are paying attention.
Understanding Islam from its own authoritative sources, not from its most marketable presentations, is not optional.It is not Islamophobia. It is literacy.
I have no degree. What I have is a nail gun, ten trades, and 1,346 audiobooks consumed while I was building other people's houses. I came to this the same way I come to everything. Primary sources first. Load-bearing joints before anything else. Nothing on ice.
Some questions are too important to leave only to people with the right letters before their names.
That is what this is about.
A. C. Rosenthal
https://acrosenthal.substack.com/p/books-and-curriculum-a-c-rosenthal
This argument run into the problem that if you read mediaeval Christian texts, they aren’t exactly more tolerant in general. Your problem is your analysing a religion through the lens of religious teaching and scripture instead of as a social practice in practice if the followers of a religion, want to believe something, the religion will be reinterpreted to permitted that’s just how humans work. It’s not hard to find ancient respected Christian scholars saying bad things about non-Christians and women, but it would be pretty stupid to use that to predict the behaviour of actual Christians nowadays. Ancient Confucian writing is pretty hostile to merchants, but I think it’s obvious that you can’t use that to predict modern Chinese attitude towards businessmen without additional context. It would be like trying to use Martin Luther’s views on Jews to predict modern Lutheran attitudes, a pointless exercise that would ignore a lot of relevant context.
This is an interesting post, but I'm not upvoting it because it's very long and it is not a direct response to the actual post where you have left it as a comment.
Interesting article. I assume Bauer, Platas, and Weinstein corrected for geography not just by norming by country but by considering the effect of the Nile's cataracts being much less of a civilization building obstacle than the Niger's or the Congo's?
What about the role of the Libyan collapse of 2011?
I feel like we also have to talk about sailing. Sub Saharan Africa does not get as much benefit from sailing, thus it has to skip from agrarian feudalism to road based trade, a harsher hurdle to development than say eastern china or southern Italy, or riverside Egypt.