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Your statement goes in the right direction of the truth, but misses pretty badly on context. First, yes, Iranians are skeptical of the US and UK for good reaso

by wheels 14y ago

Your statement goes in the right direction of the truth, but misses pretty badly on context. First, yes, Iranians are skeptical of the US and UK for good reason. The UK was the major imperial power in the middle east. The collapse of the Ottoman and British Empires, World War II and the rise of the Soviet Union as a superpower transformed the region from British control to being a proxy front for the Cold War. US policy for the majority of the Cold War was generally unabashed toppling of left-leaning governments to maintain dominance vis a vis the Soviet Union. That, combined with strengthening of political Zionism post-Holocaust, the large amount of oil in the region and the expressly anti-Western Islamic Revolution have continued to make the region a hotbed. However, I'm not sure why you pulled Iran into this discussion. The Shi'as in Iran don't particularly like the predominantly Sunni Arabs, where the majority of these protests have been going on. Their war against each other was far bloodier than any conflict they've had with the west, though the west (and the US especially) did help to intensify it. The current protests are happening primarily in the northern African "Arab Spring" countries, where the US did come down on the side of the populist movements, if somewhat late. Most of the problems in that region at present are somewhat less connected to the US's Cold War neo-colonialism and are more related to general demographic pressure and instability following the recent regime changes. The bits of anti-American sentiment in northern Africa are more connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than to neo-colonialism or direct American military action. Basically what I'm saying is that there isn't one "Muslim" opinion; Islam is spread across a wide range of countries (Hint: most Muslims aren't even in the Middle East; Indonesia has more than all of the Middle East combined.) and lumping in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, Qatar and Morocco into one bag is fallacious.

Jd 14y ago
This is generally speaking an excellent comment about which I agree more or less completely, but your final statement doesn't really tie it all together and instead is itself an example of a fallacious statement. Even if it is true that there is a lot of diversity between nations with a majority Muslim population, it does not necessarily follow that there are not certain opinions and responses to stimuli that we might expect within populations which ostensibly adhere to the same religion. Indeed, much of modern social science (Weber, Durkheim) was founded on articulating the differences between predominately Catholic and Protestant countries, including the now famous "Protestant work ethic." Of course, at the time I'm sure it was politically incorrect to say that "Catholics are lazy," and even now that would be an astonishingly rude over-simplification -- nonetheless it is possible to make generalizations on the basis of aggregated data that are generally correct. To chose a somewhat less politically sensitive example, if one were to look cross culturally at fundamentalists within monotheistic traditions, I suspect you would find that they support wife-beating at a much higher average than the general population -- of course, this is a much more politically correct way of going about things, insofar as you don't disturb things too much by pointing out the problems in people who are, generally speaking, quite far away from you -- nonetheless, we are able to make these sorts of generalizations accurately and there is no reason why we can not also do so for the Muslim world.

by wheels 14y ago

Jd 14y ago

This is generally speaking an excellent comment about which I agree more or less completely, but your final statement doesn't really tie it all together and instead is itself an example of a fallacious statement. Even if it is true that there is a lot of diversity between nations with a majority Muslim population, it does not necessarily follow that there are not certain opinions and responses to stimuli that we might expect within populations which ostensibly adhere to the same religion. Indeed, much of modern social science (Weber, Durkheim) was founded on articulating the differences between predominately Catholic and Protestant countries, including the now famous "Protestant work ethic." Of course, at the time I'm sure it was politically incorrect to say that "Catholics are lazy," and even now that would be an astonishingly rude over-simplification -- nonetheless it is possible to make generalizations on the basis of aggregated data that are generally correct. To chose a somewhat less politically sensitive example, if one were to look cross culturally at fundamentalists within monotheistic traditions, I suspect you would find that they support wife-beating at a much higher average than the general population -- of course, this is a much more politically correct way of going about things, insofar as you don't disturb things too much by pointing out the problems in people who are, generally speaking, quite far away from you -- nonetheless, we are able to make these sorts of generalizations accurately and there is no reason why we can not also do so for the Muslim world.