pardons for badly remembered pop music lyrics, but thought this part of a commentary by Scott Atran, a scientist (and intelligence analyst, apparently researches suicide bombers) was relevant. He's responding to Beyondbelief2006, a conference of atheist scientist scholars who wanted to establish a counter-weight to the "anti-evolution, anti-science" wing of Christian evangelicals who are effecting power in the Republican White House. While he has a lot to say in his argument defending faith in particular, and in the part 6, follows on the link below, but what he has to say on Islam is particularly of interest, even though he's not a muslim.
Please read and let me know what you think.
http://beyondbelief2006.org/The%20Conversation%20Continues/conversation1.php
(jump to the conversation of Scott Atran if you like)
to quote:
(5) IGNORANCE OF ISLAM IN GENERAL. We first heard from Steven Weinberg, and then from every other second speaker, about the history of Islam, about why Muslim science went into decline after the 13th or 14th centuries, and about why suicide bombers, the most fanatically religious of all would-be mass murderers, are an outgrowth of Islam. But to use one of professor Dawkins's favored expressions, "this is rubbish." None of these commentators has shown the slightest understanding of Islamic history other than the same Classic Comics summaries of names and achievements.
Why would Islam first cause science to flourish and then decline unto suicide bombing? (One might note that Chinese science, too, went into decline relative to the West after the 14th century, but is now rapidly catching up; and that until recently the most prolific group of suicide bombers was the nominally Hindu but mostly secularist Tamil Tigers.) No mention was made of the fact that Islamic science, indeed, Classical Arab civilization, collapsed primarily because of massive invasions of Mongols and other Asiatic hordes; we've heard only the wholly unsupported claim that religion has had something to do with it.
We heard from Sam Harris that Muslims represent less than 10% of the population in Western European countries such as France, but over 50% of the prison population. The obvious inference expected from the audience is that Islam encourages criminal behavior. But what is not reported is that Muslims in the U.S. are as underrepresented in prison populations, as are U.S. Jews, and that the predictive factors for Muslims entering European prisons are almost exactly the same for African Americans entering U.S. prisons, namely lack of: employment, schooling, political representation, and so forth. Moreover, religious education is a negative predictor of Muslims entering European prisons. In our global jihadi database, which we are developing under a defense department contract, and which is perhaps the most comprehensive open source database on the subject, we find that most jihadis are "born again" and come to religion late in life, and only very seldom through mosques or madrassahs. And among jihadis outside Europe, and in particular suicide bombers, science education is a strong positive predictor (the most representative educational categories of suicide bomber - a finding independently confirmed by Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta- are engineer and physician, be it for Al Qaeda or Hamas).
Sam Harris and others at the conference tells us that suicide bombers do what they do in part because they are fooled by religion into seeking paradise, which includes the promise of 72 virgins. But neither I nor any intelligence officer I have personally worked with knows of a single such case (though I don't deny that their may be errant cases out there). Such speculations reveal more the sexual fantasies of those who speculate rather than the actual motives of suicide bombers. All leaders of jihadi groups that I have interviewed tell me that if anyone ever came to them seeking martyrdom to gain virgins in paradise, then the door would be slammed in their face.
Richard Dawkins tells us that Islam oppresses women. While also condemning the terrible asymmetries between men and women in many Islamic societies, I would only note that the subordination of women has relatively little to do with religion per se and much more to do with the kinship structure of Arab society. Arab social structure and cultural identity are built around a patrilineal lineage system that passes rights, obligations and duties exclusively through the father's line. Geneaologies, however fictive, are traced back centuries to justify power and prestige. Any suspicion cast on any woman's honor anywhere in the geneaology can undermine the whole line. That is the principal consideration behind what is to most of us an intolerabl subjugation of women, including the grotesque practice of "honor killing. Granted, Arab kinship is incorporated into Islamic canon, but belief in God really has nothing much at all to do with it.
