New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Muslims must put their faith in democracy

New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Muslims must put their faith in democracyMuslims must put
their faith in democracy

I, for one, do not believe that our troubles with Islamic terrorism will end until Muslims, radical or not, edge their way into the modern age.

I say this because of insurgents murdering their countrymen in Iraq, the barely discussed racist and genocidal attitudes toward black Africans in Sudan and backward attitudes toward women in so many fundamental Muslim societies.

Central to all of that is self-righteousness and a refusal to question one's ideas or tactics. It is this unquestioned self-righteousness that we always find ourselves opposing when we seek to sustain the highest achievements of democracy.

To progressively triumph over our own well-documented excesses in the area of bigotry, as Americans we have had to confront our own self-righteousness. There is no fundamental difference between the bombing of churches or the murder of little girls during the civil rights movement and the terrorist slaughters in Iraq or the murders in the name of the unborn by American anti-abortion types convinced that it is fine and good to murder those already born.

Many violent loons live in a past that is either a fantasy or went the way of the dinosaurs because it could not keep up with the demands of modernity. They refer to a golden age in which those who thought as they do were on top and those now in power were on the bottom.

Quite simply, there is no golden future for Islam through terrorism.

Its believers will have to grow up and enter this terribly demanding world where everything is topsy-turvy, the masses must be educated to have a chance and the law never moves fast enough to prevent all sins or to bring all sinners to justice.

We actually are talking about another kind of faith - faith in democracy, which does not run at a quick pace, though it usually gets there eventually. Faith and patience are needed because democracy moves like a snail, while murder is always as fast as a bullet or an exploding bomb.

There can be no true democracy without the rule of law, and most modern-thinking Muslims realize that, no matter what they might think of American foreign policy.

Some Muslims accept the notion, fashionable in America, that hatred and violence directed at the U.S. and its allies are partly caused by foreign polices that often seem a thinly veiled extension of the petroleum industry's interests.

But if the world were to act in the interest of its ecology rather than its oil companies, and every major power now dependent on Arab oil were to embrace innovation and rationally disengage itself from the pipelines of the Middle East, we would then see something perhaps even more hysterical than we witness now, sorry to say.

With so many Islamic economies dependent on the oil business, what should we expect if the money were cut off, and these nations, which have not been prepared to compete in the world market, were thrown, uneducated, into the pit with the ravenous wild dogs of capitalism?

I assume, with poverty even more inclusive than it already is, we would see Muslim hostility focus on the Western world once again, and all that frustration would express itself in the violence that so many now explain in terms of humiliation and self-esteem.

I hope that I am wrong, but it seems to me that until self-criticism rises to a hard-won position and education becomes essential to the self-esteem process, the days will remain dark and could get even darker.