Having all religions basing a heavy weight on fear and guilt (when it is actually a misinterpretation because religions as I understand are based on love), you have people who are strongly resilient to anything external. Their kids – our generation and the previous – are getting sick and tired of unnecessary strict rules that we just want to break free, and hence end up at the very ends of the spectrum in either direction.

It’s difficult to be “in the middle”, satisfying both ends, and this happens when people realize that religion is a relationship between you and God and your society and not a collective communal service to ban Barbie

Have you read the book by Amin Maalouf about Identities that kill ? We are full persons, not just Muslims, or Christians or whatever and when we stress excessively one part of our identity it destroys the whole of us. It’s happening in Belgium right now. The language identity is killing the country.

fashaytelleh albeh in this “full blown boring essay”.

I will make this simple because the gentlemen behind me made the right points that I agree with.

But, I believe that our biggest problem in the Arab world is religion, be it Islam or Christianity, being the two most common religions of the area. It’s that simple. Trying to find practical answers from within the Quran or the Islamic Sharia or the Bible is a big waste of time. These books are for spiritual reflection and not for building 21st century states.

Ba3den shu hal habal yalleh 3am yodrob bi Iran. Ya3neh other than my admiration for the audacity the Iranians and Ahmedinejad have in publicly handling the Americans and Iranians, they’re just crazy. What’s worse is that these guys actually believe every single word they utter and Islam is not just a power tool as I may have initially thought.

You know what, our states should become secularized. Follow Turkey’s example, though it seems to be failing in some areas. Crazy as this may sound, I think with good preparation the Arab world may be secularized. Of course with the exception of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon :)

I’m agreeing with you not because I’m simply a nice guy, which I happen to be by the way.

After I went through my own personal renaissance in my early twenties I became fully aware of the devastating affect of religious professionals on the welfare of civilization (any human civilization that is). They are holding us, by claiming exclusive rights to Islam, hostages to a decadent history, ignorant bigotry and crude malformed guilt.
Some of us seek redemption in following these assholes while others throw themselves in the arms of the West. We have to remember their past as well: the history of their church and of their debauched monarchies. We have to keep in mind that their society and culture went through one of the darkest periods of recorded history: the inquisition (as evil as the period of American Emperor Gorge W. Bush, but tragically much longer). However, we have to handed it to Western Society. They got out of this shit hole, at least on the personal level.
No we’re not in this shitty state we are in because of Islam. We are partly in this mess because we let religion be anything but a personal relation between the individual and his god(s).
I’m a man who registers impressions and who turns out to be wrong on many occasions. But I have my suspicion that the zealous religious sweeping wave is receding or at least losing momentum. People are getting sick and tired of despotism and shamanism. Our future lies in literature, in art and in science. Until then, we can make dolls of Nancie, Haifa and Alissa; action figures of Arab kings, Sheiks and presidents; DVD’s & CDs of angry and tragically ominous preachers who would lose it all once we come to our senses and tell them to all go to hell by screwing themselves to death while the WAWA song invades their last moments of consciousness.

You hit the nail on the head, it is an inferiority complex but few will ever admit to that.

Al Na’eb Al 3am? Okay, that’s like state attorney, right?

Isn’t he supposed to be persecuting criminals somewhere?

It’s quite a problem in the Arab and Muslim world that everyone ‘beftee feha’…
But I wouldn’t put much weight in whatever he’s got to say; you’ve got to understand that these dignitaries speak too much (I mean like in public speaking), they speak in inaugurations, memorials, weddings and even circumcision parties. They are bound to make mistakes (or to go off the line with their speech)

Now with regards to the inferiority complex; I think it’s a very complex matter (as it is conveniently named). It’s easy for me to announce that my personality is complete the way it is and therefore I don’t feel inferior to anybody. But the fact remains that I grew up in school learning about Faraday, Newton, Pascal, Eisenstein…etc,,. And although laws of physics are abstract (the aforesaid reference is indeed reference to the law named after the persons, not the person themselves), but we just can’t just strip the scholar behind the discovery (or the invention) out of the context. I guess the ‘center of inertia’ (if you like) of the world’s science and material and civil power have moved west in the last couple of centuries and I can’t deny it. The fact that I still think (or believe) that my belief system is much more spiritually superior than the west’s doesn’t mean it can compensate for it. I can’t just set around and pray for my labs to get equipped and my bookshelves to get stocked with the best just because God loves me. I have to work my way through it. I came to realization that I am actually falling behind and that I need the access to the western privileges (be it scientific or materialistic).

Indeed, Arabs have contributed very little to humanity recently. Some people blame it entirely on Islam (like this guy). I think it’s too simplistic to put it this way; simply for the fact that, as you said, the Islamic nation was in its brightest eras where the thinkers and the intellectuals where brought to the court of the Khalifa (and not to his prisons) to debate him or debate other established thinkers or scholars in front of him.

Oh, my comment is getting too long, I better leave it at that but before I leave I must say that I couldn’t agree more with your last line!