The Muslim Ban

I've heard multiple people invoke a certain idea in defense of a Muslim ban (thank you, Melissa McCarthy for making me shout "your words not mine!" as I typed that) and I want to push back on them a little. They invoke the concept of a "clash of civilizations" between the "noble" values of the West and the "barbaric" values of the Islamic world, often using apocalyptic language. Here's what I want to say: there probably would not BE a modern Western civilization if not for the Islamic world.
Without the Golden Age of Islam there would have been no Rennaissance or Enlightenment - or they would have been much longer in arriving. While Europe saw its centers of learning shrink and struggle after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Middle East's educational system flourished under the patronage of multiple rulers. Books of philosophy and science that had long been lost to Western Europe were preserved - our knowledge of the great Greek philosophers would be much more limited if not for the Islamic world.

But let's not stop there - this wasn't a culture simply poaching the ideas of others. Muslim scientists advanced the cutting edge of all the major fields, from astronomy to optics to medicine to physics to engineering... the list is immense. From Cordoba to Baghdad, scholars, poets, and theologians from around the world gathered together in places of relative tolerance and peace to share learning. If you were in the Middle Ages and you wanted to find a place where a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew, and a Buddhist walked into a bar... let's just say you wouldn't look in Paris.

Where did it all go wrong? It really didn't, not overall, but an anti-scientific thread of Islamic thought really took root as the Ottoman Empire shrank and fragmented under pressure from a resurgent Europe. Let me simplify a very complicated period: feeling threatened, some people embraced modernization and attempted to re-close the gap while others fought to preserve the "traditional" ways that had made Islam great. They fostered a false dichotomy between a modern world and "true" Islam, insisting that polluting influences should be purged from within and fought from without. This thread does not make up the majority of Islamic thought, but its offshoots are what gave rise to both the hardline, hypocritical theocracy ruling Saudi Arabia and various terrorists organizations that now too often represent the face of Islam to the rest of the world.

Like I said - this is a vast oversimplification about topics that individually have required entire volumes to truly dissect. What's more, it's an outsider's view looking in - so I expect I myself missed a lot of nuance. However, with that proviso understood, here's what I want to emphasize as both a lesson and a warning: Islamic faith is not incompatible with an appreciation for modernity, science, tolerance, democracy or human rights. Indeed, many concepts within those arenas would not have been developed without the influence of both Middle-Eastern thinkers and some of the very core values found in Islam itself. That's the lesson, but what follows is the warning.

A group of people, feeling threatened and left behind by the rest of the world, embrace a hardline interpretation of cultural norms and religious values in an effort to re-attain a mythologized "golden time". In order to achieve those goals, they feel they must force others into compliance with these rules and mandate their obedience via violence and government intervention. To maintain purity, they excise parts of the population viewed as tainted or inferior and push away "foreign influences". They purge scientific thought that cannot be brought into accordance with dogma rather than work to adapt dogma to new learning. This tendency is not at all unique to the Middle-East or Islam, as you can find it echoed across all of history in every major culture. Indeed, today I do not need to look very far to hear the same tempting whispers.

It is cliche, but not untrue: be careful you do not become that which you fight. And the more impossible you believe that to be? The more likely it is to happen.