Monk

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David Warren sounds another sour note on the prospect of a harmonic convergence occurring between the West and the Muslim Middle East in our lifetime, looking at the election in Turkey of an Islamist party, and seeing how Turkey was perhaps our most secular and liberal Muslim nation in the region, capped off by this conclusion:

As I've written several times before (most recently June 20th), there is every demographic and political indication that Turkey's "secular" experiment is ending. It went sufficiently against the grain of an Islamic society to begin with. Over time, the prestige of Islam revived, and by presenting themselves as only moderate Islamists, whose main intention is to clean up corruption, and deliver welfare services more efficiently to the country's poor, the A.K.P. has cleverly insinuated itself into the hearts and minds of the people who still have most of the children.

Let that be a lesson to us. The Islamic world is not going to become more Western and "modern" over time. For Turkey was the farthest "West" any Islamic society could be taken, and then only by force. We must confront that reality plainly, and stop dreaming that "democracy" will make the Muslims just like us.

Some may say that it is good that they are not to become Western clones. However, what we are really talking about, I think, are governments and nations that we can deal with.

I imagine one of the main reasons why this conflict has come to a head is the ramped up globalization of recent decades, as the world seems to have become too small for both the Western and the Islamist visions. We can deal with the likes of a China, because although they are not democratic, they are into the market economy and they don't seem particularly interested in making everyone communist or Chinese for that matter. The Islamists on the other hand seem to regard the market as corrupting and they think everyone should be Islamist.

( David Warren )

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It is easy to become cynical and fatalistic about the Middle East, but it is perhaps not so often that we see this spleen vented so uncompromisingly in the mainstream media as David Warren does. I'm certainly sympathetic. Of course, this is the only world we got, and it behooves us to try to do the best we can with it.

God bless all the peacemakers! For divine intervention does seem called for.

( Warren column )

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