The Pyramids of North Africa You've Never Heard of (or, how Islam spread so rapidly throughout Africa and Eurasia)

In Peter Frankopan's new book, The Silk Roads, he offers one explanation for the spread of Islam that I'd never heard before: it was a pyramid scheme.

Context:
In 614, the Persians conquered Jerusalem, the most holy city in Christendom. It is hard to overestimate how alarming this was to the Christians of the Roman Empire. "The True Cross on which Jesus was crucified was captured and sent back to the Persian capital as a trophy of war."

The Byzantine Empire (what was left of the Roman empire) won back Jerusalem in 627, seriously weakening the Persian Empire in the process.  By that point, the Persian and Byzantine empires had both been decimated. Between 628 and 632, the Persian Empire dramatically collapsed and anarchy took its place through much of its old empire. It was into this milieu that Islam emerged.

Revelation:
In 610, Muhammad began to receive revelations. In 622, he fled to Medina, a date that would become year one in the Islamic calendar. His revelations came out of a time when the old empires were crumbling and the holiest city was under hostile occupation.

How Islam Spread:
As the Persian Empire collapsed, Muslims began to conquer the lands and cities they lost.
"Willing to sanction material gain in return for loyalty and obedience, Muhammad declared that goods seized from non-believers were to be kept by the faithful. This closely aligned economic and religious interests.
"Those who converted to Islam early were rewarded with a proportionately greater share of the prizes, in what was effectively a pyramid system. This was formalized in the early 630s with the creation of diwan, a formal office to oversee the distribution of booty. A share of 20 percent was to be presented to the leader of the faithful, the Caliph, but the bulk was to be shared by his supporters and those who participated in successful attacks. Early adopters benefited most from new conquests while new believers were keen to enjoy the fruits of success. The result was a highly efficient motor to drive expansion."

The city of Baghdad from about the 10th century

Given the Muslims were filling in a vacuum left by falling empires, conquest sometimes required little in the way of battle. "Damascus, for instance, surrendered quickly after terms were agreed between the local bishop and attacking commander." Basically, the folks in Damascus could keep their churches open but were now expected to pay tax to the prophet rather than Constantinople. Later, the Muslims' conquest of Egypt tripled their income from taxes and often just the threat of military force against other people was enough to provoke negotiation and surrender. The Muslims ignored Europe because it was so poor, concentrating instead on the Middle East and eastward to the border of China. The result was worth billions of dollars (in today's terms), making the Muslims and all of those conquering converts rich. Very rich. One wedding in what is now Baghdad included presents from the groom to people all over the country: "gold bowls filled with silver and silver bowls filled with gold were taken around and shared out ..."

In the wake of these conquests, the Muslim world was incredibly wealthy. They were not only materially rich but intellectually rich, with leading thinkers in philosophy, physics and geography. Their thought leaders wrote about medicine and lovesickness, how the world revolves around the sun, and the concept of zero. Money funds leisure and even the pursuit of knowledge. Not all of these great thinkers were Muslim but they were drawn to its world and resources.

Islam is a religion. Curiously, its expansion seems to have been fueled by a very clever business model: profit sharing from conquest for anyone who converted. It was a model that seemed, in retrospect, to ensure plenty of converts and plenty of cities and territories in which they could live.

The Illusion of Free Will (is that we can ever escape it)

“My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

-          William James

A friend of a friend made a really intriguing comment on my Facebook page the other day. “On the subject of free will -- the Bible would agree that you can do anything you want to. You just risk the eternal judgement if you go against what God made known, especially for those that known better and ignore or reject it.”

His comment provoked me to articulate what was rattling around in the back of my mind. This is one of the great perks of exchanging ideas: you not only learn what other people think but what you, yourself, think.

Hieronymus Bosch, detail

Free will is inescapable. If you are raised in Indonesia, where 88% of the population is Muslim, it might look as though you have a clear choice between free will and obedience. But the instant you know of the option to be Shia instead of Sunni (less than 1% of Indonesians are Shias), you lose this clear choice between free will and obedience; at this point you have to choose to blindly obey what you knew first or to change. Either choice involves the exercise of free will. At that instant, free will is your only option.

And once you learn about Christianity, you are forced again to exercise free will: convert or stay Muslim?

And once you convert you are forced into free will again: be Catholic or Protestant?

And then you have to choose one of the tens of thousands of Protestant denominations. Should you be Amish or Presbyterian? Calvinist or non-denominational? Meet in a mega-church with tens of thousands or in a home?

And which version of scripture do you accept? Do you include the Book of Mormon as more recent but true revelation? Do you exclude Revelation once you learn that it was only included because the Council at Nicea wrongly believed that the John who narrates Revelation was John the apostle? And do you accept the Biblical teachings that hard times are about testing you or that hard times are about punishment for what you have done or had in your heart?

And when you learn about secular humanism you are forced to choose again. Do you believe only in scientific consensus and your own conscience? Or do you continue in faith in the teachings of others, whether in the form of their writings or their sermons? Do you struggle to obey the voices from the pulpit, from the media, from private-sector or public-sector managers or from inside your own head? If you choose the secular life do you choose to realize your own potential or to enjoy life more sensually, more short-term? Or do you choose not to make it about you at all and instead dedicate yourself to improving life for others? And then which others? Future generations who might benefit from your inventions or philosophy or current generations of poor who might benefit from your volunteer work now? And if current generations, do you focus on those who live close by or people on the other side of the world? Do you follow your bliss or follow the money?

On it goes. The decision trees are endless and are growing more complex every day. One of the biggest differences between the medieval world and modern world is the degree of choice, from what to eat to what to believe. And because of the overwhelming complexity of freedom, you can see why people pretend there is an option to simply obey instead. Freedom is overwhelming.

And it isn't just religious leaders happy to tell you what to obey, sparing you the burden of choice. Political leaders, military leaders, civic leaders, business leaders, advertisers telling you what shows to watch or products to buy or .... well, obedience is always the easiest choice even if you prefer not to make that choice consciously. As I once heard Peter Block say, "The myth of leadership is a collusion between control freaks and people who don't want to take responsibility."

Even if you choose - each time - to stay obedient to your original Sunni faith, you are in each moment exercising free will. It's free will all the way through, no matter how desperately you might want not to be responsible for your own life and judgments. The Dark Ages was in part so dark because so many people gave in to the luxury of not accepting any responsibility for their own lives, rejected the hard work of critical thinking, and simply obeyed.

Some people have thought that free will is an illusion, that our lives are the products of fate, that the very decisions we make are the products of causality too complex for us to understand but inevitable nonetheless. I don't agree.

The only illusion is that you aren't - at all times - exercising free will. You are always responsible for what you choose to believe and can never blame any one verse, person, doctrine or group whether you choose to live your whole life in blind obedience or willful rebellion. This is true whether you were raised a secular humanist or Muslim and then chose to stay that way or whether you change from Muslim to secular humanist or secular humanist to Muslim. It’s true of your big choices and all your little ones.

So maybe I do believe in fate after all. My belief? We all share the same fate: we can't escape free will.

When Freedom of Religion Means Freedom from Religion

This week, Angela Merkel proclaimed that Germany is a Christian nation and that the Muslim faith doesn’t really have a place in it. Ferdinand and Isabella made a similar declaration about Spain about 500 years ago before conquering Granada and driving the last of the Muslims off of the Iberian Peninsula.


We are still pretty clumsy when it comes to religion in the West. Maybe we'd do better going back to the distinction between objective and subjective reality than talking about which religions should be allowed and which should not.

Subjective reality is the domain of religion. It is the domain of personal revelations and convictions, opinions, tastes, and personal values. The experience of subjective reality is a large part of what it means to be human. No humane society can dismiss it or claim that it isn't "real."
What has made the West since the Enlightenment such a wonderful place to live is that this subjective reality is subordinated to objective reality. The objective realities of science, democracy, and economics define our modern world.

The subjective colors what scientists study, but good science means testable hypotheses. Science is objective. The subjective influences how people vote, but in a democracy it is votes that can be counted that determine what politicians hold office and what policy becomes law. Democracy is objective. And finally, the subjective influences what people do for a living or what goods and services they buy, but it is dollars that can be counted that determine which careers are funded and which goods are made. Economics, too, is objective.

Although the West rests on the subjective, it is objective reality that has the final vote in defining our world.

And that, it seems to me, is all that matters. As long as any subjective reality - from Christianity to Islam to atheism - only has access to the public realm through the front door of objective reality, we're likely to live in a "good" society.
And this leads to the conclusion that is rarely made. During the Enlightenment, Christianity was radically redefined. It was no longer the force that Constantine defined as the basis for rule; instead, it became a way that people made sense of their individual lives. Christianity - once the basis for theocracy as oppressive as anything found in the history of Islam - was reformed. To become fully a part of the West, Islam will have to go through a similar re-definition. Turkey alone proves that this is not impossible, much less the presence of so many Muslims living peacefully in the West.
 
This is not a matter of getting the right subjective reality. This is simply a matter of never letting any subjective reality rule over objective reality. It is this more than the particulars of religion that form the basis of the modern West.

Central Europe's Disturbing Intolerance

It seems a truism that inland regions are less tolerant. People who live on coasts around ports have been continually exposed to a variety of skin colors, religious persuasions, cultures, and lifestyles. Fewer people come through Nebraska than New York or San Francisco; fewer people come through Serbia than England. Insularity seems to make people intolerant rather than curious.

Which brings us to Switzerland's stunning vote to ban "the construction of minarets, the towers that typically stand adjacent to mosques and serve to issue the Muslim call to prayer."

The Swiss speak four languages and would seem a model of diversity, but it is also worth remembering that it wasn't until 1971 that they granted women the right to vote. These are not progressives.

So I guess one ought not to be surprised that the Swiss felt threatened by the construction of Muslim edifices. Muslims, of course, make up nearly 4% of their population and are obviously a threat to the country's laws and mores.

It seems to me, though, that the Swiss have got it backwards. Rather than ban the construction of minarets, they should insist that every Muslim household build one atop their domicile, making it easy for anyone else to see where they are. And once they've done that, I see no reason why they couldn't require Muslims to wear tattoos on their forearms.

If they want to borrow from the playbook of religious intolerance, Central Europe has plenty of examples to draw from. If they are heading down that path, they should know better than to ban the symbols of religious difference that could, instead, be used to identify minorities.

Confusion About Freedom of Religion

Huckabee is on the cover of Newsweek. He's a likable guy. (My favorite quote of his is, "I'm a conservative, but I'm not angry about it.") He is seemingly compassionate and principled. The Republicans could do worse - much worse - in their choices for nominee.

But reading about Huckabee and Romney and their religious beliefs, (Huckabee saying he was going to bring this country back to Jesus, Romney talking about the dependence of freedom on religion) I had to admit to feeling more than a tad irritated. Okay. Angry.

In the West, we've got a simple and powerful formula for religious freedom. You are free to worship (or not) any way your conscience suggests you should. You are not free to bring that religious belief into the social arena. You cannot use your God as an excuse to abrogate the rights of others or as a basis for law.

Catholics, Baptists, Jews, Muslims and Smurfs are welcome to worship in this country as long as they express no aspiration to impose their beliefs onto the rest of us.

I grew up in, and still embrace, a faith that doesn't even make up 1/10th of 1% of the population. We don't own church property (we meet in homes) and our ministers are homeless. I was raised to be suspicious of organized religion and to this day am leery of paid ministers and church buildings. Yet even in my faith there are people who stupidly get excited about imposing their beliefs through policy. To me, nothing could provide more evidence of thoughtlessness. The best we can hope for is freedom to believe what we'd like. The instant someone starts to talk about imposing their beliefs onto others, that person ought to be shouted down in the public arena rather than lauded as a man of principles.

I understand conservatives in Europe who are hostile towards the Muslims who talk about changing European society. I don't blame our early American leaders who were hostile towards Catholics and Anglicans and other religious sects that hadn't learned how to stay out of the public arena. I simply don't see freedom of religion as a license to sneak religion into politics.

Freedom of religion for the individual and freedom from religion for the community. It's not a difficult concept, but any other formula just leads to madness. The next time someone decries the fact that things have gotten so secular, just sigh and say, "Yes. Isn't it lovely?" It is, in fact, religious people who ought to be the most happy about this.

Barack and Conspiracy Theory Time

News flash. Barack Obama attended a Muslim madrassa in Indonesia. This is a source of great excitement among the right-wingosphere. (I've decided that I may as well add -osphere to everything - it sounds so 21st century.)

Here's the prediction about how the Barack Obama conspiracy theory will finally be spun. I can just hear Rush Limbaugh passing this along.

"Folks, I don't know if this is true or not. I don't know if the rumors about Barack Obama basically being a Manchurian candidate, a sleeper cell candidate for Muslim extremists, are true or not. I do know that these kinds of rumors make me nervous. I mean, what do we know about this guy? He was a nobody two years ago!" And like that, Obama will lose 10% in the polls. If it were property Rush were defacing he could be charged with vandalism. As it is, it's just considered politics as normal.

There are at least two really wonderful things about a conspiracy theory. One is that the lack of evidence to support it simply reinforces just how insidious and powerful is this conspiracy. And two, even though a conspiracy theory makes it sounds like the bad guys are in charge, it at least reassures people that someone is in charge. Things aren't actually unpredictable and difficult to understand.

The model of media as something that discovers facts and then reports on them is so old school. As our right-wing talk show hosts are about to show us once again, it is so much more cost-effective to just create your own facts.

Sounding the Alarm on Alarmism

Expectations have a huge influence over our resultant reality. If you expect that people will act rude towards you, the probability of that goes up. (You might perceive offense where others would see good-natured jesting. You may well bristle at the least provocation, triggering a series of responses that make rudeness of some form not just more probable but inevitable.) If you expect a region of the world to react like zealots, you may well get that reaction. And this scares me.

The current issue of Newsweek shows a small child in Iraq holding a weapon and states, The Next Jihadists. Right-wing talk show hosts have been blathering on about the threat of Islam with the glee that they once reserved only for Bill Clinton's libido. And now even the intelligentsia is sounding alarm bells; atheist Sam Harris, in part of his larger agenda against religion as a whole, warns that Muslims are bent on world conquest and death to non-believers.

And this is the problem with expectations: all of this is true. There are Jihadists, Islam does have recurring patterns of, or references to, violence in its scriptures, and there is plenty of evidence that some Muslims would gladly kill themselves in order to kill innocent civilians. Yet there is a difference between what is true and the whole truth, as is said in a court of law.

Our own society provides plenty of evidence of a violent streak. We are gun-toting extremists who believe that God has blessed us and our wars. Our God is the true God and we are willing to send in invading armies to make it possible for our ministers to teach non-believers in foreign land. Just as most of what the alarmists say about Islam is true, so is most of what critics of our culture and policy (people like Noam Chomsky) say is true.

Life is, at any moment, so full of possibility that our minds would be overwhelmed if we could truly perceive it all. So like a radio tuning in to a particular station, we focus on one set of possibilities and, very often, make those real. (You doubt this? Think about what you expect each day about how your day will unfold, from breakfast to commute, to work. Now think about how little difference you regularly get from that.) We see what is true but not the whole truth.
The Middle East is a place of moderates eager to modernize, temper religious extremism with tolerance, and raise their children in a peaceful place that encourages economic and scientific advances. This, too, is true and is at least as true as the alarmists’ notions that have by now hijacked the thoughts of the right and left, the reactionaries and the thoughtful. And what is so alarming about that is how often expectations steer us towards one set of possibilities.

Two Reasons to Pull Out of Iraq

By the time you read this, George will have announced his intention to send another 20,000+ troops into Iraq. Here are two reasons to resist this that you are unlikely to read in the mainstream media.

1. Climate change.
The first reason to pull out of Iraq is that spending there makes it difficult to afford research into alternative energy. As long as we're spending $100 billion a year in Iraq, we can't afford a serious program to transform our energy policy. We need the equivalent of a NASA program - billions of dollars in funding - to support an array of solutions to the problem of carbon dioxide build up. Just to stabilize carbon dioxide levels - not even reduce them - we need to cut carbon dioxide emissions by about 75% across the globe. This is not going to happen without serious investment in creative solutions. As long as we are pumping $100 billion a year into Iraq (a soon to be greater number, presumably, as Bush gets his surge in troop levels), funding for such programs is unlikely to emerge. This alone is reason enough to stop funding the aggravation of Iraqis and continuing to place our troops in harm's way as if they were the ducks at a shooting gallery, but there is another.

2. Terrorism.
Oil money from developed countries helps undeveloped countries to get money without modernizing. Our dependence on oil finances extremists in the Middle East, effectively subsidizing their refusal to modernize. Islam does encourage violent extremism, as did medieval Christianity. There is, however, one really big difference between the two. Christians could not enjoy economic advance without choosing to ignore traditions and teachings that contradicted progress. That is, they had to generate their own source of economic progress and fostering economic modernity required accepting philosophical modernity. Burning witches is one way to attempt an increase in crop yield, but it won't be as effective as adopting steel plows or fertilizer. The communities that cling to superstition about witches are going to have so little in resources in comparison to the communities that adopt the scientific method that those superstitious communities will be of little threat. Primitive communities may have dangerous philosophies, but their technology will not be dangerous. By contrast, Muslim states sitting atop of oil can cling to dangerous philosophies while earning enough income to finance dangerous technology. (Think of Iran and its nuclear program.) If they did not have oil revenues, they would face two paths: cling to religious authority in lieu of modernity and be of little threat because they would not have the resources or technology to become a threat; or modernize in thought and, consequently, technology and be of little threat because they now rely upon reason instead of religious extremism. As it is, they can refuse to modernize even while buying modern weaponry.

As long as we don’t sever our dependence on oil, we don’t force the Middle East to sever its dependence on religious extremism. Our continued reliance on oil effectively subsidizes the Middle East's continued reliance upon outdated, dangerous, and otherwise bankrupting ideologies.

The biggest problem with continuing to pursue an Iraqi policy that has yet to accomplish any of its stated goals? It continues to distract us from real issues, only two of which are listed above.

Representative Keith Ellison and His 1 Billion Informal Constituents

It seems as though we have a few choices in dealing with the Muslims who share the planet with us:
1. Send Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, around the world to convince them all to become atheists.
2. Send Pat Robertson around the world to convert them to Christianity (in which case Sam Harris may feel compelled to follow him around to convert them to ... well you get the point).
3. Try to convert the Islam-a-phobics in the West into becoming warm and friendly neighbors with their fellow Muslims.
4. Stop with the conversion fantasies and continue to focus on creating a further web of interdependency and familiarity through increased levels of trade.