One thing has been holding back the Middle East

A strange and unfamiliar feeling stirred as I sat down to write these words. A feeling that has been largely absent over recent years when writing this column. It rose up within me as I pondered the diplomatic breakthrough by Donald Trump — a stunning achievement, even with all the caveats about the risks and obstacles ahead — and the prospects for an entire region. Hope.

The opportunity for the Middle East is difficult to exaggerate, a region from which my paternal ancestors trace their heritage, back as far as the great Persian civilisation and its Islamic successor (my family tree is chronicled in a direct line to Muhammad, the documents lovingly preserved by my cousin Zafar). A region that could, with goodwill, leadership and the courage of its peoples, experience the blessings of the journey we call life rather than endemic hatred, bloodshed and conflict.

It is easy to forget that this region was once the intellectual hub of the world, a place that spawned the myriad breakthroughs of the Islamic Golden Age. I am not just talking about the great strides in algebra, astronomy and mathematics but the vibrancy of a region described by the philosopher Will Durant as “the torchbearer of civilisation”. The translation movement, rendering the wisdom of the ancient Greeks into Arabic, was hailed by the Yale classicist Dimitri Gutas as “equal in significance to the Italian Renaissance”. Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century scholar, contrasted the enlightenment of the region with the “savagery” of Europe.

What, then, went wrong for the Muslim world? Why did it regress? One of the presiding iniquities of much western scholarship is the myth that all ills in the world can be traced to European colonialism, an untruth that serves as a sop to the developing world, the comforting delusion that the blame can be placed on outsiders and never on developments from within. The truth, of course, is that the degeneration of Islamic civilisation long predated colonialism and, in a certain sense, permitted it. I am talking about religion or, perhaps more accurately, that variant we call fundamentalism.

I guess I am not alone in wondering how different the Middle East might have been had it not been for the seismic influence of Al-Ghazali, that revered scholar of Sunni thought, who in the 12th century argued that science is not a liberator but a threat to the word of God and a danger to the clerics, who had every incentive to thwart the thirst for knowledge to maintain their power and privileges. “Innovator” was not regarded as a term of praise but, as the scholar Toby Huff has put it, “a term for a heretic and non-believer, subject to death”.

The historian Bernard Lewis notes in What Went Wrong? that as the influence of fundamentalist Islam percolated through the region during the later Middle Ages, “the relationship between Christendom and Islam in the sciences was reversed. Those who had been disciples now became teachers.” Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, a 19th-century intellectual, wrote that Arab civilisation, which had once “thrown such a live light on the world, suddenly became extinguished”.

To describe this as a catastrophe is an understatement. While universities such as those at Bologna, Pisa and Oxford were slowly freeing themselves from the grip of the church — notwithstanding the arrest of Galileo in the 17th century — Islamic power structures were imprisoning the human mind within the cage of revealed truth. As a Taliban leader put it recently: “Western education is a sin”, ramming his point home by explaining his view of rain. “We believe it is a creation of God rather than an evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain.”

And this, I believe, hints at the true prize for the Middle East in this accord. Western leaders must stop beating around the bush. The problem in the region isn’t a lack of aid, investment or peace initiatives, all of which in a sense put the cart before the horse. The problem is fanaticism, a virus that will infect and ultimately kill whatever peace is proposed. Fanatics, you see, lack that most civilising of virtues: doubt. Seized by absolute truth, they are not merely justified in slaughtering infidels; they have a duty to do so. Look at those who most abhor this deal: yes, Hamas (a reluctant signatory), but also Hezbollah, the Houthis and, most of all, the cult known as the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has impoverished and repressed its own people.

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I am no fan of Mohammed bin Salman (we should never forget his role in the gruesome murder of a journalist) but should we not at least acknowledge what Gulf regimes are up against? They are seeking to seed the notion in a younger generation that they might benefit by freeing themselves from the grip of the madrassas; that by embracing peace and trade with Israel they will experience prosperity and hope. That is why I support any Arab leader who takes on the Wahhabist fanatics — while always acknowledging the moral ambiguity and messiness of any transition.

But let us also note the religious zealots in Israel, who oppose this deal with similar swivel-eyed zeal. Look at Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and their followers, who proclaim that the land between the river and the sea is “promised” to them by their own fictional deity in the sky; that settling the West Bank violently is divine will; that they are the chosen ones and the Arabs the hated Amalek. They, to me, are every bit as abhorrent as, say, the Taliban and perhaps even more dangerous. For these extremists (along with the rapidly growing ultra-Orthodox population) are threatening the very foundations of the one liberal miracle yet to unfold in the Middle East.

Yet let me finish back in the Islamic world. It may be politically incorrect these days, but it is important to note that the 57 Muslim majority nations have just one university in the top 200 of the world; that there are two billion followers of Islam but only four winners of a Nobel science prize. A report in Nature magazine in 2002 found only three scientific areas in which Islamic countries excelled: desalination, falconry and camel reproduction. Over the past three decades (despite huge investment by Gulf states), Muslim-majority nations published just 5 per cent of science papers while making up almost 15 per cent of the global population. In highly literate Iran, scientific progress occurs not because of the regime but despite it.

By citing these statistics, I am not seeking to demonise the people of Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine and the like. On the contrary, they are as intelligent and capable as anyone else — indeed the best and brightest have often enriched western universities by escaping the intellectual bondage back home. I merely wish to underline the catastrophic influence of fundamentalist Islam. Where Christianity gradually (and, yes, reluctantly) adapted and moderated its theology in the light of scientific progress, Muslim majority nations typically sought to shut it down. This, more than anything else, captures the otherwise mystifying divergence in the trajectory of two civilisations.

And it’s why the most urgent task of a provisional council in Gaza (and any other governing authority in the Middle East) is to challenge what happens in schools and colleges, in madrassas and Islamic seminaries. For it is only by severing the transmission mechanisms of the virus we call fundamentalism, by thwarting the mass indoctrination that still unfolds in large swathes of the Islamic world, that these brilliant peoples can be freed from the historic trap into which they have fallen. This, ultimately, is where the launchpad of rational inquiry, scientific curiosity and economic progress is to be found. All else is fluff and window dressing.