Prince Naif of Saudi Arabia has had a stunning insight:
MADINAH: Interior Minister Prince Naif attributed the backwardness, moral decay and extremism among Muslims to their nonadherence to true Islamic principles....
The Muslims of the early years could lead the world because they were sincere in their faith and keen to follow the true religion, the prince said.
A return to the purity of the original Islamic message? That's brilliant. Why has no one thought of this before?
[Positive feedback, sometimes referred to as "cumulative causation", is a feedback loop system in which the system responds to perturbation in the same direction as the perturbation.....A system in equilibrium in which there is positive feedback to any change in its current state is said to be in an unstable equilibrium, whereas it is possible for one with negative feedback to be in a stable equilibrium. The end result of a positive feedback is often amplifying and "explosive"....
In some cases (if not controlled by negative feedback), a positive feedback loop can run out of control, and can result in the collapse of the system. This is called vicious circle....]
Prince Naif's insight reminded me, directly, of another prince of the peace, Jimmy Carter. Hitchens put it rather well:
"Here is a man who, in his latest book on the
Israel-Palestine crisis, has found the elusive key to the problem. The mistake of Israel, he tells us (and tells us that he told the Israeli leadership) is to have moved away from God and the prophets and toward secularism."
http://www.slate.com/id/2166661/nav/tap2/
Posted by: Noga | September 22, 2008 at 10:13 PM
Or, it could be just another modest proposal...
Posted by: Noga | September 23, 2008 at 05:51 PM