[ExI] riots again

[Charlie Stross]

On 28 Sep 2012, at 03:42, David Lubkin <lubkin at unreasonable.com> wrote:

> 
> Revised, related challenge: What can be done on a shoestring to
> accelerate That Religion's reformation into one that's no more
> violent or objectionable than anyone else's?

One of the huge problems is that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia pumps huge amounts of money into funding preachers and schools throughout the islamic world. The money is disbursed via the extreme wahabi clergy who typify the strain of islam peculiar to the House of Saud (who until the 19-teens were a bunch of dirt-poor fanatical desert dwellers on the fringes). The money comes from the Saudi oil budget and effectively buys the clerical establishment's tolerance of the royal family's discreet domestic decadence and corruption.

It's as if some barking mad fringe Christian sect, about as mainstream as the Aryan Brotherhood(!), had several billion bucks a year to spend on global evangelism. And had done so for decades in the poorest parts of the Christian world, building and staffing schools and churches.

A good starting point for dealing with the barking islamist tendency would be to pump a couple of billion a year into the more tolerant/mystical sects. I'd look at the sufis, and the shi'a (not the Iranian variety where it's been co-opted as the state religion of the Persian Empire, but the non-Iran affiliated shi'a). And rather than stopping at funding madrassahs that teach kids to rote-memorize the koran, I'd want them to push the kids through the koran-memorizing stage and on to higher levels of education with a reality-based bent. Mathematics, algebra, medicine, physics.

It'd be a generational program, but the goal would be to shift the entire theological bias of islam away from the authoritarian purists and back towards mystic/meditative with a revived interest in the sciences (which, I should note, were in many cases pioneered in the islamic world, back when Europeans were running around bashing each other over the head with lumps of iron in an attempt to settle how many angels could dance on the head of a pin).


-- Charlie