People give lip service to the idea that Muslim world should be developed. But in actuatality any of the real hard steps required will be met with immediate pushback. The dudes post was obviously somewhat of a bait post. Yet it was still a reflection on how massive the industrial capacity of the u.s was to build something so advanced 60 years ago and what was the response to this tweet ? For people in the comments to chimp out and talk about how decadent the west was
Again, I stated how this is just nonsensical in the broader scheme of the world. What holds Muslims back are structural, geopolitical problems, and an enduring Western imperialist post-colonial ideological festering in the Muslim world. We're entrenched in Western imperialist imposition constantly. We are embroiled in conflict, the influence of larger Western players, constantly ever since imperialism and colonialism, which, mind you, forced a system on them where it was taboo to imagine greatness outside the Western secular paradigm.
This nonsense that Muslims have an allergy to learning and building technology is nonsense for the very reason you ignored in the very post you responded to. With a response mind you, that says Muslim people's arrested material development, derived from the foolish comments highlighted, as sort of an underlying large example of what holds us back. Yet, realistically, those comments never reflect how things are on the ground, all the way to structural maintenance or institutional philosophy and the support of it. The sheikh's son is an engineer. This oxymoronic framing is not real in the everyday Muslim way of life at all, nor in any organizational or philosophical institutional way.
You might find a misguided or a foolish guy on a Twitter comment section, but that is not what drives Muslims to the ground. Again, people who frame our problems in these silly yet so destructive, uneducated ways are often full of agendas themselves because they know for a fact that never drives our knowledge associations on the ground. Otherwise, why frame us like that in the first place when that's not how people associate with knowledge attainment and drive for material improvement? Learning and improvement are what the overwhelming majority want and have tried, but when you live in a tough environment that has been bombed over and over again, you can't build a damn rocket. Let's have a balanced, mature position that grounds this in reality, sxb.
I have written about this; the West is terrified of an enlightened, advanced, collective Islamic region that has its fresh independent directionality. That is why they try to have their boots on the region's neck all the time. This is not exaggeration but an actual historical understanding. That is why Muslims banding together to shape something better for themselves have always been distorted as a problem. That was the hallmark of deliberate Western propaganda. Muslim potentiality and rise is narrowed down to extremism, backwardness that is a danger to the world and its "freedoms," overall a barbaric threat. This has been an ideological policy directive of the West. It makes the youth who are enamored by the Western world think the Westerners hold a monopoly on all the best material and philosophical collective development potential, and since they're secular and say religion holds us back, oh, well, maybe the secular route is the only way. The relationship with Islam is how Christianity was displayed, as backward promotion within the recent Western historical framing that held the cadaans back from true "progress."
Now people are lying, trying to problematize Islamic practice, or "wrong Islamic practice," with backwardness and reason for slow technological and structural advancement. Total nonsense. Learning and education are typically the central attainment for kids in Muslim households.
The irony is, the core of the problem of how Muslims think of themselves and what holds them back, as briefly introduced, goes back to Western imperialism and its enduring and consistent enforcement, even since post-colonialism. When Muslims think about education and sort of how to envisage a country, its demographic engagements, cultivated structural environments -- it's all modelled after the Western nation-state, and entirely limited to that. To give a few important examples, Somaliland, Somalia, and Djibouti were all continuations of the British, French, and Italian nation models, and that continued... This is the true framing, not this weird forced dichotomy that somehow reifies Western thinking about Muslims, which ironically is in the same propaganda lineage of Western crafting.
You've internalized a wrong and negative self-perception, imbued us with bad qualities we don't have in general to reinforce how they erroneously are central to us not advancing, the typical internal imperial scapegoat... When Muslims had post-colonial but secular nationalistic (something forced on them by Western imperialism) ambition, weren't they suppressed, faced a coup d'état; didn't the West invest in subversive terrorist groups to weaken anything they could not control, or did not serve them, and when things seemed to be a bit too scalable in the Muslim world that was literally pretty secular. Did they not then try very hard to break its legs, and use their reality as a chessboard to constantly have them undermined into impairments, decline, fragmentation, facing artificial obstacles and inhibitions. Where a country like Egypt had to find relative stability by becoming a US puppet? When democracy favored the lower-class Muslim majority, didn't the West support the dictatorial secular military man to undercut the Muslim hold on power through their own value system that they so treasure?
If you want to read a better framing of what I am talking about, here is a text written by a Somali sister on the history of this.
https://ummatics.org/criminalizing-the-caliphate/
What she addresses and frames so eloquently and intelligently, I have thought about for years in parts and in general essence and later comprehensively, so it was nice encountering someone who agreed. It also addressed your Sharia comment. I had my "this spoke to me" moment when I read it.
Just to make things clear, the central grounding general practice and philosophy of Muslims with regard to anyone (not just the West) is pragmatic and holds root from Islam itself:
Take the good, leave the bad.
To describe it more overtly in this context, learn from the West. Don't be the West. That is the balanced position of the true Islamic disposition that the ulema push. When you observe with educated competence and insight around, do you see a negation of the West, or a gross marker of Western domination in the current state of affairs, that left us with stagnation and problems? What concept is Somalia's nation model imagined after, again? Is it organic or inorganic: almost entirely Western, isn't it? Does it sound like people are measured in their pragmatism of taking the good and leaving the bad or utter Western mimicry, fully compromised through wicked paternalism, baked into the establishments of those states that led to failure? Let's not play these games, my friend. Our agency has been deliberately undermined in memory, imagination, and in the physical world. To then state why we don't build rockets is because of anti-intellectualism and moralistic arrogance is ridiculous. And it plays into these cadaan's propaganda playbook. Anyone who holds that view is a tool.
The general attitude and practice of Muslims that drive our life and discourse is not self-righteous dogmatism. When most Muslims say, "Hey, remember what's most important," i.e., crucial; otherwise, people are drawn in by the ideology of the West, not taking the good, leaving the bad. Why? Because for centuries, we've been told they are superior. They literally created idea-sets centered on why they were materially superior, and that their craftsmanship meant an indication of higher human qualities. Not only that, that their system of values, attitudes, thinking, ways of living was not only the way to attain such material superiority, but any "progress" and that the rocket is a sign of deeper qualities that test the superiority of BEING, living. I can give an example, Jordan Peterson said, the merit of Islam should have shown itself in how countries inhabited by the majority Muslim demographic produce material wealth. That is why to him, a non-Christian who is a closeted Western imperialist, thinks that Christianity is better than Islam. This ignorant, arrogant thinking is very central to how general Westerners think about the Muslim world, all places, for that matter. Their rockets mean they are better. Next thing you know, the science and technology that are merely tools are a representation of how religion is kind of obsolete and should be relegated to cultural aesthetics and secular ritual.
So am I going to point at the Muslims that now say (although the ones you guys here point out are the irrelevant misguided ones who have no effect in real life), "Hey, those gadgets are cool, get your education, build it, but don't get enamored by its illusion. Building a rocket at the end of the day is not the pinnacle of human value." And I literally wrote that down in a way shorter way, yet somehow that had to be respun into another false notion, imagining the Muslims in ways they're not living.
