A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

The Tragic Legacies of Imperialism for Muslims
The arbitrary redrawing of borders by the colonial powers, along lines designed
to meet their specific national needs or rivalries with other colonial powers, was
one of the most damaging aspects of colonial rule. Ethnic groups were often
divided up, natural lines of political and social symbiosis were severed, arbitrary
lines of new administration were established. Had Arabs been left to their own
devices, there might be fewer Arab states in existence today: we might still see a
historically familiar region such as Greater Syria, encompassing today’s Syria,
Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. Ruling these newly created artificial countries,
especially after so-called independence, became much more problematic for
Arab leaders. “Loyalty” to the newly created states was artificial, and border
disputes were a natural outcome, as were ethnic struggles and interventions by
divided peoples to reunite. Political development was to proceed primarily in
accordance with the imperial needs of states often thousands of miles away.
Economic development was skewed to become complementary to that of the
metropole, rather than meeting the needs of holistic economic development of
the state itself. The metropoles undoubtedly did invest in the infrastructure in
most of their colonies, but this was directed at serving the needs of the
metropole; regional development was largely ignored. Railways in Africa, for
example, ran from raw material resources to coastal entrepôts in Africa, but
rarely linked one state with another. And in cultural terms, the metropole
stamped each of these colonies with a new, arbitrary cultural character, favoring
certain ethnic groups and languages over others, often in conformity with their
pliability toward the metropole’s policies. All of this left damaging political,
economic, social, and psychological time bombs, which continue to explode and
produce internal tensions that will take a long time to resolve.
Joseph Stiglitz, a chief economist of the World Bank and Nobel Prize winner,
characterizes the problem:
Colonialism left a mixed legacy in the developing world—but one
clear result was the view among people there that they had been cruelly
exploited…. The political independence that came to scores of colonies
after World War II did not put an end to economic colonialism. In some
regions, such as Africa, the exploitation—the extraction of natural
resources and the rape of the environment, all in return for a pittance—
was obvious. Elsewhere it was more subtle. In many parts of the world,

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global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank came to be seen as instruments of post-colonial control. These
institutions pushed market fundamentalism (“neoliberalism,” it was often
called), a notion idealized by Americans as “free and unfettered
markets.”… Free-market ideology turned out to be an excuse for new
forms of exploitation.
Above all, the Muslim world’s oil and energy resources have been a key
driver for incessant Western intervention over ownership of the oil, control of the
oil companies, pricing policies and shares of prices, political manipulation of
leaders in order to obtain the best deals on oil, and political and armed
intervention. The first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran was
overthrown by the United States and the United Kingdom in 1958 in order to
prevent Iranian nationalization of oil. Oil politics remain a very dangerous high-
risk game, played out among the great powers on Muslim world soil, and
beyond.

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