Marginalized (The Hidden Friedman)

In which Tom Friedman takes a look at the furor over the Danish Muhammed cartoons and sees a flattened world (full access to Empty Pockets, Angry Minds available to Times Select subscribers):

I have no doubt that the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad have caused real offense to many Muslims. I'm glad my newspaper didn't publish them. But there is something in the worldwide Muslim reaction to these cartoons that is excessive, and suggests that something else is at work in this story. It's time we talked about it.

To understand this Danish affair, you can't just read Samuel Huntington's classic, "The Clash of Civilizations." You also need to read Karl Marx, because this explosion of Muslim rage is not just about some Western insult. It's also about an Eastern failure. It is about the failure of many Muslim countries to build economies that prepare young people for modernity — and all the insult, humiliation and frustration that has produced.

Today's world has become so wired together, so flattened, that you can't avoid seeing just where you stand on the planet — just where the caravan is and just how far ahead or behind you are. In this flat world you get your humiliation fiber-optically, at 56K or via broadband, whether you're in the Muslim suburbs of Paris or Kabul. Today, Muslim youth are enraged by cartoons in Denmark. Earlier, it was a Newsweek story about a desecrated Koran. Why? When you're already feeling left behind, even the tiniest insult from afar goes to the very core of your being — because your skin is so thin.

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The Middle East Media Research Institute, called Memri, just published an analysis of the latest employment figures issued by the U.N.'s International Labor Office. The I.L.O. study, Memri reported, found that "the Middle East and North Africa stand out as the region with the highest rate of unemployment in the world": 13.2 percent. That is worse than in sub-Saharan Africa.

There's more on the flip:

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Nearly 60 percent of the Arab world is under the age of 25. With limited job growth to absorb them, the I.L.O. estimates, the region is spinning out about 500,000 more unemployed people each year. At a time when India and China are focused on getting their children to be more scientific, innovative thinkers, educational standards in much of the Muslim world — particularly when it comes to science and critical inquiry — are not keeping pace.

Pervez Hoodbhoy, a professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, bluntly wrote the following in Global Agenda 2006, the journal of the recent Davos World Economic Forum:

[...]

"[Today] you seldom encounter a Muslim name in scientific journals. Muslim contributions to pure and applied science — measured in terms of discoveries, publications, patents and processes — are marginal. ... The harsh truth is that science and Islam parted ways many centuries ago. In a nutshell, the Muslim experience consists of a golden age of science from the ninth to the 14th centuries, subsequent collapse, modest rebirth in the 19th century, and a profound reversal from science and modernity, beginning in the last decades of the 20th century. This reversal appears, if anything, to be gaining speed."

No wonder so many young people in this part of the world are unprepared, and therefore easily enraged, as they encounter modernity.