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Originally Posted by Mazer
It was not a rhetorical question, and thanks for answering. 
I came across an article called Christianity, Islam, and Science today. Together with Wikipedia's article on the Islamic Golden Age it paints a picture of a Muslim world that could have entered into it's own Renaissance centuries before Europe, had circumstances been a little different. Muslims are demonstrably capable of practicing national-scale democracy, but it's only been in the last century that they've had the opportunity to try. Your doubts that military action will make them more liberal are reasonable, but your doubts that they are simply incapable of self governance probably aren't. |
i don't think i ever said they are incapable of self-governance, per se, and if i did, it was a poor choice of words on my part. what i think said is that, under the current social structure of muslim society, they are incapable of Jeffersonian-style democracy.
edit: btw, i've also read that muslim society had produced many great leaps of scientific, technological, and intellectual advancement in it's heyday - obviously the potential is, or was, there for further greatness. what happened along the way to derail that progress, i have no idea, but i would suspect that it had something to do with the introduction of great oil wealth into the culture, and the subsequent consolidation of that wealth into the hands of particular groups (just a guess on my part,with no data to back it up). at any rate, here we are.