Values, I say again, foster patterns of behavior in millions of people over thousands of years. We see this best when we focus on the values and history of a given culture. The Persians. The Romans. The British. And so on. When we look at the social/cultural evolution of whole societies in this way, what we are trying to discern is how those people's values affected their survival probabilities. How well did they survive through the threats and opportunities of their history, how much of their success was due to their cultural programming, and how much was just luck. 

In fairness, since I had a go at Christianity a few days ago, I should dissect some parts of the value system prescribed by Islam in the same way. Let's consider a few of the distinctive beliefs and values of Islam.  

Muslims are directed, by one of the "pillars" of Islam to pay a tax in every community in which they live that must be spent on caring for the poor. Not to fix roads, install public lighting, build parks, or pay police. Care for the poor. That one seems admirable to most people in the West. As I said in an earlier post, that kind of behavior on a society-wide scale makes the likelihood of that society's surviving improve. People in that kind of a country stick together even during hard times. The odds of revolution go down, the odds of vigorous resistance to invaders go up. 

Muslims also must not make what the Old Testament of the Christian bible calls "graven images". No statues or paintings of Allah or Mohammed, or even people or animals for that matter. This one, I believe, draws a clear line between what we place monetary, material value on and what is beyond such valuations. Don't put high value on things. Under Islam, the way believers view moral and spiritual matters is in an utterly separate category from the concerns of daily life. The point is that we are not to get attached to stuff. Things. Really living one's spiritual practice requires that one give one's deepest loyalty to the ideals of one's religion, not its buildings, statues, or gem-encrusted chalices. And the even deeper danger is in the clergy themselves. If church leaders begin to feel proud of their "stuff", then ordinary folk, without even being aware of it, absorb this materialistic world view. The erosion of ordinary people's moral codes and the replacement of loyalty to those values with loyalty to gems, gadgets, garments, and gain then becomes only a matter of time. The society whose members are commanded to cut that kind of thinking out of their heads will hang together more effectively over the long haul. They share because no one attaches excessive amounts of importance to material things anyway, again binding the community's citizens to each other more tightly.

The Koran tells believers that each of them must answer for how he or she has lived life when the day of judgement comes. There will be no foisting of responsibility onto one's parents, teachers, imams, bosses, or anyone else. In the general society, each person's accepting responsibility and becoming his or her own chaperon and disciplinarian has value for the community. Once this thinking gets into the head of each child, he or she will not need to be watched by parents, teachers, policemen, or anyone else. Community efficiency, again, works to increase the community's survival odds. 

Note that I am not saying that all Muslims live up to these values. They are only exhorted to do so, and when they manage to live these values even some of the time, the survival odds for the whole society go up. From all we can tell from history, Muslims were living these values quite a bit more universally and sincerely than were Christians, from Mohammed's time right into the 1600's. At that point, they seemed to lose a major part of their confidence and integrity as a society. Why this was so is still an intriguing mystery for historians. 

But I haven't so far dealt with the big one that we in the West hate and fear. The Koran tells the true believers that they can fight and kill their enemies as proof of their piety. That one we in the West do not like the sounds of. Now the Koran does say in a couple of spots that Muslims are only supposed to do this kind of fighting and killing if a foreign force invades their land and drives them from their homes. Only then, Muslim scholars are eager to tell Westerners, are the "faithful" allowed to kill other human beings. "Allah does not love aggressors." 

This value or belief is directing Muslims very clearly to stand together if they are invaded and that policy has obvious value for the survival of the larger society. But it sounds very amoral to us in the West. Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek when someone slaps their face. He wouldn't even fight back when they came to take his life. Mohammed is saying something more like: "When they come and drive you out of your homes and kill some of your family or neighbors, then all bets are off. Then you can kill them to the last man if need be, and Allah will approve." 

That there are imams who want to go from defense over to the offense and convert the whole world to Islam at the point of the sword we all have seen too clearly. But then again, if there are imams trying, probably unconsciously, to make themselves feel more important, well ...so did the Christian leaders during the Crusades and so do many of them today. There is nothing new here. The whole grim process is sad, foolish, wasteful, cruel, and wrong. But it is very human nonetheless.