It is nice to see science lending some justification to heresy, especially that variety of it that claims to be more objective and rational. I have always observed in the process of my occasional debates with Muslim believers that the Golden Age of Islam in the Middle East coincided by most accounts with the First Abbasid period – a time that witnessed the flourishing of both heresy and traditional faith.
Pity that the tolerance of that period was an inadvertent product of the times, and was never codified, and never became a real article of faith, neither in the traditional faith systems, nor in the heretical ones. Hell, even the more rational Mu’tazilite elements attempted to use the power of the state to impose their views, only to fail and have the tables turn against them. This might prove that heretics are not necessarily just or democrats. Indeed, most secular forces in our region today are not in favor of democracy for fear of the masses and their ignorance.
But then, once you support an authoritarian state, chances are the masses will become even more ignorant and insusceptible to heretical thinking, without which the status quo of intellectual and cultural stagnation and morasse can never be challenged. Just despots, if such types have ever really existed, are not produced in a vacuum, and are often the products of relatively “enlightened” pressures from a variety of sources “below.”
You cannot wait or hope for just despots to appear, this is not how societies are modernized and freedom safeguarded. You want freedom, you want justice, you fight for them, you stand by the people who need them, you gamble on their ability to see the wisdom of tolerance again, the “truth” that states are based on justice and the rule of law, not faith, and you gamble on on your ability to make them see that wisdom and that truth, eventually. Otherwise all is lost, and your alleged yearning for freedom is nothing more than a yearning to trade places with the current tyrant(s).
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 