Glimps East Forward - The Road to the Future

Copyright 2018 by Glimps East Forward

Published by Glimps East Forward on Amazon (Kindle), Apple (eBooks) and Google (Google Play)

All Rights Reserved

Published online by author, 2018

By the author:

If you have ever wondered why,
among all the human species that
lived on this planet, we are the
only ones to have survived, and
why Europe and not the Middle
East started industrial and social
revolution, this book is for you.

Contents

Preface 1

If you follow the news that currently comes out about the Middle East, it might be hard to believe that this region of the world was once the pioneer in humanitys quest for advancement and knowledge, and that it had the first of many kinds of social fabrics to the modern life in which we live and know today.

However, the people who invented writing and started one of the cradles of civilizations, ultimately leading humanity towards modernity and knowledge not very long ago, look very different now in the 21 st century.

From the war-torn country of Syria to the extremely conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the people who breathed life into modernity were located in this part of the world. They were also based in similar countries in Africa and other parts of the world, but no other country has the rich past that the Middle East has, and that is what makes this region so different from African or the South American countries.

If you compare the cultural and social behavior of the Middle Eastern countries with European countries, it will look nothing alike in most aspects, and it will be hard to believe that the Middle Eastern region, with all the current problems, was once home to the most advanced civilization of the time.

It seems that the glorious past has been replaced by struggles in society, in the form of dictatorship, backward thinking, intolerance, religiosity, old traditions, and an assault on basic human rights. Almost all the countries located in the Middle East are suffering from issues that have been dealt with and solved in the West, decades or centuries ago.

One question that might occupy the mind of some people is: what happened to the Middle East and why did they change the course and fall behind?

The nations who invented many of modern lifes aspects, and who were once more modern than any other nation on earth, have now lost so much of their past abilities, which is hard to believe.

This book is not about the Middle East or the Muslim world alone; it is about the entire human race and how we got to where we are today, and where we can be in a few generations. If most of the examples are from the Muslim world, it is only because it has such a rich and glorious past.

For humanity to reach the next level of advancement, all nations on earth have to prospect, and not just some.

Understandably, some people will feel unhappy and frustrated while reading this book, but in the long run, readers will appreciate the honesty and the effort that has been put in place to point out an existing problem.

We all should remember that if we had kept doing what our ancestors did, we would still be living in caves!

Even though I have pointed out the Middle Eastern countries as the main example, the problem will eventually be humanitys problem, and not only the Middle Eastern region or the Muslim world alone.

I might use Muslim world instead of the Middle East sometime; however, I guess it wont matter for the point I will try to make.

The Middle East is located in the western portion of the Asian continent. It has an estimated population of 260 million people. It is composed of 15 countries: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Syria, and Turkey.

Currently there is an ongoing civil war in Syrian between the Syrian government and its allies, and various forces that are opposing both the government and each other. The unrest started in 2011, following the Arab Spring, and has cost around half a million lives and created millions of refuges, so far. For more information refer to
.

Preface 2

The human race is an intelligent and peculiar species. Even though all seven billion of us are genetically very similar, when you look at the different individuals and societies, you can notice very different stories.

Ask yourself: why were the native Australian and Americans technologically less advanced when Europeans arrived on their shores? Why did some nations have very early innovations and inventions, but fall behind in the long run? Why have the Western countries become so dominant in science and technology in the last 500 years? Why did Neanderthals die out, while we havent?

You can go even further and ask the question about the human race itself: why are we the only human species to have survived and dominated the world? Our closest relatives, the great apes, is not even close to our level of intelligence in comparison, and some might even argue that dolphins or pigs are smarter than them.

When you ask the above questions, it seems that the answer for all of them must be different. How can the survival of our race among all the other human species be related to the technology differences between the nations today!

There are lots of other forces and factors as well; however, in the end, there is one major characteristic that differentiates us as human from the other animals, and from other human species that have come before us in our long history on this planet.

We as humans, for some reason, have a big ego and want to think that we are different from all the other animals on this planet, but no matter what we think of ourselves, we all started from a single life form and spread throughout the planet.

Eventually, some life forms became human-ape-like creatures, which gave rise to us and the great apes. Even though we separated from the great apes around five million years ago, for some reason, we became much more intelligent than them. Five or even ten million is not a massive time frame if you consider that life started over three billion years ago, somewhere on this planet, and it took almost that long for the intelligent life to form.

If you have ever wondered why humans but not apes dominate the world; why we and not Neanderthals survived the cold winters of Europe; why native Americans and Australians werent a match for the Europeans; and why Europeans but not the Middle Easterners invented so many of the modern technologies, then read on, as youll find that I too had these such queries, and I hope to shed some light on these questions to help you answer them.

Neanderthals, or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans in the genus Homo, who lived in Eurasia until 40,000 years ago. For more information refer to
.

Chapter

Current social fabric in the Middle East

When you look at any country in the Middle East or Muslim countries in general, it seems as if almost all of them are passing some laws that take them a little more backward. There is a hard resistance against anything that makes their society more democratic and less dictator dependent. While most of the Western countries are becoming more transparent and democratic, in the Middle Eastern region, the forward movement is very slow and has lots of bumps and barriers.

There is no shortage of theory about why it has turned out this way from Western interference in their affairs, to Islamic culture, traditions, oil, and environment, but none of them really covers the whole story.