"Little House" Big Role 2008

Heroes of Freedom Inspire Candidate

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

George Ajjan added the following to the Lew Rockwell Blog on Jan. 11, 2007.

Rose Wilder Lane

Posted by Lew Rockwell at January 11, 2008 07:33 AM

Writes George Ajjan: "Karin Friedemann points out that Rose Wilder Lane, whom Ron Paul mentioned in his 'Onward!' email yesterday as one of the 'heroes of freedom', was the daughter of Almanzo Wilder. He attributed his unusual first name to a family tradition dating back to the Crusades, in which an ancestor of Wilder had his life saved by a certain el-Manzoor - Almanzo being the anglicized tribute. Karin says, 'The good deed of one Muslim is resulting in a presidential candidacy. Never underestimate the power of mercy!'"

Rose Wilder Lane is the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the Little House on the Prairie books, which later became a television series.

The Cato Institute provides a brief biography of her at http://www.cato.org/special/threewomen/wilder-lane.html .

Ron Paul describes her as a Hero of Freedom and lists her as an inspiration for his decision to enter politics. Because of Lane's book Islam and the Discovery of Freedom, the war-mongers and anti-Arab anti-Muslim Neocon racists were unable to ensnare Paul in the false Islamophobic consensus they were trying to create through fear.

George Leef, president of Patrick Henry Associates in Michigan, reviews the book at http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=3552 .

Leef notes the following.

Lane also argues that the West was exposed to the ideas of liberty that would in time lead to its ascendancy through contacts with Muslim traders and scholars. She notes that Spanish Catholics, while welcoming the Catholic kings of the reconquista, nonetheless would not give up the liberty they had enjoyed under Islamic rule (which was tolerant of religious differences). They demanded and got documents guaranteeing their freedoms. Ahmad adds that Magna Carta, to which Westerners trace the beginnings of the idea of limited government, resulted from pressure by English nobles who had returned from the Crusades, where they had learned that the Muslim leader Saladin was bound by the law the same as any other citizen.

Columbia Professor Richard W. Bulliet describes rather more academically in The Case for IslamoChristian Civilization the balance between the central government and the ulama (Islamic legal intellectual class) that created a system of checks and balances to limit governmental authority and provide space for personal freedom. The form of secularization that the West has encouraged or enforced throughout the Islamic world has contributed to shattering the balance and creating in Muslim countries a form of authoritarianism that resembles the strong-man dictatorial governments of nineteenth century Europe. A class of Western scholars now make the rather circular and illogical argument that the prevalence of such authoritarianism in Muslim countries indicates that Islam is incompatible with democracy.

Along the same line of thought Leef suggests that Lane's depiction of Islam is incomplete.

This book is not, however, a "warts and all" portrait of Islam, which was quite indifferent to the enslavement of Africans and Europeans and placed non-Muslims on a lower legal plane. For discussion of the dark side of this civilization, one must look elsewhere.

The negative characterization of the position of slaves and non-Muslims in Islamic society has served as a staple of the modern Western critique of Islamic society, but more recent scholarship has tried to get past the propaganda and polemic.

Islamic slavery cannot be equated with the common forms of Euro-American or European slavery. For example, Ottoman slavery could provide social mobility, confer political authority and give social status to members of an alien immigrant population. Tel Aviv University Professor Ehud Toledano discusses such aspects of Ottoman Slavery in Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East. 

Hebrew University Professor Haim Gerber provides some of the results of his research into the Sharia-based legal system of the Ottoman Empire in State, Society and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective.

 

Gerber's data and analysis indicates that in a comparison of the courts of the core Ottoman Bursa/Istanbul region with those of core English region of the UK, the Ottoman State was far closer to the ideal of a Rechtstaat and achieved far greater legal equality among members of different religious groups or economic classes than the contemporary UK at all periods that Gerber studied.

 

Even though Rose Wilder Lane was not an academic specialist in Islam, her depiction of Islamic society could be a good deal closer to the historical reality of Arab-Islamic and Ottoman society than Leef believes because her unique family history made it possible for her to transcend traditional Western anti-Islamic and anti-Arab prejudices that Neocons and Zionists have worked so hard to revive and inflame in modern American society.

 

In the Ron Paul candidacy Americans are benefiting from Rose Wilder Lane's unprejudiced perspective. If Ron Paul helps shatter the perverted lens through which Americans view the Middle East, el-Manzoor's descendants may also reap the rewards of charity sown like a seed so long ago.

 

 

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