The other problem is besides the tendency for the political class to tamper with or to exploit the knowledge class and it was a kind of a trade off, the scholars would say we won’t recognize your authority and we will even tell the people to obey you even though you are corrupt, drink wine, fornicated, etcetera and most of the [IB] were not very clean people. Never the less they were symbols of authority and power and that the scholars in Islam came to terms with him saying we need a simple, we need an over arching figure to whom we can give allegiance and who would allow us the scholars to enforce the legal system, the Sharia, which is kind of a blueprint for a social economic and political activities for the society. So there is a trade off, we handle the religious blueprint and you allow us to have authority for it and we recognize your authority and ask people to mention your name in the Friday prayer and answer your call for troops for jihad or whatever. But this trade off broke down in various times and places and there was an increasing tendency for the scholar class to get co-opted by the ruling class and this is the natural tendency; it’s like here I suppose that there are certain sectors of academia who service the foreign policy of the United States and are afraid to be too critical or unorthodox or off the beaten track when it comes to criticizing what’s really in the best interest of the United States in it’s conduct of foreign affairs. So there’s a tendency that the governments rely on experts who are trained in their own institutions and whom they support to a large extent to meet their needs; it’s very common human pattern. The problem is in the last few hundreds years and here we are getting into another territory, the degradation and atrophy of the intellectual and knowledge class among the Muslims. This is a very serious situation to the point now we are many…

Interviewer: It’s limited to Muslims?

Interviewee: Yes many so called Muslims knowledge authorities [IB] are suspicious of rationality, identify rationality and certain aspects of intellectual disciplines with a westernizing approach or somehow imimicable to true Islamic principles, good Muslims shouldn’t do that. The Ulama in the past wrote poetry, were interested in astronomy, dabbled in music, were good in math. Take the average the so called [IB] in the typical Muslim society today like in India or Pakistan or Indonesia or Malaysia. They have, they don’t even know about the modern world. They can’t tell you the capital of the Germany or they are very limited in their understanding of the world today and their knowledge of the intellectual breath and the depth of their own Islamic disciplines is adolescent and that’s a charitable way of saying it. Of course if I don’t want to and we don’t have to expose dirty laundry, Muslims tend to prefer not to talk about this but it’s an obvious thing which the rest of the world is not commenting on. So you get people who issue so called Fatwās who are totally incompetent and have no business doing anything of the sort. And yet the problem is that so many Muslims take it seriously and think that somehow it’s a valid legal position that they have to somehow observe or pay heed to. But it’s not at all. This is a real issue. So we would like that Muslims recover some depth in their own intellectual and rational tradition. And that they understand the…

Interviewer: Christians as well.