Truth is often unpalatable and "politically incorrect." Anyone to whom the following is unpalatable is invited, not just to object, but to refute it, point by point.

There's a saying in the Middle East: "The Arabs will either find a desert or make one." Doubtless the Kurds and the non-Arab Sudanese would agree.

How did the Arabs get that way? Could their religion have anything to do with it? Moslems (and our own leaders) strive mightily to assure us Islam's a peaceful, worthy, fruitful civilization, the equal of Christianity. But is it? What does history say? In the movie "Lawrence of Arabia" Prince Feisal wistfully recalls that Moslem Cordoba had streetlighting and a public water supply when London was a squalid backwater.

True. But Cordoba was a Spanish, not an Arab town. The people were Latins and Visigoths, the new subjects of a thin veneer of recent Arab (or North African) conquerors. Nor did any cities in the Arab-Moslem heartland boast such civilized niceties.

The brief "Arab Enlightenment" on the heels of Arab conquest was "Arab" only in that the first generation of rulers were sensible enough to tolerate their new subjects and learn from them. They got "Arab" numerals and the zero from Hindu India. Many "Arab" sages of Islam's heyday were practising Jews, Christians, or Zoroastrians.

Averroes, ever cited as a great "Arab" scholar, who much influenced medieval European thought, wore an Arab name, but he was a Cordoban, i.e. a Spaniard. Avicenna, another famed "Arab," in truth was "the son of a moneychanger of Bokhara," a city on Islam's far-eastern, non-Arab rim.

The "most outstanding" Moslem physician, known as Rhazes in the West, was a Persian. Algebra, typically called an "Arab" invention, actually was the work of a Uzbek, of Khiva, in modern-day Uzbekistan, in central Asia. Saladin, the "Arab" hero, was a Kurd.

And nullifying these positives are the "desert-making" hijinks the true, ethnic Arabs were up to at the same time. The stories told that Amr, the Arab conqueror of Egypt, was asked what to do with the Great Library of Alexandria. "If these writings agree with the Koran," he replied, "they are useless, and need not be preserved. If they disagree they are pernicious, and should be destroyed." He "distributed the library's contents to the city's public baths, whose 4,000 furnaces were fueled for six months" with the bounty of classical Greek learning.

Pope Gregory I sanctioned the use of music and art in Christian worship, laying the foundation for Europe's cultural glories.

Islam scorned most art as idolatrous (remember those huge Buddha statues and the Taliban?) and music as a distraction from prayer.

The Moslem reverence for the Koran is hard for Westerners to understand.

Schopenhauer called it "this wretched book," and said it must lose a lot in translation. Even the mostly friendly, ever-fair Will Durant laments its disorganization and factual inaccuracies, its garbled borrowings from Judaism and Christianity, and above all its deadly fatalism: "It conspired with other factors to produce, in later centuries, a pessimistic inertia in Arab life and thought." The "Arab" or "Moslem Enlightenment" was briefer than the European, and produced no comparable fruits; but it developed along the same lines. Like medieval church leaders, Islamic leaders were alarmed when science (the pursuit of truth through observation and reason), began to conflict with revelation, religion. In Europe, after a long struggle, science won out. In Islam, it lost. "In 1150," says Will Durant, "the Caliph Mustanjid, at Baghdad, ordered burned all the philosophical works of Avicenna and the Brethren of Sincerity [a scientific school]. He forbade his subjects to study philosophy, and urged them to throw into the fire all the books of philosophy wherever found. The instructions were eagerly carried out."

Of course some Christians fought a similar obscurantist struggle against the Renaissance. But unlike the Moslems they lost their battle. Christian faith came to terms with reason. Indeed, many early scientists were devout believers, even Christian ministers.

Something, some ineffable factor in Christianity, let the West bridge the gap between reason and faith, and go on to midwive science and technology, the modern world itself. It's hard to understand; for Calvinistic Christianity (the "Protestant ethic," in Holland, England, and America) is credited with giving birth to capitalism and the modem business mindset. And Calvinism's as "fatalistic" as Islam!

The difference must be that Calvinism's more upbeat about it. So we're all already saved or damned?

Well, then. Might as well shrug, mind the store, make a million! But the equally predestined Moslem sinks into apathy. If all's in Allah's hands anyway, why bother? In a hot climate it's easy to sit, sensual or listless by the wayside of life.

The Western mind went out from Europe to convert the world (to capitalist technology, if not always Christianity). All the world, that is, save Islam. It's interesting to contrast Japan's experience with Islam. Japan too defied the West at first, but quickly saw the wisdom of: "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em." Other non-Westerners are taking to the modern Western-based worldwide culture. The Chinese admire Western classical music. Japanese millionaires buy up Dutch masters. Indians study English poetry and excel at computer science.

Yes, there are Moslem scholars (trained and mostly teaching in the West). Most of their "scholarship" seems to consist of agonizing over why their beloved Islam is so culturally sterile. The few Arabs who publish learned papers are Lebanese Christians.

To the Olympics, Moslems have contributed the occasional soccer team and of course the mass murder of Israeli athletes.

And many, perhaps most Moslems aren't merely indifferent to these fruits of modernity, they hate them!

Fancy Westerners blowing up their own oil pipelines or schoolchildren, looting their own national museum, beheading foreigners trying to help them! It's "politically incorrect" to point out flaws or drawbacks in another culture or religion.

But Moslem thinkers are doing it of their own. If they're sensible, they'll welcome the input of outsiders toward finding an answer to their admitted cultural dilemma.

The Arab "makers of deserts" got a poetic comeuppance. Starting in 1219, the Mongols began their invasions, massacring and destroying everything in their path, in the end destroying even Baghdad itself.

Islam sank into the decline from which it has yet to recover.