as it hits me...

.. so I share it here.

I happened upon the Jerusalem Post site and saw happy smiling people pictured as part of their family announcements.

You know, births, engagements, aliyahs.... well okay maybe you don't know the last one, but it's the Hebrew word for the specific act of emigrating to Israel as a Jew, a homecoming in the spiritual and national sense of the word.

And in those photographs I saw JOY, happiness of all sorts, especially on the faces of the young.

And I wondered for the thousandth time, where is the joy in Islamic countries? Is it simply hidden?

Or is it genuinely hard to come by?

I suspect the latter, in my state of relative ignorance... because life and experience tells me that joy leads to productivity.

When a person is happy, and in the company of other happy people, he or she tends toward higher productivity in whatever daily tasks are undertaken. It is a part of the human spirit, this link between energy and creativity on the one hand and personal peace and happiness on the other. One need only look at the lives of the clinically depressed to see the contrast, as they sleep too much and do little or nothing for themselves. Depressed people see no point in striving.

Happy people want to achieve, for their own sake and that of the ones they serve in life. Parents work to have something to give their children, and children work to please their parents. People work to take care of each other and themselves when they are happy.

Is it just coincidence, then, that the Islamic world is now and for hundreds of years famous for an almost complete lack of productivity? Economies are in a shambles and have been as long as I can remember.

Indeed the only thing Muslims can be counted on to strive at is the spread of Islam and the head-bobbing mindless rote of an Islamic "education".

And you know, much as I'm tempted now to clarify that 'I don't mean all Muslims, and I'm only speaking in generalities', I won't. What I'm saying is obvious to any dispassionate observer, and I do not lie or speak against Islam by pointing out the obvious.

Where is the joy in Islam?