This guy? He probably got shot down 100 too many times when asking some girl to dance. I also heard he complained about everything from haircuts to the way people talked. What a loser.
Posted on 04/28/2008 5:38:57 AM PDT by SJackson
If history works out in the end, the high price paid in blood and suffering can at least be justified as having produced some good. But what happens when it doesn't?
Clearly, radical Islamism and the region's current political troubles have parallels with the European history of Christianity and Judaism. Yet often the nearest equivalents date not from a few decades back but rather from the 1500s and 1600s. That calendar gap shows why the region's task is so monumental and lengthy.
In the 1500s and 1600s, Europe and its two main religions struggled with the impact of modernization, rationalism and scientific thinking; the challenge of new ideas; and revitalized interest in ancient pagan Greece and Rome. Despite much bloodshed and repression, a way was found to manage these contradictions.
Islam and the Arabic-speaking world, not to mention Iran, have still not done so on a large scale. Before there can be democracy, rapid development, social progress, equal rights for women and other such changes, this job has to be done. And the work has barely begun.
How did the West move from a medieval world view into the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and then on into the modern age? That's a complex question, but basically the answer includes:
the confidence that increasing knowledge, even if seemingly contradicting religious dogma, was a way to understand the deity's true plan for the world. The church sometimes acted against science or technology, but not very often;
accepting pluralism of belief, with Protestantism playing a key role in establishing a range of alternative interpretations;
incorporating a pragmatic view in which success was the ultimate test, and practice trumped ideology;
adopting reason as the ultimate tool for living in this world;
a growing separation between religion and state, and room for secularism in the public sphere. WHAT DOES this all have to do with the contemporary Middle East? Quite a lot. Not only do regional Muslim-majority states not accept these principles but Islamists, with real success, are trying to turn back the clock even further. Moreover, there's an additional problem: Islamists and even mainstream Muslim clergy know how the story turned out in the West, bringing about a vast decline of religion.
Thus Saudi cleric Muhammad al-Munajid, and many others, sound like Spanish Inquisition zealots determined to stamp out anything new, different, original, or individual.
Another parallel with Western history is the use of the Jew as the demon of modernization, conspiring to subvert traditional society and change as a way of gaining power.
Those who think the problem stems from a need to make Western policy more palatable, showing enough empathy or appeasement, have no idea of the historical processes in play. Consider an interview by Munajid on Al-Majd television on March 30.
Focusing on the threat within Islam, Munajid warns (translation by MEMRI) that advocates of change are heretics engaged in "a very dangerous conspiracy." Why? Because rather than depending on clerics, they claim the right to interpret Islam, are reopening the gates of ijtihad - closed among Muslims for almost 1,000 years - and applying reason to religious doctrine. "This is the prerogative of religious scholars, not of ignorant people... fools or heretics."
Of course, Islamists as well as liberal reformers threaten the mainstream (conservative) clerics' monopoly over Islam. Many Islamists are not qualified theologians.
But moderates are more dangerous, in the mainstream view, since they may loosen religion's hold altogether. Thus, mainstream clerics are more sympathetic to radical Islamists - a key factor in the reformers' weakness and the Islamists' strength. To paraphrase an old Cold War slogan, they say: "Better green than dead."
Islamists and mainstream clerics carry this idea even into Europe itself, trying either to keep the Enlightenment out of their own communities, or even roll back European history. Sometimes they are helped by befuddled "native" elites who have lost confidence in their own civilization.
IN CONTRAST, among Jews and Christians, despite reactionary tendencies, new interpretations were permitted to keep up with the times. This came gradually to be considered the best way for these faiths to survive and flourish. Many of their reformers were themselves highly qualified clerics.
Early Protestants were burned at the stake; others won their rights only in combat. But Europe changed.
Reformers could call for support on nationalism (Czechs and Dutch revolting against foreign rulers); on aristocratic rulers seeking their own interests (Henry the Eighth's divorce, nobles seeking to loot monasteries' wealth); and on peasants' class resentment. These factors play little or no such role in the Middle East today. On the contrary, instead of a way to win more freedom or power, reform is seen as a destabilizing tool used against Islam by foreign powers and culture.
Moreover, Munajid and others know something past Europeans didn't: how far secularism can go. As a result, Muslims are extraordinarily insecure. Munajid warns that reformers "want to open up everything for debate," so that "anyone is entitled to believe in whatever he wants... If you want to become an apostate - go ahead. You like Buddhism? Leave Islam, and join Buddhism. No problem...."
Today, new interpretations; tomorrow, rampant alcoholism, short skirts, empty houses of worship, and punk rock. It begins with freedom of thought, it continues with freedom of speech, and it ends up with freedom of belief.
In England, even when William Shakespeare was young, British universities highlighted teaching about ancient pagan cultures. The first modernist biography of Christianity's founder was published by 1830. Their equivalents are impossible in the Arab world in 2008.
Most clerics and their supporters simply don't believe they can win a fair fight in the battle of ideas. Therefore, only repression will do. Conflict is far "safer" than peace.
This is the real, underlying critique of the West and Israel: that these places are bad role models, against whom windows and doors must be barred. They must be made to seem so horrible as to close the eyes and ears of the faithful to the temptations they offer. An iron curtain must be lowered, behind which the isolated enthusiastically embrace their isolation.
One sees this process at work even in "liberated" Iraq and Afghanistan. The radicals want to roll back the West and destroy Israel, which, they argue, wants to subordinate the Middle East politically and transform it culturally. Most of the relative moderates - regimes and mainstream clerics - want, at a minimum, to hold Israel at bay and avoid a formal peace with it.
Remember, Sayyid Qutb of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood was driven to extremism by his horror at life in 1950s' small-town Kansas. What effect must 21st-century Western life, with its far greater excesses, have?
Today the advocates of "medievalism" in the Middle East have mass communications, modern organizational techniques - and, soon, even nuclear weapons.
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Interesting article and one which resonates just a bit with me as an Orthodox Christian. Over the past 20+ years I’ve seen what “Europeanization” and secularism have done to Greece. It simply isn’t the Orthodox country it was in the past. The depravity which came along with Western pop culture and even Western political ideals have transformed Greece from a Levantine place where my uncles talked about “going to Europe” to one where, at least in the cities, teenage girls dance topless in clubs and abortion is rampant. On the other hand, the people are increasingly prosperous, life spans have increased as has literacy and the infrastructure of the country, especially the highways, is spectacular.
But its as if Greece has sold its soul for material benefits. Easy for me to say sitting here spoiled in the States I suppose. Anyway, looking askance on what the West has to offer in and of itself isn’t surprising to me even if the Mohammedans’ reaction to it is depraved itself.
Alvin Tofler’s “The Third Wave” explains this very well. We have gone through this before and we will go through this again with Southeast Asia and with Sub Saharan Africa some day.
This commonly used analogy is false. The West has declined since the medieval period, with the exceptions of technology and religious tolerance. But even the latter improvement is exaggerated, as in, for example, the "Black Myth" of the Spanish Inquisition. It's a shame that most people derive their understanding of the Middle Ages from Monty Python and centuries-old "Enlightenment" myths.
The other notion, that science has flourished without religion is also entirely backwards. The natural sciences or empiricism, as we know it today, suffered still-births in non-Western civilizations, because of erroneous philosophical assumptions about the world. Empiricism arose and developed to maturity in the West because of specifically Christian (Catholic) dogmas regarding the natural world. Buridan's impetus theory (and then Newton's theory of momentum) followed directly from the (1215) Fourth Lateran Council's promulgation of the doctrine of "creation from nothing."
Of all the statistics about all the Muslims moving into Europe, one interesting stat- many of these Muslims are converting to Christianity. I recently saw where there are 5-10,000 Muslims to convert to Christianity in France alone (and anyone who knows about Christian evangelism knows these numbers rarely stay static). Many Muslims grow violent when placed in the Western world, but others realize how out-of-touch and out-of-date their religion truly is. Because man is a spiritual being, they see Christians in a free environment and see that we're not their religion makes us out to be.
The "good" Muslim has rituals he has to follow, the Five Prayers a day, the pilgrimage to Mecca, etc., yet even then they don't know if they make it to "heaven" with their unknowable Allah (heck, they don't even know if Muhammed made it). This is compared to Jesus, who is God in the Flesh, who wants all mankind to know Him, trust Him, and be your Friend.
Munajid warns that reformers "want to open up everything for debate," so that "anyone is entitled to believe in whatever he wants... If you want to become an apostate - go ahead. You like Buddhism? Leave Islam, and join Buddhism. No problem...."
Haven't we heard that the Muzzies kill those who leave Islam?
This explains many things. Such as why Israel will never live in peace with her neighbors until her neighbors are destroyed.
As I have posted on FR before:
It is a shame, but the Muslims are a bunch of wackos still stuck in the 7th century with a mindset to match. The concept of tolerance is completely lost on them. They are still fighting the crusades. They are truly barbarians who understand nothing but brute force.andUnfortunately, they are using 21st century toys.
When the Islamofascists reach critical mass and they come for you and you're laying on the ground with your head sawed off or you're burned to a crisp and hanging from a bridge, I'll remind you that your condition was wrought by peaceful folks just practicing their religion.
This guy? He probably got shot down 100 too many times when asking some girl to dance. I also heard he complained about everything from haircuts to the way people talked. What a loser.
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The Middle Ages were actually a period of great progress in Europe, since the disruption wrought by the fall of Rome had finally settled down, the Muslims were being driven out of places they had invaded, and the warring kingdoms were gradually entering into larger alliances that reduced some of the strife that had been characteristic of the period right after the fall of Rome (the “Dark Ages”).
Islam arose in the 7th century (”Dark Ages”) as a madman’s synthesis of a heretical form of Christianity (Arianism) current in the ME at that time, Jewish ritual law, and pagan practices and dieties, combined with a strange theocratic government that was probably adapted from early Judaism, Roman culture (where at various points the Emperor was divine), and his own desire for power. The only high points Islam ever had was when North African hordes conquered much more advanced societies: Persia, Baghdad and Spain. The first Muslim conquerors who came to Spain were from the recently conquered and formerly advanced societies of Baghdad and Persia. They were quite impressed by the level of learning in Sevilla, where Isidor of Seville had preserved the writings of Aristotle and produced a compendium of all human knowledge. This was also published in the 7th century, prior to the Muslim invasions, and was the intellectual mainstay of Europe for centuries afterwards. In the early Middle Ages, new scholarship - much of it from Spain, under the Christian king Alfonso X and partly based, paradoxically enough, on the studies heretical Muslims who had been impressed by Isidor’s scholarship and had access to earlier texts of the writings of Aristotle that had been preserved in Arabic at the time of the fall of Rome - provided more modern and extended translations.
But the interesting thing is that these initial conquerors were then conquered by more orthodox North African Muslims, and were regarded as heretics by other Muslims.
Muslims go by their book, and their book is evil. There’s no way of changing that. Mohammed was the L. Ron Hubbard of his day, but one with an army; or more, perhaps, the Joseph Smith or Brigham Young of his day, but without the power of the US Army to oppose him and make him adapt his doctrine to the existing law of the land.
Muslims do not have a church of the faithful (who have no say in Islam in any case), doctrine, or a central authority (since it was the Church that assembled the Christian Scriptures, accepting the consolidated Jewish Scriptures but approving or rejecting some of the many “Gospel” accounts of Christ that were circulating in the Christian world at that time).
In short, there’s no way for them to reform. They can’t even make it to the Middle Ages. What you are seeing is a Dark Ages phenomenon somehow exerting the power of its primitive viciousness over the entire world. They need to be converted, and we need to preach to them to get it done.
Islam: So easy a caveman can do it. :D
IMHO, why Islam is the way it is that the god the Muslims worship and its evil gamebook, with the moon rock god they worship is simply put SATAN or the DEVIL. What we are seeing with the violence and oppression is all commanded of them by the DEVIL himself via a moon rock.
Characterizing Qutb as a loser may have some merit.
Alas, losers can be dangerous, as the murderers at Columbine proved, and Qutb’s version of loserdom is now de rigeur in the fever-swamps of Islam. It was his ideas, importing the existentialist idea of ‘absolute commitment’ into Islam that further corrupted the Islamic conception of martyrdom, so that not only death in battle against the kufir, but even self-destruction in the pursuit of murdering kufir became considered ‘martyrdom’, the Quranic prohibitions on suicide notwithstanding.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
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