Posted on 03/18/2017 4:23:21 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Christopher de Bellaigue stresses how, over the centuries, many Muslim leaders have been paragons of enlightenment
Christopher de Bellaigue, a journalist who has spent much of his working life in the Middle East, has grown tired of people throwing up their hands in horror at Isis, Erdogan and Islamic terror, and declaring that the region is backward and in need of a thorough western-style reformation.
As he argues in this timely book, the Islamic world has been coming to terms with modernity in its own often turbulent way for more than two centuries. And wed better understand it, because its an interesting story, and often a positive one the way vast crowds streamed onto the streets of Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran in demonstrations against authoritarian rule over the past decade, for example. Western-style participatory democracy remains the dream of the man and woman in the souk. Globalisation means that technical innovation and modern ideas cannot help seeping across borders. And Islam is a notably broad church, by no means totally uncompromising: witness the popularity of the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen who, from American exile, preaches inter-religious accord while being accused of trying to overthrow the Turkish state.
De Bellaigue approaches his subject largely through those three cities Cairo, Islams intellectual centre with its famous though often sclerotic Al Azhar university; Istanbul, once capital of the vast inter-denominational Ottoman empire which straddled Europe and Asia; and Tehran, the furthest from the West, with its powerful Shia tradition.
Back in our own Dark Ages, Abbasid openness to science and philosophy provided a bridge between ancient Greece and Renaissance Europe. However, these advances were reversed as ijtihad, or independent reasoning, gave way to taqlid, or emulation of authority. The razing of the Galata Observatory in Istanbul in 1580 epitomised a waning intellectual curiosity.
The Islamic world was forced to deal with the post-Enlightenment West after Napoleons conquest of Egypt in 1798. His ambitious Description of Egypt signalled purpose, which bore lasting fruit in developments such as a medical college in Cairo, run by the French surgeon Antoine Barthélemy Clot.
Stung by a sense of cultural inadequacy, the cleric Hassan al-Attar was one of several Egyptians who travelled in search of knowledge to Europe, where he concluded that the Quranic ban on body dissection was wrong. The scholar Rifaa al-Tahtawi oversaw the translation of over 2,000 European and Turkish books. Rulers like the Khedive Ismail Pasha underpinned such initiatives with infrastructural projects, including hospitals, railways and the Suez Canal. But he also copied the Wests baser habits in his profligacy. The countrys parlous finances allowed Britain and France to extend control, sparking incipient nationalism which led to Colonel Ahmed Urabis revolt in 1879. Opposition to western intellectual and economic hegemony has played a significant part in the Islamic revival ever since.
It was a similar story with the Tanzimat reforms in Turkey and the progressive teachings of Babi and his successor Bahaullah, the founder of Bahaism, in Iran, which enjoyed a constitutional revolution in 1905.
The first world war boosted national awareness across the region, confirming, from an Islamic perspective, the Wests appetite for territorial and economic gain at the expense of the rights of the populations involved.
The convulsions of 191418 proved particularly important in Turkey, which, shorn of an empire, underwent a secular nationalist catharsis under Ataturk. Leaders such as Reza Shah in Iran and Colonel Nasser in Egypt followed similar paths: western-style development was still the aim. But as de Bellaigue points out, the aspirations of potentates were not always shared by the masses.
In charting the emergence of an alternative Muslim approach to the world, he summons up intriguing characters such the canny Iranian born Jamal al-Din Afghani, who travelled the world developing a spirit of pan-Islamism. Out of Egypt came Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Conan Doyle-loving Sayyid Qutb, whose studies in innocuous sounding Greeley, Colorado, left him frothing about American permissiveness while developing incisive ideas about the lack of spirituality at the heart of western civilisation.
In Iran a different spin came from Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, a former communist whose 1962 book Gharbzadegi (variously translated as Westoxication, Westernstruck and Occidentosis) has, de Bellaigue says, taken its place with Qutbs Milestones and Frantz Fanons The Wretched of the Earth as one of the three most influential anti-western political tracts. Al-e-Ahmad argued that the Wests cult of the machine had undermined traditional village-based Quranic values.
Add to this a strong Shia sense of resistance to injustice, articulated by the sociologist Ali Shariati, and you have the wellsprings of Ayatollah Khomeinis revolution in 1979. Meanwhile, Qutbs ideas were steeled by the concept of takfir, which held that a state or individual could be declared apostate and deserving of death. This disputed theory was adopted by al-Jihad, the group responsible for the assassination of President Sadat in 1981, and, more recently, by Isis.
De Bellaigue is happy to describe this as Counter-Enlightenment. But he is convinced there is a parallel story, and developments such as the moderate Hassan Rouhani becoming President of Iran show an underlying respect for democracy and the individual. He skilfully conveys the curious game part confrontation, part balancing act which has been played out between western dominion and Islamic Renaissance. While generally critical of the former, he has written a sweeping and hugely engaging book that throws much-needed light on modern Islam.
Islam retards nations and individuals.
People must come out of the cult, for there own sake and that of the world.
A good start is to sever ethnic and national identities from islam.
People must come out of the cult, for their own sake and that of the world.
bump for later digestion.
A good friend of mine is a devout Muslim. Wonderful, wonderful women. BUT the only mosque she will go to in the D.C. area is her “Jesus Mosque”. They believe the Christ spoke the word of God.
She came here after the over through of the Shah. (Carter made it hard.)
And most Mosques are the enemy. Time to wake up.
All very nice. But islam was, is and always will be based on conquest.
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All very nice and all BS. Islam has never made positive any contributions to society. It is evil to the core.
Architectural Myths #1: Islamic Architecture
https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2010/06/25/architectural-myths-1-islamic-architecture/
No greater retrograde force in history - Winston Churchill
If the civilized world is to survive, Islam must be understood for what it really is: Its not a religion, form of government, or anything recognizable to the civilized mind. Islam is a disease, an incurable disease of the mind that is highly contagious among the feeble minded and is now spreading among the worlds feeble minded at an epidemic rate. As with any disease, one cant reason with this disease, negotiate with it, or treat in a manner other than how one would treat any other incurable disease.
As past efforts to contain this disease have failed, carriers of this Plague of Islam must be eradicated wherever they're found, for if they're not, this disease could eventually end not just Western Civilization, but it could undo over 5,000 years of human civilization.
Islam was created by a desert bandit for desert bandits.
Islam prospered only as long as they were able to conquer and thus acquire civilized slaves who knew how to operate a civilization. When their expansion was stopped in the West, they went into a long-term decline, until oil gave them a new source of unearned wealth.
Small correction:
Balderdash. Islam only confiscated knowledge from other societies. Nothing if their own ever. HISTORICALLY AND currently Islam is jihadist first last and always.
Algebra they learned from the Hindus when they invaded India, and same with buildings. They enslaved countless Indian architects, builders and so on to help them build their pretty buildings.
Not one single useful or good thing has ever been invented by moslems.
Oh, and Arabic numerals are originally Sanskrit.
The Islamic Enlightenment - an oxymoron ...
Based on what anyone who studied history back when it was still taught could tell you was just plain false or as they say today taqyyia.
Not true! The Arab master race made huge advancements in slavery ...
Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science
“... and declaring that the region is backward and in need of a thorough western-style reformation.”
Islam cannot be reformed because it is unethical pagan monotheism. You can not reform a system of rules that promotes organized criminality. You just can’t!
Fair enough
So, like never?
Erudite leaders. Just out of curiosity how much erudition did those leaders encourage or tolorate in the people they ruled?
Just as important is the one man, often called the second most influential philosopher in Islamic history, who brought Muslim enlightenment to a screeching halt, even though it took a while, which didn’t just stop the advance of Muslim progress, but regressed it to the primitive near tribal state it still exists in today.
His name was shortened as Al-Ghazali in Arabic or Ghazali in Persian and known as Algazelus or Algazel to the western medieval world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ghazali
He lived from about 1058 to 1111 A.D. Though he was well educated, his philosophy can be consolidated into simply, “All important knowledge is in the Koran. All other learning and knowledge is just a distraction.”
He was a Persian, in a Persia of the time that was very fearful of invasion, and so quite xenophobic. So disdain of the ideas of nun-Muslims was easy to adapt.
But as his ideas spread outward through southern Asia into northern Africa, libraries and schools were closed, except for those that were entirely Islamic, advances in the natural sciences and studies ended. Art and architecture, music and other advances lost favor, not just fallen idle, but despised and destroyed.
After it crossed North Africa and entered Spain, thus began the departure of the Muslims, leaving behind the last of their libraries, and their great works of beauty like the Alhambra.
That was the last gasp of Islam as a modern or contemporary idea. Only in the last few decades have some cracks appeared in their edifice of primitivism and anti-intellectualism.
I’m reading that currently. It’s an enlightening tome.
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