About 1100 AD Hassan bin Sabah enlightened Islamist societies to terrorism as foundational statecraft for political prosperity. Philosophical and religious lawyers retained their lives, and obtained support for dictators by backwards engineering the Koran into useful totalitarian heterodoxies. Concurrently, foundational thought including Jews, Christians and Muslims as ‘People of the Book” became hazardous. Concurrently, Saladin’s Sufism stressing individual relationship with God, and exalting individuals in society became marginalized. Concurrently, extraordinary Arab achievements in mathematics, philosophy, science, and medicine submerged within authoritarian and feral societies. Omar Khayyam, Ibn al-Haytham, and Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Sina had no successors for uncompromising, independent thought.
Lethal electioneering among aspiring Islamic totalitarians causes them to grasp and retain their power through superior alliances of human cunning with animal brutality. For them an internal/external continuum exists where politics is war without bloodshed, and war is politics with bloodshed. Why abandon such proved strategies? Those who want a parliamentary solution often need not apply.
I am reminded again of what an extraordinary political leader Sadat became.
I’m impressed.
Me too.
He is one of a very few leaders in my time that I admire.