To: SauronOfMordor
I don't think that's an accident. The only Islamic country to successfully master modernity separated Islam from the state and adopted wholesale Western law, customs, and even the Latin alphabet! Kemal Ataturk's revolution in Turkey was extraordinary and his acceptance that his country's identity and future lay with the West was and is unique in the Islamic world. Its interesting Ataturk's reforms weren't copied elsewhere and that perhaps is the key to the misery and stagnation that's engulfed the rest of Islam ever since. And the failure of other Islamic countries to turn modernity into an asset has led to a rejection of the idea that progress is a necessary and inevitable outcome of the human condition. In particular Islamist Nazis have taken this victimhood mentality by blaming the West for Islam's backwardedness and in an ironic twist have used the West's own instruments of progress to destroy the advertised superiority of a culture and way of life they find completely unbearable. The West is faced then with people who view themselves as a failure and who seek to validate that view by taking down those they believe are responsible for that condition. What is particular striking about this point of view about Islamic man as articulated by Islamist Nazis is how much it shares in common with the self-hatred of leftist Western intellectuals for the success of the West. This is not a state of mind the West can address or cure; it will have to simply defend itself from both its external and internal enemies the best it can. Whether the Islamic world is capable of surmounting its victim condition and stop hating the West and become an adult and accept that it alone can change the state to which it has condemned itself is the issue that will define the rest of the 21st century and perhaps decide the fate of the world itself.
To: goldstategop
A perceptive assessment. One of the best I have seen. Thanks.
To: goldstategop
The weird thing is that a thousand years ago the Islamic world was at the forefront of culture and innovation. In fact, the ancient Roman and Greek texts came to us because they were translated into Arabic and then re-translated back again. Something happened in the Islamic world in the last few centuries to cause their world to remain in the past while the West vastly surpassed them. Perhaps they couldn't adapt to the Industrial Revolution.
20 posted on
10/15/2001 5:12:53 AM PDT by
PJ-Comix
To: goldstategop
The West is faced then with people who view themselves as a failure and who seek to validate that view by taking down those they believe are responsible for that condition. This might explain the appeal that Islam has among the Black underclass. It reinforces the fatalistic world-view that was already present among them
Fatalism is integral to the Islamic world-view. When a Muslim makes a statement about doing something in the future, he always seems to append "inshallah" (God willing). The idea that a man can shape his own future, and is responsible for his own condition seems to be absent from Muslim culture
To: goldstategop
I think that what is going to happen is a defacto split between Islam and the civilized world, after we refuse to allow any more of these human bombs into the West, and they slaughter any unlucky Westerners trapped on their side.
Once the Western food and medicine and machine parts stop flowing into the islamic nations, they will slide into warlordism, civil war, anarchy, starvation and disease. In ten years, they will resemble Kabul or Mogadishu.
To: goldstategop
The only Islamic country to successfully master modernity separated Islam from the state and adopted wholesale Western law, customs, and even the Latin alphabet! ... Turkey ... The Turks keep the evil djinn of Islam stuffed in its bottle through brute force. Whenever Islamicist parties get too successful at the polls, the military stage a coup. Maybe their centuries as the hub of an empire embued their military caste with traditions of professionalism. The "janissaries" (slave soldiers) had no local loyalties.
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