Posted on 01/31/2002 6:36:44 AM PST by Romulus
Perhaps the common thread is that the masses recognize that their own governments are a disgrace. We are loved/hated in direct proportion to our perceived relationship with the local oppressors.
Solution? Abandon the "realpolitik" based on the European elite's idea of governmental "interests". Replace it with support for what we know is right, and opposition to what we know is wrong. In other words, make sure the masses in the rest of the world know American stands for something good.
BTW: I realize how far from this we are right now. If we support only those countries trying to do the right thing, we will have lots of people supporting us, but very few governments supporting us (especially in the Arab world). However, the way things are today, I suspect we would still be better off.
Now there are two options: some feel that the failure stems from abandonment of the earlier traditions, leaving behind the authentic Islamic culture. The two main versions that have stemmed from this feeling are Wahabi Fundamentalism which is disseminated by the Saudis, and the Iranian-Shiite Fundamentalism. The other option, which adherents to the modern hold, says that the failure stems from the Muslims having adopted the shell of western culture and not its deep content, and therefore it is necessary to introduce western values in their full depth. In all of the Muslim world there are people who think that way, but the dictatorships make it difficult for them to express their opinions openly.
Bernard Lewis, in his excellent book, The Arabs in History, states the problem succinctly(p. 139):
The acceptance of the Greek heritage by Islam gave rise to a struggle between the scientific rationalist tendency of
the new learning on the one hand, and the atomistic and intuituve quality of Islamic thought on the other. During the
period of struggle Muslims of both schools created a rich and varied culture, much of which is of permanent
importance in the history of mankind. The struggle ended in the victory of the more purely Islamic point of view.
Islam, a religiously conditioned society, rejected values that challenged its fundamental postulates, while accepting
their results, and even developing them by experiment and observation. Ismailism - the revolution marquee of
Islam - might have ushered in a full acceptance of Hellenistic values, heralding a humanist renaissance of the
Western type, overcoming the resistance of the Quaran by the device of esoteric interpretation, of the Shari'a by
the unbounded discretion of the infallible Imam. But the forces supporting the Ismaili revolution were not strong
enough, and it failed in the very moment of its greatest success.
Did you actually read this article?
No need. They do it for themselves .
As all Liberals do.
Example - Robert Fisk. LOL....
Sometimes complete avoidance of certain normally engaged things is necessary, by a person, sometimes by a lot of persons together. Nevertheless, such extremism, it ain't without it's cost -- physical, social, spiritual. In an attempt to shore up one failing by abstaining from it, our bodies, minds and lives are set such that other weaknesses, other brittleness, other fragilenesses are excaberated.
Without a bit of drink now and again, people can lose that zest for life and be overwhlemed by it's bitterness. Without the elixer of forgetting they can be swept up in great grudges, pinned down by a chip on their shoulder never washed off by that wonderful elixer.
Gambling has broken many a man or woman, but a card game or a social bet now and then has helped keep people together and appreciative of one another. It can't be scorned completely.
Rosetta stone territory in those two sentences. Thank you for taking the trouble to post this interesting interview.
I noticed that Lewis commits the very error he warns against by projecting his own world-view onto his subject.There is this tendency among "Islamic experts" to ascribe everything that is occuring to the religion of Islam. This is, of course, a projection of the obsessions of post-christian, secular scholars. As with historians of medieval Christendom, these scholars have an unintentionally ironic tendency to inflate the religious content of every worldy political, social, military and economic confrontation.
A perfect of example of this is in the linked article "The Roots of Muslim Rage" in which he casually speaks of the "terrible religious wars" in Europe as though their roots were entirely and specifically theological. This is a fantastic, and easily disproved assertion. These wars were far more complex than triumphant enlightenment analysis would have it.
It seems to me that to pay excessive obeisance to moslem religious scruples as a "root cause" of the ongoing "clash of civilizations" would be to miss the mark as widely as those who pay no heed to them at all.
Also, just as an aside, I noticed in the subtext of this interview how vulnurable "Christendom" is to having its history caricatured and de-natured by post-christian scholarship. Without a political base from which to exert "earthly" power a religious culture really has no chance of defining itself in the face of its enemies--active or passive.
We see this at work every day in the American media and the continual defensive posture of "fundamentalist" christians in the face of definitions of their behavior and beliefs by those who neither know nor care about their beliefs and are often actively hostile to them on the basis of their own prejudice against "fundamentalism".
Perhaps, in some strange way, "backwards" moslems are ahead of Western Christians in their understanding and analysis of who's zoomin' who.
I just finished flipping through a Mid-East travel guide published by Harvard Press. It acknowledged that Israel is important to the "Three Great Monotheistic" religions. It goes to great length to srupulously detail the religious "beliefs" and practices of moslems--with great approval and a sort of condescending contempt for the reader's assumed philistinism in the face of such delightful, spiritually uplifting and healthy practices.
The Jewish religion is presented more as a great, ongoing historical saga.
The Christian religion, on the other hand, is dismissed with a terse reference to the split between the Eastern and Western Church!!
Whenever we hear the theory of "the clash of civilizations" being bandied about--whether from the mouths of government officials, media commetators or as in this Lewis interview--we see a complete unwillingness to countenance a contemporary christian element to the struggle. Christianity is dismissed with terse references to the lingering resentments of the "horrors" of the crusades.
I can't help returning to the image of the two World Trade Towers collapsing onto the tiny Greek Orthodox Church. It seemed an apt metaphor to explain my unease with Bush's famous "You are either with us or you are with the terrorists," dictum. My unease has grown as large as Bush's poll numbers.
>Perhaps, in some strange way, "backwards" moslems are ahead of Western Christians in their understanding and analysis of who's zoomin' who.
Yes. And perhaps in some strange way the terrorists who piloted the planes into the WTC were innocent victims, and the two thousand plus people working in the Towers who are now memories were terrorists.
>Without a political base from which to exert "earthly" power a religious culture really has no chance of defining itself in the face of its enemies--active or passive. We see this at work every day in the American media and the continual defensive posture of "fundamentalist" christians ...
[sigh] A religion that's not driven by the spirit world -- in the case of Christianity, not driven by the Holy Spirit -- isn't a religion at all. It is politics. Or an advertising campaign.
>I just finished flipping through a Mid-East travel guide published by Harvard Press. ...
The American media, even Harvard Press, neither define religion in America, nor "reflect" pop culture. They are more Establishment cattle prods than they are mirrors, even of the fun house variety.
Mark W.
Interesting that you mention this in the same post in which you lament the destruction of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church. The Christian Roman empire, and certainly its Byzantine remnant, are a nice example of a political base for an authentically religious culture. Speaking of interpreting history through one's preoccupations, I wonder if you're aware of the late Stephen Runciman's view of the crusades as the last of the barbarian invasions.
In the West, of course, we have the unique polity that is the Holy See, which bids fair to remain influential for the forseeable future. Only today I started reading a diplomatic history of the Vatican in the age of the 20th century dictators. Small as it was, without this political base from which a religious culture works, history would have proceeded very differently.
"I wondered with a secret horror at the fiend-like malice of these fanatical Bedouins, with whom no keeping touch nor truth of honorable life, no performance of good offices, might win the least favour from the dreary, inhuman, and, for our sins, inveterate dotage of their blood-guilty religion. But I had eaten of their cheer, and might sleep among wolves. The fortune of the morrow was as dark as death, all ways were shut before me. There came in a W. Aly sheykh and principal of that tribe’s exiles, he was an hereditary lawyer or arbiter among them, the the custome of the desert: the arbiter sitting by and fixing upon me his implacable eyes, asked the sheykhs of the Moahîb in an under-voice, ‘Why brought they the Nasrâny?’ [Christian (Nazarene)] They said, “Khalîl [the Stranger] was come of himself.’ Then turning to Hamed he whispered a word which I well overheard, ‘Why have you not left him -- thus?’ and he made the sign of the dead lying gasping upright. Hamed asnwered the shrew in a sort of sighing, Istugfir Ullah, ‘Lord I cry thee mercy!’ Târiba (the man’s name) was of a saturnine turning humour; and upon a time afterward, with the same voice, he defended me at Teyma, against the splenetic fanaticism of some considerable villager, threatening me that ‘except I would convert to the religion of Ullah and his Apostle, as I carelessly passed by day and by night in the lanes and paths of the oasis, a God-fearer’s gunshot might end my life.’ Târiba answered him with displeasure, ‘Wellah, [Indeed (by God)] the Beduw be better than ye!’ Târiba’s cavilling was now also for my greeting (as they use) salaam aleyk, ‘peace be with you’. It is ‘the salutation of Islam and not for the mouths of the heathen, with whom is no peace nor fellowship, neither in this world not the next:’ also he would let the people know I was a khawâja. This is the titles of Jews and Christians in the mixed Semitic cities of the Arabian conquest."
One hundred years later, in VS Naipaul's Among the Believers, very little seems to have changed. Yet Doughty's impoverished Bedouin, too backward to grasp the complete otherness of an Englishman, despise kaffirs already, for their unbelief only, not even sensing the existence of a culture to clash with theirs.
The people called "liberal" in the US are usually anything but liberal in the original sense of the word. They tend to be totalitarian. I'd be interested to know when this word was hijacked by the Left.
Hmmmm. This is very interesting. It eerily reminds me of the year I lived on a Maine Island--I won't mention the name here. It is populated largely by families who have lived there and intermarried for 300 years.
Mainland yuppies from Massachusetts and New York--filled with entrepenurial zeal--came, saw, tried to set up espresso bistros, crafts boutiques; tried to enlighten the peasantry--and were swiftly and thoroughly conquered. As they folded their tents and left in a huff on the ferry we often heard them snarling among themselves:
" I wondered with a secret horror at the fiend-like malice of these fanatical Islanders, with whom no keeping touch nor truth of honorable life, no performance of good offices, might win the least favour from the dreary, inhuman, and, for our sins, inveterate dotage of their pathetic, parochial way of life...."
So I'll assert it again--it's not solely the religion. It's the religion grafted onto something far older, tougher and lasting than mere shariahlaw or any other religious conceit. It's the ancient confrontation between the tribe and the revolutionary conscript army--the cosmopolite and the peasant. The latter takes a lickin'--but keeps on tickin'. The former's strengths always turn out to be bakelight and brittle.
It just so happens that in most of the world Islam is the religion practiced by these tribal peoples. Lewis argues that it is Islam which gives them their dignity and strength. I say it's the ancient ways of life that are, in fact, invigorating Islam.
"Experts" are mesmerized by the idea of a "Clash" between Islam and modernism. If that is how the battle will be enjoined then, based upon history, "modernism" will be defeated. Christianity, insofar as it has been reduced to a hobby among some more "backwards" moderns will go down with the bakelight canoe. The "barbarians" who once invigorated christianity--much to the horror of fastidious, "humanitarian" moderns--now battle over state funding for hemorroid removal and anti-smoking crusades......
Have you reached the part where the Japanese tried to sue for peace through the good offices of the Vatican and, in response, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb upon Nagasaki--the seat of Japanese Catholicism? Now that's what I call power.....
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