British ID register

Z

zhao

there are no accidents
crackerjack said:
In practice what this means is men in beards and black robes telling everyone else what they can and can't do.
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a few thousand years later, in and caused by a world filled with corruption, yes, often this is what it has come down to. and i don't like it any more than you do.

but to wholesale dismiss the entire spiritual tradition is wrong.
 
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vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Mr. Tea said:
Quite literally, holier-than-thou!
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I wonder why she never mentions that it is not only non-Muslims who are prevented from practicing their religion by the Wahabbist state of Saudi Arabia, but other Muslims as well...

Why did you post this letter, Zhao?
 
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
zhao said:
a few thousand years later, in and caused by a world filled with corruption, yes, often this is what it has come down to. and i don't like it any more than you do.
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So it was different back then (whenever 'then' was)? Religious oppression is a recent invention, is it?
Or could it just be that, since that time, people in some parts of the world have become aware of different world views and modes of living that are not based on the unquestionable authority of Faith?

zhao said:
but to wholesale dismiss the entire spiritual tradition is wrong.
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Why so? Is it OK if you dismiss every other spiritual tradition as well? Or seek to rationally criticize, rather than simply 'dismiss'?

Zhao, I can't help but notice that you're the first person on here to accuse anyone of Islamophobia, so tell me: why are you so relentlessly Islamophilic? I mean, if you were a Muslim yourself, or even an atheist brought up in an Islamic culture, it would make some kind of sense, but from the point of view of the average Qu'ran-basher, you're just another infidel...
 
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C

crackerjack

Well-known member
zhao said:
a few thousand years later, in and caused by a world filled with corruption, yes, often this is what it has come down to. and i don't like it any more than you do.

but to wholesale dismiss the entire spiritual tradition is wrong.
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I didn't dismiss anyone's spiritual tradition - it's when the spiritual is carried over into the political that the alarm bells go off.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
zhao said:
one way of understanding the aim of islam is striving toward the saturation of the divine in every single aspect of life, so that everything one does is in accordance with god, so that grace eclipses everyday life and they become one -- and in such a state there would be no need for scriptures or law, for all would be harmony.

and many are of the opinion that this is what the no separation between church and state was originally about.
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And yet another way to understand Islam is a relentlessly expansionist Imperial programme founded by a genocidal paedophile and anti-semite.

But I think what people here are trying to say, if we can cut across the partisan fog, is that neither view really speaks to what is happening today. The point is not what Islam is or was (as if a religion is any one thing), but was Muslims are doing. The whole notion of religion is frequently confused with culture and geography, and while your opinions of Islam are valid (and rather cute) in the sense of an ultra-subjective expression of personal religiosity, I don't think they are at all relevant to the more important and problematic temporal debates, any more so than AHA's blanket dismissal of "Islam" or Ramadan's blanket invocation of the "Muslim" community, and in fact, probably do more harm than good at the margin by muddying the waters with the end result that we all end up have five different conversations using exactly the same words.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Gavin said:
vimothy said:
Don't be silly, AEI is a think tank, not a paramilitary organisation. It won't be taming anyone, and, much like AHA, has zero influence in the Muslim world.
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Thank you for the civics lesson, and I'm sure charter members like international criminal Richard Perle have no influence on policy (although I've heard that the AEI is where neocons send their least capable members, a kind of sinecure, which is funny). Taming is something done UPON someone else, not something someone does to themselves.
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If it's all so obvious, why do you try to disingenuously shift the boundaries between what AHA says in her interviews and the views of the institution for which she works?

I didn't accuse her of making it up, I suggested that she might tailor her memoirs to suit her career as neocon ideologue. Not controversial, is it? Should Chomsky write an autobio, should we pretend it's objective fact divorced from his politics?
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We might at least concede that if her biographical reconstructions are influenced by her current ideology, that causality flows in the other direction as well. Isn't that the implication of placing, not a moral equivalence between AHA and Tariq Ramadan, but an equivalence of culturalist assumptions? Isn't AHA's problem really that she takes the Islamist and fundamentalist constructions of monolithic Islam at face value?

Well then I guess we are in agreement after all!
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Who'd o' thunk it?

Though I would like to interrogate these "superior institutions" further (not here, in general), perhaps see how they are implicated in present and past imperialism, I am all for secularism, suffrage, gumdrops, rainbows, and all the rest.
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We already have two threads for positive assessments of political and economic institutions -- post away.
 
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Z

zhao

there are no accidents
vimothy said:
But I think what people here are trying to say, if we can cut across the partisan fog, is that neither view really speaks to what is happening today. The point is not what Islam is or was (as if a religion is any one thing), but was Muslims are doing. The whole notion of religion is frequently confused with culture and geography, and while your opinions of Islam are valid (and rather cute) in the sense of an ultra-subjective expression of personal religiosity, I don't think they are at all relevant to the more important and problematic temporal debates, any more so than AHA's blanket dismissal of "Islam" or Ramadan's blanket invocation of the "Muslim" community, and in fact, probably do more harm than good at the margin by muddying the waters with the end result that we all end up have five different conversations using exactly the same words.
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fair enough vim.

as to why i come to the defense of islam:

1. great respect and love for the culture
2. great respect for all spiritual traditions
3. some of my closest friends are muslim, some of the best people i've ever met, and i see that their faith has nothing to do with anti-semitism or fundamentalism
4. wanted to balance the conversation out a bit amidst all the bashing.
 
Gavin

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
Me, I've just got a great respect for algebra.

Vimothy, I don't think it's disingenuous. I see her views as going right along with AEI stated goals of furthering American imperialism.

The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) is a conservative think tank, founded in 1943. It is associated with neoconservative domestic and foreign policy views. According to the institute its mission is "to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism — limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and responsibility, vigilant and effective defense and foreign policies, political accountability, and open debate." AEI is an independent, non-profit organization. It is supported primarily by grants and contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. It is located in Washington, D.C.

AEI has emerged as one of the leading architects of the second Bush administration's public policy. More than twenty AEI alumni and current visiting scholars and fellows have served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government's many panels and commissions. Former United States Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is a visiting scholar, and Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a senior fellow.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute

So I guess we could just take AHA's words as nothing more than that -- her own muddled thoughts and statements, reflecting nothing more than an individual philosophy. Or we could connect it to the ideology of the very powerful organization for which she works: to me, what she says in interviews dovetails quite nicely with the AEI's plans for the Middle East. She continues to support American military presence in the middle east through elements of the Clash of Civs argument and the Humanitarian Intervention argument. To me these are obviously intimately related. Bernard Lewis says the same things, but he's not a Middle Eastern woman.

In his address, the 90-year-old Lewis did not revisit his argument that regime change in Iraq would provide the jolt needed to modernize the Middle East. Instead, he spoke at length about the millennial struggle between Christianity and Islam. Lewis argues that Muslims have adopted migration, along with terror, as the latest strategy in their "cosmic struggle for world domination."
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http://www.slate.com/id/2161800?nav=wp
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
In his address, the 90-year-old Lewis did not revisit his argument that regime change in Iraq would provide the jolt needed to modernize the Middle East. Instead, he spoke at length about the millennial struggle between Christianity and Islam. Lewis argues that Muslims have adopted migration, along with terror, as the latest strategy in their "cosmic struggle for world domination."
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Jeezus. That sounds like something Mark Steyn would say.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Gavin said:
Me, I've just got a great respect for algebra.

Vimothy, I don't think it's disingenuous. I see her views as going right along with AEI stated goals of furthering American imperialism.
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And do scholars like Greg Mankiw or Allan H. Meltzer "go right along with AEI's stated goals of furthering American imperialism"? In any case it isn't clear, at least from the quote you give, that AEI's goals are furthering American imperialism. Are you sure that you're not just arguing from your own partisan bias?

So I guess we could just take AHA's words as nothing more than that -- her own muddled thoughts and statements, reflecting nothing more than an individual philosophy. Or we could connect it to the ideology of the very powerful organization for which she works: to me, what she says in interviews dovetails quite nicely with the AEI's plans for the Middle East.
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And what are those plans -- the self-evident lust for imperial expansion of American power into the Middle East? Or perhaps the AEI is a diverse group where a consensus seems to have struck post-9/11 that realism (as a foreign policy, i.e. all the things you criticise American foreign policy for, like "winking at dictators") was not up to the task of protecting America or perhaps even acting in accordance with American values? Nah, the "sinister cabal" angle is much better copy.

She continues to support American military presence in the middle east through elements of the Clash of Civs argument and the Humanitarian Intervention argument. To me these are obviously intimately related.
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I would be interested to hear you go further with this.

In his address, the 90-year-old Lewis did not revisit his argument that regime change in Iraq would provide the jolt needed to modernize the Middle East. Instead, he spoke at length about the millennial struggle between Christianity and Islam. Lewis argues that Muslims have adopted migration, along with terror, as the latest strategy in their "cosmic struggle for world domination."
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I've just finished reading Philip Jenkins' God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis, which is a good corrective for the Steyn-style demographic pessimism that populates some right-wing presses. (And Lewis might be weirdly echoing Steyn - and others more reputable - but I doubt that the idea is unpopular in the Islamic world). Razib of GNXP reviewed it here.
 
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vimothy

vimothy

yurp
polz said:
I think this i one of the big intellectual mistakes of today.

let me show you this list of spiritual traditions, and you tell me why you greatly respect them:
Branch Davidians
Heaven's Gate
Jeffrey Lundgren
Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (Uganda)
The People's Temple (Jim Jones)
Solar Temple
Aum Shinri Kyo
The Family (Charles Manson)

Maybe Islam can be added to the above list, maybe not. But you cant say: it's a spiritual tradition, therefore it deserves respect
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No, but you can look at the output of a "spiritual tradition" and say, "it has value". I don't think that spiritual traditions deserve respect by virtue of being spiritual traditions, but I do think that Islam has more value added than the Branch Davidians, for e.g. -- Rumi, Ibn Arabi, Shafez of Hiraz... where are the Branch Davidian equivalents?

And we're still confusing culture with religion or at least believing that religion is the defining characteristic of culture.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Polz, you describe a block-culture: Muslims are violent, because Islam is violent, and yet here are plenty of non-violent Muslims. What about contemporary Sufi thinkers? I don't know many modern Muslim religious thinkers, but then I don't speak Arabic or live in the Middle East (but still: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan?). You are making an argument from ignorance.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
polz said:
In their age everybody was religious, but to automatically call them islamic thinkers because they lived in an islamic culture doesnt seam fair.
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Isn't this rather a case of double standards, though? According to you, any act of violence or oppression committed by Muslims is due exclusively to the intolerant nature of Islam, but anything good created by a Muslim - even by religious scholar of Islam - is independent of Islam, or even *despite* Islam.

Do you see what I'm getting at here?
 
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