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| Olde Tyme Religion |
| Spengler - The faith that dare not speak its name [Superb] |
| 2007-06-16 |
| A magnificent essay that draws comparisons between Islam, fascism, Christianity, and Judaism. Excerpts below and much more at the link. Amid the apologetics and invective over Islam, Paul Berman's portrait of the Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan in the June 4 New Republic stands out as a thoughtful critique. Professor Ramadan personifies the West's bafflement before Islam; widely regarded as the thinking man's Islamist and a bridge-builder between cultures, he was barred by the Homeland Security Department in 2004 from entering the United States to take up a professorship at Notre Dame University in Indiana. In a rebuke to the US, St Anthony's College, Oxford, offered him a fellowship, which he now occupies. Berman untangles the spaghetti-strands that tie Professor Ramadan to the terrorist ambience. He has trouble, though, making sense of what it is that Ramadan actually believes. Is he a 7th-century throwback (Salafi reformist), or an Islamic adaptation of Western totalitarian movements, or something quite different? We find an intriguing solution to Berman's puzzle in the work of the great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who argued that pagan society everywhere always is "totalitarian" in character, and that Islam is a form of paganism masquerading as revealed religion. I put "totalitarian" in quotation marks because Rosenzweig's sociology of paganism predates this neologism. I summarized Rosenzweig's still highly controversial view of Islam in a 2003 review of a German-language volume on the subject. [1] Following Rosenzweig, then, we may say that what ties Ramadan and his celebrated family to 20th-century totalitarianism is not association or influence, but rather commonality of spirit. Professor Ramadan, in a word, is a pagan, just as the Nazis (for example) were pagans. That does not prove by any means that Ramadan bears the taint of Nazi influence, for the normative Islam of Mohammed al-Ghazali (1058-1111), which Ramadan embraces, represents a much earlier form of paganism. I will explain, but some background is helpful first. [...] Berman seems shocked to discover that radical Islam promotes a culture of death. He writes: There is nothing especially novel or bizarre in noticing that al-Banna displayed an eager interest in the esthetic cult of death. The classic history of the Muslim Brotherhood, The Society of the Muslim Brothers by Richard P Mitchell, which appeared in 1969, was quite lucid on this topic even then. Al-Banna came up with a double phrase about the importance of death as a goal of jihad - "the art of death" (fann al-mawt) and "death is art" (al-mawt fann). This phrase became, in Mitchell's description, a famous part of al-Banna's legacy. Stringing together his own paraphrases with al-Banna's words, Mitchell wrote: "The Koran has commanded people to love death more than life" (which, I might add, is a phrase that we have heard more than once in terrorist statements during the last few years, for instance in the videotape that was made by the Islamist group that attacked Madrid in 2004). And al-Banna continued, in Mitchell's presentation: "Unless the philosophy of the Koran on death replaces the love of life which has consumed Muslims, they will reach naught. Victory can only come with the mastery of the art of death." Paganism everywhere and always is a culture of death, for the simple reason that pagans know that their time on Earth is limited. |
| Posted by:mrp |
| #1 Excerpt: When Western political scientists speak of "totalitarianism", they refer to "modern regimes in which the state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private behavior" (Wikipedia). Rosenzweig explains something deeper: the individual has no identity separate from the group and therefore cannot act in opposition to it. Arthur Koestler's broken protagonist cannot help but admit absurdly false charges at his show trial; Socrates cannot help but drink the hemlock; the Germans cannot help but follow Adolf Hitler's orders. Because the individual is merely an instrument of the totality, not an individual, there is no capacity for doubt. For instance, when an Islamic state does not acknowledge a Muslim's conversion to another faith - this can range from a refusal to alter a convert's identity documents (which invariably identifies the owner's religious creed) all the way to imprisonment and/or execution as an apostate. |
| Posted by: mrp 2007-06-16 19:39 |