ELF
Right from its opening lines, the book goes against the canons of political correctness:
"Samuel Huntington's celebrated thesis that the Cold War has been succeeded by a 'clash of civilizations' has more credibility today than it had in 1993, when it was first put forward."
But what follows is even more abundantly surprising. If the liberty of which Western civilization boasts also includes the possibility of that civilization's rejecting itself — and Scruton reserves one of his most brilliant chapters to this pervasive culture of rejection — then "this is a matter of a civilization aiming at its own destruction." Likewise, Islam defines itself not in terms of liberty but in terms of submission, and this submission is also self-destructive. It is the prisoner of a sacred text, the Koran, which will make every Muslim a rootless person so long as it is read outside the context of history and the present. In the preface to the Italian edition of the volume, Khaled Fouad Allam —an insightful intellectual of the Muslim diaspora, Algerian by origin with Italian citizenship —fully attests to this condition of the disappearance of the self, for Islam within modernity.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: tipper ||
12/28/2004 9:13:41 AM ||
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#1
This could be put in simpler terms: modernity vs. primitivism, or civilization vs. barbarity. The irony was that in its time, like many other religious and cultural movements, Islam was a marked improvement over primitivism, in this case, extreme tribalism and pantheism. Yet like so many others, it had no mechanism for continued invention. Worst of all, it evolved fundamentalist anti-invention and xenophobic philosophers who prohibited the evolution of doctrine and secular culture. So it ended up on the losing end of the Darwinistic struggle, its eventual end seen in an utter loss of identity, the religion just become a label, lost in a sea of secularism.
#2
Think about it - the worst we have to deal with are:
1. Possible IRS audits but very unlikely
2. TSA patdowns but only if you are a size 36+
3. DMV lines and the inevitable result of having missed some important documentation requirement
4. Your team not making the playoffs
5. Wal-Mart
6. McDonalds
Not much to worry about and lots of things to die for - thats the difference.
Posted by: Jack is Back ||
12/28/2004 13:19 Comments ||
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#3
I read the review quickly so perhaps my "take" on Scruton's book is off the mark. Scruton believes that the West/the USA will ultimately prevail, but are Scruton's reasons unrealistic?
He says the greatest things about the USA in particular are:
a)territorial jurisdiction and national fidelity
b)Christianity as an essential element of this citizenship capable of giving identity to the West and of bringing together "the West and the rest," even amid religious diversity
The cornerstones that Scruton rhapsodizes about are being eroded in the USA 24/7. Our sense of nationalism and fidelity has been down played in recent years. Immigrants can and do hold 2 even 3 citizenships; the pledge of allegiance is being put on the back burner in many schools so as not to offend some immigrant/religious groups in the student body; our border protection from invasion of illegal immigrants is a pathetic joke. Even the Iranian Foreign Minister recently mocked it in a response to Rummy requesting that Iran do a better job of protecting its border with Iraq. The Foreign Minister laughed and said the US has no room to criticize any country about not protecting its borders, what with their own southern border with Mexico being so porous. As for Christianity, well the ACLU has succeeded in making the mention of God in a US public place a dirty word. The Christophobes in the MSM have made Catholocism if not Christianity generally to be associated in the public's minds with pedophilia. The MSM never mentioned once that 99.9% of the child abuse cases were male on male-all the MSM reported constantly was that priests sexually molested children.
So based on Scruton's text, I'm not so sure about the West being victorious in the clash of civilizations, since the the strengths he identifies are now significantly diminished. I'll need to buy the book to read the full text. Thanks Tipper for the heads up on the title.
The author of Behzti (the Punjabi word meaning dishonour or shame) is in hiding. News agencies reported last week that Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti had fled her home on the advice of the police. The law's counsel came after a theatre that was to present Ms.Bhatti's black comedy had abandoned further performances, following an attempt on Dec. 18 by hundreds of violent Sikh protesters to storm the building. The riot caused considerable property damage. Five police officers were hurt and 600 patrons had to be evacuated. Later, a spokesman from the Guru Nanak Gurdwara temple, Mohan Singh, was quoted welcoming the theatre's decision to cancel the production, regretting only that the management had not considered Sikh concerns about the play when they were expressed earlier.
Readers who might think this happened somewhere on the Indian subcontinent would be wrong. It happened in central England. It was the Birmingham Repertory Theatre that cancelled further performances of Ms. Bhatti's play and the Birmingham constabulary that advised the author to flee.
None of this should surprise Canadians. After all, it was in Montreal, not somewhere in the Levant, that the authorities at Concordia University were intimidated into cancelling two scheduled speakers, former Israeli prime ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak. And it wasn't in Falluja but in Toronto, at York University, where those who came to hear American scholar Daniel Pipes had to have their venue shifted from a campus pub to a curtained-off corner of a basketball court for their own security.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: tipper ||
12/28/2004 8:58:38 AM ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
