quote:
Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
[b]I don't agree at all. I think Hitchens and and Harris view Islam as a threat because it represents a single point of organization and opposition to Western hegemony from which both men have benefited handsomely. I think they use atheism and what they term rationality to justify their attitudes to a people. But, rather than express fear and loathing of a people, they instead express fear and loathing of a cultural practise, Islam.[/b]
I'd be more precise than that. I don't think its because their self-interest and greed (benefitting handsomely) which is the key to there distaste for Islam. I think in the current frame Islam as a basis for rejecting the west, christianity, captitalism, socialism, and in fact the whole enlightenement tradtion, which is seen by many Muslim people as all part of the same western incurrsion on their rights.
People of the Muslim lands warmly welcomed the new ideas of the west in the previous centuries, democracy, capitalism and socialism, and each in its turn proved itself to be the cause upon which the repression and indpendence of the Muslim people was justified, regardless of the specific ideology. So Islam has become the rallying point for national salvation in many Muslim countries, because there really is nothing else to which they can trust is not just another Trojan Horse.
It is no accident that the outcome of the Iranian revolution was not the overthrow of Shah (the representative of Capitalist west) and his replacement by the Tudeh Party (the rpresentatives of the Socialist west) but the replacement of the Shah by an Islamic government which could be clearly autonomous from super-power "block" politics. A rejection of both of the main trends enlightenment political tradtions.
The result is that Iran has a mixed economy, interestingly enough.
What Hitchen's and Harris object to is that this retrenchment is also an outspoken and militant rejection of the secular humanist ideology they propound, in favour of local solutions based in national traditions and culture, and moreover they dislike the fact the Islamic based resistance movements reject their right to be [i]right[/i] and to impose their rightness on Muslim people.
In short the devil you know is always better than the devil you don't know.
What Hitchens and other fail to see is that this rejection of western ideas, is entirely a result of the many attempts to impose those ideas as part of the various colonial and neo-colonial ventures, and political manipulations since the Ottoman Empire began to collapse as the central authority in the former lands of the Caliphate.
[ 08 August 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]