07.24.09
Posted in General, Islam at 6:47 pm by nemo
Addressing the issue of Islam critically in several posts over the last few days requires some clarification, viz. that this is a view from the left.
The questions of immigration, and Islam in Europe are of course highly controversial, and many rightists have addressed the question earning the label of ‘Islamophobia’ from the left, which has been a party to a generation of confused thinking on the subject.
Whatever the case, the issue has been addressed here from the left, with a demand that the left come to its senses and adopt a sensible attitude to these questions, just at the point where a destructive cultural collision seems inevitable. Not so simple, I admit, but not so impossible either.
It is a situation that can’t be addressed by the likes of Karen Armstrong and her incoherent attitudes on the question of religion. Such a scholar, if anything, will induce a dangerous reaction as the con she promotes is exposed.
The viewpoint to adopt must be at once a critical examination of Islam, and its history, even as this avails itself of serious research on such history, to forestall the kind of warped hate-mongering that we find in too many right-wing paranoids.
I find the whole history of compelling interest, but I am not going to indulge in political posturing on the question to satisfy political correctness.
A work such as Fregosi’s Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuriesexposes the reality of Islam in a way that few books have done, and yet seems to suffer a strain of the usual right-wing lensing that has made such studies bordering on chauvinism.
Whatever the case, the cat is out of the bag, and the works of apologists such as Armstrong don’t cut the mustard.
I can’t do anything about the facts people such as Fregosi have put in the public record, except possibly show that they are not facts.
We have to take back the right to criticize Islam, in examining critically its history, culture and encounter with secular modernity.
In a word, the end of sentimental bullshit on Islam, its history, and culture, without, at the same time, a narrowing of vision into prejudice. There is much that is of compelling interest in the mysterious history of Islam, something its adherents themselves can’t put their finger on.
I have interacted with sufis for thirty years, and can’t be charged with Islamophobia. At the same time I find sufism to be a case in point of the derailment of Islam, as a gnostic cult inside a religion has degenerated into a kind of mafia of religious mystic vultures.
Time for moslems to stop getting into a violent rage when the infelicities of Islam reach public nasal rejection: face it, it’s hopeless. Secularism will win out in the end. Not a big deal, either. The imperialism of the West has produced a kind of regression, which cannot be excused, but it doesn’t excuse regression in the Islamic Reformation underway.
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07.20.09
Posted in Islam, secularism at 6:20 pm by nemo
Comment on Conservative Confusion of Western Civilization….
James said,
July 20, 2009 at 5:53 pm ·
” Islam has exactly the potential that emerged with Protestantism from Catholicism to be a secular religious matrix in the context of modernization. In fact, it might be too fair to hope for such an outcome in what seems a religious culture stuck in the past.”
Actually, I hope the Islamic world doesn’t have to go through what Europe had to go through to overthrow its theocracy. Who wants to see a Thirty Years War carried out with modern weapons?
I share your hope, but it is important to see that history never quite repeats itself, and the unique moment of the early modern whence appeared Protestantism won’t occur again (as a study of the eonic effect will make obvious), so what will happen with Islam is unknown. From what we have seen so far it will be much much worse than the Thirty Years War, centuries of conflict, the destruction of Europe, the Israel, Oil, imperial, and other issues.
The confusion has already taken up most of the twentieth century. So I don’t know what to suggest.
Speaking from my own experience, however, a threshold has been crossed as the confusion over Sufism has been exposed, and is not likely to reoccur. In the name of multiculturalism, an immense and false mystique about Islam has arisen, and is about to collapse as Sufism is seen as a Big Con on the level of a super-scientology of ancient gnosticism. Once these advertisements for the superiority of Islam as a culture are played out, the secularization of Islam (for many more reasons that this example) might well occur very rapidly.
It might help if the postmodern fad could get dumped into the trash bin, and if marxists on the so-called left could get their head out of their….
It can also help to consider what secularism means. Iraq lost its secular triumph and wasted a generation on Shaddam Hussein’s fixation on Stalin’s brand of what was the ‘secular’(!!!!).
You can declare what you wish, and the results can be surprising.
But, actually, Iraq was there a generation ago, and is now being destroyed in a mini ‘thirty years war’ mixed with imperialism, and the oil great game.
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Posted in globalization, History, Islam, secularism, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 4:48 pm by nemo
History, and histories, of Islam
The problem with many of these critics of Islam, such as Spencer, mentioned in one of the comments, is that they drift into a right-wing perspective and then become proponents of ‘Western Civilization’ (whatever that is) and defenders of Christian traditionalism and religion against Islam, the status of secularism remaining confused.
The issue in criticizing Islam is not the Western tradition or some debate between Christianity and Islam.
The issue is the emergence of a new secular modernity, potentially global, in a ‘European context or matrix’, proceeding swiftly toward a transcultural context or matrix’. The emergence of modern freedoms is the great moment of this modern transition.
Muslims give themselves away as lacking in historical comprehension in their rejection of this aspect of modernity.
For Europeans bemused by a spurious latecomer consisting of postmodern multiculturalism and the rest of it to throw away their emergent heritage for an Islamic restoration of reactionary premodern culture is almost beyond belief, incomprehensible.
It is the emergence of modern secular culture in a Western source area, not Western Civilization, that is important. The reflexive focus on the West confuses the whole critique of the retrograde Islam, now most tragically threatening to overtake Europe.
Conservatives making a fetish out of the ‘West’ and Christianity are part of the problem and are inhibiting secular liberals from taking up the critique of Islam. Here the radical left with its idiotic alliance with Islamic culture has missed the point and is threatening to precipitate still another cultural tragedy, sharia in Holland. That is simply beyond belief. And no part of the legacy of Karl Marx, for crying out loud.
I recommend a careful look and study of the eonic effect to see the way in which emergent civilization transcends its source areas, and the dilemma that Muslims must face, with respect to the relatively weak basis for a world culture in Islam.
I don’t wish to be unfair to Islam, whose study I find of great interest, and in fact it is not unfair. Islam has exactly the potential that emerged with Protestantism from Catholicism to be a secular religious matrix in the context of modernization. In fact, it might be too fair to hope for such an outcome in what seems a religious culture stuck in the past. The same was said of Catholicism (now a variant of Protestantism).
Westerners, so-called, need to grasp the reality of their situation, which cannot be Christian culture vs Islamic culture. It can only be globalizing secular culture, born in the ‘west’, but rapidly globalizing on the way to a new oikoumene of secular entities.
For Europe to succumb to a retrograde phase of Islamic restoration is a recipe for total catastrophe, and it is irresponsible for any secularist to contemplate such an outcome. The radical left now abetting such an eventuality is in the midst of still another screw up, in the long list of many since the nineteenth century.
The eonic effect is a good guide to the larger dynamics of religions in world history.
Islam and Christianity/Judaism, for all their claims to spiritual foundations are in fact medieval distortions in all cases. The true moment in the Axial Age of the Greek, Israelite, Indic, Sinic (et al) intervals of transformation are lost to us now, and none of the world religions that find their sources in that era have any real connection to those periods, least wise any claim of ‘revelation’.
We should note that Axial Age Greece gave birth to secularism, and much else, and the modern transformation echoes much of that.
Thus the rise of modern secularism has a far better claim for a spiritual foundation than the medieval distortions of Christianity and Islam. Strange to say, but the facts of history in the large show the reality.
We tend to think of ‘Western Civilization’ in terms of Judaic, and Greek, sources, but that isn’t European! So why the exclusive focus on Europe. It is confusing the issue.
Look at the facts of the case with Islam: it is a most remarkable cultural matrix, but its basis is not adequate for a future global culture. This reality has to be faced, as the sentimental distortions of culture and history are set aside for a more realistic appraisal of Islamic history in light of the facts.
Christians and Moslems are full of themselves as they flaunt some special relationship to the sacred or to god. Such claims are without merit and are blinding millions to their real needs.
One of the problems is that secularism is misunderstood by its proponents, as scientism, darwinism, atheism, and a host of lesser episodes of modernity rise to claim the whole. The real significance of the secular has yet to manifest itself, and remains a project of the future.
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Posted in History, Islam at 1:16 pm by nemo
Comment on ‘Karen Armstrong vs Brigitte Gabriel
The historical facts are, you are correct, essential here, but they are not easily arrived at with the history of Islam. Robert Spencer’s revelations also have their problems! All these ‘factual historians’ are all too right wing.
Still, you are right, the histories here fail to arrive at History.
Here’s an eyeopener on Islamic history:
Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries (Hardcover)
by Paul Fregosi
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