Newsweek Debacle

[Proletariat]

I think I'll have a conversation with myself, since anytime I've put thought into a post on this thread it gets drowned out by 13 posts of nit picking.

I just can't believe that the story made so many people go crazy. Wow.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised when some lunatics go crazy b/c the book that tells them how to live their lives is flushed down the toilet.

If you were a protestant in 1640 England you would be pretty upset if something similar happened to the bible. That's the analogy.

Would we allow any Christian to get away with this excuse? It's the 21st century. We know better, they could know better if they wanted to. But, they don't.

You're speaking as a person who's part of a society that has gone through the Reformation and the Enlightenment. And even though you're a big religious person, you accept the fundamental tenets of tolerance and people-centric thought that provide the ideological underpinnings of this society.

Most muslim countries -especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan- are societies that haven't gone through the reformation and the enlightenment. God has a literal presence in most people's lives and in their thinking and it's not an accident that there's always a "GOd Willing" or "Praise God" in virtually everything that's written.

These are God-centric societies and disputes over minor detail of dogma are important.

Obviously, I think they re wrong and out of their minds, but I also understand that they have different conceptions of the world, while the historical process that would allow these societies to reach a level that's close to ours is a long and arduous one.

And yes, comparing contemporary Muslim societies with 1640 -perhaps even 1550- England is very apt if one wants to understand what's going on there.

No, it's not. 1550s England had no Enlightenment to model itself after. 21st Century Muslims do. Yet they ignore it. This is why the Iraq invasion was so necessary -- drag them kicking and screaming into the modern world. No matter what the cost of doing so in this decade, it far dwarfs the cost that would come due in the form of a suitcase nuke in next decade if the cause was now foresaken in the name of a misidentified and false "peace."

There was no "peace" in the Middle East. They were already at war with us, just as Germany was already at war with the rest of Europe in 1936. George Bush, unlike Bill Clinton, was willing to recognize this.

You say that because you haven't studied how difficult it is for a country to model itself after another. Models aren't simply copied. They are brought over, fought over, rejected, brought back in again until they are assimilated into a peculiar hybrid.

No country has managed to replicate enlightenment and its institutions outside its cultural milieue in Western Europe and the US. Sure, many countries have nominal institutions of democracy and the free market but there's something missing which make these societies not quite right. It's not the same, because you can replicate the forms, but you can't replicate the historical development that gave birth to the prototype. See Latin America and its struggles with authoritarianism and the capitalist system for example. They know what to copy, but they ve still mangled it.

Most importantly, societies aren't a singular human being to make an easy choice of a prepackaged option. They are diverse and multifaceted with many interests and trends fighting against each other trying to impose their vision.

Also if you notice, the western values most Arab countries adopted were nationalism and socialism . That's what the Baath parties and Nasserism is. Granted, they now seem either failed (socialism) or passe (nationalism) but at the time they were adopted they had a very strong intellectual appeal.

It's these children of western thought that the radical muslims are fighting against.

Somehow, someway, muslim societies need to get through their reformation and their enlightenment, but it's hard. It took 4 or 5 centuries for Europe to do it and it was partly a happy accident.

Uh... ...you guys DO realize that without the enlightened Islam of the time of the Dark Ages, while Europe was under a cloud of Roman Catholic suppression and repression, which kept alive ancient learning from Greece and earlier, there would have been no Enlightenment and no Reformation....don't you?

The Enlightenment was built on knowledge preserved through the European Dark Ages by Islam, especially in Moorish Spain. Our science is built on their work. Furthermore, the spiritual impulses which eventually led to the Reformation owe a lot to the Sufis.

Islam kept the lamp of knowledge alive and well through a time when Europe was awash in mud and superstition.

A little respect is in order.

Ad infinitum