Did you know that one of the U.S. government's Muslim counterterrorism advisers is a fellow who claims that the notorious Sayyid Qutb -- the most influential theorist of Islamic terror and Osama bin Laden's philosophical mentor -- did not want worldwide Islamic revolution, and in fact was a spiritual ecumenist from whom Americans can learn to be better people? I explain it all here.
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wow - great posts - Geoff - when I read Rod's distillation of Qutb I thought - sounds a lot like what Rod and the social cons also believe if you substitute "christian" for "islam".
Siarlys - great post - could not agree more. The greatest transfer of wealth in the history of humanity - our money for their oil - and we finance the Sunni Wahabbi who preach the extremist form of Islam. That is the real problem. But the Saudi's have the oil.
At some level one can understand why these extremists despise us as weak - we sacrifice anything just keep giving us our oil fix.
wow - great posts - Geoff - when I read Rod's distillation of Qutb I thought - sounds a lot like what Rod and the social cons also believe if you substitute "christian" for "islam".
Oh, come on, you really don't see a difference between "We think this is the right way to live, and wish others agreed" and "There must be violent revolution to impose our way of life on everybody else, and people who disagree with us are not only wrong, they're evil"?
You honestly don't think there's any difference between the world people like me aspire to, and the world that Sayyid Qutb's followers want?
But Rod, it doesn't say that. Or if it does, you haven't quoted it. What it actually says is not that different than what you say every day, including yesterday when you said that Christians should put God before country.
The point Rod is trying to make, and I think it's valid, is that the danger in Qutb's political philosophy comes less from his vision of the right arrangement of social functions between the family, the economy, and the state, as it comes from the means through which he asserts that such an arrangement should be brought about, i.e. violent revolution and theocracy.
But there are also distortions in his ideal as well, that stem from the unique cultural heritage of Islamic society in contrast to the cultural heritage of the West. That is to say, for example, in a Western framework, there are ways to socially prioritize motherhood and family cohesion that do not lead to the destruction of women's personhood, whereas in an Islamic framework there may not be.
So, you may swap out "Christian" for "Islamic" in passages like the one above, and it will sound similar, but because Christianity and Islam are not identical ethical and cultural systems, the actual meaning will be quite different.
You may be on the right track, Ethan, but a lot more work would need to be done to establish that the actual meaning would be quite different. Like Qutb, there are some Christians who would hold that the portion of Western heritage that would "socially prioritize motherhood ... in a way that [would] not lead to the destruction of women's personhood" represent a heretical departure from "Christian" principles. Interestingly, Paul Berman, whose NYT magazine article exposition of Qutb Rod cites approvingly, actually drew a parallel himself between Qutb's thinking and that of some Christian thought --- "In Qutb's interpretation, the sins and crimes of the Medina Jews in the seventh century have a cosmic, eternal quality -- rather like the sins and crimes of the Jerusalem Jews in some of the traditional interpretations of the Gospels" --- in his booklength version of the article, Terror and Liberalism.
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