You know, I was just thinking about how I took note back after 9/11 how most (all?) of the hijackers were middle-class, college-educated men. That shattered my assumptions about why terrorists committed their crimes. It proved to me that education and money have little to do with it. They aren't cures anybmore than they are causes. What is the reason that these people were so angry and evil is that despite their education, money, health and well-being, they did not have power in a personal sense, real free will as they saw it. Now, mind you that I think a lot of people in the arab street have a wildly inaccurate idea of the freedoms we have. I think Iraq's problem with anarchy right now is proof of that. I think those people who are contributing to the problem see this stuff as freedom, librerty without responsibility. There is a real problem with repression in the mid-east, and that fuels this so-called holy-war more than anything else IMO. However, it's mixed with genuine ignorance and malicious distortions of what real freedom means, it inherent limitations. Everyone can be free but you can't always get your own way.
Islam was the seed bed upon which a flowering cullture developed, a culture that emphasised learning, raising science, geometry, astronomy & mathematics to new levels of sophistication, but the reality is, that Islam imploded. Why ?
I think of Islam like a failed sun..Like Jupiter...It had a brief flurry of brightness in its early days, but was never able to sustain the critical mass needed to keep that light burning into the present.
And I don't think it was wholly due to intercene wars between muslim countries either that sapped it's power to grow.
In conparison, Christian Europe, went through even more setbacks than Islam, both political religious, as well as through periods of disease & famine unheard of in the middle east....and yet it not only thrived, but eventually displaced muslim merchants across almost all trading routes. This is not a matter for conjecture, but historical fact.
And its rubbish to say that Western culture was more successful because it was more violent or had more sophisticated weapons... Vienna was under constant Muslim (Ottoman-Turk ) Military threat until the late 17th century. Mulsims had the bigger armies & greater weapons.
Sadly, the fundamentalists look upon the past Islamic glories & want to raise it from its death bed, without examining the real resons as to why Islam became so intolerant ( and still is ) of anyone or anything that wants to seperate religion from state....
To my way of thinking, the "reformation " established the foundations of the modern western secular state and that is the dividing line between Islam & the West.
Islam needs its own "reformation" to wrench power away from the mullahs, but it is going to take a long long time..& in the meantime lots of innocent people are going to be killed all because of the dillusional thinking of a hateful fanatics...\
[B]Islam was the seed bed upon which a flowering cullture developed, a culture that emphasised learning, raising science, geometry, astronomy & mathematics to new levels of sophistication, but the reality is, that Islam imploded. Why ?
I think of Islam like a failed sun..Like Jupiter...It had a brief flurry of brightness in its early days, but was never able to sustain the critical mass needed to keep that light burning into the present.
And I don't think it was wholly due to intercene wars between muslim countries either that sapped it's power to grow.
In conparison, Christian Europe, went through even more setbacks than Islam, both political religious, as well as through periods of disease & famine unheard of in the middle east....and yet it not only thrived, but eventually displaced or sidelined muslim culture across almost all previous exclusive muslim trading routes. This is not a matter for conjecture, but historical fact.
And its rubbish to say that Western culture was more successful because it was more violent or had more sophisticated weapons... Vienna was under constant Muslim (Ottoman-Turk ) Military threat until the late 17th century. Muslims had the bigger armies & more powerful weapons.
So what went wrong ?
Sadly, the fundamentalists don't want to learn from the past, but rather look upon Islam's past glories, wanting to raise it from its death bed, without examining the real resons as to why Islam failed the test of time. Nor do they want to ask why Islam became so intolerant ( and still is ) of anyone or anything that wants to seperate religion from state. For to do so, would be to negate their own ideological purblind stance...
Ultimately the difference between Islam & the West, rests on one historical plank...Reformation.
Over-arching the agrument between Protestant & Catholic, was the idea that society needed to seperate church from state. In this historical sense the "reformation " established the foundations of the modern western secular state and that is the dividing line between Islam & the West.
Islam needs its own "reformation" to wrench power away from the mullahs & fundamentalists otherwise it is going to repeat the mistakes of the past .
It's going to take a long long time..& in the meantime lots of innocent people are going to be killed all because of the dillusional thinking, that the west can be thwarted or that history can be changed.\
Islam was the seed bed upon which a flowering cullture developed, a culture that emphasised learning, raising science, geometry, astronomy & mathematics to new levels of sophistication, but the reality is, that Islam imploded. Why ?
I think of Islam like a failed sun..Like Jupiter...It had a brief flurry of brightness in its early days, but was never able to sustain the critical mass needed to keep that light burning into the present.
And I don't think it was wholly due to intercene wars between muslim countries either that sapped it's power to grow.
In conparison, Christian Europe, went through even more setbacks than Islam, both political religious, as well as through periods of disease & famine unheard of in the middle east....and yet it not only thrived, but eventually displaced muslim merchants across almost all trading routes. This is not a matter for conjecture, but historical fact.
And its rubbish to say that Western culture was more successful because it was more violent or had more sophisticated weapons... Vienna was under constant Muslim (Ottoman-Turk ) Military threat until the late 17th century. Mulsims had the bigger armies & greater weapons.
Sadly, the fundamentalists look upon the past Islamic glories & want to raise it from its death bed, without examining the real resons as to why Islam became so intolerant ( and still is ) of anyone or anything that wants to seperate religion from state....
To my way of thinking, the "reformation " established the foundations of the modern western secular state and that is the dividing line between Islam & the West.
Islam needs its own "reformation" to wrench power away from the mullahs, but it is going to take a long long time..& in the meantime lots of innocent people are going to be killed all because of the dillusional thinking of a hateful fanatics...\
Islam was the seed bed upon which a flowering cullture developed, a culture that emphasised learning, raising science, geometry, astronomy & mathematics to new levels of sophistication, but the reality is, that Islam imploded. Why ?
I don't have time to get into the intricate details, but at a certain time, Islam became very rigid and the civilisation around it, entered its own Middle-Age?, in which it still is.
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I think of Islam like a failed sun..Like Jupiter...
I suppose that were you an eleventh century Andalusian or a Persian traveller (they were quite familiar with Classic myths) would have said the same thing about Christendom upon visiting Rome or London.
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It had a brief flurry of brightness in its early days, but was never able to sustain the critical mass needed to keep that light burning into the present.
And I don't think it was wholly due to intercene wars between muslim countries either that sapped it's power to grow.
It so happens, that Western coivilisation was the first to cross the threshold of industrialisation, of secularisation, and of modern societies born out of the the ideas of the eighteenth century philosophers of the enlightenment.
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In conparison, Christian Europe, went through even more setbacks than Islam, both political religious, as well as through periods of disease & famine unheard of in the middle east....and yet it not only thrived, but eventually displaced muslim merchants across almost all trading routes. This is not a matter for conjecture, but historical fact.
While it benefitted form the advantage of having been left mostly alone from the tenth cetury onwards (hardly scratched by the Genghiskhanides), from the fifteenth century on, Christian Europe had seen its own social, political, and religious orders repeatedly questioned, and eventually overturned, from the inside out. It has become modern.
But then, as a result, other civilisations, much older the the West, have themselves undergone the same process. Alas the civilisation born out of Islam (?Islamdom?? ?Muslimitude??) has not yet joined the fray.
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And its rubbish to say that Western culture was more successful because it was more violent or had more sophisticated weapons...
The acquisition of better tools of violence and the skillfull mastering of the violent arts certainly account for the West's success at conquering much of the world in previous centuries, but it does not account as much for other kinds of success, more significant on the long run if you ask me.
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Vienna was under constant Muslim (Ottoman-Turk ) Military threat until the late 17th century. Mulsims had the bigger armies & greater weapons.
However, already at the time there were far fewer printing presses in the immense and powerful Ottoman Empire than in the Italian operetta statelets, and of all of the printing presses in the Ottoman Empire not one was owned or operated by Muslims.
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Sadly, the fundamentalists look upon the past Islamic glories & want to raise it from its death bed, without examining the real resons as to why Islam became so intolerant ( and still is ) of anyone or anything that wants to seperate religion from state...
The concept of Islam as both state and religion (Din wa Dawla), is currently a major obstacle for modernisation. Even Turkey, which was forcibly secualrised by Atatürk, is still grappling with it.
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To my way of thinking, the "reformation " established the foundations of the modern western secular state and that is the dividing line between Islam & the West.
I believe it was the emergence of secular arts and sciences of Il Quattrocento, which triggered the process enabling the great transoceanic voyages and the relgious reformations of the sixteenth century, and all that came later.
The watershed is somewhere in the mid-fifteenth century.
Meanwhile, Islam became complacent, self-assured of its own superiority till the gunboats arrived, not unlike what had happended to Imperial China.
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Islam needs its own "reformation" to wrench power away from the mullahs, but it is going to take a long long time..& in the meantime lots of innocent people are going to be killed all because of the dillusional thinking of a hateful fanatics...
I tend to agree, they have to get over their own Middle-Ages.
This said, I don't know what's coming soon, but I'm certain the Golden Age is yet to come.
I tend to see that modern Islam has not gone through the modernisms of the west . . . and most if this is due to profund complex historical reasons including
The West's development of the printing press, the alpha-numeric written letter forms, paper replacing papyrus and other technological changes . . . these had deep impacts on the structure of Western civilization, the dissemination of knowledge and the West's form of conceptual thought: the conceptual thought is, of course, mirrored in the institutions of the civilization, and, since ours is conditioned by the alpha-numeric letters, we have had a history of compartmentalization, the division of labor and specialization which freed up a tremendous bursts of human energies for technological innnovations. It also structured a certain kind of abstract thinking that resulted in the analytical thought of the rationalists: Logocentrism . . . this all sounds grand and superior but it isn't necessarily: it resulted in a certain kind of deficiency specific to that kind of thought . . . as all thought forms have their blind-spots...
The West's tech innovations had the cultural result of putting once sacred certainties into easy doubt . . . and showed dogmatism to be ignorant of complexity, thus giving rise to humanisms and liberal democracies . . . (but more is coming)
Islam did not have this, as well as other similar cultural shifts which were due to technology as did the West. . .
now today there is another HUGE shift of our perceptions coming due to the shift in technology: electronic media and computers, video and the inter-net. These new technologies will upset the West probably as profoundly as the Printing press did (and that effect (the PP) was very very deep) and yet will take perhaps as long to truly show the way it will develop.
One of the side of this kind of major shift of cultural, institutional and conceptual thought due to technology is that cultures that are going through these shifts often resort to warfareas a means to adjust . . . and for other reasons I won't go into ; suffice it to say that WW1 is an example of just such a cultural reaction: Empires were imploding, steam, steel, gas power were reshaping the notions of selfhood and the ideas of what a nation was:
also
the Reformation, its war was a direct result of the Printing press and the dissemination of knowledge that resulted, as well as, the shift of the sense of Self from a self that of works with others and ethics in the world, to an autonomous sovreign Self (precursor to the Rational Subject of Descartes) and belief
Now, with all of that taken into consideration, and the fact that we ourselves who have somewhat acclimated ourselves (supposedly) to rapid technological and conceptual shifts and have a fluid sense of selfhood are having problems dealing with the impact of electronic media, think of cultures that have not gone through the stages of humanistic self scrutiny and conceptual traumatic revolutions of even the Rennaissance, not to mention the Enlightenment, Romanticism or even early Modernism, what would such a culture experience? -
- there is a chance that the profound structual shifts that are occuring in these cultures are due to the imposition of rapid change due to electronic media (telephone, radio, TV, as well as computers . . . and also Light itself is a medium) and there is, if the dynamic I outlined above is right, going to be violent adjustment
it doesn't mean that it will be 'US' VS 'THEM' it may take other forms . . . but it seems to be moving in a very regrettable direction
I think the worst thing that we can do is to regress back to some form of Religious fundamentalism in the face of fundamentalisms
we should reflect on what the terrorists reveal about dogmatic thought rather than use it as a dividing point: their usage of the word God should make us see how grossly inadaquate the word is . .. we should let the word die allready and stop clinging to its corpse . .
The last thing that should happen is identity panic: that is what happens in times of shift: maturity would come from becoming fluid and openning, rather than closing to Otherness.
anyway . . . many scholars actually think that the "Middle Ages" (s they preffer to call them) were actually a kind of cultural Golden Age that goes unappreciated --read Huizinga's The Waning Of the Middle Ages
I think the problem was with somebody else's sarcasm detector being badly in need of a recalibration.
or i simply misinterpreted him being serious? unless i see your face while you talk, i can't tell whether you are serious on the superconservative texan religious etc propaganda, or whether you just joke. after seeing so many jokes being for serious ...
Islam needs its own "reformation" to wrench power away from the mullahs, but it is going to take a long long time..& in the meantime lots of innocent people are going to be killed all because of the dillusional thinking of a hateful fanatics...\
Maybe the reforming of the United Islamic States is closer than the westerners expect. And meanwhile lots of iraqi, afghan etc kids are killed in the "war against the terrorism" started, not by them.
Maybe the war against terrorism wouldn't have to have happened if Islamic states had taken the bold initiatives that Atta Turk & others had taken.
Of course I grieve that anyone should die, but are the deaths somehow morally different to the deaths of the people in New York & Washington...
Sounds like yours is a sliding scale of morality...all deaths should abhor you, not just some here or there..Or are you writing like this to be provocative ?
or i simply misinterpreted him being serious? unless i see your face while you talk, i can't tell whether you are serious on the superconservative texan religious etc propaganda, or whether you just joke. after seeing so many jokes being for serious ...
I feel honored that my sarcasm was taken to be this truthful... From now on, I will try to indicate the mood with which my posts should be read. [Serious] [/Serious] or [Joking] [/Joking]
Maybe the war against terrorism wouldn't have to have happened if Islamic states had taken the bold initiatives that Atta Turk & others had taken.
Of course I grieve that anyone should die, but are the deaths somehow morally different to the deaths of the people in New York & Washington...
Maybe the war "against the terrorism" would not have happened, if Bush not was a president, or simply the Bush family had not made their money from oil. First thing behind the scene is money, and then comes the rest.
Revenging the deaths is no more than the logic "eye for an eye, hand for a hand" .. to "pay back" equally, bombing a handful of (saudi arabian! none of the pilots was iraqi or afghan) ministerial and stock buildings would have been enough.
Pfflam, i have some difficulty following biut I'll attempt to reply pertninently.
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Originally posted by pfflam
Good points Emannuel Goldstein
I tend to see that modern Islam has not gone through the modernisms of the west . . . and most if this is due to profund complex historical reasons including
The West's development of the printing press,(?)these had deep impacts on the structure of Western civilization, the dissemination of knowledge and the West's form of conceptual thought: the conceptual thought is, of course, mirrored in the institutions of the civilization, and, since ours is conditioned by the alpha-numeric letters,(?) It also structured a certain kind of abstract thinking that resulted in the analytical thought of the rationalists: Logocentrism . . . this all sounds grand and superior but it isn't necessarily: it resulted in a certain kind of deficiency specific to that kind of thought . . . as all thought forms have their blind-spots...
?However, they had closer-knit communities, and simpler, more certain ideas about life, which gave them a feel of belonging and making sense of the reality around them; which seems reassuring to many in our alienated, crowded, tense societies.
And of course, their lifestyle was often more stylish than ours, which is often a mechanist, colourless, legacy from Victorian times.?
Still, it was worth it, if you ask me.
The pre-rational world, of which so much still remains in less fortunate corners of the world, is a den of superstition. Here's what Pakistani scientist Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy wrote in his opinion piece
ago, it swept away the old theocratic medieval order and
replaced it with ideas of progress, humanism, and
rationalism. Curiously the offspring of science, technology,
has been summoned to serve and defend an increasingly
Talibanized Pakistan. The country's emerging new medieval
theocracy, that now impatiently awaits its turn for power,
counts upon having at its disposal the power of fiery jinns
to use as it wills.?
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The West's tech innovations had the cultural result of putting once sacred certainties into easy doubt . . . and showed dogmatism to be ignorant of complexity, thus giving rise to humanisms and liberal democracies . . . (but more is coming)
Islam did not have this, as well as other similar cultural shifts which were due to technology as did the West. . .
Many societies of non-Western civilisations have gone or are going through the modernisation process, I don't think they lost more than they gained, if given the choice, I suppose most reasonable minds would prefer to be South Korea rather than Saudi Arabia.
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now today there is another HUGE shift of our perceptions coming due to the shift in technology: electronic media and computers, video and the inter-net. These new technologies will upset the West probably as profoundly as the Printing press did (and that effect (the PP) was very very deep) and yet will take perhaps as long to truly show the way it will develop.
We are going through a time of fear of the change, which is not unlike the wave of romanticism which in reaction to the American and French Revolutions and to the steam engine, and both ?left? and ?right? nineteenth to twentieth century totalitarianisms owed much to that reaction.
Many mark the beginning of that trend with one of the most famous litterary forgeries: the ?discovery? of the ancient poetry of Ossian.
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One of the side of this kind of major shift of cultural, institutional and conceptual thought due to technology is that cultures that are going through these shifts often resort to warfareas a means to adjust . . . and for other reasons I won't go into ; suffice it to say that WW1 is an example of just such a cultural reaction: Empires were imploding, steam, steel, gas power were reshaping the notions of selfhood and the ideas of what a nation was:
It was rather the result of the rising oppostions between the pursuit of progress but in willing ignorance of its excluded and its harmful side-effects, and the reaction to the very ideas (the values of ?76 and of ?89) and the innovations (railway, telegraph, vaccination) vehiculated by that progress, reaction which fed on the the misery and the wrath of those suffering from the harmful side-effects.
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also the Reformation, its war was a direct result of the Printing press and the dissemination of knowledge that resulted, as well as, the shift of the sense of Self from a self that of works with others and ethics in the world, to an autonomous sovreign Self (precursor to the Rational Subject of Descartes) and belief
There were bloody wars before and after reformation, however, the Thirty-Year-War is somwehow seen as worse than the Hundred-Year-War, because during the latter, the unity of Western Christendom and its established worldview were intact, at least nominally; and the sub-lunar Earth the flat centre of a very simple universe and all were so happy with that.
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Now, with all of that taken into consideration, and the fact that we ourselves who have somewhat acclimated ourselves (supposedly) to rapid technological and conceptual shifts and have a fluid sense of selfhood are having problems dealing with the impact of electronic media, think of cultures that have not gone through the stages of humanistic self scrutiny and conceptual traumatic revolutions of even the Rennaissance, not to mention the Enlightenment, Romanticism or even early Modernism, what would such a culture experience? -
Coming from such a culture, I'd say it would experience some turbulence, but less than the West did since, for if intent of learning from Western experience it'd be likely to learn Western mistakes as well.
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- there is a chance that the profound structual shifts that are occuring in these cultures are due to the imposition of rapid change due to electronic media (telephone, radio, TV, as well as computers . . . and also Light itself is a medium) and there is, if the dynamic I outlined above is right, going to be violent adjustment
The more a culture is reluctant to adapt, the more violent the adjustment, unless it refuses to adjust, completely isolates itself from the outside, whuch becomes more and more difficult, and ends up gobbled up anyway, on the long run.
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it doesn't mean that it will be 'US' VS 'THEM' it may take other forms . . . but it seems to be moving in a very regrettable direction
It's often ?us v. us? or ?them v. them? as even the more fortunate societies are traversed by a reaction against modernity (or else why would the 99.4% of genome common to humans and chimpanzees cause so mcuh uproar in some parts of the affluent West?).
But the internal conflicts are much more violent in the less modern societies, as rational modernity is also more keen on finding less violent ways to address internal disagreements.
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I think the worst thing that we can do is to regress back to some form of Religious fundamentalism in the face of fundamentalisms
I agree, but I'm also wary of less obvious forms of ?archaeophilia? which would put the validity of astrophysics and that of astrology on an equal footing.
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we should reflect on what the terrorists reveal about dogmatic thought rather than use it as a dividing point: their usage of the word God should make us see how grossly inadaquate the word is . .. we should let the word die allready and stop clinging to its corpse . .
Terrorism feeds on the flaws of the current state of our world, so dealing with the unintended harmful side-effects of our times would certainly ruin terrorism's grazing ground (sure it's going to cost, but the alternative is even more expensive). Hovewer, terrorists must also be actively opposed, whether on the terrain of ideas (and that means also on the homefront, I don't recall Oswald Mosley having been particularly liked in the 40s Britain) or on the field of battle, no way around that.
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The last thing that should happen is identity panic: that is what happens in times of shift: maturity would come from becoming fluid and openning, rather than closing to Otherness.
Well, the openning should be toward an otherness of origins (people of other shape, forms, languages, bithplace, etc?), but there is an otherness of ideas, one which seeks to obliterate mine, and it is met with closed remparts and an unsheathed sword.
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anyway . . . many scholars actually think that the "Middle Ages" (s they preffer to call them) were actually a kind of cultural Golden Age that goes unappreciated --read Huizinga's The Waning Of the Middle Ages
Medieval Europe was the most backward corner of the Eurasian landmass, to suggest otherwise (as do scholars suggesting it was some European cultural Golden Age) is as preposterous as saying Riyadh is the present day beacon of learning, of knowledge, and of the fine arts.
And since there are ample parts of humanity going through their middle-ages I humbly suggest those scholars move there and spare themseleves the agony of our modern ages.
I'd like to add that more Muslims have been killed by violence due to the various Islamist ideologies, than by violence due to US policies (not that some of these have not been misguided).
While stressing my utmost contempt for all forms religious extremism, putting all of them on an equal footing would be disregarding these facts:
In the ?fundamentalist Christian? USA you can have an abortion (though with more risk of violent harm to yourself than in say, Finland);
in ?moderate Muslim? Egypt you can have your little daughter's clitoris removed with even less risk to yourself.
(Of course, I myself have personal biases: I have on the whole a more positive view of historical Islam than of historical Christianity, but that's besides the point)
Comments
(Giaguara, I was joking...)
Originally posted by billybobsky
my humor must be lacking something european...
(Giaguara, I was joking...)
I think the problem was with somebody else's sarcasm detector being badly in need of a recalibration.
I think of Islam like a failed sun..Like Jupiter...It had a brief flurry of brightness in its early days, but was never able to sustain the critical mass needed to keep that light burning into the present.
And I don't think it was wholly due to intercene wars between muslim countries either that sapped it's power to grow.
In conparison, Christian Europe, went through even more setbacks than Islam, both political religious, as well as through periods of disease & famine unheard of in the middle east....and yet it not only thrived, but eventually displaced muslim merchants across almost all trading routes. This is not a matter for conjecture, but historical fact.
And its rubbish to say that Western culture was more successful because it was more violent or had more sophisticated weapons... Vienna was under constant Muslim (Ottoman-Turk ) Military threat until the late 17th century. Mulsims had the bigger armies & greater weapons.
Sadly, the fundamentalists look upon the past Islamic glories & want to raise it from its death bed, without examining the real resons as to why Islam became so intolerant ( and still is ) of anyone or anything that wants to seperate religion from state....
To my way of thinking, the "reformation " established the foundations of the modern western secular state and that is the dividing line between Islam & the West.
Islam needs its own "reformation" to wrench power away from the mullahs, but it is going to take a long long time..& in the meantime lots of innocent people are going to be killed all because of the dillusional thinking of a hateful fanatics...
[B]Islam was the seed bed upon which a flowering cullture developed, a culture that emphasised learning, raising science, geometry, astronomy & mathematics to new levels of sophistication, but the reality is, that Islam imploded. Why ?
I think of Islam like a failed sun..Like Jupiter...It had a brief flurry of brightness in its early days, but was never able to sustain the critical mass needed to keep that light burning into the present.
And I don't think it was wholly due to intercene wars between muslim countries either that sapped it's power to grow.
In conparison, Christian Europe, went through even more setbacks than Islam, both political religious, as well as through periods of disease & famine unheard of in the middle east....and yet it not only thrived, but eventually displaced or sidelined muslim culture across almost all previous exclusive muslim trading routes. This is not a matter for conjecture, but historical fact.
And its rubbish to say that Western culture was more successful because it was more violent or had more sophisticated weapons... Vienna was under constant Muslim (Ottoman-Turk ) Military threat until the late 17th century. Muslims had the bigger armies & more powerful weapons.
So what went wrong ?
Sadly, the fundamentalists don't want to learn from the past, but rather look upon Islam's past glories, wanting to raise it from its death bed, without examining the real resons as to why Islam failed the test of time. Nor do they want to ask why Islam became so intolerant ( and still is ) of anyone or anything that wants to seperate religion from state. For to do so, would be to negate their own ideological purblind stance...
Ultimately the difference between Islam & the West, rests on one historical plank...Reformation.
Over-arching the agrument between Protestant & Catholic, was the idea that society needed to seperate church from state. In this historical sense the "reformation " established the foundations of the modern western secular state and that is the dividing line between Islam & the West.
Islam needs its own "reformation" to wrench power away from the mullahs & fundamentalists otherwise it is going to repeat the mistakes of the past .
It's going to take a long long time..& in the meantime lots of innocent people are going to be killed all because of the dillusional thinking, that the west can be thwarted or that history can be changed.
Originally posted by aquafire
Islam was the seed bed upon which a flowering cullture developed, a culture that emphasised learning, raising science, geometry, astronomy & mathematics to new levels of sophistication, but the reality is, that Islam imploded. Why ?
I think of Islam like a failed sun..Like Jupiter...It had a brief flurry of brightness in its early days, but was never able to sustain the critical mass needed to keep that light burning into the present.
And I don't think it was wholly due to intercene wars between muslim countries either that sapped it's power to grow.
In conparison, Christian Europe, went through even more setbacks than Islam, both political religious, as well as through periods of disease & famine unheard of in the middle east....and yet it not only thrived, but eventually displaced muslim merchants across almost all trading routes. This is not a matter for conjecture, but historical fact.
And its rubbish to say that Western culture was more successful because it was more violent or had more sophisticated weapons... Vienna was under constant Muslim (Ottoman-Turk ) Military threat until the late 17th century. Mulsims had the bigger armies & greater weapons.
Sadly, the fundamentalists look upon the past Islamic glories & want to raise it from its death bed, without examining the real resons as to why Islam became so intolerant ( and still is ) of anyone or anything that wants to seperate religion from state....
To my way of thinking, the "reformation " established the foundations of the modern western secular state and that is the dividing line between Islam & the West.
Islam needs its own "reformation" to wrench power away from the mullahs, but it is going to take a long long time..& in the meantime lots of innocent people are going to be killed all because of the dillusional thinking of a hateful fanatics...
very well said...
Fellowship
Originally posted by FellowshipChurch iBook
very well said...
Fellowship
I truly wish it wasn't so Fellowship...
Originally posted by aquafire
I truly wish it wasn't so Fellowship...
I agree with you...
I always stick with the slogan:
"live and let live" Pluralistic society is the best!
I wish more people would see the beauty of diversity and would stop the hate of others.
Fellowship
Originally posted by aquafire
Islam was the seed bed upon which a flowering cullture developed, a culture that emphasised learning, raising science, geometry, astronomy & mathematics to new levels of sophistication, but the reality is, that Islam imploded. Why ?
I don't have time to get into the intricate details, but at a certain time, Islam became very rigid and the civilisation around it, entered its own Middle-Age?, in which it still is.
I think of Islam like a failed sun..Like Jupiter...
I suppose that were you an eleventh century Andalusian or a Persian traveller (they were quite familiar with Classic myths) would have said the same thing about Christendom upon visiting Rome or London.
It had a brief flurry of brightness in its early days, but was never able to sustain the critical mass needed to keep that light burning into the present.
And I don't think it was wholly due to intercene wars between muslim countries either that sapped it's power to grow.
It so happens, that Western coivilisation was the first to cross the threshold of industrialisation, of secularisation, and of modern societies born out of the the ideas of the eighteenth century philosophers of the enlightenment.
In conparison, Christian Europe, went through even more setbacks than Islam, both political religious, as well as through periods of disease & famine unheard of in the middle east....and yet it not only thrived, but eventually displaced muslim merchants across almost all trading routes. This is not a matter for conjecture, but historical fact.
While it benefitted form the advantage of having been left mostly alone from the tenth cetury onwards (hardly scratched by the Genghiskhanides), from the fifteenth century on, Christian Europe had seen its own social, political, and religious orders repeatedly questioned, and eventually overturned, from the inside out. It has become modern.
But then, as a result, other civilisations, much older the the West, have themselves undergone the same process. Alas the civilisation born out of Islam (?Islamdom?? ?Muslimitude??) has not yet joined the fray.
And its rubbish to say that Western culture was more successful because it was more violent or had more sophisticated weapons...
The acquisition of better tools of violence and the skillfull mastering of the violent arts certainly account for the West's success at conquering much of the world in previous centuries, but it does not account as much for other kinds of success, more significant on the long run if you ask me.
Vienna was under constant Muslim (Ottoman-Turk ) Military threat until the late 17th century. Mulsims had the bigger armies & greater weapons.
However, already at the time there were far fewer printing presses in the immense and powerful Ottoman Empire than in the Italian operetta statelets, and of all of the printing presses in the Ottoman Empire not one was owned or operated by Muslims.
Sadly, the fundamentalists look upon the past Islamic glories & want to raise it from its death bed, without examining the real resons as to why Islam became so intolerant ( and still is ) of anyone or anything that wants to seperate religion from state...
The concept of Islam as both state and religion (Din wa Dawla), is currently a major obstacle for modernisation. Even Turkey, which was forcibly secualrised by Atatürk, is still grappling with it.
To my way of thinking, the "reformation " established the foundations of the modern western secular state and that is the dividing line between Islam & the West.
I believe it was the emergence of secular arts and sciences of Il Quattrocento, which triggered the process enabling the great transoceanic voyages and the relgious reformations of the sixteenth century, and all that came later.
The watershed is somewhere in the mid-fifteenth century.
Meanwhile, Islam became complacent, self-assured of its own superiority till the gunboats arrived, not unlike what had happended to Imperial China.
Islam needs its own "reformation" to wrench power away from the mullahs, but it is going to take a long long time..& in the meantime lots of innocent people are going to be killed all because of the dillusional thinking of a hateful fanatics...
I tend to agree, they have to get over their own Middle-Ages.
This said, I don't know what's coming soon, but I'm certain the Golden Age is yet to come.
I tend to see that modern Islam has not gone through the modernisms of the west . . . and most if this is due to profund complex historical reasons including
The West's development of the printing press, the alpha-numeric written letter forms, paper replacing papyrus and other technological changes . . . these had deep impacts on the structure of Western civilization, the dissemination of knowledge and the West's form of conceptual thought: the conceptual thought is, of course, mirrored in the institutions of the civilization, and, since ours is conditioned by the alpha-numeric letters, we have had a history of compartmentalization, the division of labor and specialization which freed up a tremendous bursts of human energies for technological innnovations. It also structured a certain kind of abstract thinking that resulted in the analytical thought of the rationalists: Logocentrism . . . this all sounds grand and superior but it isn't necessarily: it resulted in a certain kind of deficiency specific to that kind of thought . . . as all thought forms have their blind-spots...
The West's tech innovations had the cultural result of putting once sacred certainties into easy doubt . . . and showed dogmatism to be ignorant of complexity, thus giving rise to humanisms and liberal democracies . . . (but more is coming)
Islam did not have this, as well as other similar cultural shifts which were due to technology as did the West. . .
now today there is another HUGE shift of our perceptions coming due to the shift in technology: electronic media and computers, video and the inter-net. These new technologies will upset the West probably as profoundly as the Printing press did (and that effect (the PP) was very very deep) and yet will take perhaps as long to truly show the way it will develop.
One of the side of this kind of major shift of cultural, institutional and conceptual thought due to technology is that cultures that are going through these shifts often resort to warfareas a means to adjust . . . and for other reasons I won't go into ; suffice it to say that WW1 is an example of just such a cultural reaction: Empires were imploding, steam, steel, gas power were reshaping the notions of selfhood and the ideas of what a nation was:
also
the Reformation, its war was a direct result of the Printing press and the dissemination of knowledge that resulted, as well as, the shift of the sense of Self from a self that of works with others and ethics in the world, to an autonomous sovreign Self (precursor to the Rational Subject of Descartes) and belief
Now, with all of that taken into consideration, and the fact that we ourselves who have somewhat acclimated ourselves (supposedly) to rapid technological and conceptual shifts and have a fluid sense of selfhood are having problems dealing with the impact of electronic media, think of cultures that have not gone through the stages of humanistic self scrutiny and conceptual traumatic revolutions of even the Rennaissance, not to mention the Enlightenment, Romanticism or even early Modernism, what would such a culture experience? -
- there is a chance that the profound structual shifts that are occuring in these cultures are due to the imposition of rapid change due to electronic media (telephone, radio, TV, as well as computers . . . and also Light itself is a medium) and there is, if the dynamic I outlined above is right, going to be violent adjustment
it doesn't mean that it will be 'US' VS 'THEM' it may take other forms . . . but it seems to be moving in a very regrettable direction
I think the worst thing that we can do is to regress back to some form of Religious fundamentalism in the face of fundamentalisms
we should reflect on what the terrorists reveal about dogmatic thought rather than use it as a dividing point: their usage of the word God should make us see how grossly inadaquate the word is . .. we should let the word die allready and stop clinging to its corpse . .
The last thing that should happen is identity panic: that is what happens in times of shift: maturity would come from becoming fluid and openning, rather than closing to Otherness.
anyway . . . many scholars actually think that the "Middle Ages" (s they preffer to call them) were actually a kind of cultural Golden Age that goes unappreciated --read Huizinga's The Waning Of the Middle Ages
Originally posted by shetline
I think the problem was with somebody else's sarcasm detector being badly in need of a recalibration.
or i simply misinterpreted him being serious? unless i see your face while you talk, i can't tell whether you are serious on the superconservative texan religious etc propaganda, or whether you just joke. after seeing so many jokes being for serious ...
Originally posted by aquafire
Islam needs its own "reformation" to wrench power away from the mullahs, but it is going to take a long long time..& in the meantime lots of innocent people are going to be killed all because of the dillusional thinking of a hateful fanatics...
Maybe the reforming of the United Islamic States is closer than the westerners expect. And meanwhile lots of iraqi, afghan etc kids are killed in the "war against the terrorism" started, not by them.
Puh Leeze..dont be so purile....
Maybe the war against terrorism wouldn't have to have happened if Islamic states had taken the bold initiatives that Atta Turk & others had taken.
Of course I grieve that anyone should die, but are the deaths somehow morally different to the deaths of the people in New York & Washington...
Sounds like yours is a sliding scale of morality...all deaths should abhor you, not just some here or there..Or are you writing like this to be provocative ?
bush nightmare
Of course, this was written before September 11, which was supposedly what caused US affairs to take their current tack....
Originally posted by Giaguara
or i simply misinterpreted him being serious? unless i see your face while you talk, i can't tell whether you are serious on the superconservative texan religious etc propaganda, or whether you just joke. after seeing so many jokes being for serious ...
I feel honored that my sarcasm was taken to be this truthful... From now on, I will try to indicate the mood with which my posts should be read. [Serious] [/Serious] or [Joking] [/Joking]
Originally posted by aquafire
Maybe the war against terrorism wouldn't have to have happened if Islamic states had taken the bold initiatives that Atta Turk & others had taken.
Of course I grieve that anyone should die, but are the deaths somehow morally different to the deaths of the people in New York & Washington...
Maybe the war "against the terrorism" would not have happened, if Bush not was a president, or simply the Bush family had not made their money from oil. First thing behind the scene is money, and then comes the rest.
Revenging the deaths is no more than the logic "eye for an eye, hand for a hand" .. to "pay back" equally, bombing a handful of (saudi arabian! none of the pilots was iraqi or afghan) ministerial and stock buildings would have been enough.
Originally posted by pfflam
Good points Emannuel Goldstein
I tend to see that modern Islam has not gone through the modernisms of the west . . . and most if this is due to profund complex historical reasons including
The West's development of the printing press,(?)these had deep impacts on the structure of Western civilization, the dissemination of knowledge and the West's form of conceptual thought: the conceptual thought is, of course, mirrored in the institutions of the civilization, and, since ours is conditioned by the alpha-numeric letters,(?) It also structured a certain kind of abstract thinking that resulted in the analytical thought of the rationalists: Logocentrism . . . this all sounds grand and superior but it isn't necessarily: it resulted in a certain kind of deficiency specific to that kind of thought . . . as all thought forms have their blind-spots...
I have briefly hinted at that in another thread.
Are we any better off ?:
Originally posted by Immanuel Goldstein:
posted 05-18-2003 12:43 PM
?However, they had closer-knit communities, and simpler, more certain ideas about life, which gave them a feel of belonging and making sense of the reality around them; which seems reassuring to many in our alienated, crowded, tense societies.
And of course, their lifestyle was often more stylish than ours, which is often a mechanist, colourless, legacy from Victorian times.?
Still, it was worth it, if you ask me.
The pre-rational world, of which so much still remains in less fortunate corners of the world, is a den of superstition. Here's what Pakistani scientist Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy wrote in his opinion piece
Bombs, missiles, and Pakistani science, which was published in an American newspaper in recent years:
?When science came to Europe three centuries
ago, it swept away the old theocratic medieval order and
replaced it with ideas of progress, humanism, and
rationalism. Curiously the offspring of science, technology,
has been summoned to serve and defend an increasingly
Talibanized Pakistan. The country's emerging new medieval
theocracy, that now impatiently awaits its turn for power,
counts upon having at its disposal the power of fiery jinns
to use as it wills.?
The West's tech innovations had the cultural result of putting once sacred certainties into easy doubt . . . and showed dogmatism to be ignorant of complexity, thus giving rise to humanisms and liberal democracies . . . (but more is coming)
Islam did not have this, as well as other similar cultural shifts which were due to technology as did the West. . .
Many societies of non-Western civilisations have gone or are going through the modernisation process, I don't think they lost more than they gained, if given the choice, I suppose most reasonable minds would prefer to be South Korea rather than Saudi Arabia.
now today there is another HUGE shift of our perceptions coming due to the shift in technology: electronic media and computers, video and the inter-net. These new technologies will upset the West probably as profoundly as the Printing press did (and that effect (the PP) was very very deep) and yet will take perhaps as long to truly show the way it will develop.
We are going through a time of fear of the change, which is not unlike the wave of romanticism which in reaction to the American and French Revolutions and to the steam engine, and both ?left? and ?right? nineteenth to twentieth century totalitarianisms owed much to that reaction.
Many mark the beginning of that trend with one of the most famous litterary forgeries: the ?discovery? of the ancient poetry of Ossian.
One of the side of this kind of major shift of cultural, institutional and conceptual thought due to technology is that cultures that are going through these shifts often resort to warfareas a means to adjust . . . and for other reasons I won't go into ; suffice it to say that WW1 is an example of just such a cultural reaction: Empires were imploding, steam, steel, gas power were reshaping the notions of selfhood and the ideas of what a nation was:
It was rather the result of the rising oppostions between the pursuit of progress but in willing ignorance of its excluded and its harmful side-effects, and the reaction to the very ideas (the values of ?76 and of ?89) and the innovations (railway, telegraph, vaccination) vehiculated by that progress, reaction which fed on the the misery and the wrath of those suffering from the harmful side-effects.
also the Reformation, its war was a direct result of the Printing press and the dissemination of knowledge that resulted, as well as, the shift of the sense of Self from a self that of works with others and ethics in the world, to an autonomous sovreign Self (precursor to the Rational Subject of Descartes) and belief
There were bloody wars before and after reformation, however, the Thirty-Year-War is somwehow seen as worse than the Hundred-Year-War, because during the latter, the unity of Western Christendom and its established worldview were intact, at least nominally; and the sub-lunar Earth the flat centre of a very simple universe and all were so happy with that.
Now, with all of that taken into consideration, and the fact that we ourselves who have somewhat acclimated ourselves (supposedly) to rapid technological and conceptual shifts and have a fluid sense of selfhood are having problems dealing with the impact of electronic media, think of cultures that have not gone through the stages of humanistic self scrutiny and conceptual traumatic revolutions of even the Rennaissance, not to mention the Enlightenment, Romanticism or even early Modernism, what would such a culture experience? -
Coming from such a culture, I'd say it would experience some turbulence, but less than the West did since, for if intent of learning from Western experience it'd be likely to learn Western mistakes as well.
- there is a chance that the profound structual shifts that are occuring in these cultures are due to the imposition of rapid change due to electronic media (telephone, radio, TV, as well as computers . . . and also Light itself is a medium) and there is, if the dynamic I outlined above is right, going to be violent adjustment
The more a culture is reluctant to adapt, the more violent the adjustment, unless it refuses to adjust, completely isolates itself from the outside, whuch becomes more and more difficult, and ends up gobbled up anyway, on the long run.
it doesn't mean that it will be 'US' VS 'THEM' it may take other forms . . . but it seems to be moving in a very regrettable direction
It's often ?us v. us? or ?them v. them? as even the more fortunate societies are traversed by a reaction against modernity (or else why would the 99.4% of genome common to humans and chimpanzees cause so mcuh uproar in some parts of the affluent West?).
But the internal conflicts are much more violent in the less modern societies, as rational modernity is also more keen on finding less violent ways to address internal disagreements.
I think the worst thing that we can do is to regress back to some form of Religious fundamentalism in the face of fundamentalisms
I agree, but I'm also wary of less obvious forms of ?archaeophilia? which would put the validity of astrophysics and that of astrology on an equal footing.
we should reflect on what the terrorists reveal about dogmatic thought rather than use it as a dividing point: their usage of the word God should make us see how grossly inadaquate the word is . .. we should let the word die allready and stop clinging to its corpse . .
Terrorism feeds on the flaws of the current state of our world, so dealing with the unintended harmful side-effects of our times would certainly ruin terrorism's grazing ground (sure it's going to cost, but the alternative is even more expensive). Hovewer, terrorists must also be actively opposed, whether on the terrain of ideas (and that means also on the homefront, I don't recall Oswald Mosley having been particularly liked in the 40s Britain) or on the field of battle, no way around that.
The last thing that should happen is identity panic: that is what happens in times of shift: maturity would come from becoming fluid and openning, rather than closing to Otherness.
Well, the openning should be toward an otherness of origins (people of other shape, forms, languages, bithplace, etc?), but there is an otherness of ideas, one which seeks to obliterate mine, and it is met with closed remparts and an unsheathed sword.
anyway . . . many scholars actually think that the "Middle Ages" (s they preffer to call them) were actually a kind of cultural Golden Age that goes unappreciated --read Huizinga's The Waning Of the Middle Ages
Medieval Europe was the most backward corner of the Eurasian landmass, to suggest otherwise (as do scholars suggesting it was some European cultural Golden Age) is as preposterous as saying Riyadh is the present day beacon of learning, of knowledge, and of the fine arts.
And since there are ample parts of humanity going through their middle-ages I humbly suggest those scholars move there and spare themseleves the agony of our modern ages.
In the ?fundamentalist Christian? USA you can have an abortion (though with more risk of violent harm to yourself than in say, Finland);
in ?moderate Muslim? Egypt you can have your little daughter's clitoris removed with even less risk to yourself.
(Of course, I myself have personal biases: I have on the whole a more positive view of historical Islam than of historical Christianity, but that's besides the point)