Gates of ijtihad slammed shut? Islamists are reformers, not traditionalists! Radicalism without ijtihad is unthinkable. You think Hassan al-Banna and the many other ideologues like him, wasn’t a revolutionary who, by way of itjihad, radically interpreted the Qu’ran to his liking?
Yes, I DO think history matters, even if 800 years. 200 years ago, our founders chopped up the Bible until it hardly existed anymore and said there could be no religious test for public office. Today, you couldn’t think of running for office without proving your religious cred to the country. Good ideas, both from the Euro Enlightnement and the Islamic one, get buried and lost and it isn’t for all of Europe, America, or the Enlightenment to bear the blame for what the idiotic religious elements have wrought in our own time and country any more than all Muslims must now be told by experts like you that their religion is “the problem” to the exclusion of so many more pressing and potent factors.
We do NOT share the same position on Islam, as you continue insisting on conflating the religion with politico-religious ideologies and superstition. I know non-superstitious Muslims and I know Muslims who are anti-Islamism.
I don’t take full credit for the originality of my argument in this regard, although I do have far more knowledge than you know of how things are transpiring in Afghanistan. But Martin Amis makes many of the same distinctions I do with regard to Islam vs. Islamism, and I dare say that Stephen Schwartz knows more than the both of us combined about Marxist prevaricators and reformism in Islam.
As for the history of Islam, I can only say that I didn’t miss the work of Attar, Khayyam, Averroes and Avicenna, as you seem to have. Not calling you mean names, but perhaps suggesting you beef up your bookshelf.
As for calling the Serbian mobs droolers being bigoted, we also saw similar drooling Islamic mobs burning Danish embassies. It’s hardly bigoted of me to refer to either as such. The problem is not with saying that Serbians or Muslims can be drooling scoundrels. The problem is with suggesting that something about them as people is inherently scoundrelesque or that they couldn’t help but be drooling, riotous slugs.
Our primary difference is in my insistence on separating out the scoundrels from the noble ones. If you believe, as I think you do, that the mobs of Islamofascists who deter democracy in Iraq deserve to be eliminated, then you would do well to remember that the Iraqis and Kurds who we fight alongside also venerate the same God.
The bigotry of your reply is in its implication that something in the Arab or Muslim bloodstream will forever doom them to backsliding into the Dark Ages, whereas the Euro-Christians did not. I’m afraid that in the portion of Iraq known as Kurdistan, while elements such as the PKK unfortunately continue to thrive, the region is in many other ways an exemplar of progressivism. The Iraqi Kurds are not Christians, atheists, or Hindus–they are Sunni Muslims.
Just call it Islamism, DOOD. It’s three more letters but three billion times more precise and less ignorant. Words and history matter.
