Tuesday, April 20, 2004
CLASH of CIVILIZATIONS II
As promised, I've posted the most recent round of my correspondence with a Muslim reader of this blog who has taken issue with some of the things I've written about Islam. Here's a sample:
> I'm just giving you one little example of
> how the issue is much more complicated than it initially seems at surface
> value. I don't agree with your conclusion that dictatorships and closedness
> is somehow intrinsic to Islam or that the Shari`ah promotes it.
Well, again we shall have to agree to disagree. Assuming that a peace can be achieved between the West and the Islamic world, we shall see. My prediction is that countries governed by shariah will never prosper, because skepticism, which is the root of progress, is ultimately discouraged in a regime in which so many things are held to be haraam, off limits, forbidden, heretical. To the modern mind, all things are subject to question, governed only by facts that can be proven in a systematic, reproducible way. This approach to life seems to be inconsistent with the basic foundation of Islam as, apparently, is the reward of risk-taking that is inherent in capitalism. If the Muslim world rejects systematic skepticism and capitalism, then it IS rejecting modernism.
If the Muslim world IS willing to declare a truce, then it will have to build walls around itself to hold out the modern. This, to me, is the formula for the kind of lock on the minds and bodies of its people that the Communist world sought to enforce, also with walls, both physical and cultural. The only way that the communist world could sustain itself was through an enforced rejection of the West, a rejection its own people hated. Of course, the Communists didn't have the promise of eternal bliss to hold out to those who they sought to hold in their utopias by force.
You can read the whole long exchange here. The earlier exchange is here. Read it first if you haven't yet.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:40 PM
