some religious guys' notion of Islam
some university in Egypt
It would be easy to dismiss your post as merely another manifestation of appalling ignorance. Reprehensibly, that ignorance is a root cause of the dirge of death emanating from Iraq and Afghanistan. When faced with an unknown phenomena, a common response is to look for an analogy. Ignorant of Islam, many westerners try to think of Islam in terms of a Christian analogy. Hence, you frequently get some statements like “Islam is like the Christian middle ages”, or “Islam needs a Martin Luther”. Analogies are a very slippery logical exercise. Even when the situation is analogous, it’s very easy to draw the wrong inference. Unfortunately, Christianity and Islam are not analogous, so analogous inferences are almost invariably erroneous. Only by putting forth the necessary effort to understand the alien concepts underlying a different culture, can a westerner begin to grasp what motivates the Muslim mind. Too many westerners “can’t be bothered” with this effort, so they just dismiss the requirement.
What may appear as a “lunatic fringe” statement in one culture can be central in another. The Islamic concepts of greater and lesser jihad and the ummah have no corresponding analogy in the western world. As Arabs, across N. Africa and in the Middle East, watched US tanks roll into Iraq, they had difficulty seeing the TV for the tears in their eyes. It’s not because they loved Saddam, far from it. It was because the ummah was being invaded by the infidels. Earlier on this thread, I tried to convey the ummah concept with words like “homeland”, but as anyone who knows a foreign language understands, some words and concepts, just don’t translate. The ummah is a much more personal concept than homeland. In part, this is because the individual is much more of a community concept than is typical in the western world. So for the Arabic observers, the Iraqi invasion was like the amputation of a portion of their anatomy.
Finally let’s consider that “some university”. The “natural” state of political affairs for Muslim Arabs (that’s not repetitious, since there are non-Muslim Arabs) is unification under a caliphate. This has not been true since the fall of the last caliphate at the end of the first world war. Under “normal” circumstances only the caliph could call for jihad to expel the “unbelievers” from the ummah. Sans a caliph, that authority falls to the most senior clerics. For Sunni Muslims (by far the largest Muslim sect), that means Al Azhar. A little history
touregypt.net
JMO
lurqer |
