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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (3922)	10/9/2001 11:02:09 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

When I saw that Edward Said's argument started with this bit of condescension towards his oponents: "In both articles, the personification of enormous entities called "the West" and "Islam" is recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like identity and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary. " I suspected that there might be some weakness in his own argument that he wished to divert our attention from. And there is. While one can certainly agree with his main point, i.e., that the West vs. Islam is vastly more complicated and intertwined than "The Roots of Muslim Rage" tells you, there is another more important point that he slides over -- that large swathes of the Muslim world currently seem to be eager buyers of the "Popeye vs. Bluto" scenario. Mr. Said says, "Instead of seeing it for what it is--the capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band of crazed fanatics for criminal purposes--international luminaries from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam's troubles..." Well, bin Laden's men may be a "tiny band of crazed fanatics" -- though even there 2,000 or 3,000 is not tiny -- but they are getting wide spread sympathy in the Muslim world. That's why we don't equate them with David Koresh and his followers. Though there was widespread anger at the Fed. Govt.'s handling of Waco, I never saw Jerry Falwell or the Southern Baptists agreeing with Koresh's view of the US government or the world. I have seen many statements and fatwas from all corners of the Muslim world giving overt or implicit support to bin Laden, and this after he has all but admitted killing 5,000 innocent civilians. In trying to show some complexities in the Islamic world, Mr. Said quotes "the late Eqbal Ahmad," who "writing for a Muslim audience, analyzed what he called the roots of the religious right, coming down very harshly on the mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose obsession with regulating personal behavior promotes 'an Islamic order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion.' ... The phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradition, and twists the political process wherever it unfolds." Here Mr. Said undermines his own argument, for Mr. Ahmad is closer to the heart of the matter than he is. Mr. Ahmad describes this Islamicism as a "penal code" and a "phenomenon" that "twists the political process", i.e. it is itself a political system. Because it is a political system, and one gaining believers from all over the Muslim world, it is more correct to regard the movement as a growing totalitarian political movement than as merely the work of a "few crazed fanatics". This is the point that Mr. Said wishes us not to see.