I have been engaged in meetings with a number of scholars from the Vatican. I always bemoan and wonder why the Vatican abounds with men of religion with such splendid educational, intellectual and encyclopedic cognitive backgrounds in their various areas of knowledge, while our scholars know nothing about the great fruits of human creativity in many of the different branches of social and human sciences.
At a conference held seven years ago, I saw a scholar who is considered by some as the greatest Muslim jurist and preacher of his time. He was an Egyptian with Qatari nationality who fled from Egypt during the clashes between the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamāl Abd al-Nāsir in 1954. At the conference, he used more than one interpreter, and never got involved in discussions about modern streams of thought. On the other hand, the Vatican scholars were using four or five languages in their discussions that covered vast fields of knowledge. I will not hide the fact that I felt ashamed of him that day. He seemed so primitive in his thoughts and approaches. It appeared as if he was a primeval human from the forests of ‘ Borneo Island.’
We need a generation of Muslim religious scholars who have studied other religions, human history, world literature, philosophy, sociology and psychology and can speak a number of languages; the languages of civilization. Until this happens, our Muslim scholars will remain primitive and stay at their level of naivety, shallowness and isolation from the path of civilization and humanity.
But I guess that I shouldn’t point out things like this. It makes me (like Tarek) an Islamaphobe (see comments).
[Update at 9:30 AM EDT]
Christina Hoff Sommers has some thoughts on Muslim women, and the failure of western feminism to take up their cause. Makes perfect sense to me, though. They can’t blame the treatment of Muslim women on dead white European males. Or at least they haven’t come up with a way yet.
I’ve long been a critic of the Department of Homeland Security as in, I don’t believe that it should exist, or should ever have been formed. Well, it seems that Senator Schumer agrees with me. And he’s even honest enough to take some of the blame.
Returning to the old place after a long absence, I found that it was the scent of Algeria that now predominated along the main thoroughfare of Blackstock Road. This had had a good effect on the quality of the coffee and the spiciness of the grocery stores. But it felt odd, under the gray skies of London, to see women wearing the veil, and even swathed in the chador or the all-enveloping burka. Many of these Algerians, Bangladeshis, and others are also refugees from conflict in their own country. Indeed, they have often been the losers in battles against Middle Eastern and Asian regimes which they regard as insufficiently Islamic. Quite unlike the Irish and the Cypriots, they bring these far-off quarrels along with them. And they also bring a religion which is not ashamed to speak of conquest and violence.
Until he was jailed last year on charges of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, a man known to the police of several countries as Abu Hamza al-Masri was the imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque. He was a conspicuous figure because, having lost the use of an eye and both hands in an exchange of views in Afghanistan, he sported an opaque eye plus a hook to theatrical effect. Not as nice as he looked, Abu Hamza was nonetheless unfailingly generous with his hospitality. Overnight guests at his mosque’s sleeping quarters have included Richard Reid, the man in whose honor we now all have to take off our shoes at the airport, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the missing team member of September 11, 2001. Other visitors included Ahmed Ressam, arrested for trying to blow up LAX for the millennium, and Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian who planned to don an explosive vest and penetrate the American Embassy in Paris. On July 7, 2005 (“7/7,” as the British call it), a clutch of bombs exploded in London’s transport system. It emerged that one of the suicide murderers had been influenced by the preachings of Abu Hamza, as had two of those attempting to replicate the mission two weeks later.
Ah yes, because Bush’s post-9/11 plan has worked out so perfectly on so many levels. All along he’d hoped that by 2007 he’d be a political eunuch on the Hill and below-freezing approval levels. And the mad genius’s plan to seize Iraqi oil and topple regimes across the Middle East has gone off without a hitch. Meanwhile, Karl Rove’s Mark Hanna-like scheme to permanently lock in a Republican majority couldn’t be going smoother.
Don’t any of these morons consider why, if he’s so evil and conniving, and willing to destroy buildings and murder thousands, he didn’t plant WMDs in Iraq?
And disgustingly, rather than using the opportunity as a “Sister Souljah moment,” a major Democrat candidate panders to them, instead of properly denouncing them as loons. He can’t, though, because they’re his base.
The people who whine that we haven’t caught bin Laden (I’m still not convinced that he didn’t die years ago), or that “Al Qaeda in Iraq is not Al Qaeda,” don’t understand what we’re at war with, or who the enemy is. Andrew McCarthy explains.
The people who whine that we haven’t caught bin Laden (I’m still not convinced that he didn’t die years ago), or that “Al Qaeda in Iraq is not Al Qaeda,” don’t understand what we’re at war with, or who the enemy is. Andrew McCarthy explains.
The people who whine that we haven’t caught bin Laden (I’m still not convinced that he didn’t die years ago), or that “Al Qaeda in Iraq is not Al Qaeda,” don’t understand what we’re at war with, or who the enemy is. Andrew McCarthy explains.
In fact, what’s finally happening reminds me of a post I wrote a couple years ago on how one establishes a beachhead of cooperation, and then expands it.
A very long, but interesting (and encouraging) video interview by Bob Wright with Eli Lake, embedded reporter for the New York Sun, and a major in Iraq.
“The people who think that the insurgents are fighting for a nationalist cause should go to Haifa Street right now.”
“In terms of the Vietnam analogy, these are people trying to seek My Lais every day, and our guys are trying to prevent it.”