War Commentary

Stuck In The Past

Tarek Heggy bemoans the lack of scholarship among Islamic scholars:

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.

Administrative

Apologies To My Readers

I just discovered that Sitemeter has been putting tracking cookies for realmedia.com on my visitors’ machines. There may be some others as well.

I went in, cleared cookies, refreshed Transterrestrial, and the Realmedia cookies showed up again. I’m going to quit using Sitemeter, but I need to do a little research and figure out what to switch to for stats checking. In the meantime, you might want to block cookies from realmedia.com (and the others mentioned in the link, such as specificclick.net) if you don’t want them selling your browsing habits without your permission.

Administrative

Comments Hygiene, Part Deux

The latest loony missive from Robert G. Oler:

I should add. I think that about 1/3 of the GOP is batshit (grin) insane…nuts actually. Vince Foster, wmd [sic] smuggled to Syria, Bush is a moral man…etc etc.

They are dumber then [sic] dirt in terms of their ideology. So is the far left and I enjoy pointing out their flaws as well.

It is fascinating to watch, because it illustrates how nations can go off track. It is almost like investigating an airplane (or any kind really) of accident caused completly [sic] by human error not technology failure [sic–missing comma]. It is great post mortum [sic] to watch the “walls come tumbling down” in the decision making [sic–missing hyphen] process.

Speaking of the Rev [sic–no period] Jerry [sic–presumably Falwell–Robert is into his own nicknames for his imaginary enemies, so one can never know for sure to whom he’s referring]. I watch his act on TV some just to see how the “cover the bust of lady Justice because she has a bust” wing of the gOP [sic] operate (dont [sic] worry I watch nuts like Casey Sheehan as well [sic–his missing comma]…wasnt [sic] it a hoot when they saw all their money get bonked [sic])…

A month before the 06 election he was promising the faithful that “God wont [sic] let the GOP lose control of Congress”. Suckers [sic]

All laping [sic] it up. Just like the jet fuel folks on teh [sic] far left.

OK, I’ve had enough, but I want this to be fair. Open comments section.

Do Mr. Oler’s pompous, ungrammatical, and unjustifiably arrogant contributions add signal, or noise, to this web site? The results will tell whether or not he continues to pollute the comments section here. He is welcome to make his own case, but based on history, he will only continue to keep digging…

[Update a few minutes later]

As can be seen from the first comment, he’s decided to get a sharper spade, and attempt to find a deeper bottom…

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!