…of terrorism.
The Arab culture is very, very sick. Which would be simply sad, if it weren’t for the fact that it generates so much violence across the world. Ultimately, this is what we are at war with, no matter how much we (and particularly the people presently with the levers of power) want to fantasize that we are not.
“The Arab culture is very, very sick.”
And that can be generalised. Islam is essentially Dark Ages Arab culture transmogrified into a religion accessible to all – although Islam teaches that Arabs are superior and Arabic is a holy language. So by extension Islam is very sick as well – not a surprising conclusion!
The problem is that a culture transformed into a religion is thereby rendered unchangeable. Except by violence – which happened in the case of Christianity also; there are many instances of heretic Christians being violently repressed by the Church (and of the heretics violently repressing the original Catholic church as in Tudor England). Of course, cultures with Christianity as a major component (in many cases, anyway) stopped doing that sort of thing several hundred years ago.
“Lucky” for us there is a small but growing movement within Islam to separate out the “medieval Arabian society” from the “timeless truths” of Islam. This is much harder for Islam than it was for Christianity because Jesus was never a political ruler the way Muhammed was, and thus has no legacy of secular laws that have to be written off as “artifacts of the era”.
I wish the Islamic reformers the best of luck, because the only “solutions” the West can impose from the outside involves bombs. For all our sakes, I hope they prevail.
The problem is simple. We are not waging a religious war on Islam, but Islam is continuing to wage a religious war on the rest of the world. This is something neither Republican nor Democratic governments like to confront. The idea that only Islam can reform itself is BS. If the civilized world simply said this is unacceptable, and continued to confront the world of Islam on matters of human rights (which inlcude religious freedom), Islamic reformers would show up.
A case in point. You have heard of the Ahmadiyya sect of Muslims, who are cruelly persecuted. Well, the reason the Shia and Sunni hate these people is that they follow the teachings of Mira Ghulam, who said he was a prophet and essentially removed Jihad as an element of the religion. (Only a new prophet would have the spiritual authority to change the QUran’s exhortations to constant Jihad, which is something to think about). Other than that, their Islam is virtually indistinguishable from the garden variety Sunni Islam. He was living under the British Raj, which at the time had enough cultural self-confidence to disallow things like Jihad and slavery by the Muslims or Sutti by the Hindus. So, it was under that sort of pressure that Islam began to reform itself.
Brock: The attempt to separate Islam from politics probably died with Kemal Ataturk.