A new piece by Wolfgang Bruno:
Works such as ”The Coming of the Book” or "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change" have documented the monumental changes to Europe and Western civilization triggered by the introduction of printed books. Printing, already used in China for centuries, was reinvented in Europe by people like Johann Gutenberg. Its effects were immediate and profound. Perhaps 15 to 20 million copies of different books were printed even before the year 1500. Conservative estimates indicate that at least 150 to 200 million books were made in Europe during the 16th century. When Martin Luther put up his Theses in Wittenberg in Germany on 31st October, 1517, within 15 days they had been translated into German and summarised, printed as flysheets and distributed throughout every part of the country. Orders by Rome to burn books made by Luther and other Protestant heretics only served to trigger the curiosity of the masses. Attempts to silence the critics and re-impose strict censorship were futile. Banned books circulated in France in ever greater numbers despite all the regulations forbidding them. The tide of the first mass media revolution could not be held back.To claim that the invention of the printing press alone created the Christian Reformation would be too simplistic. The Renaissance and a slowly expanding educated audience had created new forces and needs. Political backers such as Frederick the Wise of Saxony saved Luther’s life long enough for him to finish his work. Still, it is hard to see how the Reformation could have taken place in this manner without the printing press. The fates of other critics such as Jan Hus or Giordano Bruno might have been very different had they had Gutenberg’s invention at their disposal. At the very least, the printing press served as an important catalyst for and facilitated changes already underway.
Many have made comparisons between the Islamic world today and Christian Europe in the 16th century. As some like Robert Spencer have suggested, there may be closer analogies to the Wahhabi movement. However, it is possible that in hindsight, modern communication technology such as the Internet may prove a turning point no less crucial to Islam today than the printing press was to Christianity. The global number of Internet users is approaching one billion and growing fast. Now, the Internet may not be the magic vessel for unrestricted freedom of speech as was once hoped for, but it can still retain just enough flexibility to represent a potent challenge to authoritarian regimes and ideologies.
Mass communication and education will lead to contradictory results, and could even be imagined to strengthen Islam. The Islamic Umma, or community, can be viewed as an old-fashioned Arab tribe in its aggressive dealings with outsiders, and the demand of absolute loyalty within the community. With the introduction of Islam, a new “super-tribe” was born, directing Arab tribal aggression outwards instead of inwards, and what ex-Muslim Anwar Shaikh has called the Arab National Movement was created. Later, the Umma was taken to include all Muslims. Although this concept of a global community of Muslims supporting each other against the infidels has always been a central part of the Muslim world view, it has for the most part remained a theoretical construct. With globalization and even the spread of the infidel English language as the world’s lingua franca, Islamic communities across the planet can keep in closer contact than they have ever done before. Islamists immigrants in the West can take advantage of Western freedoms to mount an effective propaganda machine. Individual PC users now have more capacity at their fingertips than NASA had during its first moon launches, and setting up your own website is cheap and easy.
The new technology will give Islam a chance to realize its original aim of global universalism, and thus increase the clashes with the non-Muslim world. The revival of Muslim identity is spreading outside the Middle East, including Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Europe, where religious identity has traditionally not been as strong. This revival has been accompanied by a deepening solidarity among Muslims caught up in separatist struggles in Chechnya, Iraq, Kashmir and southern Thailand. Jihadist groups on the Internet are multiplying, as can be testified by the Internet Haganah. One can argue effectively that the current Islamic tensions have much more to do with long-term communications changes, combined with high birth rates and Saudi petrodollars, than with the policies of any specific countries like the USA or Israel.
Even if new media may in the short run actually assist Islamic extremism, it is conceivable that in the longer run, new media will challenge the very existence of Islam as we know it. The Internet and Muslim exposure to Western society has also created the first organized networks of ex-Muslims in history, the counterpart to the Jihadist websites. These ex-Muslim sites may still be of marginal importance, but it is hard to overestimate the monumental threat they pose to Islamic orthodoxy. Infidels should make use of this combination of ex-Muslims, the Internet and greater Western freedom of speech in a deliberate effort to copy the example of 16th century Europe. We should make a selection of, say, 20 or 30 of the best critical books written about Islam by ex-Muslims and non-Muslims. Pay the authors a substantial amount of money for the manuscripts, or buy the copyrights from whomever owns it. Make sure they understand that they receive a one-time sum in return for sharing their work with humanity. After this, the books in their full length should be made available in English on the Internet, perhaps later in translations into other major languages. From then on, anybody who wants to can freely download, copy, republish and reprint the books. This would trigger a chain reaction, as the printing press did with Luther’s pamphlets. The information would spread around the planet faster than CAIR can say “Islamophobia”. The genie would be out of the bottle, and no amount of intimidation, hacker attacks or “hate speech” lawsuits could return it to the bottle. In combination with funding and support to websites by ex-Muslims and some others like Jihad Watch, we would basically present Islam with a “sink or swim”-ultimatum: Islam will have to reform if it can, or Islam will die. The entire operation would cost some hundreds of millions of dollars, not more than what can be done quietly and unofficially. We can spend this small amount of money on a “Gutenberg Fund”, or we can use hundreds of billions of dollars on defensive measures that will do little to change Islam.
Since Islamists with the murder of Theo van Gogh demonstrated their fear of Western free speech and their desire to curb it, giving them such a hefty dose of it seems like a sweet and fitting reply. This initiative would not mark the end of the struggle, of course, but we would already have won a crucial, if not decisive victory. Christianity was up to the challenge presented by modern education and mass media. It’s time to find out whether Islam is similarly up to the challenge.
Wolfgang Bruno is a European author. He is writing a book about the Internet movement of ex-Muslims. All of Bruno's essays can be republished and reproduced for free by anybody who wants to.
"Pay the authors a substantial amount of money for the manuscripts, or buy the copyrights from whomever owns it. Make sure they understand that they receive a one-time sum in return for sharing their work with humanity. After this, the books in their full length should be made available in English on the Internet, perhaps later in translations into other major languages. From then on, anybody who wants to can freely download, copy, republish and reprint the books. This would trigger a chain reaction, as the printing press did with Luther’s pamphlets."
The threat of Islam would, were it to continue to grow, especially in Europe, would undo what remains, despite our decadent universities and their largely-intolerable faculties, make any possibility of calm cultivation impossible.
To date the governments of the Western world, and the press, and those same comical universities, have been feckless and reckless with our fates. What league of intelligent maecenases will come to their well-foundationed senses and begin to fund what should be funded -- beginning with a Translation Project to put into a baker's dozen of the relevant languages -- both those of the Infidels (Engllish, French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, German, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Korean), and those of the Muslims (Arabic, Farsi, Urdu) -- another baker's dozen of the most important texts, and buy the rights up-front, and then put them out on the Internet.
13 texts, 13 languages. 13 squared is 169. How about starting within the next half-year? Someone to direct, to choose the texts, and the order in which those texts are to be put into which languages, and then to find the best translators, those who would be the most exact, while displaying verbal tact. Arrangements would also have to be made with publishers in various countries, so that the books could come out even as they are available, as well, in toto, on the Internet.
Eventually languages left out, only because they were smaller, will be included for as Dr. Seuss would say, "a language's a language, no matter how small."
A Translation Project, but one not to be sponsored by UNESCO, I'm afraid.
A willing candidate has already let me know that he could run this project. More details to enlightened maecenases everywhere, partout, dappertutto, en todas partes, vsyudu.
You do not defend the truth with lies, and this piece is so desperately riddled with historical untruth as not to be worth discussing. The idiocy of involving Giordano Bruno, who lived two generations after Luther, with Jan Hus, who lived one and a half centuries earlier, and the nonsense about the influence of print on the careers of other, defy belief. Jan Hus would never have been killed if he had not trusted the word of a lying German Emperor who wanted to crush the Czech religious revolt for his own reasons; and in case you did not know, his party actually won its war, even without him to lead them. It established the effective rule of a schismatic, pre-Protestant church, in Bohemia, which lasted for decades, and it did not need print to do so. Conversely, Giordano Bruno used the press continuously; like Hus, and like Michael Servet, he ended up being killed purely because he walked open-eyed into the headquarters of his enemies. And this is only a minor part of the nonsense this piece embodies. I have no desire to waste more time, but I will if I have to. Believe me, it has all the historical precision and intelligence of a Dan Brown thriller (which is the worst insult I can think of.).
Argh... book printing wasn't invented by Gutenberg. It was Laurens Janszoon Coster from the Netherlands. And earlier the Chinese invented some forms of book printing.
Interesting idea, but I still think dropping New Testament translations over Muslim lands is better. It would force Islamists to actually burn books. This would make Muslims curious as to what is in them. The internet is still too far from the grasp of the "benighted masses."
Book in the hand is worth two on the net.
Regarding the Internet and the spread of ideas, following is an interesting article of the importance of the blogosphere in Iran:
Words Are Weapons For Iranian Bloggers
http://www.spacewar.com/news/2005/upinews-021805-1043-24.html
I don’t see why the two ideas cannot run concurrently. Certainly dropping some Christian literature into Moslem countries tickles my fancy. I don’t want to neglect other faiths here, but as I am a Christian I do not apologise for bias towards my own faith. Second as the two most, shall we say, enthusiastic missionary religions in the world are Islam and Christianity then using Christian experience for this task is a pragmatic best use of resources.
But the real battle is to make widely known the truth of Islam’s ideology, that which makes it less than a faith and true religion. I detect an increasing exasperation with the constant demands, a feeling that all is not completely above board, but not enough yet. I know plenty of Christians who still feel that the ecumenical hand of friendship extends to Islam in the same manner as to Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism and Buddhism. More worrying are those of no religion, who regard their own Christian heritage as of little consequence, old fashioned, out of date, a meaningless ritual etc, and see Islam as no different. An irrelevance, nothing to bother them, just men with silly beards and women with no dress sense. They need to know that it is an ideology. A system whose values are incompatible with their way of life, and that that way of life is itself anathema to the way of Islam. The internet will reach those people very easily, and as the article says, once the genie is out of the bottle, that’s it.
Just make sure the writing and translation is of the highest standard (not likely to be a problem in this field) and succinct. I once attempted to read a novel of Thomas Hardy on line, and a biography from the Gutenberg collection. The first had no problem holding my interest but its length made reading uncomfortable for my back, the second hurt my eyes before my back could begin to twinge. Other on-line literature I have sampled was so bad there was no wonder the author could not find a conventional publisher.
We must use every tool at our free, ingenious, inventive and imaginative disposal.
On Jan., 2005 we readers at Jihadwatch began our own side discussion on issues Spencer raises here, beginning with debates on day-old threads, moving from there to Just Linda's "jwunited" Blogspot, dana's "babypasta," and now to our latest home for activism and further debate, to Susan B.'s www.co-jet.org. These are sites for all of us to work from to further in concrete ways the work Spencer and Hugh and others do here.
It's not particularly important to the fight against Islamic reaction whether we get the date of Gutenberg's birth right. Jan Hus and William Tynedale can be as far apart as the sun and the moon, and it really doesn't matter to our struggle. Our purpose is, rightly, to wage war against Islam.
Some of us have been quitely working since November at passing out leaflets in public places. Those leaflets are mostly hand-made, the work of dedicated and courageous souls who of their own volition take time and energy to pass out the printed word for those in their communities. Some of our readers are here at Jihadwatch because of the work of our field workers. There will be more as we get the word out to more places more often.
Over and over I have insisted that "We are the media." I argue that we do not have to rely on the New York Times to inform us and our neighbors. We, as neighbors, have more credibility in the eyes of our neighbors than does any newspaper or television station. You can discuss with your neighbor things he cannot discuss with his television. You can find out how your neighbor feels about jihadis in our schools and universities, in our social institutions generally, and you can leave a leaflet showing exact and properly cited quotations that he will not be able to refute. And you neighbor will likely not want to refute the evils of Islam that you present. Many people, whether you realize it or not, are terrified by the state of our situation, and they feel that they are isolated and victimized. You are the medium they will pay atttention to if you show up with a leaflet and an invitation to go for coffee.
I've suggested that we photocopy Spencer's book jackets and pass them out to our friends and neighbours. It's simple and effective. Unlike sex, there's no danger of losing an eye. Most people can do some propaganda work in complete safety and at the same time make a new friend.
I urge people to skip over those people who are argumentative. Many, if not most of your neighbors will be happy to hear from you that they are not alone in their concerns. You can take the cream of the crop and forget entirely those who are difficult. Don't waste your time. those who would argue with you on the doorstep are those who are trolls here. Ignore them. Go on to those who want to know, and to know more. You are the media. You have a message. Let your neighbors know what it is.
We've put together our own site for ways of co-ordinating our activities. Spencer brings us together daily to educate us in the details of jihad and the evils of Islam, but from there we have our work to do. We put together our own workspace, as it were, at www.co-jet.org for that very reason.
We are the media, and we have a place to put our minds together and to work for concrete aims. If we do, as Spencer has urged many times, act strategically rather than atomically, if we work together as an active committee in a planned and co-ordinated fashion, then we will b egin to have the the means of fighting CAIR and its ilk on an equal basis. We begin small and perhaps not as professionally as we might like, but in time we can, if we choose, grow to be Titanic, Nephalim, heroes in the land and undefeatable.
We are engaged in a battle of words and wits with a number of groups of semi-literate peasants whose greatest desire is to live in a romantic re-creation of 620 A.D. Honestly, if we put our minds to it how hard is it going to be to beat them at their own game?
We are the media. We can reach those in our communities far more easily than can the Moslem opposition. We have the means and the intelligence, but we have to find the will to win.
Join us at www.co-jet.org to see what more we can do to win this fight. Tell your friends about jihadwatch. There's much you can do. It's even some fun when you begin to take charge of your own life in this field.
http://www.co-jet.org
Johann Gutenberg didn't "re-invent" printing. He invented "moveable type". The Chinese and others only had block printing, not moveable type.
With or without US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq or the internet and blogs, the Islamic world is already in the throes of a major cultural upheaval. Although visible and "newsworthy", the Islamicist radicals are only one part of this upheaval; chiefly being a reaction to the failed modernizing projects of the 20th century.
As for disseminating information to Muslims, I reccommend _Answering Islam_ (a website) and others. As for translation projects involving the Christian Scriptures, the Wycliffe Society, Joshua Project, and a number of others are looking at the Muslim world as well as everywhere else.
I'm sure you're still the rock you were as Kepha1, and if so, would you like to join us at http://www.co-jet.org to find out if you have a place and an interest there as a community activist of some sort. I'm working somewhat successfully on making leaflets and other written and printed pieces for people to pass on to the general public, and I would like to have anyone join in that effort if they feel inclined. Others, such as the fabulous Susan B. are leafleting churches with great success in the US. Southeast, doing far better than I. There is a place for all who are interested.
Yes, there are many Christian groups working hard at many things, but our job is specifically to fight jihad, a task many churches don't seem to think is appropriate. In cases such as that I would encourage people to go to the congregation. Take some leaflets and pass them out. If you have the courage of your convictions this is one way of acting on them, though not of course the only way.
Having extended an invitation to Kepha, let me plead with the KJs of our forum to come as well to gather up leaflets and to make up their own to leaflet the constituencies of the liberal humanists who often don't seem to get much more than the pravda accoring to Moore. I think that would be the utopian Moore, Thomas.
Regardless, there is room for all who wish to work to spread the word, in particular the word that this site, jihadwatch, is worth joining for the sake of learning about the threat of Islam. I can't speak for other sites, but I do know the threat of Islam, and this is worth our efforts, this fight against it. You, no matter what you stand for in your fight against Islam, are welcome to join us at http://www.co-jet.org to make some practical difference in your community.