The participants in the 5th National Forum for Dialogue in Riyadh evidently think it will be better PR for them and the Kingdom of they stop railing against "infidels" and start railing against "the other." But wait! Isn't it the West (as the learned Saidists will tell us), in its quest to demonize the "other," that has created all the tension between Muslims and the Western world? If the Saudis start talking about the filthy "other" who wars against Islam and must be conquered and subjugated, won't that make them guilty of the same thing? And, um, show (once again) the bankruptcy of the whole Saidist thesis? Hmmm.
"Better Understanding With Non-Muslims Stressed," from Arab News, with thanks to Eschwapp:
RIYADH, 24 June 2005 — Participants who gathered in a preliminary session of the 5th National Forum for Dialogue which is to be held in Abha, have asked that the word “infidel” be substituted by “other” in all religious and media speeches in the Kingdom when referring to non-Muslims.They also called for better upbringing according to universal Islamic teachings of children, where youngsters would learn how to properly deal with “others” and called for religious institutions in the Kingdom to acknowledge their mistakes and correct them in this matter, whether they were in the judicial system or during sermons in mosques. Furthermore, they said that the hatred taught about non-Muslims in the educational system and in the media should stop and called for a definition of “religious standards” on how to deal with non-Muslims.
Dr. Abdullah Omar Naseef, deputy head of the National Forum for Dialogue who attended Wednesday’s preliminary session in Abha, said that efforts must be exerted for permitting what he called “an open channel” where citizens would express their concerns and discuss matters of interest at all levels.
Dr. Naseef also stressed in his opening speech the importance of how we deal with others and others’ feelings about us. He also said it was important to know our shortcomings in our dealing with others, adding that it was equally important to improve the way we deal with others, no matter where they were or where they come from.
Abha’s preliminary session to the 5th National Forum for Dialogue under the title “We and the others” which will be held in several months time in the same city, was attended by some 50 male and female participants from different educational backgrounds, among which were religious scholars, thinkers, young men and women, and local residents.
Discussions held by the participants also shed light on the need to define who the “other” was before engaging in a dialogue with the other party.
One participant said that “before engaging in any conversation with another party, it is important to know what the other party knows about us and how he thinks about us,” adding that it was important to “reconstruct society and provide the chance for its citizens to educate themselves in a way that would be beneficial to everyone on how to deal with others.”...
Yet another participant, Dr. Ali Al-Moussa, said that many Saudis have used religious speech to promote their own ideas of rhetoric and hatred toward others, especially since many of them have not been educated well enough in religion and tend to abuse the term “sheikh” to spread wrong messages in the community.
Well, certainly the wrong messages are getting out. But this doesn't seem to have been any accident, and has happened at the highest levels. We have documented many instances here of hatred and vitriol against the "other" being featured on official Saudi TV. Will that change? I doubt it.
I'll join your dialogue, Sa'udi Arabia, when you let me bring my Bible into your country, and when my co-religionists in your country get the same degree of understanding and tolerance fortheir beliefs and open, public practice that yours get in mine.
Islam is the original creator of "the Other." Indeed, through all of Islam runs the clear distinction, to be found running thread-like through Qur'an, Haidth, and Sira, of the clear distinction, and opposition, between Believer and Unbeliever, Muslim and Infidel. If ever there were a belief-system, or a civilization, that relied so completely on, and constantly reinforced, the idea of "the Other," that belief-system is Islam.
One hopes that the silently disaffected who for practical reasons are members (in name only) of MESA Nostra, will at the next annual goings-on dare to present a paper or two on "The 'Other' In Islam." Go ahead. Shake things up. Show Cole, Khalidi, Anderston, Esposito that you too are fed up with them, and the nonsense they have peddled, and the embarrassment they have caused, to real students of the Middle East, all of whom must, of course, understnand the tenets, the attitudes, the atmospherics of Islam. There is not a single question, political, cultural, economic, literary, in the entire Middle East that does not, in some way, relate to Islam.
So why is Islam the subject that, in any serious way, is completely ignored at meetings of MESA Nostra?
We know why. But let's pretend we don't. So here's what some one should do (yes, first ask the government or a foundation for a nice grant -- without which no thoroughly modern academic would think of opening a book, or putting fingers to keyboard, or even trying to ponder a matter)
Call for Papers at MESA Nostra:
Islam and "The Other." Ever since its creation out of pagan Arab lore, Judaism, and Christianity, in the seventh or eighth centuries, Islam has -- as a belief-system that came into being at the very time that Arab tribesmen were conquering far more advanced, settled, wealthier populations of Christians and Jews in Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa -- served to both justify, and promote, such conquest.
Scholars are invited to submit papers to Professors Ibn Warraq and Ali Sina.
The meeting will be held in the Mutanabbi Room at the Ramadan Inn, in Fairfax, Virginia, where MESA Nostra traditionally holds its meetings. Metal detectors will be functioning appropriately. Participants will be supplied with Kevlar helmets and jackets for use both during, and after, their presentations, and members of the D. C. police force, and a contingent of Marines, will be available to escort participants back to their hotels or other undisclosed locations.
This should provide the opportunity for a fruitful and useful scholarly exchange.
All are welcome to send their proposals for papers. Death threats will, however, be forwarded to the F.B.I.
This article reminds me of the Heaven's Gate cult which killed themselves in California a few years back.
Prior to their suicides, the members of that fatalistic group bought a high-end telescope in order to view the Hale-Bopp comet.
They returned the telescope the next day and when asked if there was a problem with it they responded with, "No, but we couldn't see "The Other." "
What? Is Jihad becoming politically correct?
Actually, I prefer the label of "infidel" better. It is more distinctive and I happen to wear it with pride.
The Harbiyun
There's another word for us Infidels and Others which has solid Islamic tradition behind it: We are the "Harbiyun" -- the inhabitants of the Dar-al-Harb, the "zone of permanent war".
I haven't seen it used much in reports about Muslim propaganda: perhaps Muslims only use it when talking amongst themselves about us "others".
Michael Sells last year wrote a perfectly predictable, perfectly idiotic book. The predictable title of that predictable book:
"The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy."
Of course. Islam, a belief-system that is entirely based on the clear division of the universe between Believer and Infidel, gets off scot free. Infidels, attempting to protect themselves (Beslan, Amsterdam, New York, Washington, Madrid, Kashmir, southern Thailand, southern Sudan, northern Nigeria, and a hundred other places where Muslims have attacked and murdered, or mass-murdered, Infidels) are described as creating a figment of their own imagination, an answer to some deeply-felt psychic urge -- not fighting a war of self-defense against the adherents of an aggressive belief-system that has clear tenets, and 1350 years of accumulated violence used to conquer, subjugate, and kill, convert, or permanently humiliate, the Infidel.
But nothing about that will be written by the Michael Sellses of this world. They have it all ready for cramming into the innocent brains of trusting and unwary undergraduates. It isn't difficult.
The book, by the way, the disgraceful book with the disgraceful title and the silly thesis, apparently won a price as one of Choice Magazine's "Academic Books of the Year."
Well done, Choice. You have met our expectations, and then some.
And one hopes that there were smiles all round, and encouraging remarks, made by the whole galere at the annual meeting of MESA Nostra -- beginning with John Esposito and John Voll and Yvonne Haddad, and then of course there is Carl Ernst, and silly Whitney Center for the Humanities head, and "expert" on the Wonder that Was Islamic Spain, Maria Rosa Menocal -- who may just be intelligent enough to be embarrassed about her "Ornament of the World," and her failure to consult, or even to list in her bibliography, a single one of the great authorities on Islamic Spain, beginning with Evariste Levi-Provencal. It really just won't do to befriend, on the New Haven-New York train, the wife of Harold Bloom, and to get his clueless blurb, and to take it from there.
Is there anyone left at Yale with standards? Even the Law School, with all of its complacency and self-regard, managed to see through Khaled Abu El Fadl and not to invite him to come back, no doubt to the "world's foremost authority on Islamic law's" evident chagrin. But really.
Would that -- magari, ojala -- someone somewhere would recall those stirring days of yesteryear, when even the faculty members in the humanities actually had to be cultivated people, actually had to know something. Any chance those days could come again?
Hugh,
The Academe of yesteryear is gone because of a massive mental disease that has infected the modern West, whose causes are very complex. Even the diagnostic description of it is complex.
It may be simplified in the following paradox: It is a pathology of excessive health -- too much of a good thing, too much self-criticism & self-examination on the part of a Civilization brimming with too much health.
To grasp it beyond this simplex paradox would require a digestion of a breadth and depth of cultural complexities going back at least 200 years.
But these problems of Western Leftist pathology didn't just fall out of the sky a couple of years ago for baffling or uninteresting reasons, as you and Robert sometimes seem to imply.
Unfortunately, they did.
But these problems of Western Leftist pathology didn't just fall out of the sky a couple of years ago for baffling or uninteresting reasons, as you and Robert sometimes seem to imply.
As a pathological Western Leftist, I prefer to have little boys and girls survive notwithstanding the genocide, whereas you are only one of the employees of genocide who is offended at the survival of children.
I'm good.
Unfortunately, they did.
But these problems of Western Leftist pathology didn't just fall out of the sky a couple of years ago for baffling or uninteresting reasons, as you and Robert sometimes seem to imply.
As a pathological Western Leftist, I prefer to have little boys and girls survive notwithstanding the genocide, whereas you are only one of the employees of genocide who is offended at the survival of children.
I'm good.
Unfortunately, they did.
But these problems of Western Leftist pathology didn't just fall out of the sky a couple of years ago for baffling or uninteresting reasons, as you and Robert sometimes seem to imply.
As a pathological Western Leftist, I prefer to have little boys and girls survive notwithstanding the genocide, whereas you are only one of the employees of genocide who is offended at the survival of children.
I'm good.
Unfortunately, they did.
But these problems of Western Leftist pathology didn't just fall out of the sky a couple of years ago for baffling or uninteresting reasons, as you and Robert sometimes seem to imply.
As a pathological Western Leftist, I prefer to have little boys and girls survive notwithstanding the genocide, whereas you are only one of the employees of genocide who is offended at the survival of children.
I'm good.
Loxias~ whom are you accusing here of advocating genocide? Please be specific.
Wow. That's what's wrong with this jihadwatch quasi-forum. I post a provocative and interesting (sorry for tooting my own horn here) post specifically addressed to Hugh (who so far has never deigned to glance down from on high to respond to my repeated questions/comments specifically addressed to him, except once -- in an arrogantly parenthetical, dismissive remark), and all I get is a cryptically loony retort (repeated 4 times to boot!).
Jeezus Effin Christ.