Theodore Dalrymple works as a doctor in Britain's prison system and is one of the great essayists of our age. Observing that "man does not live by bread alone," he has long chronicled the psychological and moral dimensions of anti-social behavior. Here, writing in the City Journal via Frontpage he examines the mental tension in westernized Muslims and considers that suicide bombings in fact provide a ready resolution for that psychological tension.
All terrorists, presumably, know the dangers that they run, accepting them as an occupational hazard; given Man’s psychological makeup—or at least the psychological makeup of certain young men—these dangers may act as an attraction, not a deterrent. But only a few terrorists use their own deaths as an integral means of terrorizing others. They seem to be a breed apart, with whom the rest of humanity can have little or nothing in common...As is by now well known (for the last few years have made us more attentive to Islamic concepts and ways of thinking, irrespective of their intrinsic worth), the term “jihad” has two meanings: inner struggle and holy war. While the political meaning connotes violence, though with such supposed justifications as the defense of Islam and the spread of the faith among the heathen, the personal meaning generally suggests something peaceful and inward-looking. The struggle this kind of jihad entails is spiritual; it is the effort to overcome the internal obstacles—above all, forbidden desires—that prevent the good Muslim from achieving complete submission to God’s will. Commentators have tended to see this type of jihad as harmless or even as beneficial—a kind of self-improvement that leads to decency, respectability, good behavior, and material success...
The BBC peddles this sociological view consistently. In 1997, for example, it stated that Muslims “continue to face discrimination,” as witness the fact that they were three times as likely to be unemployed long-term as West Indians; and this has been its line ever since. If more Muslims than any other group possess no educational qualifications whatsoever, even though the hurdles for winning such qualifications have constantly fallen, it can only be because of discrimination—though a quarter of all medical students in Britain are now of Indian subcontinental descent. It can have nothing whatever to do with the widespread—and illegal—practice of refusing to allow girls to continue at school, which the press scarcely ever mentions, and which the educational authorities rarely if ever investigate. If youth unemployment among Muslims is two and a half times the rate among whites, it can be only because of discrimination—though youth unemployment among Hindus is actually lower than among whites (and this even though many young Hindus complain of being mistaken for Muslims). And so on and so on.
A constant and almost unchallenged emphasis on “social justice,” the negation of which is, of course, “discrimination,” can breed only festering embitterment. Where the definition of justice is entitlement by virtue of group existence rather than reward for individual effort, a radical overhaul of society will appear necessary to achieve such justice. Islamism in Britain is thus not the product of Islam alone: it is the product of the meeting of Islam with a now deeply entrenched native mode of thinking about social problems...
Muslims who reject the West are therefore engaged in a losing and impossible inner jihad, or struggle, to expunge everything that is not Muslim from their breasts. It can’t be done: for their technological and scientific dependence is necessarily also a cultural one. You can’t believe in a return to seventh-century Arabia as being all-sufficient for human requirements, and at the same time drive around in a brand-new red Mercedes, as one of the London bombers did shortly before his murderous suicide. An awareness of the contradiction must gnaw in even the dullest fundamentalist brain.
Furthermore, fundamentalists must be sufficiently self-aware to know that they will never be willing to forgo the appurtenances of Western life: the taste for them is too deeply implanted in their souls, too deeply a part of what they are as human beings, ever to be eradicated. It is possible to reject isolated aspects of modernity but not modernity itself. Whether they like it or not, Muslim fundamentalists are modern men—modern men trying, impossibly, to be something else...
Of course, one of the objects of the bombers, instinctive rather than articulated, might be to undermine this very restraint, both of the state and of the population itself, in order to reveal to the majority of Muslims the true evil nature of the society in which they live, and force them into the camp of the extremists. If so, there is some hope of success: physical attacks on Muslims (or on Hindus and Sikhs ignorantly taken to be Muslims) increased in Britain by six times in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, according to the police. It wouldn’t take many more such bombings, perhaps, to provoke real and serious intercommunal violence on the Indian subcontinental model. Britain teems with aggressive, violent subgroups who would be only too delighted to make pogroms a reality.
Even if there is no such dire an eventuality, the outlook is sufficiently grim and without obvious solution. A highly secularized Muslim population whose men nevertheless wish to maintain their dominance over women and need a justification for doing so; the hurtful experience of disdain or rejection from the surrounding society; the bitter disappointment of a frustrated materialism and a seemingly perpetual inferior status in the economic hierarchy; the extreme insufficiency and unattractiveness of modern popular culture that is without value; the readiness to hand of an ideological and religious solution that is flattering to self-esteem and allegedly all- sufficient, and yet in unavoidable conflict with a large element of each individual’s identity; an oscillation between feelings of inferiority and superiority, between humiliation about that which is Western and that which is non-Western in the self; and the grotesque inflation of the importance of personal existential problems that is typical of modern individualism—all ensure fertile ground for the recruitment of further “martyrs” for years to come.
Surveys suggest that between 6 and 13 percent of British Muslims—that is, between 98,000 and 208,000 people—are sympathetic toward Islamic terrorists and their efforts. Theoretical sympathy expressed in a survey is not the same thing as active support or a wish to emulate the “martyrs” in person, of course. But it is nevertheless a sufficient proportion and absolute number of sympathizers to make suspicion and hostility toward Muslims by the rest of society not entirely irrational, though such suspicion and hostility could easily increase support for extremism. This is the tightrope that the British state and population will now have to walk for the foreseeable future; and the sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced, in a single day, by the nightmare of permanent conflict.
Read it all.
Always enjoy his pieces. City Journal, Autumn 2002, "Barbarians at the Gate", relavent to the last week in Paris.
um, relevant
Dr. Dalrymple is a national treasure. I've read both of his books. They are classics in the same tradition as "The Treason of the Intellectuals." He puts the blame for human failure in modern society exactly where it lies: at the feet of the "victims" and their enablers.
"A constant and almost unchallenged emphasis on social justice, the negation of which is, of course, discrimination, can breed only festering embitterment."
-- Theodore Dalrymple
Uh oh. Mistaken leftist analysis has bedeviled the civilized world ever since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published their fake numbers in the mid-19th century.
But when it feeds the ever-aggrievable Moslem, then it's high time to put a stop to mistaken leftist analysis.
PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH
"Surveys suggest that between 6 and 13 percent of British Muslims—that is, between 98,000 and 208,000 people—are sympathetic toward Islamic terrorists and their efforts."
-- Theodore Dalrymple
These numbers seem way low to me. What kind of Moslems is Great Britain breeding, anyway? Koran- and Sunnah-ignoring Apostates?
PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH
I shall terrorize the infidels. So wound their bodies and incapacitate them because they oppose Allah and His Apostle.
-- Koran 8:12
Mohammed said, ‘I have been made victorious with terror.’
-- Bukhari:V4B52N220
If you come upon them (infidels), deal so forcibly as to terrify those who would follow, that they may be warned. Make a severe example of them by terrorizing Allah’s enemies.
-- Ishaq:326
We have been dealt a situation from which there is no escape. You have seen what Muhammad has done. Arabs have submitted to him and we do not have the strength to fight. You know that no herd is safe from him. And no one even dares go outside for fear of being terrorized.
-- Tabari IX:42
Little do you remember My warning. How many towns have We destroyed as a raid by night? Our punishment took them suddenly while infidels slept for their afternoon rest. Our terror came to them; Our punishment overtook them.
-- Koran 7:3
It may seem churlish, given how sensible Dalrymple is, how unwilling he is to leave standing, much less bring burnt offerings to, the idols of the age, to point to one important omission.
He nowhere goes into what it is that makes Islam, that makes Muslims. He writes of victimhood and the underclass, with particular attention to those he has had personal experience of working as a doctor in England. But he nowhere discusses how, for example, a black immigrant from St. Kitts or Uganda, if not a Muslim, lacks that full-scale ideology of hostility toward not only the native British, but also to the laws, customs, manners of Great Britain, and not only to the laws, customs, and manners, but also to much else that we take for granted -- including freedom of speech (the right to criticize, the right to mock), freedom of artistic expression (including sculpture, painting, music all of which are severly limited in mainstream Islam), freedom of free and skeptical inquiry (without which the enterprise of science is difficult or impossible to pursue), and a clear caste system based on the superiority of all Muslims to all non-Muslims.
The problems he identifies are generic and not specific to the Western world's treatment of Islam. The Western willingness to both create and indulge others in fantasies of victimhood, the various misinterpretations of "equality" to mean equality of result, the "carriere ouverte aux tous but especially anyone who belongs to those categories -- Third-World will do nicely -- that are somehow for some reason supposed to be given special favors, while the Western world itself extends no favors, offers not even a minimum of self-protection, to its own citizens, its own civilization, all because of some quasi-ideas or rather attitudes that were allowed to take hold a few decades ago, and throw out tentacles throughout society, and seize control that only by dint of a tremendous effort can now, just possibly, be shaken loose of their sturdy and malevolent grip.
If the inhabitants of the West, which whittled its own stick and then handed it over to others to use in beating that same West, cannot get beyond guilt feelings, built on repetition of cliches and imperfectly understood history, about "colonialism," and fail to realize that the Arabs and Muslims not only suffered hardly at all from such colonialism, but themselves have been the beneficiaries of the most successful imperialism in human history is that of Islam, or rather of Arab Islam that not only took over large swaths of territory, but also managed to convince many to ignore or reject their own histories, cultures, and even languages so as to ape, in name, and in dress, and in mores, Arabs of the seventh century -- possibly quite imaginary Arabs at that. And then there is that insidious word "post-colonialism" which decades after the end of colonial rule by Europeans (but not by Islam) everywhere, exists as a proposition, as an idea, as an attitude, and one which has no scadenza or sell-by date, for "post-colonialism" can simply be said to go on forever, it never ends, it has no necessary end as long as the concept proves useful -- and so it does, and so it will, as we sit here waiting for the barbarians -- both those at the gates, constantly seeking ways in, and those within the gates, both barbarians already within, and their sympathizers, who are ready, and willing, and it seems quite able, to open those gates and hold them open, so that they may be joined by still others who think and act as they do. colonialism" (it never ends; it is ever at the ready, forever to be invoked).
So one wishes that Dalrymple would spend a week or so reading Bat Ye'or, Spencer, Bostom's compilation "The Legacy of Jihad," and perhaps K. S. Lal (why, after all, stop at the West when the greatest victims of Islam, in numbers, have been the inhabitants, and civilization, of India) as well. He might then see that the problem with Muslim immigrants in England, in France, in Germany, in Belgium, in Spain, everywhere, is of a different and far more menacing and untreatable character than the resentments of any other immigrant group he might care to identify.
Read the whole article, this man is brilliant, I love that bit when he asked the wannabe Suicide bomber about his reaction if the state killed his mother, brothers and sister in return for his actions, priceless.
Daffersd, Here it is: "I asked him whether he thought that, in order to deter him from his course of action, it would be right for the state to threaten to kill his mother and his brothers and sisters—and to carry out this threat if he carried out his, in order to deter others like him.
"The idea appalled him, not because it was yet another example of the wickedness of a Western democratic state, but because he could not conceive of such a state acting in this unprincipled way. In other words, he assumed a high degree of moral restraint on the part of the very organism that he wanted to attack and destroy."
He sounds like a delightful specimen.
"After a vicious rape for which he went to prison, he converted to a Salafist form of Islam and became convinced that any system of justice that could take the word of a mere woman over his own was irredeemably corrupt."
MI5 has just released this picture of IA786.
KT,
Has someone else taken over your brain? That is two comments that can be construed as "on our side".
I suggest above that the behavior of Muslims in Europe, as in the Middle East, is not to be found so much in the problem of "identity" or in the conditions of life, but in the problem of the immutable and inescapable ideology, that remains within the consciousness of Muslims even if they have, in the West, at some point led wild, Western-underclass-decadence lives. Their problem is that Islam teaches that they should be on top, and they are not, that the Infidels should support them through a kind of jizyah, and that support is insufficiently generous, that everything that is wrong in the West is wrong because it is un-Islamic.
An example of how one can go wrong if one has relied on one or two so-called "experts" on Islam is in a piece written by Francis Fukuyama in the Wall Street Journal. He shows no familiarity with Islam. He relies entirely, it seems, on the views of a single "expert" (Bernard Lewis has already, in private, expressed his great dismay over this particular "expert"). This "expert" is the Frenchman Olivier Roy, a quasi-apologist for islam (Fukuyama seems not to realize this), who has in the past been quick to attribute Muslim attitudes to anger over -- yes, "Israel" and "Palestine." Oliver Roy is one of the people upon whom tne French chose to rely in admitting so many Muslims into their midst -- and not scholars, of the older school, such as Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, who in the early 1970s was expressing alarm about the large-scale introduction of Muslims into Europe (for more of Dufourcq, see Bostom's "The Legacy of Jihad").
Francis Fukuyama has not been known to have taken a year off to read deeply in the theory and history of Islam. Or perhaps he has, and has chosen to do it hidden from view. Certainly nothing he wrote in the Wall Street Journal piece showed any familiarity either with the canonical texts, or any of the great scholars of Islam, many of whose works can be sampled in "The Legacy of Jihad." He is not alone. All sorts of people think they are entitled to make all sorts of pronouncements on Islam without studying either the canonical texts -- available synoptically, in different translations, on-line, or the history of Islam, or the 1350-year history of how Muslim jihad-conquest was followed always and everywhere by the same similar treatment of non-Muslims, whether they were Christians and Jews in the Middle East, Zoroastrians in Iran, Hindus and Buddhists in India, and in more recent times, Sikhs and Confucians wherever they were located in lands ruled by Muslims.
Here is an excerpt from Fukuyama's piece:
"We profoundly misunderstand contemporary Islamist ideology when we see it as an assertion of traditional Muslim values or culture."
In order to make this statement, one would have to have studied Islam, which is the overwhelming Fact of Life for all Muslims, to find out what Muslim values and Muslim culture is all about.
Fukuyama shows no signs of having read or taken seriously the Qur'an, the Hadith, and the Sira. If asked why virtually the first act of the Ayatollah Khomeini was to lower the marrriageable age of girls to nine, he might well be at a loss to explain it. If asked what Muslims were taught to think about the claim of Muslims to the land and goods of Infidels, or how they were taught to treat Infidels, and had in fact treated them, over a very long time, over a very wide space, he would it seems not know what to say.
Yet he blandly tells us, with a tone, entirely unmerited, of self-assured authority, that
we profoundly misunderstand contemporary Islamist ideology, etc."
Only one question for Francis Fukuyama. Kindly list 10, or five, or even one way, inwhcih "contemporary Islamist ideology" differs at all from the standard Jihad-ideology, taken from the Qur'an and the Sunnah (i.e., the Hadith and the example of Muhammad), that is set out by the Qur'anic commentators and jurisconsults, and all other important figure sin the history of Islam, including the traveller Ibn Battuta, the historian Ibn Khaldun, and even that "Sufi" dreamer Al-Ghazali. A week spent reading not only "The Legacy of Jihad," and perhaps reading more in the Clement Huart, Snouck Hurgronje, Armand Abel, W. St. Clair Tisdall, and a few dozen other eminent and keen scholars -- who were not, alas, given to tossing things out in Op/Ed articles, but to different standards, in a different age, might not cause Fukuyama to change his views.
But it might cause him to be just a bit more hesitant, a bit more reluctant to think that Islam can be so brightly, cavalierly, discussed by magic instant expertise, based on a reading of Olivier Roy and others who have themselves been so discredited, or are seen to be, in the light of the scholarship that has been deliberately ignored and suppressed, but is now, book by book, being unearthed and republished.
Even spending a week with just one writer -- Snouck Hurgronje -- would help one to see right through to the shallow bottom of Olivier Roy, or Gilles Kepel. Not exactly petits pois in an inflamed French pod, but close.
It can't.
Psst, - Carolyn
(don't look now but when you get a chance check the spelling and spacing!!!??)
Rebecca;
"assumed a higher degree of moral restraint"
Most cowards will not engage on an equal footing.
Any undersized schoolboy who has endured being surrounded by brutish punks can attest to that. How many times has a bully faded away once he realizes he doesn't have the upper hand. Obviously it's not that simple.
But, therein may hide a solution, unpleasant as it may seem at first blush, taken without explanation. Nobody would suggest we target wives and children to combat Islamofascism, but I'm sure that there is a concensus among the murderous that if you are captured by the West, once you make it past the rough men on the frontlines, the US/UK soldiers who fight and die and don't "appreciate" the "value" of MC/PC/ME thought and reject Western guilt for the crimes of the totality of human history, once you get past that real threat, life is pretty good, even coddling to the righteous. Sure, you lose mobility, you may miss your son growing or blowing up, but "3 hots and a cot", provided qurans and prayer rugs, volleyball, well, you get the picture.
How would this cancer view the fight if they perceived the COST as being unacceptable? What would they view as an unacceptable cost? Obviously death doesn't scare them, it's the ultimate promotion. Being locked up sucks, but you have like-minded company, few cares, plenty of time for the "greater jihad" and networking.
The problem is that they know that we're NOT like them, concerned as we are with troubling issues like decency, compassion, and morality.
It is insane that Isreali targeted assassinations receive condemnation. Effective as they are, they are overt, in-the-open operations, conducted in the public view. How much more psychologically devastating would assassinations be if conducted with the stealth exhibited by the Viet Cong? GIs on guard duty who fell asleep only to wake up next to their dead partner, never having heard a sound, left alive to transmit the horror. Death in the night, without time to prepare for martyrdom. Would you even be a martyr if you are killed in your sleep, unable to die in a fight? Would you be a martyr if your life is simply taken from you, without a chance to offer it up to the big A? Include factors specifically horrific to a muslim terrorist. Ignominious death, cowardly death received while running away, broadcast to the folks back home to shame the family, tribe, village.
I don't know. But the answer is in there. It's the cost. Maybe I'm just blithely stating the obvious, or maybe there is an effective tool there somewhere.
Carolyn2:
Not knowing what the other post was about, I'd say it's just as likely that KingTolerance is making fun of us, but adopting a more subtle approach than usual.
Theodore Dalrymple is wonderful. One of my favourite articles is An Imaginary 'Scandal', which is about political correctness getting in the way of compassion. Long, but well worth reading.
Dalrymple looks reality full in the face, and talks about the plight of 'Muslim girls' without using euphemisms like 'Asian'. For example, in this article he says:
But I don't think he has analysed Islam in detail, and he seems to see the problem as cultural rather than religious. In addition, his experience of the native British underclass is so horrific that it perhaps crowds out an understanding of the uniquely threatening nature of Islam itself.
Perhaps Ms. Weatherwax is suggesting that the troll has an imitator.
Interested I take it you mean the bit about "the same hairstyles and mannerisms, including the vulpine lope of the slums. Gold chains, the heavier the better, and gold front teeth, without dental justification,"
I think vulpine lope sums up these youngsters so accurately. My generation (well my cousins, I was the speccy swot, wot got out) tended to dart, into allyways and out of shop doorways. I know you rate Theodore Dalrymple very highly. I must catch up on some of his articles.
I like your style Mr Infidel33
Ah, the subtle difference. Maybe KT has a split personality...
http://www.clarablog.com/thon/04/angeldevil.jpg
KingTolerence is on our side...King Tolerance is not.
Hugh,
One of the only valuable original works in Islamic studies to come out in a long time. It's not as fast-paced as Robert's PIG, but it's a great follow-up read for those ready do get into the nitty gritty.How many MESA professors does it take to churn out one scholarly work based on primary sources?
Answer: nobody knows yet.
Hugh writes:
"Fukuyama shows no signs of having read or taken seriously the Qur'an, the Hadith, and the Sira."
Spot on. I read his piece in the Wall Street Journal
when it came out and I was dismayed. How did this
guy get to be a respected expert at anything?
Granny W - TD, like me, and you too, I bet, is a grammar school product. Grammar schools - check out this little gem - were the greatest engine of social mobility Britain has ever known. This wretched Labour government hates them, because the left hates meritocracy. Bolton clung onto them for longer than most, so I was lucky.
'Vulpine lope' is just superb. Revel in this:
Bless.
Fukuyama has boxed his reason and logic into a corner. After he declared the fall of the Berlin Wall was "The End of History" he wanted us to believe that henceforth the world would be one big Kumbaya jam session for all ideological fault lines have disappeared. Actually, Fkuyama's view is that the liberal democracies would only compete with each other ieconomically and not militarily, and in turn all of them would isolate the rogue states. His trouble is that his definition of liberal democracy was too broad, equating Pakistani democracy with that of India, for example.
Interested,
Thanks for the link. The essay was fascinating...encompassing not just sociology but literature, morality, ethics and the poignancies of irony. I sent it off to family and friends.
I like the certitude Dalrymple conveys in this "uncomfortable truth":
"You can't be a multiculturalist and believe in the legal equality of the sexes."
Most of us here are already well aware of this, but to phrase it so starkly might just move those who are sufficiently alerted to the dangers of Islamic intolerance but haven't bothered drawing the necessary conclusions that would force a re-evaluation of their world view.
Dalrymple (AKA Anthony Daniels) has not yet turned his mind fully to the dangers of Islam - other matters have distracted him. He has retired now, I believe, and will have more time to do so. If he does, I am confident that he will be a formidable opponent of Islam.
Yes, I have just finished the piece about Bradford (where my father in law was born although he was brought up in another yorkshire town) and Ray Honeyford.
My school was a girls grammar when I started and became a girls comprehensive when I was in the 4th form (what would now be Year 10) it is now a mixed school, predominantly boys (this is now a borough with a high Muslim population) where, according to the last Ofsted report (not a bad report to be fair)"students in Years 7 to 9 from minority ethnic groups is satisfactory, which is in line with that of other students. The exception to this is for Asian/Pakistani students who achieve standards lower than that of the majority." This is a school where "64 % represent groupings other than white" and 29% have English as an additional language. Religious education is unsatisfactory and the school fails to provide a daily collective act of worship. Apparently standards are rising and a lot of the failures of the pervious report are being resolved. To my great sorrow, that being my great love when I was there, history remains one of the areas causing concern. Teaching of Urdu and other modern languages (I was the very last to take Latin, the most common ancient language, in 1970) is good. Generally attainment in GCSE is well below national average.
"But I don't think he has analysed Islam in detail, and he seems to see the problem as cultural rather than religious. In addition, his experience of the native British underclass is so horrific that it perhaps crowds out an understanding of the uniquely threatening nature of Islam itself."
Interested--spot on. Much as I admire and have enjoyed reading Dalrymple's essays, I too have noticed his tendency to identify most societal problems as a function of the underclass behaving in a predictable way. While Dalrymple (which, as I understand, is a pseudonym) emphasizes the immense stumbling block of Muslim male supremacism, he fails to trace it back to its source--that final, perfect revelation which landed us in this mess in the first place.
Scaramouche - that is true. Incisive and eloquent about so many things, when it comes to Islam he falters and becomes rather woolly. But I don't think this is from any political agenda, simply lack of knowledge.
Granny W - interesting info. My grammar school went 'the other way', becoming independent. It is still a good school, but would be closed to such as me, and open to less able pupils whose parents could afford the fees. Wealthy parents whose offspring are not so able can move into the catchment area of a good comprehensive, which mine could not have done. That is Socialism for you. Equality? Dream on.
"when it comes to Islam [Dalrymple] falters and becomes rather woolly. But I don't think this is from any political agenda, simply lack of knowledge."
It's not so much lack of knowledge as it is the obverse side of that coin: presence of PC whitewashing knowledge -- a mountain of knowledge so large, opaque and osmotic all around us in our PC West, that it takes a singular type of person to have the will and penchant to labor to mine through to get to the buried nuggets of that vast field of data obscured by many decades of PC sediment.
What moves some (still, alas, a small minority) to begin that spelunking, and what inhibits others (alas, the vast majority) from stirring from their complacency, seems to be a mystery: why a Dalrymple or a Bernard Lewis haven't yet begun, when they should have years ago, cannot be explained by facile explanations like a "lack of knowledge" (nor by some nefarious conspiracy of Turkish and Saudi largesse, as Hugh would have it. It's not that rich Muslims aren't trying to obfuscate in any ways they can; of course they are; it's just that a Bernard Lewis is not the type who can be so transparently bought, as Hugh suggests).
"it's just that a Bernard Lewis is not the type who can be so transparently bought, as Hugh suggests..."
--- from a posting above
I never suggested any such thing about Bernard Lewis. It is his personal and professional ties, his desire to be thought well of by all sides, including Ottomanist friends, and other Arab friends, including Prince Hassan, or for that matter sentimental ties even to a member of the Osmanlis, and not money -- my god -- that help to explain Bernard Lewis. But he also never quite focussed on Islam's treatment of non-Muslims (did nothing to help, and a little possibly to hinder, Bat Ye'or's reception), and his own private Islam was formed partly from his experience in wartime Egypt (i.e., Egypt under the ancien regime, that still affected by Lord Cromer's earlier administration of the civil service and by the freer atmosphere that still existed prior to 1952), Turkey (where Kemalism was riding high fifty years ago), and even Jordan. It is not that one has to actually be in Saudi Arabia to get the full force of Islam -- even being there, a foreigner can be easiy cushioned from seeing the whole thing. But one has to be relentless in not allowing personal charm of one's interlocutors, who are often so helpful, so flattering, from somehow getting in the way. This I think Lewis has not always been able to do, though he is so obvously superior to all those who over the years have criticized him for being too hard on Islam, and Muslims, when he was so only by comparison with the assorted Espositos and Saids and the successive officers, and many of the men, of that army of apologists known as MESA Nostra.
I never suggested Lewis could be bought by the Saudis or the Turks -- and if I referred to Prince Hassan as a host or a generous host, that kind of liberality does not imply any kind of bribe.
You've got it wrong.
It still seems strange that a historian of Lewis's intelligence and erudition would ignore mountains of history out of social blandishments and temporary cultural pleasantness. It still doesn't add up.
Interesting discussion Pepper.
I've always seen Lewis as exhibiting many of the traits of Will Durant. They were both products of a different age and obviously were influenced by the seminal events of their impressionable years.
Their respective styles differed as significantly as the scope of their studies. Durant interpreted for us all of civilized human history. He did so weaving a fabric, telling a story...and always as a universalist,...open, receptive and characteristically magnanimous to all. There are very few figures in history, much less entire cultures, in which he was not at least somewhat generous in appraisal.
Lewis interprets for us only the Islamic world, focused and analytically, so much less prone to Duran's colorful prose and creative liscence.
But both seem to be almost innately non-ideological...as if the common culture from which they sprang necessitated if not detachment, then at least the obsessive pursuit of balanced presentation. Perhaps this was a reaction to the impression the ideological excesses of the thirties and fourties might have made on them as young intellectuals.
I'm convinced that Durant's generous account of Islam and Muhammad is based at least in part on the fact that the Islamic world was so seemingly moribund at the time that he wrote its history. It is after all much easier to be magnanimous when one's civilizational rival is down and out.
This could also be the basis for Lewis's take on Islam. It was formed in his consciousness years ago under very different circumstances. For many an expert, the post-WWII Muslim world was relevant only as a playground for superpower rivalry. But for Lewis, it was so much more than that, it was his life's work and perhaps for that reason, he imbued it with an integrity it never warrented.
Just ran a google on Durant and discovered he was 30 some odd years older than Lewis (I had thought it was more like 15).
Doesn't necessarily invalidate my point. The destructive nationalism of WWI could have effected the young Durant much the way the barbarities of fascism probably appalled Lewis.
Instead of largess or the loyalties engendered by friendship, I would look to that blind-spot that afflicts so many-a-scholar: The understandable development of affinity for the object of study.
After all, this is not Andrew Bostom investing a year or two on a project to debunk popular myths. Lewis devoted his life to the study of Islam and Ottoman Turkey. The body of his work - and the formation of his views - occurred during a period when Islam was the furthest thing from being an existential threat to the West.
It's unfortunate that we can't credit Lewis with greater foresight and vision, but at least there is a balance and integrity in his work that distinguishes him from the likes of Esposito. But to expect him in his eighties to redefine himself and his views in lieu of transformational world events is a bit like trying to teach an old dog new tricks.
why a Dalrymple or a Bernard Lewis haven't yet begun, when they should have years ago, cannot be explained by facile explanations like a "lack of knowledge
Dr P, of course I can't see into Dalrymple's mind, but I don't imagine for one minute that political correctness would get in the way of his judgement. So, 'facile' or not, I think I'm right about this.
MI5 has just released this picture of IA786.
Posted by: KingTolerence at November 3, 2005 01:17 PM
So this is what you have been reduced to?
Hit & run shit stirring?
It makes more sense than your lack of balanced liberal arguments - & at last & at least you are now looking for the Jihadists on the web.
Shame that instead of finding balance & maybe some understanding of the DW / JW position you just found pictures that turn you on & are in tune with you.
Being American, would you dare have posted a picture of a Muslim burning the Stars & Stripes?
Have you booked your ticket out of the western democratic hell hole you hate so much yet?
All the best old son
Albion
Granny:
Your speller's eyes must be better than mine, but perhaps not your typographer's. The bona fide KT poster is KingTolerance.
KingTolerAnce
KingTolerEnce
Still funny tho.
Prophet Geoff
Hey guys, how about some recognition of me?
KingTesticle(King Tolerance with a ball)
KingTesticle: Unless you are female, I sincerely hope that you have the customary two.
KingTolerance:
If this chatroom of paranoids is as worthless and uninteresting as you describe, why do you persist in coming around? To congratulate yourself on your ability to shoot fish in a barrel?
There are pro-Jihad websites out there, publishing in English, but they are rather transient, being subject to shut-down courtesy of the Internet Haganah and I don't know what point is served by directing you to engage in discourse with them anyway.
Cornelius and Interested,
You might be right about Lewis. Nobody's perfect, I guess; not even those who should be less imperfect -- at least in their area of expertise.
King:
Can it be inferred from your closing comment that you believe that Islam could stand a bit of changing?
Sigh. You know, KT, I have other morons to correct. I don't have time just for you, dumb as you might be. Really.
Geoff: "tho"
King: That would be 'though', Geoff. Get a dictionary and a clue, guttersnipe.
'Tho' is a legitimate short for 'though', my 'perseverant' patsy.
'Guttersnipe?' 'Woh cur, suhr. I doesn'ts 'arf t' tek nin 'o yer 19th-cent'ry insults, I doesn't. If ye'll excuse me, I'm 'arf t' the apothecary fer t' fix me sem ointment - me lug'ole is arctin' somethin' fierce, it is.'
'Guttersnipe'. Good god.
KingPerseverance: "When push comes to shove, the "dhimmiwatchers" resort to toilet humor, hijacking monikers and cannot even provide websites of Pro-Jihad websites when asked."
Er..no. You were given some. Al-Azhar didn't teach you to read? LOL!
"They also forage for spelling errors, make up stupid acronyms and refer to themselves as prophets or imams while dealing their guttersnipe abuse to those who disagree with them."
OMG! WTF! ROFL! This punk's talking about ME, Prophet Geoff [bbuh] and the RoP! That comment semes to refer to none other. Well, abuse where abuse gets, I always say - and I really only need about a half second to find your grammatical (not just spelling) errors, given my training in actually reading articles. Literally. It takes my eye about that much time. Scary, eh? Then again, people who use words like "perseverate" deserve, frankly, all the abuse that can be heaped on them.
LOL!
Perhaps, of course, if you hadn't started off your da'wa here by calling everyone here a racist, I'd be inclined to let you off with a simple fatwa. But your uber-anger with the very first post kinda makes me feel that you have a more...personal connection to the issue at hand.
Know what I mean?
Well, you don't, but I do, for I am:
Prophet Geoff [bbuh]
Well Kingky, I didn't think you would sink so low as to publish a fake picture of IA786, especially since you have meant so much to each other.
You should be greatful that someone cloned you.
Isn't that just too sweet. And you thought no one cared.
I especially like the way you refer to posters here as 'paranoid children' and other charming platitudes. Have you ever really seen a paranoid child? Would you know one when you see one?
I would not describe Waterdragon52 as a paranoid child, nor Hugh, nor Robert, nor Cornelious, nor
Dr Pepper, or any of your favorite antagonists.
In fact the only clearly identifiable paranoid children comming here, have been muslims.
'The suicide bombers among us', are those paranoid children having a tantrum, as are all jihadists and supporters.
You should listen to Imam Geoff(PBUH) and Albion, (PBUH too), you could learn a lot. Your vessel is mostly empty, these guys can help you fill it up...