A mindset that Westerners have great difficulty understanding — and that misunderstanding leads to numerous miscalculations and errors of judgment. Most Western analysts cannot conceive of such an all-encompassing religious imperative, and seem to assume that Muslims in general accept their own core assumption that all people wish to live in peace, abhor war, and will ultimately do virtually anything to avoid it. And that all people believe generally in the equality and dignity of all people, and will act on that belief.
None of those assumptions, of course, apply to Islamic jihadists.
From Alan Caruba in New Media Journal, with thanks to Tom Syseskey:
Anything modern, anything secular, including the rise of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leading proponent of Arab nationalism, was an anathema to Qutb. He was not ignorant of the West, but he was utterly contemptuous of it. Despite his having read widely of Western philosophers and, apparently, science and other topics reflecting the long road to modernity made since the Enlightenment, the only truth to be found anywhere, so far as Qutb was concerned, was in the Koran.
“First and foremost,” wrote Qutb, “the verses of the Koran were revealed in order to establish the correct criteria on which God wishes the concepts of humans as well as their life to be based.” Everything that preceded the Koran was the “accumulated debris; beliefs, concepts, philosophies, myths, thoughts, doubts, superstitions, customs and traditions.”
Prior to Islam, humans were “unable to find certitude.”
The one thing Islam does provide to those born into it and to those who convert to Islam is certitude. And with certitude comes the human affliction of an arrogant belief that no other religion or form of government other than that imposed by Islamic law has any right to exist. The punishment for leaving Islam is death. The enemies of Islam are to be beheaded.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you al Qaeda, Wahhabism, and the Islamic revolution that is your obligation to resist for the sake of all mankind.
Read it all.