Harland Harrison wrote: > Jon Roland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes > >> You need to meet such people. >> > Please introduce me. > Doesn't work that way. First you have to develop good Muslim friends who have contacts with a variety of other Muslims. Then you arrange to be present, almost invisible in the background, while they talk among themselves, with your friends encouraging talk in English so you can understand it. There are no introductions. > But Sayyid Qutb died in 1966! What modern reference do you have, if any? In that culture recency means nothing, and the writings of someone from 1000 years ago can be more influential than today's report on El Arabiya. Many of them speak of the crusades as though they happened yesterday. The culture has a very different sense of historical time. It is a very different way of seeing the world. One of my best Muslim friends, an Egyptian lady with a college education, fluent in four languages, still cannot accept that the moon revolves around the Earth, or that Cleopatra was Greek. > But if you really think that sexual temptation is the problem, why is the > still relatively prudish US the target, instead of Europe? > They are not reacting to the reality of how we live. They are reacting to our TV programs and movies. Many have trouble understanding that if people actually behaved like people do in such entertainments, we wouldn't pay to watch it. Talk to some from that background who come here and discover that fact. > But if sex is the problem, is it temptation or morality? It is temptation. It is also a refusal to accept personal responsibility for managing one's own moral behavior, despite pious rhetoric to the contrary. If one is tempted it is the fault of the temptress, not oneself. If a member of one's tribe commits an act of terrorism, it is never his fault, or one's own fault for failing to intervene to prevent it. It is always the fault of the alleged offender, even if the offense is just existing, or failing to intervene in favor of his side of a dispute. A foreigner who is perceived as powerful will often be hated more for not siding against one's enemies than the enemies themselves are. In Iraq a few surveys showed that the main cause of hate toward Coalition Forces was not that they intervened to depose Hussein, but that they shamed them by doing what they feel they should have done themselves, and didn't.
It is important to understand the pathologies that come when a civilization fails, and the Muslim world is a failed civilization, with an intense inferiority complex. Don't think that just because they have many of the trappings of modernity that modernity has been accepted by them or guides their civic behavior. It is no accident that most of the refugees from Iraq are most of the competent professionals, dubbed by their countrymen as "seculars", and rejected as such, leaving the running of the country to half-civilized sectarians. -- Jon ---------------------------------------------------------------- Constitution Society 7793 Burnet Road #37, Austin, TX 78757 512/299-5001 www.constitution.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------- [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
