Andrew, I thought the article was nuanced and accessible. Thank you for linking to it and on a selfish level I want to especially thank you for introducing me to the author of the article, Kenan Malik
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenan_...eaning_of_Race Any friend of the Enlightenment is a friend of mine. I did not know about his writing and am looking forward to reading more.
Quote:
As a scientific author, his focus is on the philosophy of biology, and contemporary theories of multiculturalism, pluralism and race. These topics are core concerns in The Meaning of Race (1996), Man, Beast and Zombie (2000) and Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate (2008).
His work contains a forthright defence of the values of the 18th-century Enlightenment, which he sees as having been distorted and misunderstood in more recent political and scientific thought.
|
I fully concur with him and with you on this: that
it is not going to help either Muslims or non-Muslims to say: “The terrorists aren’t real Muslims.”
Yet daily, I see and hear demands in print and in the public and social media that the individual Muslims and their collectives do exactly that. And I hear, also on a daily basis, Muslim voices explaining over and over that Islam is not Jihadism.
I agree with you also that Jihadism is a very real threat and that Wahhabism feeds it by exporting radical imams to peaceful congregations in Western (and other) countries. And Saudi Arabia leaders in turn protect and support it in the hope that they will be left alone, though any fool can see that they are a potential target and they will be toppled when the time is ripe. I also believe that the west has turned an equally blind eye to Saudi beheadings, stoning and double-dealing because of the oil.
Looking further afield, ridding the world of its dependency on oil is not only good for the climate. So the sooner we rid ourselves of dependency on fossil fuel, the better, and fracking be damned.
I don't want to go off-track into climate change for that deserves a thread of its own, but as an aside, it would help to start curbing the wasteful Western life-style. It doesn't make sense that on a hot day, the air conditioning is so high in restaurants and shops that you freeze without a sweater—and then swelter back to an air-conditioned car and home. Or that the city dumps and landfills are gorged with broken plastic items that no one ever needed anyway.
Despite the loud noises made by the Tea Partyers and their likes, it was the ideas of the Enlightenment that influenced the Constitution of the new United States, a society based upon reason rather than faith and religious doctrine, for a new civil order based on natural law, and for science based on experiments and observation. The idea of a separation of powers in a government was also a thought-child of the Enlightenment.
So thanks again for the article, well worth reading and reflecting upon.
PS. Another topic that veers off this one yet is related is that poverty and system collapse is a logical outcome of wealth concentration.
I have been hearing a lot of ballyhoo in the media lately (thanks to the World Bank and others) that fewer people are living in poverty now than in recent years. To which I say, yeah, right! The poorest ones have all died off through starvation or war.