April 8, 2003
STRANGERS TO REASON:
Intellectual Speaks of the Arab World's Despair (SUSAN SACHS, April 8, 2003, NY Times)Early in the morning, while most of Cairo is asleep, Ahmed Kamal Aboulmagd watches the war on television and despairs over the path taken by the United States. Even in the gloom of 4 a.m., this is not a normal emotion for Mr. Aboulmagd, a sprightly man of 72 who has lived through more than his share of revolutions, wars and international crises, yet has maintained a marvelously sunny outlook. [...]Mr. Aboulmagd is one of Egypt's best-known intellectuals, a senior aide to former President Anwar el Sadat, consultant to the United Nations and ever-curious polymath whose interests range across the fields of Islamic jurisprudence, comparative religions, literature, history and commercial law. [...]
He has devoted decades of his life and his writings to the cause of modernizing Islamic life and promoting understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Now those efforts, Mr. Aboulmagd said, have been set back by President Bush's "exaggerated" response to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, a response he believes only encouraged mutual enmity and suspicion by painting Muslims and Arabs as potential enemies to be reformed or destroyed.
"I find what is happening to be a serious setback in the endeavors of noble people who have realized the commonalities among different civilizations and nations," he said.
The problem, he said, is that the war on Iraq is widely seen in the Arab world as an attack on all Arabs, meant to serve the interests of Israel with no compensating outreach to aggrieved Arabs.
Here's the problem with multiculturalism: the depth of Mr. Aboulmagd's beliefs does not make them any less asinine. Yet an overweaning desire to "respect" his culture forbids the Times and others on the Left from making that rather basic point. Having lost any belief in objective truths, unless proven by the scientific method, Timesmen and the like are unable to look at what is being said here and admit, even if just to themselves, that when a culture's leading intellectuals believe things that are this patently false then that culture is seriously dysfunctional.
Posted by Orrin Judd at April 8, 2003 12:54 AM
Sad but true.
Is it even possible to one "cure" all those people, their supporters, defenders, apologists and sympathizers of these delusions and world view? And if so, how?
Barry - Someone once said that the way to get a new theory accepted is to wait for all the old scientists to die - there's probably a similar rule for Islamists.
Posted by: Paul Jaminet at April 8, 2003 7:11 AMExcept that without at least some idea of what constitutes truth---other than a means to achieve whatever is believed to be the ends, at any particular moment---there seems to be in this case an endemic, self-perpetuating system of delusion leading to depravity and disaster.
I've come across several articles today that describe the symptoms:
">http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD49103
">http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1049683151389
">http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1049683151007
Barry:
You have to start posting stuff, Please....
Actually, it occurred to me that one way to "cure" such delusions (see question in post #1) is to have everyone believe them(!), which is, I believe, the strategy of all to many of those running and funding the Middle-East studies programs at the universities.
Problem seems to be that while France, Belgium, Germany and Russia
(to name a few) are on board, the US still hasn't been totally persuaded.
At least, not yet.
The thing that struck me was this "intellectual's" statement that the most pressing problem in the Middle East was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He didn't say anything about political repression or booming birthrates or economic stagnation or stifling illiteracy among young Arabs. It's always the j-e-w-s.
Posted by: David Wilfinger at April 8, 2003 10:03 AMMr. Judd;
I liked best the concept that preventing Arabs from being fed feet first in to a shredder isn't a form of outreach to aggrieved Arabs. As Mr. Wilfinger says, Arab aggrievement seems to stem only from the actions of the Jews.
How do you characterize a world view based almost totally on nationality, ethnicity and religion?
Ethnicity and religion seem to be the overiding factors in determining the nature of all human relations as far as much of the Arab world is concerned.
Mr. Aboulmagd appears to be projecting this lack of tolerance on to the west and the U.S. in particular. The real reason for the "exagerated" response to Sept. 11 is the openness of the U.S. and the realization that 9/11 is where such openness could lead if we fail to realistically take the measure of those who wish us harm.
Mr. Aboulmagd acknowledges, on the one hand, the recognition by the U.S. of the commonalities of mankind, while on the other, seems to chide her for not respecting those who do not.
If Mr. Aboulmagd has "...devoted decades...to the cause of...promoting understanding between muslims and non-muslims" there are some flaws in his approach.
A huge problem is that Arabs (and others) like Aboulmagd treat the Arab world like a monolith
, which is a fiction. Some Arabs are being fed feet first into shredders--some aren't. So it's really not an outreach to Arabs when we rescue some from that fate. It's just an outreach to those that are rescued. The others, Aboulmagd included, have other, more pressing concerns, such as Israel. But at the same time, they don't accept that their rescued bretheren are anything but a piece of the same-thinking, unified Arab monolith, and so must deny the idea that, just maybe, they like being rescued.
It's worth noting that the Western media has been a chief offender in furthering this mirage of the Arab monolith.
All:
You can see though why removing the Palestinian thorn from the Arab paw will cause such a political earthquake. Turn all this fury inwards and the Arab world will change radically, though maybe not for the better.