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you know, the problems start with this abstraction called "islamic civilization"--islam (i posted this before elsewhere, i feel like i am repeating myself) is a belief system shared by a huge number of people around the world--indonesia to pakistan to the middle east to north and subsaharan africa to everywhere else...this belief system has certain common features--as would any belilef system--but it has turned out to be amazingly adapted to the contexts in which it has flourished---extraordinarily complicated kinds of syncretism---
it is **not** anything that can be coherently argued to be a discrete "civilization"---because the notion of a "civilization" as a self-enclosed, self-referential whole is incoherent--and even if it was not, the degree of variation would force you to generalize the encompassing category to the point of meaninglessness were you to try to make it do anything. so you loose either way.
this sounds like 19th century theories of the category, which more often than not sat on top of theories of racial "development" which is a way of domesticating racism by spreading it out as a history.
in the quote above, you have an exact replica of the old arguments: islam can be lined up against western european history as a repetition of a stage that the europeans have transcended (this writer seems to thank the reformation--on its own--for this--presumably this fuckwit would consider catholicism to be in itself midaeval and a childs version of protestant ideology)...this is a typical colonial outlook, a bit of debris floating free of the 1890s--according to this kind of argument, your own space is understood as adult---everything you do not understand is like a child--so all of history leads to you---and everything different is less than you---the argument is just bullshit.
as is the clash of civilization argument---it is the argument of folk like bin laden make too--but they use it as a kind of marketing tool--what amazes me is that you have people in the us who eagerly lap up the mirror image of this line to market their own war.
kinda make you think about the ways in which other actions are equivalent, doesnt it?
you live in 2004.
isolationism assumes the continued self-enclosedness of nation-states--not even a question, at best, it is a nostalgic dream that appeals to nationalists only---the proof of the total interconnectedness of the states with the world around it can be had by even opening your closet and looking at the labels on your clothes. the political adjustments to what is obviously already and increasingly a multilateral world economically are lagging well behind---the argument seems more to be between a kind of reactionary nationalism and an openness to a future---bewteen categories that let you deny that the world is changing over positions that cause you to face the massive uncertainties that the mutations is capitalism are causing for all units, economic, political, cultural and otherwise....
these posts get too long too fast....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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