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it might help if you looked at some studies of who "islamic fundamentalists" tend to be, where they come from, etc.
they are not parallel to american-style christian fundamentalists--they do not come from a petit bourgeois background for the most part and are not working in situations with stable social networks in place--they are not about instituting new forms of social stability.
it looks like in most places these movements come out of impoverished, marginalized spaces--often french-style suburbs (look at a map of paris, for example, to get an idea of this notion of urban geography--it is almost the opposite of the american---in general poorer folk shoved to the margins of the city and capital concentrated at the center) in which the most basic features of social life--markets, mosques, etc.---have collapsed.
these movements are reflections of social deterioration that operate on the basis of a rejection of the entirety of existing society--including existing forms of islam, existing power relations within and outside the religion. this rejection operates on generational lines as well. there is interesting new work coming out on these movements in morocco, for example, which is well worth checking out.
the general conclusion is that these movements are more about the new types of extremely cultural and economic poverty being engendered by globalization than they are about anything to do with islam as such. this argument is not surprising if you think about it from a viewpoint that does not assume up front that capitalism is an unqualified good.
the viewpoint that ustwo expresses is not about even beginning to try to understand anything about these movements: it is about using a vague idea of them as a justification for racism.
his is a good index of the extent to which the right in the states provides no analytic latitude, no space for thinking, no space for anything really except for the group hate phenomenon. the american right is about the only space on earth where the notion of clash of civilizations has any currency. this operates at a level of sophisitication than maybe someday might rise to the appalling, low standards of such publications as time magazine, but until that day comes will float about in the lower reaches of intellectual vacuousness, the modes of which you check in with by reading the washington times.
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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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