roachboy

i dont have time to respond in detail to your post at the moment, jorgelito, so i'll defer until the weekend...for the moment, i dont think you necessarily have to go as far back in time as you are going, though the very general contexts you point to would ultimately figure and you would have to know something abut them in order to think in a differentiated way about this "fundamentalist" matter.

you already have a fine example of a regime instrumentalizing fear of a "fundamentalist" movement for its own political ends in algeria--teh fln was worried that it was behind in polls, so soon after this problem became clear, a sequence of massacres happened that were attributed to the islamic salvantion front (fis)--most of which were in fact carried out by the fln itself, it turns out.

now i want to be clear: i am not saying that the present american administration has gone this far--what i am saying is
1. almost from the outset, these movements have been used to generate fear in a given population
2. that fear has been predicated on a totally undifferentiated understanding of who was responsible for attacks and why
3. this fear was generated with the end in mind of helping the party in power to remain in power.

this political usage of "islamic fundamentalism" is being repeated in the states--this law is a fine fine index of it. one way to counter it is to insist that one think otherwise about these movements--seperate them from each other and from islam in general; think about the particular conditions that shape them (economically, generationally, socially, religiously, etc)--each step in such an understanding is a push through the logic of bushworld----which believe would not still be in place politically had it not been for the extended, cynical usage the administration made of fear to legitimate itself.

most of these movements have been underway since the early 1980s--the horizon for understanding them is often shaped by political and economic developments that have unfolded since the 1970s---signposts include the mobilization around the iranian revolution, through the rise of parallel groups in egypt, through the rise of parallel movements in saudi arabia, to the rise of movements superficially similar in western europe.

the general explanations include (in some cases) the nature and degree of state repression, the extent to which that repression drove political opposition into the mosques because theyu were among the only spaces not directly and often brutally repressed (such was the case in iran--the pattern repeats in many cases): in western europe, you have a whole host of other factors, liek the ending of the more open immigration policies that had obtained at least since world war 2 during the period of the oil shock, which fundamentally transformed the kind of relation you see between what was migrant labour and the spaces to which they migrate....

out of time, but the point is that when you talk about "islamic fundamentalism" you are not talking about a single phenomenon.

all this "facing reality" or "acknowledging the problem" talk in this thread is reduced to nothing by this fact alone: laws like those being discussed in this thread are not at all about facing reality: they are about facing a particular, cynical, incoherent way of enframing reality. outside the logic of bushworld, the "reality" being faced across laws like this is an incoherent fantasy.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite