|
i was a bit concerned when i saw the way this thread was framed that it might deteriorate into a kind of "my religion is better then yours" thread and sure enough...the "fundamentalist christianity is better than islam" trend above appeared.
which served, as it usually does in these sorry times, as a pretext for trotting out the kind of uninformed nonsense about islam that seems to circulate out there to motivate folk who support bushworld to hedge themselves round with distorted views of the Other--in this case islam---in ways that are little more than transposed racism.
it seems that if you locate yourself within the context of defending fundamentalist protestant ideology in its recent american variant, then any level of racist idiocy is justified because it becomes intertwined with matters of "faith"--and thereby becomes an arbitrary committment the utility of which is not to be evaluated with reference to any descriptive power.
this type of argument is then an almost perfect example of the matter i have been going back to again and again in arguments with conservatives here--this style of argumentation boxes you in by shifting the premises from description to belief. so it follows that you can make apparently coherent arguments about islam without knowing the first thing about it. because in the end, these arguments are not about a world external to the believers--it is about the ways images of the world are processed in order to buttress a set of (arbitrary) convictions. it is also about how the right is mobilized politically.
you can see it as demonstrating why the right works with and through a horror of substantive critique..because their premises do not and cannot withstand it---from which follows their interest in using truncated arguments of "principle" as wedges to shut down the spaces within which critique can operate...see the thread on tenure and "accountability" at the university level for an example.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|