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once again, a simplistic way of framing an extremely complex issue witht he result that part of the thread ends up being about the way the thread is framed, and another part about the topic.
such is the nature of the Beast, perhaps.
if you are going to refer to 'islamic reform" in the singular, then it requires that there be some kind of template that functions to orient what you are saying.
let's assume for a moment that the template is iraq.
the link to colonialism that i have been hearing most often refers to iraq--the arbitrariness of the colonial construct iraq are obvious, if you look at the history of it--but this information does not enable anyone to simply map the 1920s onto the present and from that assume that a functional explanation has been developed---this because it skips over the particular mode of domination practiced by saddam hussein, which was predicated on a repeating of the british colonial model--generation of strict borders that divide factions (itself a colonial notion) and then a move to play factions off each other.
this is not a typical pattern, and so cannot function as the basis for general statements about "islamic reforms".
but if the unifying idea is not iraq, then what is it?
second, the category "islamic reform" presupposes that all middle eastern political regimes are dominated by clerics such that to refer to "islamic reform" refers to political reform in any direct way.
that presupposition is false.
the worst offense committed by the category is grouping together the self-evdently antagonistic elements within islam--if you focus on the conflict between "fundamentalist" groups and mainstream islam, and then, by extension, on "the west", the basic logic would be otherwise: it is obvious, if nothing else is, that these "groups" conflate the existing power structure within islam with the domination of globalizing capitalism/neocolonialism/americanization (take your pick).
so the huntington thesis is once again demonstrated to be incoherent.
another hobbling of actual thought that occurs through the repetition of the huntington thesis in a poll like you have in the op is that it not only makes thinking about conflicts that are ongoing like those referid to above extrememly difficult, but it also poses a kind of ridiculous seperation between "islam" and "the west"--what are these two categories?
where do they stop and start?
what are the implications of "thinking" this way for how you would understand the significant muslim populations that live, and have lived, in "western" countries" how does this not simply posit them as outsiders, as Other?
how is this any different from the rest of neofascist discourse in western europe, which recodes is racist understanding of islam through the same procedure, the same distinctions?
it is on the basis of this kind of non-understanding that a nitwit like jean-marie lepen can argue that muslims who live in france, who have lived in france, who are french citizens, whose children as a french as any other, should be "sent home"?
does that follow for folk here as well?
is that what you are saying?
it is hard to respond to the poll because i do not know what you are talking about across it.
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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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