What's this? A halfway-sane article about the Afghan conflict!?

Source: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/simplistic-moralism-sells-afghans-short-20100806-11ofx.html

Simplistic moralism sells Afghans short
PRIYAMVADA GOPAL
August 7, 2010

Cartoon tales of good and evil are distorting our picture of Afghanistan.

Reprising a legendary 1985 National Geographic cover, this week's Time magazine features another beautiful young Afghan woman, but with a gaping hole where her nose used to be before it was cut off under Taliban direction. A stark caption reads: ''What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan.''

An editorial insists the image is not shown ''either in support of the US war effort or in opposition to it'', but to counterbalance damaging WikiLeaks revelations - more than 90,000 leaked documents that, Time believes, cannot provide ''emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land''.

Feminists have long argued that invoking the condition of women to justify occupation is a cynical ploy, and the Time cover already stands accused of it. Interestingly, the WikiLeaks documents reveal CIA advice to use the plight of Afghan women as ''pressure points'', an emotive way to rally flagging public support for the war.

Misogynist violence is unacceptable, but we must also be concerned by the insistence that the complexities of war and occupation can be reduced to bedtime stories. Time is not alone in condensing Afghan reality into simplistic morality tales. A deplorable number of recent works habituate us into thinking about Afghanistan as what British Defence Minister Liam Fox called a ''broken 13th-century country'', defined by pathologically violent men and brutalised women.

While Afghans have been further disempowered by being reduced to objects of Western chastisement, a recent judgment against Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul has raised the possibility of challenging distortions.

Based on her stay in the eponymous protagonist's home, Seierstad's memoir uses offensive commercial language to describe ordinary marital negotiations and refers to female characters as ''the burqa''. The tone implies that even the most anti-Taliban Afghan men are irredeemably vicious patriarchs. Predictably, some critical reaction deemed Afghanistan a ''horrible society''.

While there exists a colonial tradition of relegating the non-West to the past of the West - and some suggest leaving it to rot in hopelessness - the trendier option involves incorporating Afghans into modernity by teaching them to live in a globalised present.

In non-fiction bestsellers such as Deborah Rodriguez's Kabul Beauty School, an American woman teaches Afghan women the intricacies of hair colour, sexiness, and resisting oppression. ''To all appearances, there is no sex life in Afghanistan,'' writes Rodriguez, obsessed, as is Seierstad, with the nuptial habits of Afghans. Sex and the City 2, set in the Middle East, may have tanked as a movie, but as ideology it has displaced meaningful global feminism.

Acceptable Afghan-American voices such as Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner) and Awista Ayub (Kabul Girls Soccer Club) reiterate the notion that suburban America can ''infuse'' Afghans with freedom. Formulaic narratives are populated by tireless Western humanitarians, sex-crazed polygamous paedophiles (most Afghan men) and burqa-clad ''child-women'' who are broken in body and spirit, or have just enough doughtiness to be scripted into a triumphal Hollywood narrative. The real effects of the NATO occupation, including the worsening of many women's lives under the lethal combination of patriarchal feudalism and new corporate militarism, are rarely discussed.

The mutilated Afghan woman ultimately fills a symbolic void where there should be ideas for real change. The truth is that the US and allied regimes do not have anything substantial to offer Afghanistan beyond feeding the gargantuan war machine they have unleashed.

In the affluent West itself, modernity is now about dismantling welfare systems, increasing inequality (disenfranchising women in the process) and subsidising corporate profits.

Other ideas once associated with modernity - social justice, economic fairness and peace, all of which would enfranchise Afghan women - have been relegated to the past in the name of progress.

This bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators.

GUARDIAN

Priyamvada Gopal teaches post-colonial studies at Cambridge University.

Stop Blaming Ignorance for Islamophobia

In the popular discourse Muslims are the regular target of diatribe. It is also just as expected to answer such prejudicial behaviour with allegations of ‘ignorance’. So if someone is a bigot, it is because they are ‘ignorant’. If someone discriminates, it is because they are ‘ignorant’. Now, nobody is denying that this is true at least some of the time, but such a way of thinking possesses a serious flaw.

If we assume that a bigoted person is so due to the state of being ignorant, it becomes implicit that this person’s attitude is an irrational aberration, in contrast to rational, non-ignorant society at large. By extension, we go on to assume that this bigotry can be remedied by the removal of ignorance. Thus, ‘educating’ that person, in removing his/her ignorance, makes that person no longer a bigot, bringing him/her in line with ‘normal’ society.

Can anyone see the problem here? Bigotry is seen as the fault of the person. It is up to that person to change, because they are guilty and we are innocent. The onus for tackling religious prejudice is put solely on the shoulders of the individual. But no individual exists in a vacuum. Such an approach effectively whitewashes the responsibility of institutional, structural and ideological factors in contributing to this prejudice.

We keep harping for individuals to ‘stop being so ignorant’ whilst the media continually employs sensationalist, reductionist and value-laden language. Whilst minority communities continue to bear the brunt of socioeconomic disadvantage. Whilst anti-terror laws practically single out Muslims as THE threat. Whilst politicians continually use Muslim-related issues as a convenient vote-buying tool. Whilst the popular subconscious still holds as axiomatic a worldview grounded in Orientalist tropes which cannot help but view Islam and the ‘East’ as inherently inferior - culturally, morally, intellectually and spiritually.

Ignorance? More often than not the most vocal and influential Islamophobes are highly educated, charismatic and intelligent, and actively seek knowledge related to Islam which they use to further their agendas. Indeed, far from being irrational, Islamophobia is a product of a highly rational system of power relations which instigates and reinforces oppression and dominance at multiple levels.

Now if I may hearken back to my university days, in the field of public health, there is a very famous analogy which lecturers are forever paraphrasing to first-year students as a means of illustrating a key principle of the discipline. Basically, students are asked to picture being beside a flowing river, and seeing a struggling person in the water. Of course, one would jump in and rescue him/her. But then another unfortunate person comes floating into view. And so you rescue that person as well. But yet more and more people come floating by, crying for help. You want to rescue them too – but have you ever considered – just who the heck is upstream pushing all those people into the river?

It is precisely these ‘upstream’ factors which we need to deal with if we are to achieve any real progress in tackling Islamophobia.

I Learned Something Today

If you ever lose a contact lens under your eyelid:

1. Gently push up your eyelid with your finger, similar to what you do when putting in a contact lens.

2. Without blinking, look up, then look down. Repeat until the lens comes out to the front again!

So simple, so useful, should be so obvious but often is not!



Bwahaha, you guys owe me a du'a.

Hijacked art, sidetracked peace

From link http://www.altmuslim.com/a/a/a/3857

There is a central tragedy to these endless cartoon scandals, such as the one involving the Seattle cartoonist, Molly Norris, who penned the comic sparking an "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day." No one is looking for a resolution.


By G. Willow Wilson, July 19, 2010


Seattle, Washington
When Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris was put on an Al Qaeda hit list for her "Draw Muhammad Day" project, my inbox started filling up.

Since I'm one of the only practicing Muslims in the American comics industry, people assumed I had some kind of profound insight into the reasons these cartoon incidents keep flaring up. But the only explanation I have is too simple to satisfy anyone: they happen because hate sells. It sells in the West, where anti-Muslim hate groups feed on incidents of Muslim rage; it sells in the Muslim world, where extremists are only too happy to use examples of Western intolerance to win over new recruits. This is the reality we live in: any satirized depiction of the Prophet Muhammad feeds into a global propaganda war, whether the artist intends it or not. There is no longer any such thing as artistic immunity in the battle of images, and to think otherwise is fatally naive.

Molly Norris thought otherwise. But as soon as she realized what she'd gotten herself into, it was too late: by taking the offending images off her website and issuing a bewildered apology, she enraged the Islamophobes who were ready to hail her as a martyr to their cause. In the opposing camp, Al Qaeda spokesman Anwar Al Awlaki was unwilling to give up such a plum opportunity to rally support for his jihad. A tepid explanation was not what either party wanted. Extremists of all stripes need blood and conflict in order to survive. Molly Norris has no true supporters: in order to be of any use to either the Islamophobes or the jihadis, she must be a blasphemer whose life is in jeopardy. As a peacemaker she loses her utility.

This is the central tragedy of these endless cartoon scandals. No one is looking for a resolution. Drawing insulting depictions of the Prophet Muhammad has become a favorite pastime of hipster racists, whose bulbous-nosed bushy-bearded 'satire' resembles the anti-Semitic cartoons of the Third Reich. Thanks in no small part to the vigorous, often violent outcry from hardliners in the Muslim world, these artists are elevated to a kind of freedom-of-speech sainthood whether their work has any real merit or not. Death threats are issued, lives pointlessly imperiled, careers of pundits - never themselves in any danger - made overnight. Noted American Muslim leader Imam Zaid Shakir put it best: this isn't the clash of civilizations. It's the clash of the uncivilized.

Molly Norris never drew a picture of the Prophet Muhammad as a wild-eyed Semitic bogeyman. She drew a cartoon teacup, the sort of thing you might find in a children's picture book. Her intent was to inject a little innocent humor into an increasingly absurd conflict. What she didn't realize is that there is no room left for innocence or humor in what has become a cynical exercise in mutual provocation. In honor of Draw Muhammad Day, her legion of unasked-for followers posted cartoons that were more and more grotesque and hate-filled. The result was a threat against Norris's life from an al Qaeda spokesman - and fellow American - who does a better job of caricaturing himself than a cartoonist ever could. She disavowed her own comparatively innocuous cartoons, took down her website, and went into hiding. But the battle begun in her name rages on.

What Norris failed to understand is that by creating events like "Draw Muhammad Day", artists hurl rhetorical stones that go straight through their enemies and hit Muslims like me. Al Qaeda isn't hurt by Draw Muhammad Day. Its entire PR campaign is built on incidents like these. Without the Molly Norrises and Jyllands Postens of the world, Al Qaeda would have to get a lot more creative with its recruitment strategies. Artists who caricature the Prophet inevitably claim, as Norris has done, that they never meant to hurt ordinary Muslims, but ordinary Muslims are the only ones who are hurt. As a Muslim in the comics industry I spend more time than is good for my mental health defending the art and the religion I love from each other. Events like the fallout from Draw Muhammad Day make me think I'm wasting my time - the hate runs too deep on both sides. My conscience won't let me support the criminalizing of art, but neither will it let me support a parade of cartoons depicting lurid, racist stereotypes of Arab men and passing them off as satire of a holy figure.

Molly Norris claims she never meant for this event to become a hate-fest. As silly as that sounds - anyone who's spent more than half an hour on the internet could have told her how this would turn out - I believe her. If provocation was her objective, she could be basking in the light of notoriety as we speak. Instead she's being vilified not only by extremists like Al Awlaki, but by her own former supporters. She's learned the hard way that this conflict was never about her art or her ideas. As her fans turn their backs, looking for someone with a better stomach for scandal, it's clear that no one was ever really interested in what she had to say.


G. Willow Wilson is the author of The Butterfly Mosque, a memoir about her conversion to Islam and life in the Middle East; as well as the award-winning comic books AIR and CAIRO. This article was previously published in the Newsweek/Washington Post blog On Faith.

HT in Oz: Foolishness on both sides

As I write this, Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT) has just held a conference here in Australia. Now for those of you not in the know, HT is an Islamist organization founded in 1953 with the goal of establishing a global caliphate. The theme of the conference was “The Struggle for Islam in the West”, keeping in with the group’s dualistic world view.

Predictably, the newspapers became ablaze. The site of the conference itself saw a picket by the Australian Protectionist Party, a xenophobic anti-immigration group. Wherever one turns, headlines scream of assaults on democracy (which HT has called for Muslims to reject) and ‘western culture/values’ in general.

What a circus. HT claims to act in the best interest of Muslims, but their methodology raises more questions than answers. For a start, how exactly do they plan to get ‘back’ former Muslim territories like Spain, as they desire? What will the non-Muslim inhabitants make of it? And how about the Shi’a? How will they be a part of the caliphate?

And they believe in a War on Islam – nobody is denying that Muslims so often bear the brunt of persecution in today’s world, but this self-indulgent luxuriation in paranoid “WAHHH the whole world is against us” conspiracy theories is simply obscene. It achieves absolutely nothing except perpetuate a hopeless victim mentality and further entrench the Huntingtonian concept of a “Clash of Civilizations” which has already been the source of so much pain and suffering in the world. People are complaining of being treated as a faceless, monolithic entity, but are all too happy to return the favour. Ya Allah, do they think that the Prophet s.a.w was sent to further divide humanity? Such an approach is good for nothing but the creation of fitna.

The opposing side is definitely not free from blame either. They go on pontificating about their sacred “democracy” and proclaim secular fatwas against those who offer even the slightest hint of criticism. So they say that democracy should be defended from Islam? If by “democracy”, one means the ability of the common people to have their voices heard by government, then this is absolutely compatible with Islam. In fact, one could even argue that throughout history, Islamic societies have done a much better job of this than their Occidental counterparts. But if by “democracy”, one means the specific institutions developed in Western contexts, it is nothing more than ideologically-motivated hubris to suggest that a particular system of governance is superior, has been superior, and will always be superior regardless of time, place and circumstance.

Both parties suffer from a bad case of cart-before-the-horse syndrome. If you want to change society for the better, purify your heart first! If this is not done, then even the most “perfect” external structure will be nothing but an empty shell. Why are people so obsessed with their ambitions in the dunya? This world is meant to be used for the benefit of the akhirah, not the other way around. You want to "save" Islam? Oh brother, sister, Islam is not a thing which is for "saving", and certainly not by the dabblings of politicians - don't you even have enough iman to realize that God's victory is assured already? He is the Greatest, the best of planners. Just follow the shari'ah and the tariqah, and everything else will come natually.

I am reminded of a sohba I attended last week when the sheikhs talked about how Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi (q) used the example of a flute to illustrate the relationship between the external and internal realities of things. Now, there is the flute as a piece of wood, and the flute as a thing which, by the interaction of its physical, external form with an inner quality, allows for the creation of music as the air flows through it. If we apply this analogy here, I daresay we are caught between two sets of musicless flutes which incidentally deny the validity of all other wind instruments.

What's in a Name Part XVIVXIXIXIXIXIXIXIXI

I found out in the newspaper the other day that 41 people were killed and 175 injured in a bombing at a Sufi shrine in Lahore (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/bombers-target-heart-of-liberal-islam-in-pakistan/story-e6frg6so-1225887291875). My heart filled with rage – but not because of the actual incident itself. Astaghfirullah, something else was the initial cause of my anger.

That article was the front-pager and plastered all over the top in big bold letters was the title ‘Bombers target heart of liberal Islam', in a move that ‘appeared designed to inflame sectarian tensions’. The article goes on to state ‘Lahore is a sort of mecca for Sufism, the liberal, mystical arm of Islam that rejects the concept of jihad and promotes spiritual development through music and prayer’, finishing with a mention of an earlier attack on two Ahmadi mosques.

This piece is a near-perfect example of the hackneyed, reductionist and misleading use of language that newspaper editors and journalists seem so fond of, especially when writing about topics related (or not – religious profiling of delinquent youths, anyone?) to Islam. Complex phenomenon are reduced to easily-digestible categories that pit good versus evil, ‘liberal’ versus ‘conservative’ in a Manichean struggle, for the entertainment of the plebiscite.

As one who is highly empathetic to Sufism, I take it I am a ‘liberal’ then. So what the heck does that mean? That I listen to popular western music (I don’t)? Go to nightclubs (nope)? Wear revealing clothing (I don’t even wear shorts in the Australian summer)? Am I really the same as, for example, the westernized descendents of upper-class Iranian exiles who may do all of the above? On the other hand, I can tell you for a fact that I feel uncomfortable being at the same table with someone with a glass of bubbly. I also pray five times a day, which usually would have marked me as a backward zealot except that according to this article my that is something I do a a means to lovey-dovey spiritual enlightenment (presumably other Muslims don’t pray?).

Oh yes, and I reject jihad! Damn the fact that ‘jihad’ is the term used to mean anything a Muslim might undertake to ‘struggle’ for the perfection of his/other people’s Islam, and can range from refusing to have that extra cookie in the jar, to smiling whenever one greets another person, to defending Jerusalem from the forces of Richard the Lionheart! Damn the fact that so many of the greatest heroes and defenders of the Muslim peoples and upholders of chivalry and honour have been Sufis. Presumably Imam Shamil and Abd al-Qadir al Jazairi spent their days drinking tea and whining about what they could do to better integrate into Imperial society with those nice Russians and Frenchmen (a sausage-sizzle, perhaps?)!

And Sufism is implied to be a sect – but ‘Sufi’ itself is just a term used by westerners to categorise the expression of the science of the purification of the heart. It is a practice and a discipline. Sufism exists across the entire spectrum of Islam. Saying Sufism is a sect is like saying peanut butter is a type of bread. The Ahmadis, with their radically different beliefs, are indeed a sect – they themselves are named after their founder who believed he was the Messiah. Please do not compare us to them.

Criticism of such use of language may seem to be nit-picking, but such writings have a very real and very serious effect in the real world. If one controls language, one controls the way people think, and the media wields huge power and responsibility. I strongly do not appreciate the implication that in order to be seen as more acceptable to western society, I have to be a lesser Muslim, and that those who indiscriminately murder are somehow judged as being ‘more’ Muslim. I do not appreciate the caricature of Islamic spiritual practices and the implication that the only acceptable Muslim is one who unquestioningly devours current western trends and fashions. The pigeonholing of Muslims into ‘liberal/moderate’ and ‘conservative/radical’, in denying any complexity to us, effectively denies our humanity, reinforces the world-view of the terrorists, insults the victims of the bomb attack under the façade of mourning and shackles any real attempts to achieve meaningful international relations and inter-religious understanding

An Interview with Seyyed Hossein Nasr - Today's Zaman

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

‘So-called Islamic universities following Western tradition’

 Renowned Iranian thinker and academic Seyyed Hossein Nasr told Sunday’s Zaman that most of the so-called Islamic universities in the Muslim world are not Islamic in the sense that they operate within the framework of a Western worldview.

“Their successes are successes of Western science,” Nasr said. According to Nasr, as long as Muslim educational institutions continue to copy Western science without engaging in any endeavor to internalize it, the Muslim tradition will continue to be destroyed. Professor Nasr is not altogether pessimistic, though. He observes that a new generation of Muslim intellectuals and scientists is being produced in certain Muslim countries. “Even when they write about Derrida, Heidegger, modern astrophysics or something like that, they try to speak from a perspective of a Muslim tradition,” he said.

Professor Nasr is particularly fond of the intellectual productivity he has witnessed in Turkey and Iran, whereas Western philosophy seems to be stuck at a dead end.

Nasr was in İstanbul to speak at a conference held as part of the UN-backed Alliance of Civilizations initiative, Sunday’s Zaman interviewed Nasr, who is regarded as a prime traditionalist, about the Muslim tradition, intellectual productivity in the East and the West and about the relationship between knowledge and the socio-cultural milieu it is produced in.

In the preface to “The Heart of Islam,” you say you wrote all your works to preserve tradition. What does tradition mean to you and why is its preservation so important?

The English word tradition is used in different ways, including customs, habits and historical transmission, but for me tradition means a reality of sacred origin which is given to humanity through revelation. Through preservation and application of that teaching, of that sacred instruction, our civilization was created. The same is true for the Western civilization. The Christian civilization was created by the coming of Christ. That is the beginning of the Christian tradition, and then it created the Western civilization with many forms of sacred Christian architecture, theology, ethics and forms of social structure. In Islam we have the Quranic revelation. That’s the beginning of the Islamic tradition and then the whole civilization is created with its art, with its social structure, with its laws and so forth. It is important to preserve this tradition because we believe that it comes from God, that it is reality.

So you don’t support the historicist claims about contextuality of revealed sacred texts?

We reject that completely. God always speaks in the language of the people to whom He addresses His message, but the sociological understanding of revelation is rejected by us. That is itself a completely anti-traditional idea. All Muslims for 1,400 years believed that the Quran comes from God, that it is not a product of pre-Islamic Arabian society or Mecca.

Do you make a distinction between the revelation of the Quran by God into the heart and mind of the Prophet and its understanding by the Prophet as a historical thing?

No, the Prophet was chosen by God and was protected from making errors. He was also protected by the Archangel. The Prophet’s understanding of the Quran is a guarantee for our correct understanding of the Quran.

There is a dependence on Western literature in the Muslim world by means of educational material. How will we preserve tradition if even on the most basic of issues we are dependant on a foreign tradition?

We will not be able to do so if we continue like this. Everything we do is copying from another civilization. Obviously it is going to end up by destroying our own civilization, and much of it has already been destroyed in the last 200 years. Education is a very, very key issue. When the West first began to colonize the Islamic world, they began with military forces, naval forces in the Mediterranean Sea and then land forces in North Africa. They soon followed by trying to dominate over the Islamic world by means of education, and since they had more knowledge of the natural world, natural sciences, many Muslims accepted this, and gradually the Western educational system spread throughout the Islamic world. I believe that what we have to do is to teach Western sciences, but not from the Western perspective. We have to recreate our own educational system. Even theology is being dominated now in certain places by just copying in a very weak way. I say “in a very weak way” because Western theology is not strong enough to persist.

How universal is the university? Can we speak of an Islamic university?

There is always a relationship between every form of knowledge and a worldview within which that knowledge is accepted as knowledge. There is no doubt about that. The worldview in all civilizations before modern times came from religion. This is true for every civilization. Hindu universities, Chinese universities, Islamic universities -- but as Western influence spreads all over the world, we will begin to emulate Western forms of knowledge, which claim to now be independent of religion. But it was not independent of the Christian worldview. The secularist paradigm which was created in the 17th century is itself a pseudo-religion in that it is a view of the nature of reality. There is no abstract knowledge; knowledge is always within the framework of a worldview, of a way of looking at the nature of reality.

Are there any Islamic universities in the world?

Since the first World Muslim Congress was held in the 1970s in Mecca, they decided to create Islamic universities throughout the Islamic world, and several have been created in Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan and elsewhere. They are called Islamic universities, but they are not really Islamic universities because they teach the Shariah, Arabic and Islamic history, but the other subjects are not integrated. In other places, they tried to take the old madrasa and modernize it, like al-Azhar University. The university itself is an Islamic university, but not the medical school. The medical school does not teach Islamic medicine. The school of architecture doesn’t produce Muslim architects. They copy Western architecture with a Muslim name. The name is Ahmet instead of John. But it is possible to have an Islamic university.

How will the Islamic philosophical worldview be revived?

I believe that all important intellectual transformations begin with a few, not with the many. When the modern scientific worldview came about, at the beginning, at the time of Galileo, there weren’t more than 20 people in Europe who understood and accepted what they were saying. The transformation always comes with the few.

Do you see new intellectual minds emerging in the Muslim world?

Definitely! Fifty years ago there were only two types of intellectuals in the Islamic world. One were those traditional ulama -- great scholars of Arabic, theology and Islamic law -- and the other type of intellectuals were totally Westernized intellectuals, but God does not figure in Western scientific thought. But 50 years later, now, we have a number of younger intellectuals in Turkey itself, in Malaysia, in Indonesia, in Iran, in Pakistan -- mostly in these five countries. Even when they write about Derrida and Heidegger, they try to speak from the perspective of a Muslim tradition. This is a very, very good sign. We didn’t have that 50 years ago. I have a lot of hopes for the future, and I spent all my life trying to create that. InshaAllah [God-willing] something will come out of it.

But is there still an intellectual infertility in the Muslim world?

I don’t usually see that in the same way. In Iran we have leading and incredible scientists doing all kinds of things in physics and in nuclear science. The fact that Islam has not made such a big contribution to Western science is a cultural problem. It is not a scientific problem. We lost our self-confidence, we lost the confidence in ourselves, we just try to copy the West. There are excellent Turkish heart surgeons or Arab heart surgeons in the US. But to make it a civilization of your own is something else. That was not done very much because of a lack of self-confidence.

What about the West? At least speaking about philosophy, it seems the West is passing through a kind of paralysis also.

The West is now undergoing a very, very severe intellectual crisis. The reason why people are not aware of it is because of the power of technology and the military might of the West. It is like the end of the Roman Empire. As long as the Roman legends were leading in Libya, nobody thought that something was wrong. It is a very similar situation. Western philosophy is now at a dead end. Even Heidegger said, Western philosophy ends with me. There is a philosophical crisis and a religious crisis as a result of that. After that comes the environmental crisis, which is not solved unless the West changes completely the way it lives, its worldview, and they don’t want to do it. So they use cosmetics all the time. Look at the Gulf of Mexico now. It is a great tragedy of human history. Nobody wants to talk about it. So the West is also experiencing a very, very large crisis, and I’d say it is suicide for us to try to blindly copy the West at this stage.

How did the West come to this point?

In a sense, if we speak in Islamic terms, the leaders of the society in the West decided to sacrifice the akhira to the dunya completely [Nasr is referring to Quran 2:86, which reads: “These are the people who buy the life of this world (ad-dunya) at the price of the Hereafter (al-akhira).”] The great German poet Goethe in “Faust” speaks about this. Faust sells his soul to the devil in order to get power and technology. So everything is sacrificed for material ends and earthly human welfare. But we also have spiritual needs.

Can we update Western democracy into a new system where our spiritual needs are also provided for?

First of all, democracy is a method; it is not a value system. It is a method of government, and it is a question of having more people participate. Look at the Ottoman world -- very powerful sultans sat here in İstanbul, and people claim that there was no democracy in the Ottoman state. But who elected all the village elders who ran all of Anatolia? It wasn’t the sultans sitting in Topkapı Palace. It was the local people. There was a lot of internal democracy within the Islamic world even at that time. Now it is possible to develop an Islamic model of democracy on a more macro level without sacrificing the spiritual values. But it is something that Muslims have to work on, and we are in a terrible situation when it comes to the field of politics.

During the last 200 years, the power of governance in the Islamic world has increased, not decreased. It increased step-by-step. As a result, all our institutions have been destroyed. We are now looking for models based on Western civilization, and they don’t always work because those institutions grew out of a particular civilization. What it needs is creativity and adaptation. Democracy is also not ideal in the West. Money is much more powerful than the individual. We see this in the US. You cannot even participate in a nomination for a party unless you’re a millionaire to begin with.

Please comment on the idea that original and innovative ideas need freedom to blossom. Looking from this perspective, how do you evaluate the atmosphere of freedom and democracy in Turkey?

First of all, let me talk about “new ideas needing freedom in order to blossom.” What happened to the word “truth”? Where is truth in this matter? Every new idea is not a good idea. Politically, we don’t believe that Karl Marx’s ideas, which were very new, were very good also. They killed tens of thousands of people during the next 100 years after his death. Truth is the criteria. And in every society, there must be this ambiance in which ideas are tested and only true ideas survive. Islamic civilization in its golden age created this ambiance. Otherwise it would not have produced such great philosophers. People debated each other and opposed each other, but they did not oppose the oneness of God. That was like a sky over everything. But within that, there was freedom of discussion. We already lost that. That has become more and more restrictive in the last century with the rise of modernism, which in the name of freedom destroyed the whole atmosphere of the Islamic ambiance. So you were free only if you expressed Western ideas; otherwise, you would be put in prison.

Now the atmosphere in Turkey is fairly good. I am not saying ideal, but the two countries which have the greatest field of intellectuals are in Turkey and Iran. Pure philosophy, which is the heart of all scientific development, is produced more in Iran and Turkey than in the rest of the Islamic countries. I think Turkey and Iran have the largest number of books coming out which seriously deal with these intellectual matters.



23 May 2010, Sunday


KERİM BALCI / ŞEYMA AKKOYUNLU İSTANBUL

Source: www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-210911-so-called-islamic-universities-following-western-tradition.html