- The only part of that paragraph which comes from the Koran are the
following sentences: “In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end
of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held
them up to ridicule.” In the translation of the Koran from which these
sentences come, they are not even two sentences, but one sentence.
http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=30&verse=10#. It is
reported that Bush was advised by Karen Armstrong and by Professor
Bernard Lewis.
But Mr Bush was staking his bet on the assumption that the Islamists
were not speaking for Islam; that the world’s Muslims long for
modernity; that they are themselves repelled by the violence of the
terrorists; that, most significantly, Islam is in its nature a religion that can
be “internalized”, like the world’s other great religions, and that the
traditional Islamic aspiration to conjoin worldly political with
otherworldly spiritual authority had somehow gone away. It didn’t help
that Mr Bush took for his advisers on the nature of Islam, the paid
operatives of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations, the
happyface pseudo-scholar Karen Armstrong, or the profoundly learned
but terminally vain Bernard Lewis. Each, in a different way, assured him
that Islam and modernity were potentially compatible.
The question, “But what if they are not?” was never seriously raised,
because it could not be raised behind the mud curtain of political
correctness that has descended over the Western academy and
intelligentsia. The idea that others see the world in a way that is not only
incompatible with, but utterly opposed to, the way we see it, is the thorn
ever-present in the rose bushes of multiculturalism. “Ideas have
consequences”, and the idea that Islam imagines itself in a fundamental,
physical conflict with everything outside of itself, is an idea with which
people in the contemporary West are morally and intellectually incapable
of coming to terms. David Warren, “Revisitation”, Real Clear Politics, 12
March 2006,
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/03/revisitation.html/. (This
article is also archived at http://www.webcitation.org/6m3pXQPzT). ↵
dana p.
(Dana P.)
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