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Promethus
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Battle Creek, Michigan
Jan 2002
time: 00:27
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I know that the average Apolyton OTer's attention span is to short for this but I thought it was importmant enough to bring it up.
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/magazine/23GURU.html
To anyone who has looked closely enough, Al Qaeda and its sister organizations plainly enjoy yet another strength, arguably the greatest strength of all, something truly imposing -- though in the Western press this final strength has received very little attention. Bin Laden is a Saudi plutocrat with Yemeni ancestors, and most of the suicide warriors of Sept. 11 were likewise Saudis, and the provenance of those people has focused everyone's attention on the Arabian peninsula. But Al Qaeda has broader roots. The organization was created in the late 1980's by an affiliation of three armed factions -- bin Laden's circle of ''Afghan'' Arabs, together with two factions from Egypt, the Islamic Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the latter led by Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's top theoretician. The Egyptian factions emerged from an older current, a school of thought from within Egypt's fundamentalist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, in the 1950's and 60's. And at the heart of that single school of thought stood, until his execution in 1966, a philosopher named Sayyid Qutb -- the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into Al Qaeda, their Karl Marx (to put it that way), their guide.
Qutb (pronounced KUH-tahb) wrote a book called ''Milestones,'' and that book was cited at his trial, which gave it immense publicity, especially after its author was hanged. ''Milestones'' became a classic manifesto of the terrorist wing of Islamic fundamentalism. A number of journalists have dutifully turned the pages of ''Milestones,'' trying to decipher the otherwise inscrutable terrorist point of view.
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Drake Tungsten
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Knee deep in alien womyn...
Oct 2001
time: 14:27
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quote:
The thing is that Qutb does give a nicely self contained explination and examination on the current alienation of man, which is what is so scary. |
I agree. This section in particular stood out to me...
quote:
In writing about modern life, he put his finger on something that every thinking person can recognize, if only vaguely -- the feeling that human nature and modern life are somehow at odds. But Qutb evoked this feeling in a specifically Muslim fashion. It is easy to imagine that, in expounding on these themes back in the 1950's and 60's, Qutb had already identified the kind of personal agony that Mohamed Atta and the suicide warriors of Sept. 11 must have experienced in our own time. It was the agony of inhabiting a modern world of liberal ideas and achievements while feeling that true life exists somewhere else. It was the agony of walking down a modern sidewalk while dreaming of a different universe altogether, located in the Koranic past -- the agony of being pulled this way and that. |
I feel that agony all the time, the sense that the things our modern society expects of us are in some way antithetical to the things we should really be doing. I have my own struggles with reconciling my desire for spiritual fulfillment with the spiritual void that is modern life. When I think about my own struggle with these issues, I can understand how people like Mohammed Atta come about. Honestly, if I had been born in Saudi Arabia, I could have been Mohammed Atta. That's a truly horrifying thing, to know that a mere twist of fate in your place of birth could turn you into the evil you hate and fear most...
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Drake Tungsten
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Knee deep in alien womyn...
Oct 2001
time: 14:27
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quote:
Maybe this sounds strange, but I believe science and religion are one and the same; they just take differing forms. |
I've thought this for a while as well. While there are differences, at their most basic levels both religion and science are attempts by man to comprehend the world around them. Both also rest squarely on a foundation of faith, whether in an all-powerful deity or the power of human reason. As Qutb points out, the complete division between the two in Western society is certainly odd and possibly harmful...
Last edited by Drake Tungsten on 24-03-2003 at 13:43
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Berzerker
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topeka, kansas,USA
May 1999
time: 23:27
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quote:
Actually, I think the last bit of the article implied that we might lose this battle of ideas because many in the West dont really believe in the rightness of our ideals. In order to triumph over Islamic fundamentalism, we need to have a strong belief in the superiority of our system. I think the author has doubts about our faith in Western values. I'm inclined to agree with him. |
Let me see, freedom (albeit greatly limited by left and right wingers)...or a brutal theocracy where people are tortured for minor infractions of religious dogma. Sorry, but I have NO doubt about which system is better and have NO ambivelance about allowing the "sinful" behavior this guy laments to have our freedom. A big problem is we've sacrificed our freedom for security in all sorts of areas, but even with the loss of that freedom, the west is still far better than Islamic states and will be as long as Muslim theocrats reject religious freedom. If we in the west were having to live in an Islamic state, you'd see just how much we believe in western values, but it's hard to see that loyalty we have to western values when we aren't faced with the alternative Muslim theocrats might have waiting for us. What's the saying? You don't know what you have until you lose it? We can speak out about what we don't like and do so quite a bit, but do people living in Islam have that same freedom? Nope. I wonder how much people living in those states actually believe in the Islam being practiced over there. Just as there are competing values in the west, there are competing values in Islam, and one set of values matches how most of us feel about Islam - live and let live. They are in a "civil war" over their own religion and they are going to conquer the west because we supposedly don't believe in our values? Nah...
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Agathon
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Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:27
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quote:
Qutb wrote that, all over the world, humans had reached a moment of unbearable crisis. The human race had lost touch with human nature. Man's inspiration, intelligence and morality were degenerating. Sexual relations were deteriorating ''to a level lower than the beasts.'' Man was miserable, anxious and skeptical, sinking into idiocy, insanity and crime. People were turning, in their unhappiness, to drugs, alcohol and existentialism. Qutb admired economic productivity and scientific knowledge. But he did not think that wealth and science were rescuing the human race. He figured that, on the contrary, the richest countries were the unhappiest of all. |
Pretty much true really.
The idea that rationality cannot be sufficient for knowledge independently of God is an old one - Al Ghazali writes about this in "Deliverance from Error"
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Berzerker
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topeka, kansas,USA
May 1999
time: 23:27
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Drake - quote:
[quote]The threat isn't that we will lose our values to Islam, but that we will lose Islam to the values that Qutb espoused. |
Ah, I see.
quote:
I feel that agony all the time, the sense that the things our modern society expects of us are in some way antithetical to the things we should really be doing. I have my own struggles with reconciling my desire for spiritual fulfillment with the spiritual void that is modern life. |
That led me to believe you viewed western values as inferior in some way to Islam and worthy of rejection by Muslims. Let's face it, people in the past were more religious because they didn't have our toys.  Besides, we know why a volcano goes off, they didn't, so only "God" could explain the world to them.
quote:
It is in all of our interests to ensure the Islamic fundamentalism does not dominate the Islamic world, but I'm not sure if we in the West have the faith in our own values that is crucial in any attempt to spread our values to the Islamic world... |
The battle you speak of is for Muslims to fight, not us. The outcome may be in our interest, but we aren't going to convert Muslims to our values without them wanting our values in the first place. And if we have to give up some of our values to accomodate Muslims, that fight isn't worth having. It's bad enough we have Christian fundies trying to run our lives without having to give away freedoms to get the approval of other fundies. All we can do is kill the SOB's when they try to kill us for being infidels, but in reality, most Muslims could care less about how we live our lives. They want the freedom to worship and as long as we leave them alone, they'll leave us alone. But we haven't been leaving them alone, that's why some of them have been attacking us.
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chegitz guevara
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Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:27
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It's not hard to realize that the modern world is fundimentally alienating to human beings. Just about everyone in the world realizes and understands that this is a problem. There are some, though, who think this is the best of all possible worlds.
For the rest of us, who realize something is fundimentally wrong with this world, the question is: what? For Qutb and others of his ilk, from bin Laden to Jerry Falwell, the answer is obvious, people have turned away from God. For communists, it's the capitalist system. For conservatives and liberals, it's lack of personal morals (but each side accuses the other for not having them). For libertarians, it's living in socialism.
Regardless of who is right (we commies are, just for the record), almost everyone feels the world is wrong. If I had to put my finger on it, the single main source of the problem is the pace of change in the world. Things change so fast we don't have time to adapt, let alone get settled. The world has changed a lot in my 36 years, and I still want to relate to it the way I learned in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Today's leaders lament that the world isn't like they knew it growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Tune in, turn on, and drop out wasn't merely a mantra for hippies. People have been doing it since capitalism began. Look at the trends in yuppie culture: dreaming of retiring to Tuscany or Provance, the slow food movement, etc.
Qutb has an answer, and an easy one at that. As the Italian and German Communists found, much to their chagrin, the easy answers of Fascism beat the complicated ones of socialism all the time. This is gonna be a long struggle.
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24-03-2003 11:15
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