Nothing to do with that. What the knuckle-dragging Western triumphalists fail to register is that men are always most severe against the faith against which they rebelled. I may be a confirmed skeptic of all the creeds under heaven, but my hostility toward Islam and let us say Hinduism are not equally matched. Having little acquaintance with the customs, the tradition and the folklore of the Hindu faith, it strikes me from a distance as an exotic and mysterious religion kissed by a thousand gods with a thousand d!cks. I have never endured its clerically imposed privations. I have never been scourged by its tyranny. I have not been robbed of sleep. Why should I then be expected to share the grievances of a Hindu widow on the lowest pecking order of the Indian caste system?
Where I'm intimately acquainted with Islam, its follies, its perils, its menace to civilisation, Hinduism stirs no ill blood in me except a vauge awareness that it's quite, quite bad. So it is with everybody else. Edward Said was a Maronite Christian turned atheist. He's not expected to wage Jihad against the towelheads.
Thats all true to an extent, but then in some ways Said rendered apologia for Islam. Do you remember the blind Egyptian sheikh who was involved in the original World Trade Centre bombing in 1993? I once saw an interview with Said in which he said that his arrest and investigations of him were examples of western bigotry and 'Islamophobia' because people mistook (because of their racist ignorance and prejudice) his hellfire ranting against kuffars for extremism when it was actually just harmless piety. This kind of thing does and can and has in the past led to an atmosphere in which even the slightest scrutiny of Islam, Islamic theology, even in extremist contexts, means putting yourself in the line of fire of people who cry wolf over and over and over again - it inhibited honest discussion of things, it still does in many contexts.
"we can smell traitors and country haters"
God is Love.
Love is Blind. Stevie Wonder is blind. Therefore, Stevie Wonder is God.
Topic: The West is Best - Ibn Warraq