Six years ago, a prescient
Six years ago, a prescient Daniel Pipes produced this piece on the Western influences within militant Islam. It's worth reading more than once.
Like many of the Islamist leaders cited by Pipes, Mohamed Atta studied in the West. He studied architecture at the University of Hamburg-Harburg in Germany, producing an analysis of Alleppo, a town in Syria. His professor gave him the highest possible mark for his defense of it. Given its subject--the preservation of Islamic architecture in the face of modernism--I can only image the sublime aesthetic pleasure with which he anticipated the destruction of the quintessentially modern World Trade Center towers.
I knew of Atta's education. What I didn't know was the extent to which the very foundations of the Islamist movement have been Westernized. We must resist the tendency to regard the radicals as atavistic, superstitious, God-fearing simpletons. Pipes points out that the melding of Western-style notions of political ideology with Shari'a has produced a revolutionary movement that closely resembles twentieth-century Western totalitarianism. This is an ideology of a completely different order than the blustery, eternally offended and easily mocked fundamentalism we know and love here in America. Pipes write, "Islamism's potential grows as do its numbers." That's truly frightening. One of the reasons the Marxist left offers to explain the failure of a socialist revolution to materialize in America is that there simply weren't enough revolutionaries to make it happen here. There are nearly a billion Muslims on the planet, and while they're certainly not all Islamists, it seems to me that the ground is fertile for the planting of the radical seed.
An interesting quote from Hasan at-Turabi, then ruler of Sudan:
"I am for equality between the sexes...a woman who is not veiled is not the equal of men. She is not looked on as one would look on a man. She is looked at to see if she is beautiful, if she is desirable. When she is veiled, she is considered a human being, not an object of pleasure, not an erotic image."
A provocative defense against Western assumptions about the Repression of the Veil, although Turabi probably wasn't the portrait of feminist enlightenment. But it is something to think about as we contemplate our own culture, in which the bodies of women and sexual images thereof are used to sell everything from cars to shampoo, while the genuinely erotic has been replaced by gynecological fuck tapes, voyeurism, and drunken revelers flashing their tits in Daytona Beach and New Orleans.
