Horseshit. "Perhaps the majority"? 700 million people?

Yeah, Arafat had a real lack of self-esteem and feeling of worthlessness, huh?

I've met an awful lot of Muslims, and have yet to see this "lack of self-esteem" as any more prevelent than any other group (and significantly less than Catholics or Buddhists in my experience).

I didn't say I agreed with it...I just posted it.

Anybody here have any thoughts on Gurr's "Relative Deprivation" theory?

BTW, if you haven't read Understanding Terrorist Networks by Sageman and this subject interests you, you should buy the book. Jimbo's recommendation is a good one.

Commentary: Al-Qaida's take on the U.S.
By Michael Scheuer
Special for United Press International
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breakin...3338-6777r.htm

Please see link in above post instead.

An insightful analysis. I'll have to find and read his books. Do you think he gored enough sacred cows? This type of thinking might explain why he was buried to the point he felt he had to write his expose's. It also reminds me of a couple other "speculative fiction" articles I've read that would be of interest to this board. If I can find them in my archives, I'll get TS to help me post them. Peregrino

This book review from yesterdays NY Times,seems to dovetail into the discussion. Having not read the book; I can't really speak to it. The review raises some interesting points.
May 4, 2005
The Jihad Is a Civil War, the West Only a Bystander
By WILLIAM GRIMES
NO GOD BUT GOD
The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam
By Reza Aslan
310 pages. Random House. $25.95.

For many in the West, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center turned a page in world history. They signaled the onset of a monumental struggle between fundamentalist Islam and modern, secular democracy, what the Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington has called a "clash of civilizations."

Not so, Reza Aslan argues in "No god but God." "What is taking place now in the Muslim world is an internal conflict between Muslims, not an external battle between Islam and the West," he writes. "The West is merely a bystander - an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter in its story."

That history, grippingly narrated and thoughtfully examined, takes up nearly all of "No god but God." Mr. Aslan, an Iranian by birth and a doctoral student in history and religion at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has written a literate, accessible introduction to Islam (or, more accurately Islams), carefully placing its message and rituals in historical context. Complete with a glossary and an annotated bibliography, it could easily serve as a college textbook.

Mr. Aslan is, in a certain sense, a fundamentalist. The Christian sense of the word is meaningless in Islam, of course, because Muslims believe that the Koran was dictated by God and, therefore, that its words are literally true. But like the puritanical Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia, whom he reviles, Mr. Aslan looks to the first Muslim community in Medina, established by Muhammad 1,400 years ago, as a model for reform today. His Medina, though, is a communal, egalitarian society dedicated to pluralism and tolerance. The problem with Islam, Mr. Aslan argues, is the clerical establishment that gained control over the interpretation of the Koran and the hadith: the anecdotes describing the words and deeds of Muhammad, passed on by his followers and their descendants. Less than two centuries after Muhammad's death in 632, there were some 700,000 hadith circulating throughout the Muslim world, "the great majority of which were unquestionably fabricated by individuals who sought to legitimize their own particular beliefs and practices by connecting them with the Prophet." The stoning of adulterous women, to take a notorious example, originated not in the Koran, but in the virulent misogyny of Umar, one of Muhammad's first converts and later the ruler of the caliphate, who simply claimed that this form of punishment had accidentally been left out of the Koran. Although women in the Medina community were given the right to inherit the property of their husbands and to keep their dowries as their own personal property, later scholars decided that the Koran, when instructing believers "not to pass on your wealth and property to the feeble-minded," had women and children in mind.

One of Mr. Aslan's most important chapters deals with the centuries-long struggle between traditionalists and rationalists over the proper interpretation of the Koran. The outcome weighs heavy on the world today. The rationalists saw the Koran as both the word of God and a historical document whose meanings change through time. For the traditionalists, the Koran is fixed and eternal. Therefore, "what was appropriate for Muhammad's community in the seventh century C.E. must be appropriate for all Muslim communities to come, regardless of the circumstances."

The traditionalists won. The power to interpret the Koran came under the control of religious scholars, collectively known as the ulama, who ended the era of consensus and free reasoning that, up to the 10th century, had defined Koranic inquiry.

If this sounds like a remote quarrel, it is not. Mr. Aslan says it is now being played out again throughout the Muslim world. This, he argues, is the real jihad, not holy war against the West, but the internal struggle for Islam's soul, with reformers pitted against reactionaries in Tehran, Cairo, Damascus and Jakarta, as well as in Muslim communities in the West. "Like the reformations of the past, this will be a terrifying event," he writes. "However, out of the ashes of cataclysm, a new chapter in the story of Islam will emerge."

This has a heroic ring to it, but Mr. Aslan acknowledges that the outcome is in doubt. He places his hopes in the like-minded liberals who, he suggests, constitute Islam's silent majority. "The fact is that the vast majority of the more than one billion Muslims in the world readily accept the fundamental principals of democracy," he writes. Like the reformers in Iran, they are committed to "genuine Islamic values like pluralism, freedom, justice, human rights, and above all, democracy."

This may be, but Mr. Aslan, in his polemical conclusion, tends to assert rather than present evidence. His impassioned plea for an Islamic form of democracy, although moving, sounds sophistical. Religion and the state, in his view, cannot be separate. The very concept is alien to Islam. "At its most basic level, the Islamic state is a state run by Muslims for Muslims, in which the determination of values, the norms of behavior, and the formation of laws are influenced by Islamic morality," he writes. Yet somehow pluralism, human rights, equality of the sexes and religious tolerance would prevail, because, ultimately, these values already exist in Islam.

As Mr. Aslan acknowledges, Iran's halting steps toward a synthesis of Islam and democracy have been discouraging. The example of the Taliban casts a very dark shadow over the idea of an Islamic state. But the tide of history, Mr. Aslan insists, is moving in the right direction, sweeping Islam back, after 1,400 years, toward Medina.

Wow, he pretty much stole his whole thesis from Michael Vlahos.

Maybe so, but it sure sounds an awful lot like the Reformation to me.

Nice to see this from the newspapers, reflecting what TR mentioned on another thread, and I suspect many others have thought too.

From Boston Globe, Why Islam is disrespected, by Jeff Jacoby, May 19, 2005

Hard points follow:

his take on USA:
http://www.usindo.org/Briefs/2005/SBY%20Speech.htm

Good read. Thanks.

sprechen Sie Deutsch?
 

Princeton professor: "Europe will be part of the Arab west". End of western civilisation by 2100?


Berlin, July 28, SPA -- Europe will have an Islamic majority by the end of this century based on current demographic and migration trends, a leading U.S. Middle East specialist said Wednesday.

"Europe will be part of the Arab west - the Maghreb," said Bernard Lewis, a Princeton University professor and author of numerous books on the Middle East, in an interview with the newspaper Die Welt.

In addition to immigration, Lewis said Europeans were marrying too late and having too few children whereas Moslems in Europe married early and had far larger numbers of children.

"Current trends show Europe will have a Moslem majority by the end of the 21st century at the latest," said Lewis as quoted by the paper.

Germany, the biggest European Union (E.U.) country, currently has over 3 million Moslems out of a total population of 82 million.

E.U. leaders will in December decide on whether to open membership talks with mainly Moslem Turkey which currently has a population of 70 million. --SPA 1419 Local Time 1119 GMT

Orginal interview (in German)
http://www.welt.de/data/2004/07/28/3...s&searchHILI=1

While the debate in here goes on....


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8551653/


Doc

Are we at war with Islam?
 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1811

BMT