Zombie on LGF talks about Islam

Edward Said speaks at UCLA


Said's thesis of "Orientalism" proposes that the "West" has fetishized the "East" (and he absurdly lumps the Middle East in with the Far East -- but that's another story). The West ascribed all sorts of patronizing foreign conceptual structures on the East. Out of this results colonialism, exploitation, etc. This was Said's view.

And even though he was wrong on many levels, on one point he was very right: The West came in and defined Islam as a "religion," when in fact it never was one before we came along and applied our condesceding label on something we couldn't grasp.

The very notion of there being "religions" is a Western one. Islam does not see things that way. To an observant Muslim, there is Islam as the one true mode of existence -- and everything else is blasphemous evil garbage. In Islamic belief, there is no competition between Islam and rival religions -- because everything non-Islamic is on a lower plane, to be dismissed and destroyed. Islam, in its own definition of itself, is vastly more than just a religion. It is life itself -- law, goevernment, personal behavior, military strategy, rules for intimacy, how each person on earth must spend every minute of every day, and on and on. Islam sees itself not merely as a manner of living -- it sees itself as the only possible manner of living. The other so-called "religions" are seen as threats that must be extirpated.

This "Orientalist" mis-definition of Islam as a religion -- as we Westerners understand religion -- is the root of the problem. Once we shake loose this label, and all the PC protection that comes along with it, we will finally be prepared to rid the world of Islam once and for all.

(Zombie is a pseudonym of a contributer to Little Green Footballs website. He didn't say I could use this, but I thought it was insightful.)