badgenome said:
The way I've always figured it... The most obvious explanation is that, while there are exceptions, generally there's a high degree of correlation between poverty and religiosity. But clearly something deeper must be going on to explain the aggression. I think globalism and western multiculturalism both factor in pretty heavily here. Globalism because people are now more aware of what other people around the world are doing and what they have. Sayyid Qutb was an influential Islamist whose trip to America in the '40s seemed to have a profound impact on him, and a lot of the regression in the Islamic world strikes me as a similar backlash against modernity. And multiculturalism because it's a nil, and you can't beat something with nothing. The timidity that this non-value breeds only emboldens the absolute worst elements in Islamdom. The most vociferous western feminists seem to pipe right down when it comes to the treatment of women in the Islamic world because, thanks to the insane hierarchy of political correctness, "Muslim" trumps "woman" every time. It's pretty hard to empower reformers and democrats in Islamic countries when you're busy fawning over the hardliners and how authentically anti-US/Bush/capitalism/whatever they are. |
Basically a replacement for Communism as a rallying cry for the dispossessed? I would debate the latter point as well, because many Western efforts are focused on bettering the lot of women in the Muslim world, certainly one of the main goals as far as social development in Afghanistan was education for girls, and some of my associates back in DC were working hard on a campaign to make it illegal for Americans to send their daughters on trips to other countries for the purpose of female genital mutilation (obviously illegal in this country, but they get around that by just sending them to Mali or somewhere and having it done anyway)
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
