Bill Maher #billmaher --- Even though perpetrators of this kind of violence invoke Islam, their acts are mainly political, she writes: What all suicide operations do have in common ... is a strategic goal: to compel liberal democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorist consider to be their homeland. This is not to deny that Hamas is as much a religious as a national movement, only that the fusion of the two is a modern innovation. The exalted love of the fatherland, which has no roots in Islamic culture, is now suffused with Muslim fervor. All of Armstrongs arguments come back to the same basic point: Its impossible to explain contemporary or historical violence solely through religion. Muslim fundamentalism ... has often—though again, not always—segued into physical aggression, she writes. This is not because Islam is constitutionally more prone to violence than Protestant Christianity, but rather because Muslims had a much harsher introduction to modernity. (Here, she dates modernity to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire during World War I.) In other words: Even religious history has to be read through the narrative lens of politics.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 19:01:59 +0000
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