From: Kharin (kharin@kharin.com)
Date: Thu Sep 25 2003 - 12:31:26 MDT
" Do yourself a favour, read the book. "
I hardly think reading anything by Scruton (for the benefit of US readers, Scruton is our version of Falwell or Pat Buchanan) would do anyone a favour, and the only circumstance I can envisage purchasing a Scruton book is to ensure that it was safely burned.
However... in essence, Scruton describes a contrast between Western civilisation (which due to the inherent character of christianity allowed for a split between church and state) and Islamic civilisation (which did not). There is certainly something to this, but the problem is that, as one would expect for a christian apologist, Scruton grossly understates the theocratic character of many European states prior to the Renaissance and neglects to observe how the absence of formalised church structures in the Islamic world permitted the cultivation of much science and art that christian Europe would not have tolerated at the time. In addition, Scruton's solution to Islamic fundamentalism appears to be a revival of christian fundamentalism, expressed in such terms that he comes close to implying that September 11th was a just revenge for Western decadence and impiety:
"<i>"It may be hard to sympathize with these spoiled and self-indulgent advocates of violence. But it is not hard to sympathize with the feelings upon which they depend for their following. Globalization, in the eyes of its advocates, means free trade, increased prosperity, and the steady erosion of despotic regimes by the growing demand for freedom. In the eyes of its critics, however, it means the loss of sovereignty, together with large-scale social, economic, and aesthetic disruption. It also means an invasion of images that evoke outrage and disgust as much as envy in the hearts of those who are exposed to them. In the United States, where pornography is protected as free speech, people are able to accept that this assault on human dignity is the price we must pay for freedoms too precious to relinquish. But if you have not known those freedoms, and believe in any case that happiness resides not in freedom but in submission to God's law, the impact of pornography is devastating. No less devastating
, for pious Muslims, are what they see as the indecent clothes and behavior of young women in the West — clothes and behavior that are in no way modified when those women travel on business or as tourists to Muslim countries, there to presume on a toleration which they are willing to reciprocate but do little or nothing to earn."</i>"
Or indeed this:
"I would go further and suggest that what motivates the hostility of Islamic terrorists is not America’s material and political success but the flagrant democratization of those spheres that piety has traditionally protected. As Zakaria is aware, democratization seeks to turn every value into a price and then to bid down the price to the lowest that the market will sustain. This has happened to culture through the TV sit-com and chat-show, through MTV and the music video, through the Internet, and above all through pornography, protected by lawyers who invoke a constitution intended precisely to forbid such things. And it is these products of the moron culture that have the greatest and most shocking impacts on pious Muslims. "
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