The Company You Keep

Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, launched a trenchant attack on Islamic culture, saying it was authoritarian, inflexible and under-achieving. The report was carried on the front page of the Daily Telegraph newspaper in the United Kingdom. [Read the article] . I was going to comment on Carey’s statement, but then I came across a response to the same article in the Muslims Under Progress blog. The section is entitled “Is Carey right?”. In fact all of the postings here are quite good except for the fact that the poster[?] seems to think that suicide bombers are martyrs if…

“Muslims need to recognize that we live in the modern world whether we like it or not. But the modern age in which we find ourselves is not a homogeneous one. The four pillars of modernity are modern concepts, conceptions, means and ends. These in turn shape the pluralistic and heterodox worldview of modern life. The plurality of modernities means that there exist many different ways through which people understand themselves in the world today. The modern age has given us modern conceptions, such as the conception of God, of Prophethood, etc. The modern age also furnishes us with modern…

Here are my notes from the Construction of the Other Panel. Please keep in mind that this is a stream of consciousness capture of my interpretation of what they had to say. (sorry for the terrible formatting – no time to fix it right now)