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 they are in a war morally justified. The problem is that any war can be morally justified. It depends what side you are on. Smart guy, good writer, some faulty justification.
Related Posts
Call for films
While not strictly Muslim related, there is enough overlap in the ethnic and religious categories to make it worth posting. SPEAK OUT! : CALL FOR FILMS: SOUTH ASIANS, ARABS AND THE STATE OF THE UNION Many Voices. One Democracy. Our Responsibility. SOUTH ASIANS, ARABS AND THE STATE OF THE UNION 3rd I NY and Breakthrough, invite film and video submissions from all filmmakers of South Asian and Arab descent for the Speak Out! Festival, a film and video festival which explores themes of health care, education, immigration, campaign finance, terrorism, foreign policy and other issues directly related to the November…
A Must Read
Haroon over at Avaristan has done it again! He has written a very nice response to Reid’s orignial posting about misunderstandings between Christians and Muslims. Also very applicable to Muslim misunderstanding about Christians AND other Muslims! Well worth the read. Now if only he would change is colour scheme – so my eyes don’t hurt after I finish reading. White on Dark is just plain wrong!
‘Granddad, There’s a Head on the Beach’ and Other Summer Reads – NYTimes.com
So proud to know Willow. Looking forward to this book. ‘Granddad, There’s a Head on the Beach’ and Other Summer Reads – NYTimes.com. But this year’s improbably charming book about hackers is “Alif the Unseen,” a novel prompted by its author’s frustration. G. Willow Wilson, admired for her graphic novels and memoir, says that she was sick of treating her readers as separate factions (“comic-book geeks, literary NPR types and Muslims”) and sick of assumptions that blogging and social media could not have political consequences. So she conjured Alif, a young Arab-Indian hacker living in an unnamed Middle Eastern high-security…
3 thoughts on “The contributions of Muslim civilisations”
Comments are closed.
Salaam!
“The problem is that any war can be morally justified.”
Do you believe that is really the case? Can _any_ war be morally justified? I’m not sure.
In any case, I would make a clear distinction as to who the targets of war. Pakistani soldiers reportedly throwing themselves at Indian tanks is not evil; I think that is a justified cause. Palestinians attacking a pizzaria full of children must be condemdned with no exceptions.
I do not think that War is morally justified, however, I do believe that any side in a given conflict can easily justify their participation in that conflict as moral. Again, it depends on what side you are on. Do you think that al-Qaeda does not feel justified in their crimes? Pol Pot and his followers most probably felt the same. There have been very few instances in history where the doers of bad deeds have said “I know this is wrong, but we are going to do this anyway”. I know of none. Do you?
Maybe we’re arguing over words?
Perhaps I should have phrased it better. But ‘war’, a physical struggle, can become morally justified. An example is fighting a hostile invader – that’s a ‘war’ in my eyes.
As to Pol Pot, al-Qa’ida et al.: sure in their eyes their actions are ‘moral’. But what is the justification? Power-grabbing? Ethnic hatred? A “holy” cause? A fuzzy feeling?
Unless we’re all Abraham’s with sacrificial sons, I don’t think _anything_ can be morally justified.