{"id":1362,"date":"2007-03-03T19:52:36","date_gmt":"2007-03-03T19:52:36","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2007-03-03T19:55:01","modified_gmt":"2007-03-03T19:55:01","slug":"deans_world_dis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1362","title":{"rendered":"Dean’s World: Discuss"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dean Esmay has a new post up<\/a> explaining (somewhat) his new stance on Islamophobes, as well as a post directly addressed to me<\/a> about his decision and my post on it.<\/p>\n

He suggests – and I agree – that some dialog around this issue would be a good thing.<\/p>\n

I’ll reaffirm: I think that the central problem of the current historical moment is the war within Islam. I think that war is between adherents of a traditional religion, and one that has cross-pollinated with some of the less-desirable features of Bad Philosophy to create an inherently dangerous and highly attractive response to modernity in the West and to oppression and hopelessness in much of the Arab world.<\/p>\n

If the bad guys win – and they may – Islam will be transformed into what it’s enemies today say it is. And we’ll have some significant problems.<\/p>\n

That hasn’t happened yet, and because it hasn’t happened yet it’s worth doing two things – 1) not treating Muslims as though they are automatically Bad Guys – even if they don’t like us and their interests are opposed to ours. Much of human history has involved the ways that cultures that disagree and compete manage to live together without mass slaughter…and 2) figuring out what, if anything, we can do from here that will weaken the Bad Guys and strengthen the good ones.<\/p>\n

Yeah, that’s Western-centric and implies that we get to decide who’s good and bad…and that issue itself will be an interesting topic for discussion.<\/p>\n

But I think that Dean is right when he says that Islam is not, itself the problem … today. And further, when he suggests that going down the path to Islamophobia today is dangerous, because it makes the ‘clash of civilizations’ more, not less likely. And he’s wrong when he fails to recognize that Islam is the locus of the problem, and that finding a way to deal with the changes Islam is going through – and to contain the energy those changes will release – is a central and legitimate task today.<\/p>\n

Do I agree with commenter Jim Rockford here when he responds that the root of all our problems in the Middle East today is Islam? No. Do I agree with something I read into Dean’s posts (which may not be there) which suggests that it has no part of the problem, and that things in the ummah are hunky-dory? No.<\/p>\n

So let’s discuss this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dean Esmay is trying to talk about it…and that’s a good idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1362"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}