In his weblog, Andrew Pulrang
In his weblog, Andrew Pulrang comments, …On the other hand, Bin Laden undercuts his own credibility by casting his argument in religious terms…
The whole post is well worth a read. I think this statement and the argument below it need a little qualification, though. The statements Bin Laden is making cause him to loose credibility in our eyes and perhaps in the eyes of many Muslims. What he says though clearly appeals to enough people that he is formidable.
Statements like Bin Laden’s are just not “21st century.” Andrew is right that they belong in the age of the Christian kings if not the Byzantine Empire. I’ve long thought that it would be worth the exercise of comparing the Middle East of today to Europe at the beginning of the Renassiance. Europe had been the heart of a vast, Roman, empire that crumbled and destroyed most of the existant civil and psychological infrastructure and plunged Europe into a dark age. I wonder if the same could be said about the Middle East in one way or another.
A wonderful high culture of arts and sciences existed in the Middle East. I’ve heard it argued that it was not the Irish that saved civilization but the Arabs, by proactively acquiring as much knowledge and literature as possible and not just transcribing it, but studying it and furthering it. This corpus of learning was rediscovered (relearned?) by Europe starting after the Reconquest of Spain. Was the decline of the influence of the Middle Eastern cultures analogous to the European Dark Ages?
Imagine the confusion and uncertainty, and the backlash they caused, in Europe as science was again communicated and practiced. In the last 50 years advances in communication have bombarded the developing world and the Middle East with current ideas of life, the universe and everything. Might this be a real cause of the Occidentosis (fear/hatred of the West) that is manifest today?
Boy, that’s enough rambling for tonight!