Tebbit on Islam
It seems that Norman ‘Rottweiller’ Tebbit is once more unleashed and giving us all the benefit of his opinions on Islam. Normally I wouldn’t give him much attention, and all the more so now he is sinking into his dotage but it is worth addressing as his views are a recapitulation of an opinion that has gained common currency and is, imo, a factor that militates towards less understanding rather than more.
This is what he said:
“The Muslim religion is so unreformed since it was created that nowhere in the Muslim world has there been any real advance in science, or art or literature, or technology in the last 500 years.”
Firstly, let’s look at the non sequtur: ‘So unreformed since it was created’ is not only bad grammar but it is an oxymoron. Something cannot be ‘unreformed’ since it’s inception. It is questionable whether it can even be so unreformed in any event.
The subtext of Tebbit’s rant is basically that there is something inherently wrong with Islam a priori, not that there was once a time when there was ‘no problem’ and that a reformation will return to that status, which is what the term essentially means. Tebbit clearly doesn’t have the balls to just come out and say what he thinks - which is even odder imo, no-one would mind, he may even enjoy a rennaissance of sorts in his twilight years.
But onwards: no advances in 500 years. That would put the cut-off point at around 1500 CE. A convenient dating as it ignores the golden age of Islamic Civilization but we don’t even need to go there - there never has been a unified ‘Islamic State’ in the manner of , say, the British Empire or America and Islam in a sense is in fact the umma itself - this is the core of Tebbit’s issue btw as he clearly is much preoccupied with notions of ‘Britishness’ and ‘multiculturalism’.
As such, what Tebbit is in fact suggesting is that there have been no contributions to society, science, art and literature by Muslims in the last 500 years. The fact that he can get up and say something like this without be laughed at - as opposed to being instead challenged with angry ‘lefties’ or ‘liberals’ - is because the public are ignorant of what Islam is.
We don’t need to talk theology - it is a well-known that Islam is not widely understood as a religion. But tebbit is talking about culture. How many people are familiar with the masterpieces of Islamic Art? Yet the experts agree, this art is one of the finest expressions of human creative endeavour.
How many people can name (let alone have actually read) an Islamic work of literature other than the Arabian Nights? Yet they are among the world’s masterpieces and are acknowledged as influences on such western luminaries as Goethe, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare and on....
What is needed today is not a reformation but a spread of information about Islamic thought and creativity in all areas. This will outtflank all those who know nothing of Islam yet try to push their view of what it is - whether they are Tebbits, armchair generals or religious maniacs from under the Islamic umbrella.
Links
Godbothering
Techieness &
Design
Mystic Mayhem
ParaPolitics
Everything Else
Archives
Recent Entries
Meta
