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"The West and the Rest." Review
ELFRight from its opening lines, the book goes against the canons of political correctness: "Samuel Huntington's celebrated thesis that the Cold War has been succeeded by a 'clash of civilizations' has more credibility today than it had in 1993, when it was first put forward."But what follows is even more abundantly surprising. If the liberty of which Western civilization boasts also includes the possibility of that civilization's rejecting itself — and Scruton reserves one of his most brilliant chapters to this pervasive culture of rejection — then "this is a matter of a civilization aiming at its own destruction." Likewise, Islam defines itself not in terms of liberty but in terms of submission, and this submission is also self-destructive. It is the prisoner of a sacred text, the Koran, which will make every Muslim a rootless person so long as it is read outside the context of history and the present. In the preface to the Italian edition of the volume, Khaled Fouad Allam —an insightful intellectual of the Muslim diaspora, Algerian by origin with Italian citizenship —fully attests to this condition of the disappearance of the self, for Islam within modernity. Posted by: tipper 2004-12-28 |
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