jon will like this

[Jon Ford]

James--All I can say in response to Naipaul is--overly general statement! 
The fact is that a) Almost every Muslim country except those immediately 
adjacent to Saudia Arabia is non-Arabic-- they were all converted, yet not 
all of them support Osama equally. b) There are many more obvious reasons 
for Muslims to admire Osama: he has defied the "great Satan," he is an 
underdog, born to an elite family yet willing to give up all the compromises 
that the upper-class Muslims have made to prosper, and he stands strong 
against Israel's brutal presence in Palestine c) There are a great many 
fundamentalist Arabs in Saudia Arabia, Oman, and elsewhere in the peninsula 
who support  Osama (himself an Arab-- what about that??). These facts, even 
the last one alone would make a laughing-stock out of our new 
Nobel-prize-winner and his half-baked comments about international relations 
among Muslims.

Jon




>From: James Holland <jhollnd@swbell.net>
>To: austin-ghetto-list@pairlist.net
>Subject: Re: jon will like this
>Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 10:33:05 -0500
>
>I wanted to pass along these links...one is for the "Arts and Letters
>Daily," part of my morning cyberpatrol, and the other is linked from it,
>V.S. Naipul's interview in tomorrow's NYT about Islam.  This particular
>exchange really struck me:
>............................................................................
>.............................
>Are you surprised by Osama bin Laden's support in Pakistan, Indonesia,
>Malaysia and Iran -- countries you wrote about in your travel books on
>Islam?
>
>No, because these are the converted peoples of Islam. To put it brutally,
>these are the people who are not Arabs. Part of the neurosis of the convert
>is that he always has to prove himself. He has to be more royalist than the
>king, as the French say.
>
>Is this what you mean when you write about Islam's imperial drive to extend
>its reach and root out the unbeliever?
>
>Yes. It is not the unbeliever as the other person so much as the remnant of
>the unbeliever in one's customs and in one's ways of thinking. It's this
>wish to destroy the past, the ancient soul, the unregenerate soul. This is
>the great neurosis of the converted.
>
>
>
>http://www.aldaily.com/
>
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/magazine/28QUESTIONS.html?pagewanted=print
>
>Jim H.
>
>


_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp