Saturday, April 26, 2008

Okay, Okay, So I Lied. Blame Fjordman.

Looking at the site meter (a good way to discover new blogs), I couldn’t figure out why we had so many links to GoV from Jihad/Dhimmi Watch so I opened one to find out.

I should have guessed.

As an LGFer once intoned whilst squatting in our comments, “Wow. Just wow.” — thereby giving me the gift of my new favorite banality, surpassing even “awesome, dude.”

However, this time the stunned feeling is genuine. Fjordman has written one of his best essays to date, and it’s up at Dhimmi Watch — “Fjordman: Socratic Dialogue vs. Islamic Dialogue.”

“Dialogue” explains for me what I knew but didn’t have the reading background to articulate — i.e., that the Islamic approach to history is both a strength and a fundamental weakness. There is greedy consumption in which Islam consumes history and then preserves it without ever reviewing it or going back to the sources it used so as to re-examine old theories based on new information. “Knowledge” becomes sacerdotal and enshrined in amber.

This is one of the reasons that Islam can’t create. Its tenets forbid returning to the place where a theory originated in order to reframe a new hypothesis based on further information acquired in the interim. Even worse, Islam destroyed the original documents once it had digested from them whatever was immdiately useful:
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“(The Muslims) desired to learn the sciences of the (foreign) nations. They made them their own through translations. They pressed them into the mold of their own views. They peeled off these strange tongues [and made them pass] into their [own] idiom, and surpassed the achievements of (the non-Arabs) in them. The manuscripts in the non-Arabic languages were forgotten, abandoned, and scattered. All the sciences came to exist in Arabic. The systematic works on them were written in (Arabic) writing. Thus, students of the sciences needed a knowledge of the meaning of (Arabic) words and (Arabic) writing. They could dispense with all other languages, because they had been wiped out and there was no longer any interest in them.”

Rémi BragueAs Brague says, the consequence of this disappearance of the original texts and the neglect of the original languages was that the Muslim world has not been able to return to what it translated and deepen their examination. “In doing this, the Islamized world made the phenomena of ‘renaissances’ impossible — that is, of a return to the original texts against the traditions that claimed to follow them.” In European history, “one witnesses a constant effort to go back up toward the classical sources. One can thus describe the intellectual history of Europe as an almost uninterrupted train of renaissances.”

I beseech you to go read the whole thing. How Fjordman remains dispassionate and yet engaged with his subject continues to amaze me. A guess: he is, at heart, a scientist dressed up in other intellectual clothing. He has given up the test tube for the pen, and we are the richer for it. On the other hand, maybe he’s a polymath.

If you do nothing else today, go read this gem…and then re-read it.

By the way, he is quoting Rémi Brague here, from Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization. Fortunately, it’s available in English. Any amateur historian should put it on his “must have” list.

[NB: okay, so I lied. This is a post. By me. I will have to do some penance or other. Oh, wait. This is Fjordman's fault, not mine. Blame him.]

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dymphna

I was getting ready to write you a mail along the lines of "you can't do that, you can't just leave us!" when I came across your post.

Good to see you're back! This feels right. And eff the Johnson and the Shrinkwrapper and all the other Europhobes!

EtNorskTroll said...

This is long, but it is worth the reading time.

Really, REALLY worth it:

http://californiaccw.org/posts/list/3520.page

...it expands on Fjordman and Remi's ideas.

~ENT

Findalis said...

The full article is very interesting.

Critical thought is antithetical to Islamic thought. In Islam one must not question, must not think. One must memorize and recite.


When a Muslim's mind is scanned it should read "Closed due to lack of use."

X said...

Findalis, you're right. I was discussing this with my brother over a few whiskies some nights ago (he had a bunch of miniatures he wanted to get rid off and I was happy to oblige) and the conclusion we reached, and the reason why there are no true "moderates" in Islam, is that Islam isn't merely a religion, or a mnere totalitarian ideology but, first and foremost, a means of absolute population control.

It was designed from the first to give Mohammed absolute control over his followers. It promotes rote behaviours, mind-numbing repetitive actions and pavlovian responses. Even the most "moderate" muslim raised in that environment is dangerous, simply because they're trained from birth to behave in certain ways to certain specific stimuli. That's all it's about. control. That's why Islam is incompatible with the west, why muslims will never truly assimilate the way people keep wanting them to. Retired police attack dogs have to be placed with special carers for the same reason.

A muslim can't assimilate without giving up the very things that make him a Muslim...