Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: ma parliamo di religione!

If I had slept through yesterday, woken up this morning, and gone
online, I might have thought the EDL beheaded someone. There is a lot
of displacement on Twitter and FB, as if it's all too politically
difficult and socially awkward to talk about the killers' ideology, or
the place of religion in that ideology. So we talk instead about the
EDL, or John Reid, or drones, or "the religion of peace" or say
"Christians kill too" or "what about Anders Breivik", or, well,
anything but the brute fact that the murderers, like so very many
before them, shouted "Allahu Akbar".
 
Of course we need to condemn every form of racist backlash and seek
unity between Muslims and non-Muslims against extremism of all kinds.
And much of the response, beginning with those truly heroic women who
risked their lives to protect that young man's body from further
mutilation, has shown the best of us, just as our reaction to 7/7 did.
But it isn't enough. We need to discuss the elephant in the room – the
radical and sectarian, often violent, and sometimes fascistic
political ideology and global movement of Islamism.
 
Why? Because we are fighting against a religiously inspired ideology,
jihadism, but we don't want to talk about religion. There are many
reasons for our reticence but here are three for starters: two are
unattractive, while one is laudable, if misplaced.
 
First, we are frightened to talk freely.
 
Not, hitherto, because we fear that our throats will be slit, although
since the Rushdie Affair that fear has produced much artistic self-
censorship, as the artist Grayson Perry once had the courage to admit.
No, intellectual self-censorship begins elsewhere, in the fear of
losing one's place in the warmth of the tribe, huddled together by the
fire. We fear that if we look too closely or think too clearly, or
talk too much about the problem of Islamism, and the connections as
well as the separations between it and Islam, then we will be sent
into the cold – shunned by colleagues, not invited to this dinner
party, or that conference. We may even face social death itself by
being called "Islamophobic". The university today is a stultifyingly
conformist institution, reminiscent of those old Soviet-era "cultural
associations". The standard version, the line, is policed rigorously.
And the only accredited language in which people are allowed to speak
is full of well-rehearsed evasions and apologias and exculpatory
frameworks.
 
Second, we are ignorant of what to talk about.
 
In our intellectual culture religion is a mystery. That's why the
commentators mostly refuse to believe religion, any religion, can have
anything to do with terrorism. So they either translate terrorists
screaming "Allahu Akbar!" into something they can understand –
economics, foreign policy, identity – or just change the subject
altogether, writing instead (not as well) about the dangers of a
racist backlash, the threat of the loss of civil liberties, and so on.
 
In the last 24 hours I've read again and again about the need not to
talk about Islam. "All religions are the same," say the commentators
and politicians. Well, are they? Is anything? Yes and no. Try
sentences that begin "all political parties are…" Or "all governments
are…" "All sports are…" "All art is…" In every case you can say some
sensible things in the rest of the sentence but you have walled
yourself from most things, and most of the things that matter most,
about any particular political party, government, sport, or art form.
The fact is that there are all sorts of differences between religions
and they matter. For example: the character and reception of the
founding revelation, not least whether it is understood as mediated or
not (and therefore open to reform or not). Or the content of the
revelation, including the very understanding of God. Other differences
include the relation to other religions, to the secular world, to
human-made power and law (e.g. "Rome"). Does the religion view the
very idea of a separate political realm as a kind of impiety, an
affront to God? Was the prophet his own Constantine or not? The
answers diverge and radically. Religions, in other words, can't just
be analysed as barely distinguishable forms of the same impulse, as if
we were all in an A Level Religion class. They have radically specific
contents, unique and conditioning histories, and those differences
matter profoundly when they bump up against the secular world.
 
Third, we want to protect a vulnerable minority.
 
The last reason for our reticence about talking about Islam and
Islamism is the best one. We are frightened of giving comfort to those
who would exploit the actions of radical Islamists to attack ordinary
Muslims. We worry that if we link this terrorist murder to big words
like Islam and Islamism then we will unleash reaction, encourage the
EDL and BNP, and the victims will be ordinary Muslims. And that is a
good impulse which should condition how we talk about Islam and
Islamism. But it should no longer determine whether we talk about
Islam and Islamism. It's all too late for that.
 
Muslims like the Canadian writer Irshad Manji will tell us that the
people who would benefit most from a free-wheeling conversation would
be ordinary Muslims who are perplexed by our society's pussy-footing
indulgence of the extremism which has taken root in some places and
would feel licensed to speak out. We can defend religious freedom and
defend Muslim reformers, but what we can't do anymore is just change
the subject.
 
Anyway, it's too late, for another reason. One of the fruits of
globalisation is that the walls separating what concerns "us" from
what concerns "them" have tumbled down. We are all "us", now. The
global is local. Woolwich made plain that the fear and the violence
and the grieving that has spilled over from what the Muslim political
scientist Bassam Tibi calls "Islam's predicament with modernity" are
now also ours to bear, and they will borne also by our children and
our grandchildren. No more changing the subject.
 
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/alanjohnson/100218584/we-need-to-talk-about-islamism/
 

 
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk
 
 
è inutile che cerchi di recuperare buttandoti a destra, tanto sei
sempre un lurido comunista :D