oooooooooooo. shoulda called them indians instead! why were they called indians? where, geographically, were the explorers headed? west or east?
get it?
>didn't have cultures all
>their own? How about the relatively backwards inhabitants of Europe at the
>time? My only mistake was accidentally writing "vary" instead of "very."
>
>-- Luke
firstly, you said dark ages, too, another ooops. Secondly, you were referring to an "idea" when you bring up the "West", to western values. now, in the interest of deflecting criticism (or else you genuinely do not know or hadn't thought it through) you are trying to claim that it was about geography. it wasn't, not when you originally typed out your claims about 'western values' IOW, "west" as compared to what? where is the "west" ORIENTED? get it?
heh.
The Islam of the sociological discourse is, of course, an immanent phenomenon and not a transcendent ideal. As such, however, it is also an elemental fact of the pathology of its putative other, the Euro-West. No image of the Western self is either comprehensive or comprehensible if it does not include a complementary picture of the Islamic other. Islam is an inexpungable constituent of every past discourse on Western identity, be it religious and premodern or imperialist and modern. 'The Orientalist discourse,' admits Turner, 'was ultimately about the origins of the West, not the origins of the East.' http://www.algonet.se/~pmanzoor/OXF-TURNER.html