Compared to the heartless void of capitalist culture, Islam burn bright; but it is at best a fairy tale and at worst just another shackle.
Joanna
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I forgot to discuss the problem with Islam, Christianity and Judaism in their fundamentalist form. They borrow or pretend to be all that their former civilizations were, while offering only the bare armature, its skeleton---its animated, but dessicated corpus---the triviality of moral philosophies, exactly the text without that living stuff that brought them life in the arts, culture, language, ways of life---now long dead and gone---buried somewhere in the waste of the Middle Eastern desserts along with the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Romans---their universal imperial Others.
Just as the Fundamentalism of neoliberal capitalism as US Imperium is the dissecated corpus of all the treasures of the European Renaissance, Baroque, Reformation, and Enlightenment---stripped of everything that once made these burn just as bright.
So, that's why I called it the clash of anti-civilizations.
And, yes I would recommend both Tariq Ali and Ahmed Rashid's latest. The Clash of Fundamentalisms has a nice picture of George W as a Mullah on the front, and on the back OBL as US President. Very funny. Ali was here last week to give a talk and sign books at Cody's, but I was too wiped out from a jaw infection to walk up and see it. Rashid is a little more tedious to read, because it is more straight forward reportage.
Which reminds me to ask, if and when the Palestinians ever emerge from the rubble and death grip of Israel, then what? Shopping malls and consumer culture like Israel and the rest?
Is that the salvation that lays at the end of their horrible road?
Chuck Grimes