Since they are westernized Muslims and completely reject
>religious ideas, that is they are creative and rational in the
>enlightenment sense of the words, they are completely blind to the
>yawing void that greets their western contemporaries who grew up here
>in the US. In other words they can not see, or at least didn't choose
>to write about, the tremendous abyss that lays at the heart of the
>enlightenment, made exponentially deeper and wider by the endless
>ascension of capitalism, and its free market ideologies that
>erase everything that can not be transformed into a commodity, and which
>is so grossly forced down the throats of every breathing soul on the
>planet---starting with us. Their own relative success as writers and
>the satisfactions that brings, makes them blind to the spiritual and
>culture void of their adopted worlds.
Maybe it's you, Chuck, or maybe it's me with my relative success as a lawyer and formerly a professor, but I don't experience this yawning void, etc., of which you speak. I think what's called for is materialist analysis of the appeals of fundamentalism, not existentialism. jks
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