[lbo-talk] My Secret, Ephemeral Life As An Islamist.

Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
Sat Sep 22 18:44:31 PDT 2007


On Sat, 2007-09-22 at 18:21 -0800, Miles Jackson wrote:


> Given that choice, I'll take Islam. (Seriously.)

Apparently a lot of people are doing just that.

Some years ago I was talking to a friend in Academe -- a population biologist -- who did a lot of field work in various Latin American countries. I asked him about a phenomenon which had been puzzling me -- the growing popularity of Pentecostal cults, pulling people away from their time-honored Catholic devotion.

His take was that this was just a sanctioned, readable, comprehensible, non-idiosyncratic way for them to stop drinking and pissing away their leisure hours, in the immemorial Catholic-peasant fashion.

In a strange, fascinating way, Islamization and Pentecostalism look a lot like the Third World's attempts to assimilate the bourgeois virtues. NB that our own bourgeoisie was born in a similar way -- those wonderful old Roundheads who lopped off Charlie Stuart's head would have understood Ahmadinejad very well.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list