Beat-the-heat

Beat-the-heat t1_jcdc0xb wrote

>One shouldn’t dismiss the Arab conservatives influence on Islamic resurgence otherwise you wouldn’t be able to explain away the Saudi and Qatari influence

Arabs simply provided money, ideologically they aren't behind the Islamic resurgence; Most Muslims are Asians and have their own distinct ideological movements e.g. despite what most westerners claim the Taliban are neither Wahhabi nor Salafi, they are Deobandi and the influence of Salafism is highly overstated. This misunderstanding is also why the West heavily funded Sufi movements post 9/11 in countries like Pakistan and they are now even more problematic (with most of the recent attacks on minorities being initiated by Sufi groups like Barelvis)

>As for moral outrage, it’s subjective and not universal.

Maybe not to you because you live in the west and think like they do, most of us really hate these people though for what they have done to our countries and the region at large; As Malcom X would say, there are two types of Negroes.

​

>As for your last paragraph, those aren’t the only two options available

Largely does seem to be the case presently

​

>A secular led government can still have the indigenous interests in mind while still being a productive and independent member on the world stage; Indonesia or Malaysia comes to mind.

So what exactly is the distinction between an "Islamist" government in your mind and a supposedly secular government like Indonesia which imposes conservative laws (e.g. banning sex outside of marriage, blasphemy provisions etc) ; Indonesia is one of the countries leading the Islamic resurgence but it is never outright called an "Islamist" country by Westerners.

1

Beat-the-heat t1_jcahkt9 wrote

"Islamists" largely don't call themselves that and this documentary kind of just hashes out the familiar tropes that inflate the relevance of Arab conservatives to the Islamic resurgence when it is largely just an ethno-religious response to foreign intervention more than anything else, after all many of the conflicts that the US got involved in after 2001 were far older than the Muslim brotherhood, some in fact were older than America itself.

This simply just presents the same oversimplified orientalist view of conflicts without really delving deeper into the roots of them; the single highest predictor of Islamic militancy has always been moral outrage and not philosophical or religious disposition (you can see research by Scott Atran to confirm this).

Now i myself am agnostic but raised Muslim, if you ask me who i would rather see in power; a secular government allied with the west or a conservative Islamic government that advocates indigenous interests then i would definitely say the latter, this is essentially why there is a growth of "Islamism" across the world, as Bin Laden himself said even his "pagan ancestors" would have fought against the West.

−9