Referring to the group simply as “IS” quietly constitutes the enemy as “the Islamic State,” and reinforces perception of the struggle as anti-Islamic for some, for others as significantly a different thing: anti-Islamist.
#Islamism
Fighting “The Islamic State”
Posted in Anismism, Neo-Imperialism, Political Philosophy, War Tagged with: Anismism, IS, ISIL, ISIS, Islamism
The Egyptian Exception and the Other Islamic State
The alternative resolution or the other Islamic state, the one that avoids the tyrant’s despair – or, put more politically-philosophically, allows for a liberal-Islamic assimilation that would also be integrative or unitary rather than irrecuperably conflictual – would appear to rely on modes of idealization of religion that would evolve simultaneously and bi-conditionally, or, as Fadel or Fadel’s Khaldun puts it, “organically.” Their current impermissibility is a reflection of the same problem.
Theses on Contradictions within Liberal Democracy, in Relation to Islamism
1. The conflict between liberalism and Islamism is a creedal as well as cultural, social, political, and economic conflict.
2. As an ideological articulation of an Islamic concept in relation to and within an expansionary global political-economic system dominated by liberal-democratic regime forms, Islamism will absorb and re-express contradictions internal to the liberal democratic concept.
3. The “Great Separation” of religion from politics is a paradoxical mythic-fictive foundation of liberal democracy whose necessary concealment cannot be continuously maintained in the encounter with unitary political alternatives as under typical forms of Islamism.
4. The generally occluded, intermittently exposed theological (Christian-soteriological) origin of the Great Separation and therefore of liberal democracy conforms to the instruction of the Qur’an on the political realization of revealed truth.
5. The radical coercive potential of the modern nation-state will be turned irresistibly against those who would accept and implement this instruction, except under adaptive integration of an effectively liberal-democratic concept.
Foucault on Iran, Some Fool on Egypt
I don’t matter to Egypt, or to U.S. policy on Egypt, or to thought in general on Islam and liberalism.
I am in general unknown to politicians, imams, priests, and philosophers.
There is no becoming-known-ness in prospect for me. It’s a daily struggle for me to convince myself that I might in some way come to matter even to me.
Liberalism v Islamism – A Headnote
As long as the liberal-seculars and the Islamists in Egypt view their belief systems as mutually exclusive except under the ultimate and effectively permanent neutralization of the adversary – as long as each sees the other as evil – the decision between them will be determined as a matter of the violent conversion of the errant believer that is for each held to be a foundational impossibility, so must develop under a mutually external power or authority. The connection might otherwise be a beginning point, an at least half-shared location of the sacred, if it did not remain invisible amidst the teargas, and unheard among the shouting. It will still be there, nowhere, whoever happens to be declared the winner.
Posted in Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Politics Tagged with: Egypt, Incoherence of the Liberals, Islamism, Liberalism, Paul W Kahn
A compact example of liberal illogic re Egypt cc @arabist @ibishblog
Liberalism is the ideology that turns what the non-liberal wants into its opposite, then insists that he acknowledge no difference.
Posted in Philosophy, Politics Tagged with: Egypt, Islamism, Liberalism, The Incoherence of the Liberals
Liberals vs the actual Egyptian state (cc @ibishblog)
Hussein Ibish sees the workings of a master plot, not quite the same as a the plot of a mastermind, in Morsi’s Egyptian maneuvers. Yet the strengths of Ibish’s criticism undermine themselves: The picture of Egypt that emerges – of the real Egypt rather than the Egypt of liberal aspirations – is of a nation dominated by non-liberal forces, in which the primary negotiations are effectively two-sided, between the forces of the nationalist-military deep state and of the Islamists.
2nd Précis: Cairo and Philadelphia (cc @hhassan140 @ibishblog)
On, appropriately enough, July 4 of this year, via Twitter as @hhassan140, Hassan Hassan (“HH” below) offered a provocative summary of an article on Islamists and the Arab Spring by Hussein Ibish (@ibishblog, “HI”). A colloquy between Hassan, Ibish, and myself (“CM”) ensued, its terms anticipating the same arguments, and the same situation, that informed that tweet of Hassan’s at the head of my “1st Précis.”
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Religion, The Exception Tagged with: Egypt, Islamism, Liberalism, Muslim Brotherhood, The Exception
Careful what you pray for – Morsi’s coup may not have much to do with Islamism
Political events in Egypt are being determined primarily by questions of sovereignty and systemic adjustment rather than by ideology, whether liberal-democratic, Islamist, or Egyptian-nationalist
Posted in notes, Politics Tagged with: Egypt, Islamism, liberal democracy, Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, sovereignty
Contention(s) of the Day – Max Boot slanders America
[A]s many people have noted, the War on Terror is not a reflection of an Islam vs. the West clash; it is part of a clash within Islam pitting fanatical Islamists against the vast majority of the world’s 1.2 billion…