Letters to the Editor
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Qur'an
3:151
We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve, because they set up with Allah that for which He has sent down no authority, and their abode is the fire, and evil is the abode of the unjust.
8:60
And prepare against them what force you can and horses tied at the frontier, to terrorize thereby the enemy of Allah...
8:12
I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.
Moreover Allah says of those who reject him. Because, Allah has already sentenced them to death.
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There are some peaceful verses but they are abrogated, that is a later revelation has made the peaceful verses invalid.
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Amis's shtick
Amis is a minor writer who makes his work seem more important by dealing with hefty themes-- the Holocaust, nuclear war, the gulag, 9/11. His novels can be fantastically funny and he's a great prose stylist, but he tends to want to be more "grandly authorial" or whatever, so he ends up with embarrassments like Time's Arrow.
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@nacazo Oh Puh-leeze!
You should read some of the stories, legends and "rules" of plenty of other religions in the world. Hindu widows were expected to burn on the funeral pyres of their dead spouses until early last century. The Emperor in Japan was considered a God until the end of WW II. "Christians" put Jews into gas ovens 70 years ago and also found biblical foundations for slavery 150 years ago.
Frankly, having lived in the Middle East and in countries with large numbers of Muslims, I'd rather spend time with lot's of the people I met there than with Pat Robertson, John Hagee and the Morman Leadership who ran that Church before they decided blacks had "whole souls" in the late 1970s!
There are incomprehensible rules and customs and there are haters and monsters in every religion. It is ignorant to blame ONE religion for everything evil that happens.
You didn't get ANYTHING that was in the article. Can you READ? Or are you just blinded by your hatred and bigotry of Islam?
You didn't see that the author was pointing out that the people who committed the evil act of 9/11 have more in common with some of the screwed up, empty loners in some modern English novels than they do to "medieval religious fanatics?"
Go back into your dark hole of ignorance and leave thinking people alone.
I am a Catholic, by the way. We had several lovely eras of burning heretics at the stake and slaughtering Muslims who wouldn't convert at "sword point." There was a time when Kingdoms could rise and fall because of religious conversions -- remember King Henry VIII? It also concerned huge amounts of money and treasure -- which is why the Catholics and the Muslims (and everyone else) have been known to be so "touchy" -- and violent -- about religious conversions.
The answers can often be found in history and literature. Not in the minds of frightened, ignorant people.
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Innocence?!
Does Martin Amis really believe that the US was ever INNOCENT? Funny how America keeps losing its innocence every decade or two.
'Without a doubt, Islamists do work themselves up into a state of anti-Americanism by contemplating the "depravity" of Western life: the materialism, the sexual promiscuity, the "looseness" of our women, the indulgence in drugs and alcohol and the general lack of moral fiber.'
So do a lot of Americans. The home-grown US fundamentalists love America in theory; they hate it in practice.
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There is no such thing as terrorism people don't deserve
Sorry, but if you discovered yourself dead today, you probably deserved it. If you discovered you're not dead, you should be.
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Ignorance on both sides, gack
A young woman in the audience stood up, speaking "in a voice near-tearful with passionate self-righteousness, saying that it was the Americans who had armed the Islamists in Afghanistan, and that therefore the U.S., in its response to Sept. 11, 'should be dropping bombs on themselves!'"
Oh this sounds so right, except that it's so WRONG.
It annoys the heck out of me that people on the left get this so wrong. Crack open a book now and then. It won't kill you!!
There is no one group called "the Islamists" in Afghanistan. The Islamic groups we did arm after the Soviet invasion were divided into factions based on ethnic and tribal affiliation as well as degree of adherence to Islam. Some of them were moderates, and some of them were not.
Arguably the worst of the bunch we armed was Gulbuddin Hekmatyr, but he had nothing to do with 9/11.
America never armed the Taliban, who were still young madrassa students when the Red Army left Afghanistan in 1989.
When the Red Army left, so did American funding.
It was Pakistan under Benazir Bhutto that armed the Taliban and sent them in to Kabul.
Hekmatyr was briefly friendly with the Taliban, but that was his own reasons.
I'm pretty sure now they're bitter enemies, but I don't know because it's not like I'm watching him or anything.
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Ahhhh . . .
. . .the slippery slope of hatred and bigotry. Don't hate the playa, hate the game. Or, for Amis, hate the playa AND the game. What a hack.
Isn't this how it always starts? The so-called declared (by what authority?) intellectuals (puh-leeze) begin to legitimize hatred and bigotry, by compartmentalizing it -- Islam vs. Islamists. Then they get some defensive tripe essentially advertising the hatred without really writing or saying anything (yes, I mean you, Ms. Miller). So what was the point of this article? Other than hatehatehatehatehatehate.
Never again . . .unless you're a Muslim. Right?
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BTW it's partly Nixon's fault that the Sufi moderates became so powerless in Afghanistan
Speaking of the Sufis, before the 1973 coup, Afghanistan was ruled by King Zaher Shah, who was a Sufi moderate.
Nixon didn't like him. He thought he was weak. Afghanistan had become a haven for hash-smoking hippies, and Afghan hashish was being smuggled into America. There were even rumors that the King smoked hash and favored legalization.
Nixon found out that the King's cousin Daoud was eager to take over the government. Daoud was the kind of "strong man" Nixon liked.
Just like Nixon, Daoud hated hippies and hashish and intellectuals. Aside from the fact that most of Daoud's supporters were Marxist-Leninists, whereas Nixon's were Republicans, the two men had a lot in common.
So the CIA helped concoct a phony medical emergency to get the King to leave for Italy and Daoud took over in a mostly bloodless coup the next day. And the Shah of Iran offered a big wad of cash to support the new regime.
Before 1973, tribal Pushtuns were very adamant about sticking to their traditional patriarchal ways, with burqas and honor killings and all that stuff.
But they were still tribal. They hadn't yet formed what we know today as the mujahedin armies.
The tribalists ended up forming their mujahedin armies only after their conflict with Daoud's authoritarian pseudo-Marxist government escalated into outright armed resistance.
This was clearly a consequence of the 1973 coup.
The Sufi moderates fared even worse than the tribalists, because so many of them were allied with the King.
Daoud's government wanted to reform the tribalists, but anyone allied with the King was targeted for elimination.
American policy has been, shall we say, LESS than empowering towards moderate Muslims.
It's not fair to point to their relative lack of global influence in Islam when our own foreign policy has often helped rob them of any influence they originally had.
Especially in Afghanistan, where our policy in 1973 was shamefully cynical and misguided and has had blowback beyond our wildest nightmares.