Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Bernard Lewis - Our greatest expert on Islam: "authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, (is the defining characteristic) of the Islamic political tradition"

At some point we need to deal with the reality of political Islam and quit pretending it's Methodism in drag.  More from Dr. Lewis of Princeton:

There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law. . . . For the last thousand years, the political thinking of Islam has been dominated by such maxims as “tyranny is better than anarchy,” and “whose power is established, obedience to him is incumbent.”
As they say, read the whole thing.

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