You Bastards

Islam is the Real Civilization

The Islamic society is not one in which people call themselves 'Muslims' but in which the Islamic law has no status, even though prayer, fasting and Hajj are regularly observed; and the Islamic society is not one in which people invent their own version of Islam, other than what God and His Messenger-peace be on him-have prescribed and explained, and call it, for example, 'progressive Islam' [...]

The Islamic society is, by its very nature, the only civilized society, and the jahili societies, in all their various forms, are backward societies. It is necessary to elucidate this great truth

It should be easy, as a fundamentalist, to judge the legitimacy of a government. But it's not easy. Your sources are static and the world is not. You may be restless and perpetually unsatisfied. You may grow violent and obsessive. You may have competitors claiming to have greater zeal and better judgment than you.

The matter is important because a community has to function on some basis, knowing itself and its justification. If you can't arrive at a comfortable consensus for the justifications of your way of life, your culture will fail to provide the soil that nurtures life. Everybody cares about that.

Legitimacy in western political thought is bound up with the knowledge of human fallibility. No human created thing, including a government, is capable of perfection. Since there are two major threads of political thought, left and right, this idea takes two broad forms. On the left, continuous progress is the common element of a range of ideologies that includes Marxism at one extreme and a kind of maternal statism at the other. While Marxism is actually based on a theory of history, all left wing political thought assumes constant political evolution. On the right, while there is no emphasis on an idea of directional progress, it's nevertheless understood that constant striving for and falling short of perfection is the way human life, and thus human government at its best, unfolds. Ideally, a society can adapt without losing its soul.

The fight between these two halves of western political thought is huge. It's massive. It has at times consumed the world and at others threatened to destroy it. But both are still expressions of the same idea.

Antigone.

CHORUS singing

- strophe 1
Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south-wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, the unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as the ploughs go to and fro from year to year.

- antistrophe 1
And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts, and the sea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils, he leads captive, man excellent in wit. And he masters by his arts the beast whose lair is in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck, he tames the tireless mountain bull.

- strophe 2
And speech, and wind-swift thought, and all the moods that mould a state, hath he taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost, when 'tis hard lodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing rain; yea, he hath resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come: only against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath devised escapes.

- antistrophe 2
Cunning beyond fancy's dream is the fertile skill which brings him, now to evil, now to good. When he honours the laws of the land, and that justice which he hath sworn by the gods to uphold, proudly stands his city: no city hath he who, for his rashness, dwells with sin. Never may he share my hearth, never think my thoughts, who doth these things!

This question of legitimacy is not merely academic. Systems increasingly govern the world. Two of those systems (EU, Islam) have ambiguous territory and are inscrutible to non-experts. The societies they rule over are therefore incapable of self criticism, even if they desire it.