All praise is due to Allah , we praise Him and we seek his help and ask
His forgiveness. We seek refuge with Allah from the evil of our selves
and from the evil results of our actions. I testify that Allah alone is
worthy of worship and that Muhammad is His slave and final Messenger. May
Allah's salawaat (peace and blessings) be upon the last and final
messenger Muhammad, his family and his followers. Ameen!
To begin: The best discourse is the book of Allah, and the best way is
the way of Muhammad, and the worst of the matters in the religion are those
newly introduced innovations, for every innovation in the religion is misguidance,
and every misguidance is going astray and every going astray is in the
Hellfire.
I have embarked on my commentary on The Economist magazine's
survey "Islam and the West" (large insert in August 6th 1994
issue) after some considerable deliberation, and find myself confronted
with a considerable task, and indeed Allah is the best of helpers. Brian
Beedham is able to rely on what Noam Chomskey calls "manufactured consent".
While dictatorships use force in order to achieve consent from the people
and prevent opposition, "democracies" manufacture consent through the media
by using it to providing a particular world view which conforms to the
interests, by and large, of the ruling elite. He is able to get away with
a short, condensed, article because he doesn't need to prove much of what
he is saying, he only has to repeat the prefabricated conventional platitudes.
For example, when he talks the Algerian Muslims as "a singularly intransigent
bunch of Islamic rebels, fundamentalists of the most bloody minded sort"
he doesn't have to prove it, because the establishment has already ensured
that people believe this is the case. In fact the statement in not at all
true. The Algerian fundamentalists proved willing to go to elections and
seek a peaceful way re-establish the Islamic Sharee'ah . Recent
events, such as the meeting of the opposition groups, including the "rebel
fundamentalists", in Rome, calling for talks and a return to free elections
- which was even supported by the French government and was rejected by
the Algerian government - shows that it is the Algerian government that
has proved bloody minded. In spite of such obvious discrepancies Mr. Beedham
is able to get away with it because consent has already been manufactured
that the fundamentalists are rebellious and bloody minded.
Similarly he never feels he has to prove that democracy is an advantage,
it is taken almost completely for granted, knowing his audience is already
"captive" so as to speak. In the age of the "sound-bite"
(or perhaps in this case "word-bite"), opposing the conventional
wisdom is not easy, for what the likes of Mr. Beedham can say in a sentence
opposing it would take a book. Even then it would be of doubtful effectiveness,
for opposing the norms of society is perhaps one of the hardest paths to
take for an instinctively societal creature like ourselves. Thus I shall
be writing a series of letters, and not just one, thus enabling me to break
down the commentary into more manageable pieces. I shall also refer certain
topics to appendices, which may include video and audio tapes.