23 March 2011

One remaining absolute

"Many terrorists are nihilists, who wish to vent their disappointment by destroying the sham society by which they are surrounded. ... But nihilism is the other side of religion: it is the disappointed howl of the believer on discovering that God is dead. The true nihilist is incapable of settling for the world of compromise, toleration, and secular loyalties that the rest of us enjoy, since it is a world deprived of absolutes. The death of God leaves only one remaining absolute, which is Nothingness. The duty to annihilate is the last remaining glimpse of the transcendental in the heart of the one who has lost all belief in it and who cannot live with the loss. ...
 "Globalization  has plunged the Islamic world into crisis by offering the spectacle of a secular society maintained in being by man-made laws, and achieving equilibrium without the aid of God. It has also obliterated many of the customs and ways of life of the Muslim people, extinguishing ancient pastoral traditions and replacing them with a phony and humiliating economy of pure consumption, fed not by labor but by oil. At the same time it has re-awakened the age-old nostalgia for a reign of goodness, in which those who corrupted the Prophet's community will be finally destroyed, and the true order of shari'a established on earth. The resulting psychological mixture is explosive, and is bound to prompt young Muslims to express their discontent with the regimes that govern them, with the global economy that finances those regimes, and with the impious way of life that is intruding everywhere into the dar al-islam." (The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, Roger Scruton, 2002; page  157-8). 

No comments:

Post a Comment