UBL and Fisk: a quick note on something that caught me eye
I’m interested in the honor / shame angle because I have just been reading my friend Richard Landes‘ paper Edward Said and the Culture of Honour and Shame: Orientalism and Our Misperceptions of the Arab-Israeli Conflict and his blog post Game Theory and Social Emotions… I may not always agree with Richard, but he certainly sets me thinking…
The second point of interest here — which I’ve noted before — is the emphasis in the minds of bin Laden and his followers on the prophetic nature of dreams.
It is the third that is, if Fisk is accurate in his recall here, the most interesting – that bin Laden would utter the words “If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim.” Fisk is not threatening him, so this is not an occasion for taqiyya as I understand it – perhaps it is an occasion, as Fisk himself suggests, for diplomacy.
But how does that remark sound as theology in the mode of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab?
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david ronfeldt:
August 7th, 2011 at 11:32 pm
following your lead, i took a look at landes’s augean stables blog for first time in a long time. some very interesting impressive posts. in addition to what you mention, a post i particularly liked is about the "honor-shame jihad" paradigm at:
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http://www.theaugeanstables.com/reflections-from-second-draft/paradigms-and-the-middle-east-conflict/honor-shame-jihad-paradigm-hjp/
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point after point could be applied to breivik’s mentality as well, in my view.
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rlandes:
August 9th, 2011 at 3:52 am
isn’t it ironic that Fisk has become the inspiration for a verb "fisking" meaning to go through a piece paragraph by paragraph showing the layers upon layers of dishonesty. i’m sure there’s a relationship here to taqiyya, but not quite what…