Why the West Is Best, Ibn Warraq
...the latest book from the world's foremost scholar of Islam: Why the West Is Best.
Ibn Warraq, ... celebrates New York as the crowning achievement of Western civilization: a place where artistic and intellectual and economic activity and every other kind of human enterprise is encouraged and enabled. He compares this civilization favorably (without any apology to the Western multiculturalists who are instrumental in our civilizational suicide) to the stagnant Islamic culture that has as its basis Islamic law; with its prohibition of music and representational art; its antipathy toward intellectual exploration; and its fatalism that spells death for any sense of real initiative, any impulse to create the beauty, the genius, and the sense of the sublime....
But what about slavery? What about colonialism? What about the usual laundry list of the evils of the West that America-hating leftists trot out at every possible opportunity? This is what they're learning in our own universities these days: that America and the West are the worst things that ever happened to this planet, and if we just gave up and gave it all back to the Native Americans, the world would be better off.
Ibn Warraq shows in
Why the West Is Best that the sins of the West are common to the whole world: plenty of other cultures have histories of conquest and colonialism, as well as slavery and exploitation. Only in the Western Judeo-Christian context, however, did the principles of free speech and free inquiry develop to the point that longstanding societal and cultural practices could be questioned and ultimately rejected. Muslims took plenty of slaves, but only in the Western world did there ever arise an abolitionist movement. Muslim countries have been home to plenty of tyrants, but only in the West did free speech become a valued and protected principle, as one of society's foremost protections against regimes that could do whatever they wanted, no matter how much it outraged the will of the people.
As we saw in the Muhammad cartoon controversy and its aftermath, the Muslim world responds to criticism not with reform, but with repression. Ibn Warraq details that controversy in this valuable book, and he shows that this inability to deal with criticism and questioning is one key reason why the Muslim world will always lag behind the West -- unless, that is, our clueless and compromised elites continue to give away the store. Why the West is Best shows how crucial it is for the West to stand up to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation's war against free speech. If we don't, this book will not be the call to defense of an imperiled civilization that Ibn Warraq clearly intended it to be. Instead, it will be the epitaph of a vanished culture, dead by its own hand.
Excert from Pam Geller,
Atlas Shrugged, http://networkedblogs.com/tzOC3
As we saw in the Muhammad cartoon controversy and its aftermath, the Muslim world responds to criticism not with reform, but with repression. Ibn Warraq details that controversy in this valuable book, and he shows that this inability to deal with criticism and questioning is one key reason why the Muslim world will always lag behind the West -- unless, that is, our clueless and compromised elites continue to give away the store. Why the West is Best shows how crucial it is for the West to stand up to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation's war against free speech. If we don't, this book will not be the call to defense of an imperiled civilization that Ibn Warraq clearly intended it to be. Instead, it will be the epitaph of a vanished culture, dead by its own hand.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/02/a_muslim_apostate_sings_the_wests_praises.html#ixzz1lWDWNnsC
