Islam and the non-debate with in Islam.

The 'not debating' of Islam with in Islam.

I have been thinking about the cultural, almost whole-hearted acceptance, of the cultural stagnation with in the trifurcation (the spiritual, the legal and the cultural/social) of Moslem society under Islam. It doesn't seem to matter whether this is with in the heart of Islam, Saudi Arabia, or worst still those countries like Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, or Malaysia, who should know better than allow the worm of intolerance to be placed at the head of their efforts to building a democratic republic.

Protagoras said,”Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not".
I believe this to be true, in as much as I think we are products of our own imaginations whether that be political, religious or social constructs. Culture to me is a liability brought about by very limited comparative social reasoning. Not something that is portrayed by the left as being something definitive within the broader community of mankind. Something to be celebrated in it's diversity. I find no reason to celebrate a multitude of narrow mindedness in itself. Diverse communities have diverse cultural exchanges and social commentary. Limited or narrow social enclaves have limited cultural exchange and acceptance. This is not a fault in itself. A penny can never be a dollar no matter how revered the penny. I allow every excuse for yesterday and the notions of the ancients but, wonder how a people irrespective of culture in this day and age, with all the technology and privilege that confers on the individual, can allow their own to be enslaved by the bastardization of an idea, be it religious, political, or social. I can not imagine myself being brought up with in Saudi Arabia or Iran in this age and day and being comfortable with the idea of an enforced silence on every subject of interest and magnitude that the rest of the world gets to wrestle with. To live with out impassioned discussion, while being force fed the idea that strapping on a dozen sticks of dynamite is the social equivalent and really quite acceptable for your every day Moslem in the name of Islam. And most certainly not for any maintenance of any sense of traditionality.

I have tried to think of Islam and the Moslem practice in terms of contemporary philosophical thinking -considering the spectrum of governing Islam demands from it's adherents -and where most would label the entirety of Islam as right wing. I have gone the other way believing Joseph Margolis better answers. Especially with his philosophical germination through Hegel and Marx. I know... it's not intuitive and many Jews may take exception, as well as an equal number of Moslems but, not dismissing the 'naturalness' of the enmity culturally invested between these two peoples and their very history as antagonist, culturally they are not dissimilar.
Joseph Margolis, defines Philosophy as concerned principally with three things: i) what we assume to be the nature of the real world, and why; ii) what we assume to be how much we might know about the real world, and why; and iii), after having answered those question as best we can, how we should live out our lives, and why.
The world is a flux and our thought about it is also in flux. Agree or disagree? For the Israeli, coming from diverse corners of the world with many world experiences prior to 1948 one would expect such a question to be a primary given and they have adopted a societal model that reflects such diversity. The ultra right with in Israeli society may even say such a cultural liberalism is a destructive force. Then there are those in Israel as well who think Israel should be more than an island of (cultural and religious) Judaism amidst an Arab/Islamic construct.
Margolis has developed a carefully crafted philosophy which treats the “natural” as ontologically prior to the cultural, while emphasizing that we only know nature via cultural means, hence, that the cultural is epistemologically prior to the natural, in a logical sense.
Margolis emphasizes that justifications cannot be dispensed with. They cannot because any statement implies a whole set of beliefs about the way the world is (ontology) and about how we know that (epistemology). We must legitimize our statements as best we can, else we should never know why we should choose some over others, nor should we know how to proceed to make other statements building upon, but going beyond, our original exemplars.
Margolis offers five philosophical themes which have gathered momentum from the time of Kant on. They are: 1) Reality is cognitively intransparent. That is, everything we say about the world must pass through our conceptual schemes and the limits of our language, hence there is no way of knowing whether what we say “corresponds” to what there is; what the world is like independent of our investigating it; 2) The structure of reality and the structure of thought are symbiotized. That is, there is no way of knowing how much of the apparent intelligibility of the world is a contribution of the mind and how much the world itself contributes to that seeming intelligibility; 3) Thinking has a history. That is, all we take to be universal, rational, logical, necessary, right behaviour, laws of nature, and so on, are changing artifacts of the historical existence of different societies and societal groups. All are open to change and all are the sites of hegemonic struggle; 4) The structure of thinking is preformed. That is, our thinking is formed by the enculturing process by which human babies become adults. The infant begins in a holistic space which is immediately parsed according to the norms and conduct and language she is brought up in. By taking part in the process, we alter it, alter ourselves, and alter the conditions for the next generation; 5) Human culture, including human beings, are socially constructed or socially constituted. That is, they have no natures, but are (referentially) or have (predicatively) histories, narratized careers. He embraces all five themes separately and conjointly, defends them all, and concludes that our future investigations of ourselves and of our world risk ignoring them at our own peril.

The end result is, like many, I can not imagine a world of philosophical and societal and cultural stagnation because my experience from birth has never allowed such an aberration to preclude my societal norm. I am a product of diversity. Conversely, I question the unseemly acceptance of religious and cultural intolerance being promulgated by Islamic States and their willingness to be, for time immemorial, named the scourge of any and all advancement of humankind with in their societies at a time when all peoples no longer have the convenience of a dark age.
No matter the oil money the Arabs spend, no matter the death toll of Islamic jihadi, or whatever the the dupes of the “other” practitioners of Islam get up to, that furthers todays destructiveness bred from a restrictive interpretation of Islam, a societal implosion, or authoritarian government, the world will continue to question and debate and grow towards a 'collective” humanity. The world has become too small a place to allow tin pot dictators and wanna be caliphates to rule the best interest of the majority no matter how local an impression. Sooner than later, one should expect to travel the circumference of the globe knowing that at each mile post all mankind is equally respected and his or her rights as human beings well regarded, protected.
I live in a country where all races, creeds and nationalities have an equality under law that can not be precluded by any race, religion or creed. When my brothers and sisters in the Islamic States can lay such a claim in truth I will begin to believe in a Islamic reformation long sought since the initial cessation of debate with in Islam that led to this deafening silence and strict adherence to the sacrificing of these last generations to such an ignoble end as an unwillingness to recognize and respect differences in opinions or beliefs.

It isn't a case of us against them. It's a case of that methodology against the rest of the world. A single authority dictating to the multitude a fear of change. An inability to change with the world. The not giving.

“How could what is perish? How could it have come to be? For if it came into being, it is not; nor is it if ever it is going to be. Thus coming into being is extinguished, and destruction unknown.
Nor was [it] once, nor will [it] be, since [it] is, now, all together, / One, continuous; for what coming-to-be of it will you seek? / In what way, whence, did [it] grow? Neither from what-is-not shall I allow / You to say or think; for it is not to be said or thought / That [it] is not. And what need could have impelled it to grow / Later or sooner, if it began from nothing? Thus [it] must either be completely or not at all.
[What exists] is now, all at once, one and continuous... Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike; nor is there any more or less of it in one place which might prevent it from holding together, but all is full of what is.
And it is all one to me / Where I am to begin; for I shall return there again.” Parmenides ~5th century B.C.

The Islamic States have an obligation to their own citizens and the citizens of this world to expand their cultural precepts. To be inclusive. To be strong enough, to be flexible enough philosophically if they wish to be assumed as a people equal to others, and to accept that the world is greater than their cultural/religious experience. If they can not propagate such an expectation through out their society with the same vigor they have suicide bombings and other terrorist actions I fear that the prediction of the beginning of the “cultural wars” will begin as America and the west moves from the democratic realism as expressed in todays foreign policy and begins the targeting of “Cultural enemies”.

Summary:
“World politics is entering a new phase, in which the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of international conflict will be cultural. Civilizations-the highest cultural groupings of people-are differentiated from each other by religion, history, language and tradition. These divisions are deep and increasing in importance. From Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Central Asia, the fault lines of civilizations are the battle lines of the future. In this emerging era of cultural conflict the United States must forge alliances with similar cultures and spread its values wherever possible. With alien civilizations the West must be accommodating if possible, but confrontational if necessary. In the final analysis, however, all civilizations will have to learn to tolerate each other.”
Published by the Council On Foreign Relations- Samuel P. Huntington.
THE NEXT PATTERN OF CONFLICT
World politics is entering a new phase, and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be-the end of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the emerging reality. Yet they all miss a crucial, indeed a central, aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years.
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and a half after the emergence of the modern international system with the Peace of Westphalia, the conflicts of the Western world were largely among princes-emperors, absolute monarchs and constitutional monarchs attempting to expand their bureaucracies, their armies, their mercantilist economic strength and, most important, the territory they ruled. In the process they created nation states, and beginning with the French Revolution the principal lines of conflict were between nations rather than princes. In 1793, as R. R. Palmer put it, "The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun." This nineteenth-century pattern lasted until the end of World War I. Then, as a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between communism and liberal democracy. During the Cold War, this latter conflict became embodied in the struggle between the two superpowers, neither of which was a nation state in the classical European sense and each of which defined its identity in terms of its ideology.
These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, "Western civil wars," as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true of the Cold War as it was of the world wars and the earlier wars of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its centerpiece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations.