Yep. I know that Islamism is an outgrowth of Islam and not its only interpretation. My criticism of Islam as an obstruction to change is not that all Moslems are Islamist. It is that Islam creates the environment in which Islamist ideology emerges. It is that intrinsically Islam is also a political and legal system as well as a religion and, like the US Constitution, the desire for change and the obstructions against it generate heat between them. And that this heat can be extremely destructive.
Is it even fair to claim Islam resists change? I think so, although of course other influences pull in different directions. Whence does Islam derive its resistance to change? In literal interpretations of the text of the Koran and the Hadith. In the arguments surrounding Sharia that oppose ijtehad. In the writings of Al Ghazali that give God miraculous powers of intervention over science. Above all, in assuming that religious views have a power to overrule human enquiry. How is the rejection of change expressed? In several ways. Sometimes through entities like Isis and Al Qaeda.
I see an analogy in Western history in the period of Catholic obstruction of the science that challenged the Aristotelian system and the religious politics which depended on the status quo. Through the middle ages, the Papacy claimed an authority which it has mostly lost. The fact that this argument occurred hundreds of years ago doesn't make it irrelevant. Time offers perspective.
The Islamist argument (although not its expression) is also somewhat similar to the argument for originalism in US Constitutional theory. And I am very much in the camp that the only viable interpretation of the US Constitution in the long run is as a living document (viable from a social and political viewpoint). Unchanging values frustrate progress and must in the end be swept aside. But better yet, build a system that allows constant gradual modification.
My premise - you can call it a bias if you prefer - has nothing to do with Islam and, without wishing to be pompous, everything to do with my own interpretation of evolution, human history, the laws of the universe etc: which is that managing change relative to the environment one inhabits (including competing entities) is key to survival. The more enshrined the dogma, the greater the obstructions to moving forwards, the greater the issues a society encounters. Nevertheless, change is no guarantee of survival. Just as an eccentric modification of a gene between one generation and the next may make the difference between a long beak and a short one in a bird population on a Galapagos island or between a normal variation and a crippling defect in a human being. You cannot survive without changing but changing is no guarantee of survival.
Clearly, if you believe in eternal truths expressed in books then this idea of a truth built around change is going to be difficult. But a truth that defies observation is no truth at all.
Now that I know that armp is actually armp, much to my surprise, I will be curious to see why he thinks what he thinks.
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