Qutb Bio Translated
I am…unsettled…by this interview with John Calvert, who has just translated the early autobiography of one of the touchstones for the Islamist worldview. I understand it is important to know one’s enemy; but am not convinced that an effort such as Calvert’s is a worthy thing to sell as a commodity.
These ideas have to be unpropagated, confronted, defeated, rolled back, like the idea of slavery or any number of things we used to think were okay. And this book will be read by young English-speaking baby jihadis who don’t have enough Arabic yet, without any explanation as to why Qutb’s ideas led to evil.
And, unfortunately, it won’t be read by the people who refuse to understand the nature of our enemy.
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January 7th, 2006 at 2:04 am
[...] Just as one of our centers of gravity for this war is our own popular will to use force and not just threaten same, one of the centers of gravity for the Legion Of Splodeydopes is the mindset of their cause as a noble and worthwhile and honorable thing. It’s easier to add Legionnaires if being a Legionnaire is the Most Important, Bestest Thing To Do. Aspects of nobility abound to aid recruitment, but those aspects are perverted. One example is a fellow who had some ideas about the downtrodden, was a dissident and jailed and tortured because of it in a totalitarian society, but whose ideas propagated after his death. There are several of those fellows, and so far it sounds like I’m describing someone good. Unfortunately there’s plenty of evil in the message of guys like Qutb and Wahab. This discussion of Qutb’s life from a translator’s interview gets the point across. (Godwin’s Law preemption here with a discussion that both explains the logical fallacy and takes all the funny out of it.) [...]