Re: Economics of Islam

[Colin Danby <danbyc@xxxxxxx>]

> Here is an excellent article on the background of September Eleven:
> "The Roots of Muslim Rage"  -- The Atlantic, September 1990:
>
>     http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/90sep/rage.htm

Bernard Lewis' work is deeply problematic.  I would not take it at face
value.  You really need a sense of the debate over scholarship like
Lewis' opened by Edward Said's 1978 book _Orientalism_.  Here's a
webpage that gives a very quick alternative view,
http://www.fair.org/extra/9507/islam.html but this is not something that
can be dealt with in soundbites.

>It is suggested that one source of the rage stems from the failure of

A lot of different people in different places and different situations
may be unhappy about different things for different reasons.  Reducing
all of this to one category of "rage" is unhelpful.

> the Islamic nations to develop economically.  Some of them have

"the" Islamic nations?  What is an Islamic nation?  Which ones qualify?
Are you really going to bracket Kuwait, Sudan, Turkey, and Indonesia?
What are the relations between Islam as a religious tradition, its
particular institutional presences in a particular place, states and
national authorities, and "development"?  Note how all these questions
of social analysis get short-circuited by this kind of reductionist
framing.

Best, Colin