Title

Terror and liberalism

Description

Berman shows how a genuine spiritual inspiration can be twisted into a fanatical demand for murder. He offers remarkable insights into the trends and conflicts influencing Islamic radicalism. He illuminates the surprising connections between very different political movements, and he reveals the several ways in which Islamic extremism resembles some all-too-familiar episodes in American and European experience. "Berman draws on sources that range from Albert Camus's The Rebel to the Book of the Revelation - from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to the Islamist scholar Sayyid Qutb's magisterial In the Shade of the Koran. Berman condemns the foreign policy "realism" of the political right, and he diagnoses the naivete of the political left. He calls for a "new radicalism" and a "liberal American interventionism" to promote democratic values throughout the world - a vigorous new politics of American liberalism."--BOOK JACKET.

Identifier

1102923

393057755

Creator

Berman, Paul

Format

1st ed.

Source

Brian Lamb Booknotes Collection

Gift of Brian Lamb, 2011.

Catalog record

Language

eng

Date

2003

Program air date: June 22, 2003

Publisher

Norton

George Mason University. Libraries. Special Collections & Archives

Text

Transcription of Annotations
Notes on front endpapers refer to U.S.efforts for Muslims in supporting a Palestinian State, sending food aid to Somalia and coming to the aid of Muslims in Kosovo, list Arab and Muslim terrorists who have Western roots, and contrast the West's belief in rebellion with the Islamic belief in submission. The disconnect between the rational consensus at the beginning of World War I and the 9 million war dead at the end is pointed out. Other notes refer to Sayyid Qutb, the most influential writer among Sunni Arabs, his education at the University of Northern Colorado, his master work 'In the shade of the Qur'an' and his execution by Nasser in 1961. The purpose of liberalism is identified as the separation of religion and the state. Qutb despised this "hideous schizophrenia of modern life" for which he blamed the Jews since two Jewish thinkers - Marx and Freud - had contributed to the materialistic doctrine and the sexual revolution in his mind. The back endpapers include notes on the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and identify Qutb and Khomeini as fellow thinkers. Martyrdom is called 'the highest and most beautiful of destinies'. It is also pointed out that the Palestinians have attached the Nazi label to Israel. Other notes call the 1991 Gulf War a colossal blunder since it taught the world that America could be withstood. The following questions and statements are part of the notes: "In Islam the divine is everything." -- "Sweden [is] left wing, Switzerland [is] right wing - both cared only for themselves and remained neutral thanks to others who did the fighting." - "Islam in its radical version of the present poses every imaginable danger." -- Annotations by Brian Lamb in the margins and underlining of pertinent phrases throughout the book. -- Examples: p. 77: "He [Qutb] wanted to show that Islam was self-sufficient - that Islam did not need the thinkers of the West, could rely on its own spectacular resources of the past, was all-inclusive, independent, and fully adequate." -- p. 103: "Nasser hanged Qutb because the Egyptian state feared the subversive violence of the Muslim Brotherhood." -- p. 120: "Totalitarianism: [a] cult of death." -- p. 153: "The 9/11 attacks revealed many unexpected and astonishing truths, but surely the most astonishing of all was that, in Arlington, Virginia, the Pentagon had no plan to defend the Pentagon. Everyone, unto the chiefest of Indian chiefs, turned out to be a simpleminded rationalist, expecting the world too act in sensible ways, without mystery, self-contradiction, murk or madness. In this country, we are all Noam Chomsky."

Subject

"Terrorism."

"Liberalism."

Relation

Original Booknotes interview

Rights

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