I mean of course academic Orientalism, not the superficial, politicised Orientalism associated with colonial administration from the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. The greatest error committed by modern Arab intellectuals in fighting Orientalism was that they did not make a sufficient distinction between these two forms of it.
The vast majority of the doctors of law in the various currents and sects of Islam still give their blessing to suicide operations where the Muslim blows himself up in order to kill a few or many civilians. Moreover they have termed these depraved acts ‘martyrdom operations’, so that they have become the object of admiration and a subject for incitement and encouragement.
My interest in political Islam began in 1965 with the case of the famous member of the Muslim Brotherhood Sayyid Qutb. This interest intensified when the Muslim Brotherhood entered the arena of events in Egypt at the beginning of the 1970s. For a period of 40 years I have been studying the entire literature of political Islam and have followed all of its movements issuing from the Muslim Brotherhood current.
Of all the problems that the Islamist textualist trend faces with respect to modernity, one of the most thorny is their constant systematic recourse to the store of tradition to derive what they consider to be timeless solutions eternally relevant to all times and places and untouched by what takes place in reality.
The vast majority of the doctors of law in the various currents and sects of Islam still give their blessing to suicide operations where the Muslim blows himself up in order to kill a few or many civilians. Moreover they have termed these depraved acts ‘martyrdom operations’, so that they have become the object of admiration and a subject for incitement and encouragement.
Of all the problems that the Islamist textualist trend faces with respect to modernity, one of the most thorny is their constant systematic recourse to the store of tradition to derive what they consider to be timeless solutions eternally relevant to all times and places and untouched by what takes place in reality.
