Books and
Cooks West
July 2003
The West and the Rest by Roger Scruton
The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat
by Roger Scruton
Dawn and Jared's place
July 12 at 5:30 PM
Pizza, macaroni salad, vegetable salad, bread,
jam bars, custard, pineapple wine
Our rating: 2.6 cups of tea!
From
Booklist
Last seen riding cheerily to the hunt, English philosopher Scruton turns
to Islamic terrorism and the war against it, illuminating them by
contrasting the West and Islam. The West has consisted of territorial
nations, each defined by language and a legal system. Islam, however,
is universal (hence, "the rest"--and more), bound together by the
Arabic of the Koran and Islamic law. The West's religion, Christianity,
discriminates sacred and secular realms of authority; Islam doesn't,
regarding secular arrangements as conveniences, at best, and ultimately
accepting no territorial state. Westerners' loyalties historically have
been national-territorial; Muslim loyalty is nonterritorial--to Islam.
The increasingly tolerant and multicultural West brims with evil in
devout Muslims' eyes, which see Western-style globalism as sufficiently
terrifying to justify such Muslims as the Ayatollah Khomeini and the
destroyers of the World Trade Center in taking advantage of Western
mores to mount reactive strikes against the West. Scruton concludes
that U.S. retaliation against artificial, Western-created Muslim
nations, and Israel's against Palestinian Muslims (and, inadvertently,
Christians) supposedly controlled by Yasir Arafat, wrongly presume that
borders and politicians control Islam. There is much more meat in
Scruton's concentrated argument, which concludes not by suggesting how
to fight terrorism successfully but by urging the West to reexamine its
prejudices about immigration, multiculturalism, free trade, and
religion. Ray Olson.
