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Old April 16th, 2016 #1
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Post Why Muslims Like Hitler, but Not Mozart

I have had some interesting discussions with my good friend Ohmyrus, who is an ethnic Chinese man but appreciates some aspects of Western civilization that many Westerners themselves appear to have forgotten, or rejected. He is not unique in this regard. One of the best books about European culture published in recent years is Defending the West, written by the former Muslim Ibn Warraq who was born in the Indian subcontinent, not in the Western world. Essentially, according to modern Multiculturalism, every culture has the right to exist – except the Western one. The Iranian-born ex-Muslim Ali Sina denounces Multiculturalism for precisely this reason in his book Understanding Muhammad, which I have reviewed online:

As a native European, it is strange to notice how many (non-Muslim) Asians apparently appreciate my civilization more these days than so-called intellectuals in my own country do. It is challenging to explain how the West could make so many advances in the past and yet be as stupid as it currently is. The question of what went wrong with the West is far more interesting than what went wrong with the Islamic world. The best answer I can come up with is that maybe our current flaws are related to our past virtues, at least indirectly. For instance, being stubborn can be a strength or a weakness, depending upon the situation. The West is a non-traditionalist civilization. We have unquestionably made advances that no other civilization has done before us, despite what some critics claim, but perhaps the price we pay for this is that we also make mistakes that nobody has done before us. Organized science is a Western invention. Organized national suicide, too, is a Western invention. The Western university system once represented a great comparative advantage for Europe vis-à-vis other civilizations. Today that same system is undermining the very civilization that gave birth to it.

Since European civilization is so far the only civilization to have had a truly global impact, this means that all other civilizations have to face the challenge of dealing with a layer of impulses and ideas which are not their own. There is no doubt that this has been a disruptive process in many cases, but it is also true that different non-Western cultures deal very differently with the Western challenge and appropriate very different parts of its heritage.

The Arabs had no significant pictorial tradition of their own even before Islam. The Islamic ban on pictorial arts was not always enforced, just like the ban on alcoholic beverages was not always strictly enforced, but pictorial arts were discouraged and consequently never occupied a prominent place in that culture. Some Muslim rulers could interpret the religious rules regarding the depiction of human figures quite liberally. A tradition for book illustration and miniature painting did develop, but it is important to remember that even the paintings that did exist were intended as illustrations o

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read full article at source: http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3911
 
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