Islamic doctrine has justified opposite political programs alike
Evidence
If we come to realize that, as many scholars have recently noted, Islamic doctrine can be seen as justifying capitalism as well as socialism, militancy as well as fatalism, ecumenism as well as exclusivism, we begin to sense the tremendous lag between academic descriptions of Islam (that are inevitably caricatured in the media) and the particular realities to be found within the Islamic world. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 76
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the determinist-vs-instrumentalist debate on religion in politics — same range of justifications seen for Christianity and others.
Related
- Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.84)
- The reified notion of Islam has hindered rather than helped understanding of Muslim societies (similarity 0.82)
- Medieval Christian polemics could only read Islam as affirming or negating Christianity (similarity 0.82)
- Every portrayal of Islam is an act of willed interpretation, not a description. (similarity 0.82)
- Left-liberal intellectuals confirm conservative caricatures of Islam (similarity 0.82)
- Christians could only conceive Islam as derivative of Christian truth (similarity 0.82)
- Political Islam parallels other modern fundamentalisms rather than stemming from Islam’s essence (similarity 0.82)
- Islamism is a distinctly non-Western modernity that rejects rather than adapts Western discourse. (similarity 0.82)
- Muslim-world upheavals are driven by social and economic factors, not by Islam (similarity 0.82)
- Europe’s image of Islam tracked its political and military needs, not theology (similarity 0.81)
- Treating Islam as monolithic enables claims that it is inherently anti-democratic and violent (similarity 0.81)
- Both medieval Christianity and Islam defined each other by disagreement, not overlap (similarity 0.81)
- Islamic history resists any single coherent characterization (similarity 0.81)
- Understanding Islam’s coverage requires demystifying the power-knowledge link (similarity 0.81)
- Western discourse reduces all Muslim societies to a single malevolent essence (similarity 0.81)