Attack in Nice on July 14th

[garbon]

Get a room.

Hey at least they make it easy to scroll past their nonsense.

[Hamilcar]

Get a room.

Hey at least they make it easy to scroll past their nonsense.

Go choke on a Deleuze commentary compilation.

[Queequeg]

I don't think it is.  What distinguishes Daesh from other, Islamic-oriented movements, is not heterodoxy.  They aren't advocating an alternative version of Islam.  They are not neo-Shi'ites or ultra-violent Bahai.  They are simply ignoring the variant of Islam they claim adherence to.  And it appears that they may be doing it because at its core it is not an Islamic movement at all.  It is a heterogeneous collection of "outs" the militarized core of which is secularized ex-Baathists who (much like Saddam) view Islam as nothing more than an convenient propaganda tool. 

I don't think the facts back this up.  They use the Black Flag, have gone out of their way to adopt Abbasid and Rashidun symbols...it's a slightly innovative outgrowth of Wahhabism, surely, but it's still there.  They aren't Mormons.  There's no new scripture.  There's not even any claims that a religious leader is the Mahdi or an Imam come out of occultation.

Does this matter?  One could argue that it doesn't and that their actions speak for themselves.  But to the extent people think it does matter that we identify and understand the enemy and "tell it as it is" then yes such distinctions are pertinent.

Yes.

Islamic civilization is collapsing.   Work needs to be done.   After 1945 we had the Frankfurt School and Hannah Arendt.  For the collapse of the Islamic world we have a bunch of smart people repeating the same bullshit "ISIS isn't Islam" nostrum, which just feeds in to the same intellectual stagnation that has us treating Said and other Postcolonial thinkers as gospel 50 years after their works were written and now feeds the idiocy, self-pity and conspiratorial nonsense that fuels the collapse.

I don't know what this means.

I'm a bit confused that you are confused.  I'd noticed this trend before, but this cycle was clearly articulated in W3710 History of Iran to the Safavid Period by Richard Bulleit on iTunes U, which I seem to remember you linking me to. 

Muhammed wasn't "puritanical"

How are we defining that?  He destroyed icons and statues of Pagan gods and focused on war and equality. 

The Almoravids and Alhomads were garden variety Sunnis

No?  .  They both began as religious reform movements.  Ibn Tumart was a fanatic and Catholic Monarchs style mass expulsions were pretty normal.  Maimonidies?  What's the argument here? Am I missing something?

The Fatimids were typical Shi'a as were the Safavids by the time they rose to power.

I don't know much about the Fatmids but the Safavids weren't.  People thought Ismail was the Mahdi or a new Prophet and the Kizilbash were 1/3rd Tengrist 1/3rd Christian 1/3rd Sufi fanatics.  He came out of one of the most diverse, weird regions in the entire Islamic world, and escoteric, mystical, Ali-revering Turkmens across Azerbiajan and Anatolia were extremely sympathetic to him.  From what I've read I don't think there even was a coherent conservative Twelver Shi'ism during the time of Ismail.

And virtually every new kingdom and empire for thousands of years rose through conquest and slavery, except in medieval western Europe where it was enserfment rather than slavery.

Again I don't think this is accurate.  By the time of the Ottoman Conquests, at least within Europe dynastic politics were probably more important than the kind of slaughter and destruction that the Ottomans wrought in the Balkans.  I don't think the Hapsburgs and Valois took millions of captive Netherlanders when Charles the Bold died, ditto the unions that brought about the UK, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and modern Spain. You could argue that this made possible by the violence and slavery in the New World but that's a simplification. 

I don't eat pork either.  That's not the point.  The point is that the eagerness with which the organization embraces people who obviously have no religious commitment whatsoever is symptomatic - what really defines identity is the willingness to engage in violence which is the end in itself.

It was always there.  In the Byzantine commentaries on the early Muslims the largest theological difference mentioned is the Islamic belief that death in battle is heroic and equivalent to Christian martyrdom.  We're 100 years out from the simultaneous Armenian, Assyrian and Pontic Greek genocides.  Colonialism and Arab Nationalism were intermissions.

[Razgovory]

The belief in a literal paradise is so corrosive, so dangerous that it must be made unacceptable in modern civilized society.

You can't do this. The need for a transcendental (any type of religious, spiritual, mystical etc.) experience is deeply wired in our psyches and, according to the Maslov's theory, it cannot be ignored without a significant detriment to one's psychological health (there are individuals who lack this need, at least ostensibly, but they are in a great minority and one cannot build a society around such minority).

This is why I said "literal paradise".

For spirituality without religious myths, try this: https://www.samharris.org/waking-up

Ah Sam Harris, fringe theorist, potential murderer and supporter of torture.