Ignorant Experts on False Islamism
Martin Kramer directs us to an observation by a man genuinely knowledgeable on Islamism and strongly critical of false experts who speak without knowledge:
Graeme Wood (The Atlantic), in his new book [The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State] on ISIS: "In my conversations with [Western] scholars of Islam, few of the people who dismissed the Islamic State as a product of false Islamism - Jacobinism with an Islamic veneer - were able to name a single cleric or [Muslim] scholar associated with the Islamic State, or a fatwa or other statement by that [Muslim] scholar. The level of ignorance is as appalling as if a scholar of Marxism declared the Soviet Union 'not Marxist' and turned out to be unfamiliar with the name of Trotsky or Lenin." [The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State, page 76]That means I know more than most so-called experts. Yet, I know that I know next to nothing about anything. By the end of the semester, however, I should know quite a bit more than next to nothing, since my Islamism course appears to have enough students to take place this time.
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 4:43 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
One of my instructors At Bible College was asked a theological question. His reply was..."I haven't yet examined that particular subject, but when I do so, it will be the final word." He came to the USA from East Germany as a teen ager, and had his doctorate in theology from a seminary in the USA. He was very confident in his abilities. A typical German?
Cran
Sorry about the captitalized a
Germans are pretty blunt, but they don't BS, and they rarely joke . . . but that one you describe might have been exaggerating for effect, or maybe he picked up some American humor from living in the States for so long.
Jeffery Hodges
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