(2004-06-23) Wilson Islam

Interview with Peter Lamborn Wilson from Mar'2002 includes bit about Islam and Globalization. And I'd have to say that the old Marxist historian, Maxime Rodinson, who wrote the book Islamic Capitalism, still remains correct in saying that Islam has never really developed as a whole, as a whole cultural world, much less as a theological structure, and it's never really developed a coherent critique of capital. You can see this in the kind of communiques that AlQaeda and these other groups put out. No, absolutely no concept about capital. It's not part of their consciousness even to think about it. They are in fact fascistic, and that's the end of it. Their economics never goes beyond crude Fascism. I'm talking about the Islamists now, but in the 60's and 70's and even in the 80's there were plenty of thinkers and activists in Islam who had a much more interesting and broader concept and really were trying to develop some kind of critique of capital. But where are they now? I guess that's all you can say, is that they're dead. All those people in Algeria, all those journalists and writers and intellectuals who got shot, it's like that... If we look at Chechnya for example - people are laboring under a very dangerous misapprehension about Chechnya when they assume that the resistance there is Islamist or fundamentalist. But historically, it's Sufism, it's the Naqshbandi order. The Naqshbandis are also quite political in Turkey and they try to take a position between the secular army types and the Islamists. They try to offer a politics of Islam that is tolerant and open to a certain extent.