Jacques Myard Quotes
It's always hard to talk about the culture that you are from, especially with Islam, it is a very sensitive subject and I don't want to be seen to be adding to the problems of Islam and the west.
For most Muslims, their religious identity supersedes their nationalistic identity. Sukarno’s quotation is famous because many ultraorthodox Muslims castigated him for putting nationalism before Islam. There is an orthodox Islamic concept of the Ulma—the community of all Muslims in the world, and this takes precedence over any nation or set of nations. In that sense, extreme Islamic fundamentalists have always opposed Sukarno claiming he was an enemy of Islam.
This phrase and the theory behind it are often misattributed to Samuel P. Huntington who first used it as the title of a talk at the American Enterprise Institute in 1992 and the following year used if as the Title of a very important article in Foreign Affairs. Huntington was very familiar with Lewis’ works and doubtless used the Lewis phrase as it perfectly fit Huntington’s concept. See {604193}.
Many, if not most, non-Muslim scholars and thinkers very much disagree with Hamid on this point. The great exceptions of Islam are almost 1,000 years in the past. Current Islam, they argue, is not more exceptional than the beliefs of modern Mongolia which dominated most of the known world centuries ago, but has little that deserves special respect in the 21st country beyond the general respect which is owed to all religions and nationalities. With the exception of Turkey, Islamic nations are for the most part, backward, and virtually no other non-Muslim nations try to emulate them in any way.
Jacques Myard is a former member of the National Assembly of France. He represented the Yvelines department, and is a member of The Republicans.
