About This Forum: Social Sciences, Moral and Religious

[marct]

Hi Tom,

One question that pops into my mind is the issue of patterns of expansion of religious, political, commercial, and other theories, ideologies, and systems. the linkages are obviously multi-layered and therefore complex. We talk much about the Judeo-Christian system of values and that alone makes large assumptions about unified views on social mores, structures, and languages.

I've always found the spread of ideas fascinating, myself. The more I study them, the more convinced I am that some of what Richard Dawkins is talking about with "mind viruses" is probably correct. I think he analogy plays well into some of the trends we have sen n the New Religious Movements and in the return to "fundamentalisms" in the mainstream religions and political ideologies.

You are quite right about the assumption of unity within a belief system and the concomitant social-structural assumptions that are, supposedly, contained in it. That's also one of the big problems Islam has had in many of the immigrant communities - an inability to separate the "cultural" from the "religious". I'm pretty sure I know why that has happened (a rather strange process of symbolic accretion tied in with fairly standard patterns of immigrant enculturation and a consequent mis-mapping of perceptual topologies), but very few symbol systems contain quick ways to adapt.

Sorry, I know that sounds like a lecture.

Islam is inherently self-limiting in some regards because the Koran is only the Koran when it is in classical Arabic. On the other hand as the religion spreads, the new adherents have to learn enough Arabic to at least understand basic tenets.

Christianity especially Catholicism when services had to be delivered in Latin shared some of this. But Christianity allows translation and we would not have a "King James" version of the Bible if that had not been the case.

I think that this is a crucial strength of Islam and, to a much lesser degree, of pre-Vatican II Catholicism. It really enforces a common language for communication, together with all of the perceptual biases inherent in that language. The reason Islam is stronger is that their scriptures are written in the "common language" whereas one of the Christian scriptures are written in Latin.

What brought all this to my mind was a comment made by a reviewer on an article I sent to SWJ for another of my authors here....

The reviewer pointed out the fallacy in that statement: there is a strategy and it is global.

That it is not "coherent" to the authors of the NIE is a statement of their analytical failure.

I've got to agree with you there. Still, remember that phrase I used earlier "perceptual topologies"? I suspect that that is what stymied the NIE analysis: I fully suspect that they cannot conceive of an "insurgency" being a broad social movement without having a centralized leadership function and a "coherent" (i.e. comprehensible to them) strategy (hey, I really like the new "wry grin" smilie!!!).

You know that I see that strategy and method as a global insurgeny based on ideology of a particular distorted sect within the Muslim world. What got me thinking about patterns of expansion is the use of the internet. the article in question centers on that issue and I will not reveal more because it is in the SWJ inbox. But in the interim, Islam has spread through conquest--especially in its early years and through the peak of the Ottoman empire. Parallel to that expansion by the sword, Islam spread via trade and local contacts.
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What seems to me especially relevant in all of this is the emergence of the internet and its applications for global prosletyzing. It has become in many ways the electronic model of the spread of Christianity via disciples early on and the creation of a Church with a priesthood.

My first real contact with the Internet was back in 1986 when I got involved with a distributed BBS system called PODS (Pagan Occult Distribution System) as part of my research. Utterly fascinating how it worked and how "communities" would be built without any face to face contact. That experience certainly conditioned most of my future research and thinking .

Once the WWW showed up back in '93 (okay, December '92 for the purists), I spent a lot of time tracking down how it was being used by religious groups. I think your analogy to the early Church is, actually, quite sound, especially if we look at the epistolary tradition (e.g. St. Paul). The main difference I see is that there has been a vast increase in the "communicative density". In effect, if I can now reach 100 million people, I am quite likely to find several hundred, or thousand, who believe whatever I do. There's a parallel in law enforcement circles with the rise of child-porn trading rings and the spread of the 'net (excellent MA Thesis on that here).

The spread of the Radical Safali version of Islam is, to my mind, a somewhat different case. Basically, I think w have a situation where a radical, ideological insurgent group, the Muslim Brotherhood, lucked out in finding a very rich ally, the Wahhabist movement in Saudi Arabia, and he two of them have orchestrated a very effective, and long reaching, IO campaign i both real space and cyberspace. We should get Terri to comment more on this, since she's the expert n the area.

The 'net has played into their hands in that it has given them access to a lot of Muslims who have been raised pretty much "secular". As such, they don't really have a well developed religious "immune system" to pretect hem from the "mind viruses" being spread by the MB. This may sound a little weird, but the same pattern has played out inside Christianity and Judaism in North America and Western Europe. Without that "immune system", they are definitely "at risk".

Marc