hat tip-Jerry Gordon
Dr. Richard L. Rubenstein, Lawton Distinguished scholar at Florida State University and former President of the University of Bridgeport (CT) is a noted author, theologian and a close personal friend and colleague. Read this excerpt from his forthcoming book. It is a wake up call to us in Amercia about the threat of political Islam in all of its guises.
THE GOD OF ABRAHAM
AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
Richard L. Rubenstein served as Florida State’s Robert O. Lawton Distinguished professor of religion for many years, leaving the university in 1995 to assume the presidency of the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, a post from which he retired in 1999. A renowned figure in contemporary theology and the study of religion and society, Rubenstein is best known for his numerous works dealing with the theological implications of the Holocaust and the phenomenon of modern genocide in general. He lives in Fairfield, Connecticut, where he continues to teach and write. The following is an edited excerpt from his newest book in progress.
As the United States finds itself in what has been officially characterized as a “war against terror,” we would do well to reflect on the question of whether the “clash of civilizations” that Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington argued could be the fate of humanity in the 21st Christian century is already upon us.
According to Bassam Tibi, a devout Muslim, A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University, and professor of International Relations at Germany’s Göttingen University, the “clash of civilizations” is both real and dangerous. Tibi comments:
After September 11 we can no longer afford to confine ourselves to warning of Islamophobia, if civilizational discord is addressed. The rhetoric of dismissing “The Islamic Threat” and the so-called “Myth of Confrontation” can no longer be pursued free of context. Discord can be related to clashing worldviews and it can assume a military shape. What else than a threat was September 11…? It is not correct to play down what happened in New York and Washington as an act of a small group or a “crazed gang;” this argument conceals instead of enlightening. In short: on September 11, an act of irregular war took place. That act was equally an assault on the values and the concept of order of the West. The event is placed in a civilizational context which cannot be overlooked.
Nevertheless, Tibi counsels us that we must distinguish between Islam as a religious faith and Islamism or fundamentalism which, he argues, is “an outcome of the politicization of Islam. This is a distinction that other scholars would challenge, claiming that ideally, Islam knows no separation of the religious and political spheres.
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