/lit/ - Literature

From Sir Roger Scruton’s book “How to be a Conservative”

>Our national narrative may change, but what underlies it is something that remains always in place: the secular law. We who have been brought up in the English-speaking world have internalized the idea that law exists to do justice between individual parties, rather than to impose a uniform regime of commands. Other Western systems have also reinforced the attachment of citizens to the political order – notably Roman law and its many derivatives (the code napoléon among them). It was evident from the earliest days of Christianity that the New Testament was not an attempt to replace the law of the imperial power, but an attempt to make a space for spiritual growth within it. In his parables, Christ emphasized that the secular law is to be obeyed, and that our duty to God does not require us to defy or to replace it. Nor should we pay too much attention to the finicky edicts of the Torah, since ‘the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath’.

>To someone raised on the doctrine that legitimate law comes from God, and that obedience is owed to Him above all others, the claims of the secular jurisdiction are regarded as at best an irrelevance, at worst a usurpation. Such is the message of Sayyid Qutb’s writings, and of Milestones (ma‘alim fi’l tariq, 1964) in particular. In that book, Qutb denounces secular law, national identity and the attempt to establish a purely human political order without reference to the revealed will of God: all are blasphemous in Qutb’s eyes. Qutb’s followers have included Osama Bin Laden and his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri

>Anybody who understands what is at stake in the global conflict that is developing today will, I believe, come to see that the nation is one of the things that we must keep. In what follows, therefore, I shall be appealing to people who identify their political rights and duties in national terms, and who have learned to put God in the place where He belongs.

He goes on to describe Islam as standing against and the biggest threat to all the core western values

Give me your best trad books. I mean no holds barred trad, poetry, prose, politics, rad trad, full trad, and total trad. Trad that critiques Islam, ultimate trad.

Rod Dreher

>Mr. Elmougy said he didn’t understand why I considered Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the popular satellite TV evangelist and spiritual advisor of the Muslim Brotherhood, to be violent. I responded by pointing out that Qaradawi has advocated executing homosexuals, and that he gave advice on his website about how a Muslim man can beat his wife in an Islamically correct way.

>“That’s violent,” I told Mr. Elmougy. He slammed his hand on the table and said he agreed with the Shaykh, and that he wouldn’t apologize for it. He went on to tell a story about an adulteress who came to the Prophet asking for release from her sins. The Prophet ordered her stoned to death, said Mr. Elmougy, and declared that he could see her rejoicing in paradise. Mr. Elmougy finished his account by saying that things we Westerners consider to be unacceptable violence are considered by Muslims like him to be pro-family “deterrence.”

>I thanked him for his candor, for admitting that he favors executing gays, wife-beating, stoning adulteresses, and chopping the hands off of thieves.