Andrew G. Bostom: The Pentagon's Willful Blindness
[Andrew Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad and associate professor of medicine at Brown University Medical School.]
...The contemporary willful ignorance -- and subversion -- of our DOD contrasts starkly with the studious and intellectually honest approach to jihad taken by C. Snouck Hurgronje. A professor and Dutch colonial official, Snouck Hurgronje was also a pioneering and prolific Western scholar of Islam.
He visited Arabia (1884-85), including a stop at Mecca, while serving as a lecturer at the University of Leiden (1880-89). Hurgronje's two-volume classic work Mekka (1888-89) describes the history of the city and expounds upon Islam's origins and the traditions and rituals of the earliest Islamic communities. Translated into English as Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th Century (1931), the second volume includes many details of daily life in an Islamic culture and also discusses the Indonesian Muslim colony at Mecca.
From 1890 to 1906, Snouck Hurgronje was professor of Arabic at Batavia, Java. He also served as an adviser to the Dutch Colonial Government for Arabian Affairs, and in 1891 he was sent for a year to Sumatra to study the Acheh uprising -- the subject of his two-volume De Atjèhers (1893-94; published in English translation in 1906 as The Achehnese), his ethnographic account of the people of northern Sumatra and a standard reference work....
Although deeply respectful of Islamic religious life, as an authoritative scholar of Islamic doctrine and history and a Dutch colonial official, Hurgronje vigorously opposed Islamic jihadism. He stated plainly that all teaching with regard to the orthodox, mainstream Islamic institution of jihad war and the establishment of a caliphate should be prohibited in Muslim schools. But perhaps most importantly, Hurgronje's "prescription" was based on a meticulously researched, clear-eyed, and unfettered understanding of Islamic doctrine, history, and culture....
Our military leadership -- epitomized by gullible, triumphantly ignorant men such as [General Stanley] McChrystal -- must abandon its self-destructive, Muslim Brotherhood-nurtured "understanding" of Islam and rediscover the wisdom and experiences of honest Western scholars such as C. Snouck Hurgronje.
Read entire article at American Thinker
He visited Arabia (1884-85), including a stop at Mecca, while serving as a lecturer at the University of Leiden (1880-89). Hurgronje's two-volume classic work Mekka (1888-89) describes the history of the city and expounds upon Islam's origins and the traditions and rituals of the earliest Islamic communities. Translated into English as Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th Century (1931), the second volume includes many details of daily life in an Islamic culture and also discusses the Indonesian Muslim colony at Mecca.
From 1890 to 1906, Snouck Hurgronje was professor of Arabic at Batavia, Java. He also served as an adviser to the Dutch Colonial Government for Arabian Affairs, and in 1891 he was sent for a year to Sumatra to study the Acheh uprising -- the subject of his two-volume De Atjèhers (1893-94; published in English translation in 1906 as The Achehnese), his ethnographic account of the people of northern Sumatra and a standard reference work....
Although deeply respectful of Islamic religious life, as an authoritative scholar of Islamic doctrine and history and a Dutch colonial official, Hurgronje vigorously opposed Islamic jihadism. He stated plainly that all teaching with regard to the orthodox, mainstream Islamic institution of jihad war and the establishment of a caliphate should be prohibited in Muslim schools. But perhaps most importantly, Hurgronje's "prescription" was based on a meticulously researched, clear-eyed, and unfettered understanding of Islamic doctrine, history, and culture....
Our military leadership -- epitomized by gullible, triumphantly ignorant men such as [General Stanley] McChrystal -- must abandon its self-destructive, Muslim Brotherhood-nurtured "understanding" of Islam and rediscover the wisdom and experiences of honest Western scholars such as C. Snouck Hurgronje.