01-18-2005, 12:59 AM
"We should come to know our Shadow or else there is a strong tendency to project our Shadow upon others." (Carl Jung)
"The West misunderstands Islam largely because we’ve got a deep cultural prejudice that is as deeply ingrained as our anti-Semitism, which developed alongside it from about the time of the Crusades. We’ve got into the habit of projecting our own shortcomings onto Islam, just as we did upon the Jews." (Karen Armstrong)
Many other things Islam is blamed by the non-Muslims – come from their own ‘dark past’. For example, in today’s lexicon of the dreaded Veil and fanatical woman-hating, it may be hard to remember a time when Islam represented wanton sensuality and licentiousness. "Today when many people in the West are trying to shed the sexual repressions of their Christian past, we say that Islam is a sexually repressed religion…..At a time in the Middle Ages when Europe was extremely hierarchical, we blamed Islam for giving too much power to menials like slaves and women. Today we’ve thrown that off and we blame Islam for being oppressive to women. Again, we’ve reversed the old stereotype, not because we’ve found out anything about Islam necessarily, but because we’ve got into a cultural habit of making Islam the opposite of us." Armstrong points out.
As a matter of fact, western are ‘born-in’ racial profiling and religious bigotry. For example, Why weren’t white men profiled after the Oklahoma bombing or during the Unabomber scare? Or why Catholicism was racialized and made a big issue in the election of John F. Kennedy?
Sounds crazy, eh? Well, racism and bigotry don’t have much to do with sanity."