Site of the Week --Stray Reflections

This is a blog by Alghazalians-A group of students studying Western Philosophy and Civilisation from the perspective of Imam Ghazali. ( A Persian Philosopher)

http://alghazalians.blogspot.com/

The major problem these students seem to have with Marxism, is it's close ties to the Enlightenment which places the capacity of self determination squarely in the realm of the individual and champions this indivdual mode.

"Both liberalism and communism are routes to the some end – abundance and freedom the worship of desire and the proclamation of man’s sovereignty and his rebellion against God.

All the higher religions and most emphatically Islam reject the metaphysical conception of the individual as a self determining being (the conception of man as God) Islam insists that human fulfillment lies in a voluntary surrender (the word Islam means surrender) of the capacity of self determination.

The capacity of self-determination is not denied but the authentication of ends with reference to this capacity leads one to Kufr and to frustration since such authentication cannot conceivably provide a basis for the ordering of values. The ordering of values and the authentication of ends cannot be achieved through an exercise of man’s rational faculty. Reason can identify means for achieving given ends but it cannot provide a basis for valuing ends.

Some of you may be rather turned off by the "Anti-Americanism" found on the site though:

Merciless slaughter of defenceless people is the dominant theme of American history. Fifteen million Red Indians were systematically butchered over a period of two hundred years and an entire continent stolen from them - much as the Zionists are now murdering and plundering Palestine. The Red Indians have been followed by Mexicans, Moros, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Serbs, Afghans and Iraqis in this never ending horror story of the blood thirsty American quest for world domination.

But such savagery is not confined to America’s dealings with strangers. It characterizes all public life in America. Today America’s prison population stands at well over two million. American imprisonment rates are now more than six times higher than those of Britain, Canada or France. In addition to this a further 3.3 million Americans are on probation and over 700,000 on parole. One percent of all white American males and 9 percent of all black American males are currently in prison. Over 1.2 million black male Americans are on probation or parole. Incarceration rates have more than doubled for both white and black American males during the past twenty years.

That being said, there are plenty of interesting links to major thinkers ( they found a great number of links to Being and Time---Kudos!) and the anaylsis of Marx is well thought out. (Even though I would disagree with much of it.)