Mick Hartley

Good interview with Salman Rushdie (via) at Haaretz:

You once wrote that Islam needs to be reformed. What did you mean?

"It's not so much about reforming Islam as it is about reforming Islamic societies. You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years. If they don't start to adapt to the new world, they will continue to be economically poor and incompetent and authoritarian. They will be basket cases, and there isn't a successful economy there. Even with the oil, all they have is the oil, nothing else. At the time I remember people saying it was overly optimistic or Westernized nonsense, but to me what these uprisings are showing is that this is what people want. "They want to be able to share in the conversation about their societies. And they want a degree of personal freedom which has been denied them for generations. You can see that what they want is to have a voice in the shaping of their society, they want personal freedom, they want jobs. In order to generate jobs and to have an economy that functions, you have to create a modern state. That is what I was talking about, and now it seems it may be something they think, too. But it's obvious that you can't run a modern state along the principles of the seventh century."

I also liked this:

Intellectuals have also done nonsense. Michel Foucault, for example, glorified Khomeini.

"Intellectuals are not saints, and can sometimes be very stupid indeed. In the United States, it is very difficult for intellectuals to have an impact on society, whereas in Europe it is more possible. I never knew Foucault. I met Jacques Derrida several times and he had a level of personal vanity which distorted the way he expressed himself…