AmirAshkan Pishroo's blog

The assassination of an author

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 06:27:28 +0000

Bad habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into, but hard to get out of. The sad thing about the post-communist countries is that they are more ready to give up the good habits than the bad ones. In these countries authorities have been using communist-era's police secret files to settle political scores.

Americans: A nation of givers

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 06:29:42 +0000

For its March/April 2008 issue, The American has run an intriguing research by Arthur C. Brooks, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who maintains that Americans are the most giving people in the world.

John McCain & the making of a financial crisis

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:18:59 +0000

The Making of a Financial Crisis is an impressive short documentary that shows why John McCain's failed philosophy and poor judgment are a recipe for deepening the economic crisis.

If you were a Jew

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 07:04:04 +0000

If you were a Jew in the time of Holocaust, Richrd Rorty argues, your chances of being helped by your kind neighbors were greater if you lived in Denmark or Italy than if you lived in Belgium.

Rorty warns us how not to explain this difference: “A common way of describing this difference is by saying that many Danes and Italians showed a sense of human solidarity which many Belgians lacked,” Rorty (1984).

Of woman

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:13:14 +0000

To my knowledge, men often ask themselves “What is woman?” “When does a ‘girl’ become a ‘woman’?” At least, they do so in the mode, or in the form that they grant to the questions such as: “What is Being?” “What is technology?” “Are colors more mind-dependent than weights? “What is the relation of language to thought?” etc.

The futurology of the Middle East

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 07:55:39 +0000

There is no need to spell out that Islamist terrorism is not, and never was, an existential threat to Western civilization as a whole. But this should not lead to a feeling of great relief, since it will have the potential to cause millions of deaths and unimaginable damage. Islamist terrorism is a security threat that will span a generation. But it will not last longer than two generations.

An apostate Pakistani girl: Let me speak

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 05:41:48 +0000

The following is a letter written by a young Pakistani woman on my post entitled “Do Muslim women believe and desire what Western women believe and desire?.” The letter, though provocative, is a good read:

Selfhood

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 02:51:29 +0000

In discussing his notion of “the self,” Richard Rorty starts with a poem by Philip Larkin. Here is the final part of it:

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what

You command is as clear as a lading-list

Anything else must not, for you, be thought

To exist.

And what’s the profit? Only that, in time

We half-identify the blind impress

All our behavings bear, may trace it home.

But to confess,

'It’s the Middle East, Stupid'

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:19:39 +0000

Many Western scholars paint a gloomy picture of the present situation in the Middle East. Take Michael B. Oren, for example, who claims, “the possibility that a border scrap between Israelis and Palestinians could ignite a regional conflagration should not be too surprising,” wrote in an article entitled “It’s the Middle East, Stupid,” published in The Washington Post.

Sociological imagination: Iranian Revolution

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:29:58 +0000

The Iranian revolution was a product of the contradictions of combined and uneven development in Iran.

It was not Islamic ideology and/or Shi’a discourse that radicalized the revolutionary processes, but the power struggle itself brought the radicalization of the revolution.

Many of the slogans and key concepts during the revolutionary process were essentially democratic and borrowed from the West. But once the Pahlavi regime was swept aside, the drive toward Islamization began.

Liberal Musilms

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:03:14 +0000

[Above photo: Sami Yusuf known as the Islamic Bono]

Osama bin Laden’s attacks had a threefold purpose

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 03:46:19 +0000

Osama bin Laden’s attacks had a threefold purpose:

The first was payback.

The second goal was to use massive terrorist strikes to put fear in the hearts of the American people, turning them against their leaders.

The third purpose was to encourage other Muslims to attack the United States by demonstrating that America is a “paper tiger.”

Racism of the anti-racists: Multiculturalism

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 04:50:26 +0000

The difficulty faced by a Western intellectual who is sympathetic to Islam yet dedicated to liberalism–one who thinks of himself as auxiliary to the politician rather than to the priest–is to avoid hinting that his sort of multiculturalism is based on the equal dignity of cultures which could not be evaluated merely on the basis of our criteria.

I am no man, I am dynamite

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 08:12:59 +0000

Why I Am a Destiny: I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous–a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Do Muslim women believe and desire what Western women believe and desire?

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 05:22:52 +0000

Consider: if it were natural for women to cover their bodies, they would not need so many laws and sticks commanding them to do so. Women would not have to be tempted into it by carrots of immortality, men’s love, or God’s love. Like so many men, to paraphrase Phyllis Chesler, “women follow orders– to their own detriment, to their very deaths–when they are given by male dictators, by father-figures on earth and in Heaven.”

Who said Iraq will be a Qaedistan?

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 09:21:42 +0000

Renowned Islamism scholar Oliver Roy has claimed that “One of the key questions in the U.S. presidential race is what will happen if U.S. troops leave Iraq, (The International Herald Tribune). I am not sure which U.S. presidential race, 2004 or 2008, Professor Roy has in mind. For anyone following the present race knows that Iraq is not the key question, let alone the concern about the aftermath of U.S. leaving Iraq.

زیباشناسی مرگ: شکنجه

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:44:08 +0000

چون قدرت یک مترسکی بیش نیست پس شکنجه تلاشی مذبوحانه برای احیای خشونت بار این مترسک محسوب می شود. شکنجه در چارچوب مراوده ای زورمدارانه نمایان می شود و بدین راه هر گونه ایستادگی را در یک رابطه ی رو در رو در هم می شکند.

The Body in Pain

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 04:10:45 +0000

For good reason: if social scientists agree on anything, it is that torture can never be defended on the grounds of military necessity.

The object of torture is torture. On the need for such a qualification, we must turn to the remarkable scholar Elaine Scarry, the author of The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, which is a thorough study of pain and torture from medical, political, military, legal, and literary perspectives.

Hey, girl, show me your Hezbollah tattoo

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 05:13:45 +0000

"A picture is worth a thousand slogans and not just in Lebanon."

Via Tabsir: Backing an Islamic Party

What’s gone right in Iraq?

AmirAshkan Pishroo — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:37:11 +0000

what’s gone right in Iraq? This much is obvious: Saddam Hussien and his psychopathic crime gang, are out. He was a time bomb that threatened the entire region and indeed the international community. He had to be defused, and should have been deposed already in the first Persian Gulf war. Thanks to the United States and its allies that Saddam, “the butcher of Baghdad” is today no longer among us.