Former Archbishop of Canterbury supports Huntington on Islam

A couple of readers sent me a London Times article yesterday concerning a speech by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, in which he supported the pope’s September 12 lecture and said that Islam is the problem. Because the speech seemed to be all over the place, I was perhaps too quickly dismissive of it. I acknowledge it is a hopeful sign that the former Archbishop approvingly quoted Samuel Huntington:

“The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

By the way, the problem with Huntington’s discussion of Islam in The Clash of Civilizations is that he sees the Islam-West clash solely in terms of his overall generic theory of civilizational relations. Throughout his discussion of Islam, he barely touches on the peculiar features of Islam as a religion. In other words, as welcome and important as Huntington’s “Clash” theory has been (and remember, he singled out the West-Islam clash as the great issue of our time several years before the 9/11 attack), it is, in a manner of speaking, yet one more “non-Islam” theory of Islamic extremism. My list keeps growing like topsy.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 21, 2006 11:43 AM | Send