Bollywood vs. Bin Laden

Note that the feudal landlord is my cousin, and the guy/village is based on a real person, so I'm not just pulling this story out of thin air (i.e. anecdata).

The Pakistan Taliban has a pretty good reputation in the Pashtun regions. ("Taliban" is a pashtun word) One of the more popular proposed reforms is Sharia law.

Sharia has an appeal that's difficult to understand in the West. Pakistan's official court system is deeply, deeply compromised. The police are hopelessly corrupt. Cases take many years to resolve, and victory goes to the person who paid out the most in bribes.

You can use the parallel legal "system", jirga tribal law. Jirga is less "legal system" and more "binding arbitration". It evolved to end blood feuds by negotiating settlements between tribes, and as such, can be blindingly unfair.

Compared to these two equally terrible alternatives, Sharia looks pretty good. In fact, Muhammed invented it back in ~600CE precisely to stamp out customary law. Compared to jirga, it's positively progressive, esp. in regards to women. (Which makes sense, it's about a thousand years newer than tribal law) (Many interpretations of Sharia allow women to own property, for instance; and Islamic judges typically don't settle blood feuds by trading women)

EDIT: Ha ha, remembered the wrong date.

Can you let me know which specific part of my comment makes you think I'm "mixing up my terrorists"?

> There is a fundamental diference between a group like the Taliban whose primary focus appears to be "taking their country back" , and characters like Osama who have delusions about being holy warriors in some imaginary battle with the west.

Agree totally. Both the Afghan Taliban (who from what I understand of the current situation, are attempting to cut all association with Al-Qaeda) and the Pakistani Taliban share a relatively hardline interpretation of Islam, but that's about where the similarity stops.

The posted article is about curbing fundamentalist Islamic views in Pakistan through movies. My comment was basically saying that while fundamentalist Islamic groups like the TTP operate and recruit in the manner that they do in rural Pakistan, movies aren't going to make much of a dent.

EDIT: Clarification.

> Pakistan’s ideology is based on Islamic ‘nationalism’ where it views itself as part of a greater ‘Ummah’, but is certainly not recognized by the members of the ‘Ummah’ as its leader. In other words, Pakistan does not have native ownership over its own ideology, which inevitably leads to Pakistan associating itself with other, more influential members of the ‘Ummah’ like Saudi Arabia and Iran, at the obvious expense of its own subcontinental origins.

Neither Pakistan nor India wield a significant influence in the Islamic world - that power belongs to the aforementioned Saudi Arabia and Iran. No matter what may or may not happen in Bollywood, its influence in Pakistan/Afghanistan/etc. will always be overshadowed by Saudi & Persian mullahs. The reason why mullahs from those countries have the sort of transnational power they do is because of the unifying nature of Islam, across ethnic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries.

But the further west you go from India, the more the "influence" of Bollywood declines (and it is quite rapid). Regardless of whether the top Bollywood actors are Muslim, India itself is almost 80% Hindu, and that will never be forgotten by those in the Middle East watching Bollywood movies.

Although to those of us in the West, it may be easy to lump India and the Middle East into the same "cultural" category, that couldn't be further from the truth. Shared "conservative" values only go so far, and their respective histories are quite different.

And it gets even more difficult than this because most religions don't look or feel anything like Christianity, but because that's the most common religion in the US most surveys are biased in favor of religions that look like Christianity.

So you have issues like, is the Church of Subgenius a religion? Is science a religion? Is gnosticism the same as Gnosticism? etc.

There are entire college classes you can take on the history of the methodology of the study of religion, that focus on these questions like how do you know if something is a religion and how do you determine if someone is religious or not.

edit: A fun quote I snagged from Overdosed America suggesting that the excessive belief in western medicine may in fact have some commonalities with religion:

"Could it be that, although we define our era by the tremendous scientific and technological progress that is being made (particularly in medicine), our desire to believe in this narrative of biomedical progress predisposes us to uncritical belief in its real merits? In other words, might the shared belief in the potential of medical science be, in large part, our cultural mythology?

We tend to look upon myths with romantic condescension as the stories of primitive societies that provide shared meaning and hope and ease the prospect of suffering and death -- stories that are made of 'facts' that we (scientifically sophisticated as we are) know are not really true. Our belief that we are too scientifically grounded to succumb to such nonrational beliefs may, in fact, be our myth. How else can we explain the widespread agreement that statins or the new antidepressants or the COX-2 inhibitors are genuine breakthroughs that will preserve and restore our health in ways never before possible? These are our myths, merging science and hope into our shared belief."

Here's a caricature of how it went down:

(mid 1800s, Liberalism): "Hey, it turns out when you look at ancient copies of the Bible from 2 different areas, there are occasional differences in spelling and word order. Therefore, the Bible is totally fiction, but teaches moderately useful lessons, so long as we understand the figurative language it's using."

(late 1800s, Fundamentalism): "What? You guys are quacks. The King James Bible is totally reliable because God specially preserved it. Therefore, there's no figurative language whatsoever, everything is literal."

It's my perception that Fundamentalism's influence is waning; I run into far fewer "fundies" than I did during my childhood (but I live in the same house and attend the same church.) In surveys I've seen, a lower percentage of people self-identify as Fundamentalist, and a lower percentage agree with certain key Fundamentalist doctrines. They may be louder than before, but I don't think they're any more prevalent.