Of the “many Islams,” America has for decades actively fostered and manipulated its own useful preferences. These “preferred Islams” of earlier periods are part of the story of the Islamist Imaginary of our own.
Source/Credit: Salon
By Raymond William Baker | September 23, 2015
American propaganda exaggerates the power and moral depravity of the Islamic enemy, in the service of our empire
The United States is at war with a very different, mythic Islam of its own making that has nothing at all to do with this Islam of the Qur’an. To make sense of that conjured threat, scholarly studies of Islam or Islamic movements are of no help at all. Even the examination of the real-world history and practice of empire has limited value, unless the perceived Islamic dimension is considered. The American imperial project cannot be brought into clear view without assessment of the distinctive rationale that the Islamist Imaginary provides. The task is not an easy one. The Islamist Imaginary has no simple and unitary existence. Rather, it is a complex amalgam that shapes both the delusions of empire and a conjured threat to imperial power into a co-evolving composite. It is a “difficult whole,” in the helpful language of complexity theory.
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