Fear eats the soul

On this blog I've always looked for beautiful things to post (on art, music, poetry) and in this I've been greatly helped by some readers with their own selection of wonderful images, music etc. But now and then I feel like reporting on the ugliness that I see around me.

[If you're a Muslim and reading this I would be particularly interested in your comments]

Here is one of my colleagues who, along with his group of zealots, is busy brainwashing the students. This is from a public lecture.

On Pakistan's elites:

"And here I will make a point and I’m not saying this rhetorically I say this with full confidence as an objective scholar. The elite in our country - they are amongst the most ignorant group of people on the face of this earth. It is difficult to find a group of people who are even close to being as ignorant as these people are. Not only are these people ignorant about their own country, about their own history, about their own religion, they are ignorant even about that other place which they think is the ideal. They watch fox news, cnn; they read Newsweek and Time magazine; they tell us: we know what's happening over there. They are utterly ignorant. It doesn’t take much to illustrate this."

And then this gem:

"It may very well be the case..again I will not argue this point ..that in Islam a woman is treated like a commodity…she is treated like property..I would not argue with this but what I will say in response to this that in the contemporary West a woman is less than a commodity. She is the thing to be used for you to sell your commodity. So she is less than a commodity. If you want an objective impartial discussion or description of the situation, this is the situation."

Followed by:

"I know them as classmates, as colleagues, as my boss and so on and so forth..And those of you who have had interaction with the West or similar experiences, I ask you the following question have you ever met a woman in the West who socially or culturally had the same status, the same dignity as your grandmother did? In thirty years of living there (the U.S.) I've never met anyone in that society who reached the position/honour that my grandmother got in our society. "

Similarly, a friend of mine, someone who has lived all his life in England, been to good public schools, worked in the top financial institutions, said to me: you know, K, my grandmother was very religious.

Well, what do you mean by that?

She never once took a step outside of her house.

Are you fucking serious?!

And here's some Qutb:

The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs -- and she shows all this and does not hide it

And all this from my colleague at arguably the best university in the country, someone who's got a book on Weber and speaks with the most awful American twang. I can't help but wonder at the delusional state some people are in. When will they realise it ain't the jews, it ain't "the west", but that the beast is within?