Larison Converted to Islam?

[Ed. note: This is a fascinating post to me because The Man from K Street had either read this or had put the pieces together regading Larison and Islam. The earlier comment he made to Dreher's blog was deleted, but Silicon Valley Steve preserved it and re-posted it in my blog on June 6, 2007. MfKS's comment was dated April 16, 2007:

I make no secret of my opinion of Larison. I think he's one of many C-list academic paleocons I've known: angry, pedantic, as terrified of female sexuality as any Wahabbi imam, self-important, and waiting for a societal collapse that will never happen. In five years he'll be an untenured hanger-on at some jerkwater college, a perpetual bachelor, and no one will give two seconds to his ramblings online or off.

His blog helps me see neo-Agrarianism/"Cruchiness" as the ideology of the loser. But your posts of the past couple days make it look like the creed of the coward as well. I'd love to be moved away from that sense, but the fact that I fully expect you to delete this post only underscores that.]

First Comment

If you are ~18, hopelessly nerdy, internally conflicted about yourself, looking for history's "strong horse", and terrified by female sexuality (or at least by even the subtle expression of it), Islam offers a welcome prospect of certainty and reassurance, and a worldview that nicely dovetails with your inner angst. In western nations, this means conversion to a 'restrained' sort of Sunni (or better yet, Sufi) profession of the kind that we *want* most born Muslims in the West to adhere to. See Larison and Stephen Schwartz for examples of this. The problem of course is that in societies that are already Muslim, only radical Islam offers the kind of counter-cultural refuge that certain uncertain young men seek.

Posted by: The Man From K Street January 24, 2008 6:21 PM

Second Comment

I admire them, very much. I could never embrace their way, being a staunch Trinitarian. But I prefer their company and conversation to that of any denizen of Wall or K street, any day. Austerity's forever preferable to vapidity, after all.

This reminds me of another more-papal-than-the-pope paleocon, Lawrence Auster, who was scandalized at the anti-Syrian demonstrations in Lebanon in 2005...because sexy! Arab women! with boobs! were so prominent in them. Such decadence that he could come to sympathize with the Hezbollah POV against our western depravity.

But it's an old meme. There is a persistent topos in Islamic writing about the West regarding the babeliciousness of our self-reliant devil-whores, dating back to at least Crusader times.

Posted by: The Man From K Street January 24, 2008 10:01 PM

Third Comment

Sometimes I really wonder if Rod and other comboxers here have actually read Qutb, rather than read second-hand what others say he wrote. There's a nice excerpt of The America Which I Saw (Amrika Min Al Dakhil) in From the Outer World, Harvard University Press.

There is a lot about materialism, violence, attitudes towards death, lack of the spiritual in American churches, lack of art, lack of taste in food and clothing...say, does this sound at all familiar? Half the time he reads like a chapter from Crunchy Cons (the book, not the blog)!

But not really a whole lot about sex--that vice was far down his list. Some obvious misreadings -- you really have to wonder how anyone living in small town Colorado in 1950 could deduce that homosexuality was about to subvert the Western world -- and there is one sentence where it's obvious that he spent a little too much time studying the female student body: "in the glances of their eyes, their thirsty lips and bodies, the swelling breast, the plump thigh, the fat posterior, the smooth leg left entirely unconcealed." Although it should be pointed out that Qutb never married, and there is a school of thought that believes he was homosexual in orientation if not in practice (not that Islam is all that persnickety about the distinction).

But mainly, Qutb's work on us is about how materialistic and shallow and uncultured Americans are. I have no trouble believing that Larison and other, ahem, genius/freaks, could find in it, and much else besides in Islamic literature, ideas to confirm their inner convictions.

Posted by: The Man From K Street January 25, 2008 7:58 AM

Context.

On Ron Paul Paleo Support

Cry not for Larison. Behind many a paleo's affected Tory elevated sentiments, there are a lot of dark, pug-ugly psychoses lurking about. Sooner or later they slip up, like Sam Francis or Joe Sobran, and let them break through to the surface. The greater frequency of blogging as opposed to print journalism means this can be expected to happen earlier in a career rather than hidden for decades, since there are more opportunities for 'inadvertent honesty'...

Source.