The Western Mind of Radical Islam

A fascinating article about Islamist debt to western thought. It rang bells for me when I read one Arab commentator [a minister of Religion]:
'they "ignore the fundamental facts of Islam." Like Mawdudi, these autodidacts mix a bit of this and that,'
Note the autodidact bit: these are often people who are uprooted from their own culture by learning and who feel a need to reconstruct Islam but without having really got hold of it in their home context and who teach themselves [I believe they often end up Salafi as a result]. Then there is the pick'n'mix approach -where have we seen that before: new agery and postmodernism generally. In fact the NewAge comparison works at both levels: NewAgers [for want of a better term; Western Esotericists, perhaps] are often autodidacts when it comes to science and religion and they engage in a pick and mix approach held together by certain fundamental assumptions which are normally the reflexes of post-modernism ... hmmmm