Gideon Rachman, the Financial Times’s chief foreign affairs commentator (as well as Prospect’s former Brussels diarist), is one of life’s natural bloggers. Today he explains how a smutty question posed by his eight-year-old son over breakfast led him to a heartening conclusion about the integration of Muslims into British society. But we’re proud to say that Gideon cut his blogging teeth on the Prospect site—first with his dispatches from Davos 2006, and later in the year with his wonderful World Cup diary. Our loss has been the FT’s gain.
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Surely the top Rachman blog post has to be the Davos claret/sitting shiva one
Is Rachman’s such a great piece? It says
“But, in the long run, the attractions of modernity will surely overwhelm the forces of fundamentalism. Just think of what we have to offer: the Enlightenment, scientific progress, free inquiry, religious and political tolerance, prosperity, women’s liberation, sex, alcohol. The fundamentalists, by contrast, can offer a life of religious devotion and the vague hope of a revival of the Caliphate. It’s no contest.”
To which I replied:
“But there is another side to this story.
Just consider Iranian cinema. Constrained by the authorities from representing sex and violence, and with a long philosophical tradition including Islam, but also many other influences, Iranian film makers moved towards films driven by plot, characters and philosophical observation, producing some of the finest cinema in the world.
Lets not get so smug that we can’t learn from others: It is also we who are assimilating to our new cultural realities.”